(1859)
Copyright, 1891, by The Travelers Insurance Company
Copyright, 1899, by The Travelers Insurance Company
The "Life of Milton," by Prof. Masson, is a difficulty for the critics.
It is very laborious, very learned, and in the main, we believe, very
accurate; it is exceedingly long,--there are 780 pages in this volume,
and there are to be two volumes more; it touches on very many subjects,
and each of these has been investigated to the very best of the
author's ability. No one can wish to speak with censure of a book on
which so much genuine labor has been expended; and yet we are bound, as
true critics, to say that we think it has been composed upon a
principle that is utterly erroneous. In justice to ourselves we must
explain our meaning.
There are two methods on which biography may consistently be written.
The first of these is what we may call the "exhaustive" method. Every
fact which is known about the hero may be told us; everything which he
did, everything which he would not do, everything which other people
did to him, everything which other people would not do to him, may be
narrated at full length. We may have a complete picture of all the
events of his life; of all which he underwent, and all which he
achieved. We may, as Mr. Carlyle expresses it, have a complete account
"of his effect upon the universe, and of the effect of the universe
upon him." [2] We admit that biographies of this species would be very
long, and generally very tedious; we know that the world could not
contain very many of them: but nevertheless, the principle on which
they may be written is intelligible.
The second method on which the life of a man may be written is the
selective. Instead of telling everything, we may choose what we will
tell. We may select out of the numberless events, from among the
innumerable actions of his life, those events and those actions which
exemplify his true character, which prove to us what were the true
limits of his talents, what was the degree of his deficiencies, which
were his defects, which his vices; in a word, we may select the traits
and the particulars which seem to give us the best idea of the man as
he lived and as he was. On this side the Flood, as Sydney Smith would
have said, we should have fancied that this was the only practicable
principle on which biographies can be written about persons of whom
many details are recorded. For ancient heroes the exhaustive method is
possible: all that can be known of them is contained in a few short
passages of Greek and Latin, and it is quite possible to say whatever
can be said about every one of these; the result would not be
unreasonably bulky, though it might be dull. But in the case of men
who have lived in the thick of the crowded modern world, no such course
is admissible; overmuch _may_ be said, and we must choose what we will
say. Biographers, however, are rarely bold enough to adopt the
selective method consistently. They have, we suspect, the fear of the
critics before their eyes. They do not like that it should be said
that "the work of the learned gentleman contains serious omissions: the
events of 1562 are not mentioned; those of October, 1579, are narrated
but very cursorily"; and we fear that in any case such remarks will be
made. Very learned people are pleased to show that they know what is
_not_ in the book; sometimes they may hint that perhaps the author did
not know it, or surely he would have mentioned it. But a biographer
who wishes to write what most people of cultivation will be pleased to
read must be courageous enough to face the pain of such censures. He
must choose, as we have explained, the characteristic parts of his
subject: and all that he has to take care of besides is, so to narrate
them that their characteristic elements shall be shown; to give such an
account of the general career as may make it clear what these chosen
events really were,--to show their respective bearings to one another;
to delineate what is expressive in such a manner as to make it
expressive.
This plan of biography is, however, by no means that of Mr. Masson: he
has no dread of overgrown bulk and overwhelming copiousness. He finds
indeed what we have called the "exhaustive method" insufficient: he not
only wishes to narrate in full the life of Milton, but to add those of
his contemporaries likewise; he seems to wish to tell us not only what
Milton did, but also what every one else did in Great Britain during
his lifetime. He intends his book to be not
"merely a biography of Milton, but also in some sort a continuous
history of his time. . . . The suggestions of Milton's life have
indeed determined the tracks of these historical researches and
expositions, sometimes through the literature of the period, sometimes
through its civil and ecclesiastical politics; but the extent to which
I have pursued them, and the space which I have assigned to them, have
been determined by my desire to present, by their combination,
something like a connected historical view of British thought and
British society in general prior to the great Revolution."
