"Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles,
Nods and Becks and wreathed Smiles
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
And love to live in dimple sleek,
Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides."
If this be Puritanism, it is Puritanism with a difference. Did any one
in a few words give such a picture of mirth--
"So buxom, blithe, and debonair?"
Was this the real Milton? Why not? His radiant youth was as real as his
blindness and his old age. And Milton the political pamphleteer was real
too, though his language was not always that which might have been
expected from the author of "Paradise Lost." We pass lightly over pages
of vituperation which any one might have written, and then come upon
splendid passages which could have come from him alone. The sentiment of
democratic equality is invested with a dignity which makes all the
pretensions of privileged orders seem vulgar. Here is the Milton who is
invoked to--
"Give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!"
In these moments we become aware of a man who was not to be explained by
any general rule.
To one who takes delight in the personality of Milton, even "Paradise
Lost" is not a piece of unmitigated sublimity. It is full of
self-revelations. The reader who has come to share Milton's passion for
personal liberty and scorn for a "fugitive and cloistered virtue" is
curious to know how he will treat his new theme. In the "Areopagitica"
he had frankly treated the "Fall of Man" as a "fall upward." "Good and
evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost
inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven
with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly
to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche
as an increased labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more
intermixt. And perhaps that is the doom which Adam fell into of knowing
good and evil; that is to say, of knowing good by evil. As therefore the
state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence
to forbear without the knowledge of evil.... That virtue, therefore,
which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the
utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a
blank virtue, not a pure.... Since, therefore, the knowledge and survey
of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human
virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can
we more safely and with less danger scout into the region of sin and
falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner
of reasons."