We need not do more than observe that this union of heterogeneous aims
must always end, as it has in this case, in the production of a work at
once overgrown and incomplete. A great deal which has only a slight
bearing on the character of Milton is inserted; much that is necessary
to a true history of "British thought and British society" is of
necessity left out. The period of Milton's life which is included in
the published volume makes the absurdity especially apparent. In
middle life Milton was a great controversialist on contemporary topics;
and though it would not be proper for a biographer to load his pages
with a full account of all such controversies, yet some notice of the
most characteristic of them would be expected from him. In this part
of Milton's life some reference to public events would be necessary;
and we should not severely censure a biographer if the great interest
of those events induced him to stray a little from his topic. But the
first thirty years of Milton's life require a very different treatment.
He passed those years in the ordinary musings of a studious and
meditative youth; it was the period of "Lycidas" and "Comus"; he then
dreamed the
"Sights which youthful poets dream
On summer eve by haunted stream." [3]
We do not wish to have this part of his life disturbed, to a greater
extent than may be necessary, with the harshness of public affairs.
Nor is it necessary that it should be so disturbed: a life of poetic
retirement requires but little reference to anything except itself; in
a biography of Mr. Tennyson we should not expect to hear of the Reform
Bill or the Corn Laws. Mr. Masson is, however, of a different opinion:
he thinks it necessary to tell us, not only all which Milton did, but
everything also that he might have heard of.
The biography of Mr. Keightley is on a very different scale: he tells
the story of Milton's career in about half a small volume. Probably
this is a little too concise, and the narrative is somewhat dry and
bare. It is often, however, acute, and is always clear; and even were
its defects greater than they are, we should think it unseemly to
criticize the last work of one who has performed so many useful
services to literature with extreme severity.
The bare outline of Milton's life is very well known. We have all
heard that he was born in the latter years of King James, just when
Puritanism was collecting its strength for the approaching struggle;
that his father and mother were quiet good people, inclined, but not
immoderately, to that persuasion; that he went up to Cambridge early,
and had some kind of dissension with the authorities there; that the
course of his youth was in a singular degree pure and staid; that in
boyhood he was a devourer of books, and that he early became, and
always remained, a severely studious man; that he married and had
difficulties of a peculiar character with his first wife; that he wrote
on divorce: that after the death of his first wife, he married a second
time a lady who died very soon, and a third time a person who survived
him more than fifty years; that he wrote early poems of singular
beauty, which we still read; that he travelled in Italy, and exhibited
his learning in the academies there; that he plunged deep in the
theological and political controversies of his time; that he kept a
school,--or rather, in our more modern phrase, took pupils; that he was
a republican of a peculiar kind, and of "no church," which Dr. Johnson
thought dangerous;[4] that he was Secretary for Foreign Languages under
the Long Parliament, and retained that office after the _coup d'état_
of Cromwell; that he defended the death of Charles I., and became blind
from writing a book in haste upon that subject; that after the
Restoration he was naturally in a position of some danger and much
difficulty; that in the midst of that difficulty he wrote "Paradise
Lost"; that he did not fail in "heart or hope," [5] but lived for
fourteen years after the destruction of all for which he had labored,
in serene retirement, "though fallen on evil days, though fallen on
evil times," [6]--all this we have heard from our boyhood. How much is
wanting to complete the picture--how many traits both noble and
painful, might be recovered from the past--we shall never know, till
some biographer skilled in interpreting the details of human nature
shall select this subject for his art. All that we can hope to do in
an essay like this is, to throw together some miscellaneous remarks on
the character of the Puritan poet, and on the peculiarities of his
works; and if in any part of them we may seem to make unusual
criticisms, and to be over-ready with depreciation or objection, our
excuse must be, that we wish to paint a likeness and that the harsher
features of the subject should have a prominence even in an outline.
There are two kinds of goodness conspicuous in the world, and often
made the subject of contrast there; for which, however, we seem to want
exact words, and which we are obliged to describe rather vaguely and
incompletely. These characters may in one aspect be called the
"sensuous" and the "ascetic." The character of the first is that which
is almost personified in the poet-king of Israel, whose actions and
whose history have been "improved" so often by various writers that it
now seems trite even to allude to them. Nevertheless, the particular
virtues and the particular career of David seem to embody the idea of
what may be called "sensuous goodness" far more completely than a
living being in general comes near to an abstract idea. There may have
been shades in the actual man which would have modified the
resemblance; but in the portrait which has been handed down to us, the
traits are perfect and the approximation exact. The principle of this
character is its sensibility to outward stimulus: it is moved by all
which occurs, stirred by all which happens, open to the influences of
whatever it sees, hears or meets with. The certain consequence of this
mental constitution is a peculiar liability to temptation. Men are
according to the divine, "put upon their trial through the senses." It
is through the constant suggestions of the outer world that our minds
are stimulated, that our will has the chance of a choice, that moral
life becomes possible. The sensibility to this external stimulus
brings with it, when men have it to excess, an unusual access of moral
difficulty. Everything acts on them, and everything has a chance of
turning them aside; the most tempting things act upon them very deeply
and their influence, in consequence, is extreme. Naturally, therefore,
the errors of such men are great. We need not point the moral:--
"Dizzied faith and guilt and woe;
Loftiest aims by earth defiled,
Gleams of wisdom sin-beguiled,
Sated power's tyrannic mood,
Counsels shared with men of blood,
Sad success, parental tears,
And a dreary gift of years." [7]
But on the other hand, the excellence of such men has a charm, a kind
of sensuous sweetness, that is its own. Being conscious of frailty,
they are tender to the imperfect; being sensitive to this world, they
sympathize with the world; being familiar with all the moral incidents
of life, their goodness has a richness and a complication: they
fascinate their own age, and in their deaths they are "not divided"
from the love of others. Their peculiar sensibility gives a depth to
their religion: it is at once deeper and more human than that of other
men. As their sympathetic knowledge of those whom they have seen is
great, so it is with their knowledge of Him whom they have not seen;
and as is their knowledge, so is their love, it is deep, from their
nature; rich and intimate, from the variety of their experience;
chastened by the ever-present sense of their weakness and of its
consequences.
In extreme opposition to this is the ascetic species of goodness. This
is not, as is sometimes believed, a self-produced ideal,--a simply
voluntary result of discipline and restraint. Some men have by nature
what others have to elaborate by effort. Some men have a repulsion
from the world. All of us have, in some degree, a protective instinct;
an impulse, that is to say, to start back from what may trouble us, to
shun what may fascinate us, to avoid what may tempt us. On the moral
side of human nature this preventive check is occasionally imperious:
it holds the whole man under its control,--makes him recoil from the
world, be offended at its amusements, be repelled by its occupations,
be scared by its sins. The consequences of this tendency, when it is
thus in excess, upon the character are very great and very singular.
It secludes a man in a sort of natural monastery; he lives in a kind of
moral solitude: and the effects of his isolation, for good and for
evil, on his disposition are very many. The best result is a singular
capacity for meditative religion. Being aloof from what is earthly,
such persons are shut up with what is spiritual; being unstirred by the
incidents of time, they are alone with the eternal; rejecting this
life, they are alone with what is beyond. According to the measure of
their minds, men of this removed and secluded excellence become eminent
for a settled and brooding piety, for a strong and predominant
religion. In human life, too, in a thousand ways, their isolated
excellence is apparent. They walk through the whole of it with an
abstinence from sense, a zeal of morality, a purity of ideal, which
other men have not; their religion has an imaginative grandeur, and
their life something of an unusual impeccability: and these are
obviously singular excellences. But the deficiencies to which the same
character tends are equally singular. In the first place, their
isolation gives them a certain pride in themselves and an inevitable
ignorance of others. They are secluded by their constitutional
_daimon_ from life; they are repelled from the pursuits which others
care for; they are alarmed at the amusements which others enjoy. In
consequence, they trust in their own thoughts; they come to magnify
both them and themselves,--for being able to think and to retain them.
The greater the nature of the man, the greater is this temptation. His
thoughts are greater, and in consequence the greater is his tendency to
prize them, the more extreme is his tendency to overrate them. This
pride, too, goes side by side with a want of sympathy. Being aloof
from others, such a mind is unlike others; and it feels, and sometimes
it feels bitterly, its own unlikeness. Generally, however, it is too
wrapped up in its own exalted thoughts to be sensible of the pain of
moral isolation; it stands apart from others, unknowing and unknown.
It is deprived of moral experience in two ways,--it is not tempted
itself, and it does not comprehend the temptations of others. And this
defect of moral experience is almost certain to produce two effects,
one practical and the other speculative. When such a man is wrong, he
will be apt to believe that he is right. If his own judgment err, he
will not have the habit of checking it by the judgment of others: he
will be accustomed to think most men wrong; differing from them would
be no proof of error, agreeing with them would rather be a basis for
suspicion. He may, too, be very wrong, for the conscience of no man is
perfect on all sides. The strangeness of secluded excellence will be
sometimes deeply shaded by very strange errors. To be commonly above
others, still more to think yourself above others, is to be below them
every now and then, and sometimes much below. Again, on the
speculative side, this defect of moral experience penetrates into the
distinguishing excellence of the character,--its brooding and
meditative religion. Those who see life under only one aspect can see
religion under only one likewise. This world is needful to interpret
what is beyond; the seen must explain the unseen. It is from a tried
and a varied and a troubled moral life that the deepest and truest idea
of God arises. The ascetic character wants these; therefore in its
religion there will be a harshness of outline,--a bareness, so to
say,--as well as a grandeur. In life we may look for a singular
purity; but also, and with equal probability, for singular
self-confidence, a certain unsympathizing straitness, and perhaps a few
singular errors.
The character of the ascetic or austere species of goodness is almost
exactly embodied in Milton. Men, indeed, are formed on no ideal type:
human nature has tendencies too various, and circumstances too complex;
all men's characters have sides and aspects not to be comprehended in a
single definition: but in this case, the extent to which the character
of the man as we find it delineated approaches to the moral abstraction
which we sketch from theory is remarkable. The whole being of Milton
may, in some sort, be summed up in the great commandment of the austere
character, "Reverence thyself." We find it expressed in almost every
one of his singular descriptions of himself,--of those striking
passages which are scattered through all his works, and which add to
whatever interest may intrinsically belong to them one of the rarest of
artistic charms, that of magnanimous autobiography. They have been
quoted a thousand times, but one of them may perhaps be quoted again:
"I had my time, readers, as others have, who have good learning
bestowed upon them, to be sent to those places where, the opinion was,
it might be soonest attained; and as the manner is, was not unstudied
in those authors which are most commended: whereof some were grave
orators and historians, whose matter methought I loved indeed, but as
my age then was, so I understood them; others were the smooth elegiac
poets, whereof the schools are not scarce, whom both for the pleasing
sound of their numerous writing, which in imitation I found most easy
and most agreeable to nature's part in me, and for their matter, which
what it is there be few who know not, I was so allured to read, that no
recreation came to me better welcome. For that it was then those years
with me which are excused, though they be least severe, I may be saved
the labor to remember ye. Whence having observed them to account it
the chief glory of their wit, in that they were ablest to judge, to
praise, and by that could esteem themselves worthiest to love, those
high perfections which under one or other name they took to celebrate,
I thought with myself by every instinct and presage of nature, which is
not wont to be false, that what emboldened them to this task might with
such diligence as they used embolden me; and that what judgment, wit,
or elegance was my share would herein best appear, and best value
itself, by how much more wisely and with more love of virtue I should
choose (let rude ears be absent) the object of not unlike praises. For
albeit these thoughts to some will seem virtuous and commendable, to
others only pardonable, to a third sort perhaps idle, yet the
mentioning of them now will end in serious.
"Nor blame it, readers, in those years to propose to themselves such a
reward, as the noblest dispositions above other things in this life
have sometimes preferred; whereof not to be sensible when good and fair
in one person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment, and
withal an ungentle and swainish breast. For by the firm settling of
these persuasions, I became, to my best memory, so much a proficient,
that if I found those authors anywhere speaking unworthy things of
themselves, or unchaste of those names which before they had extolled,
this effect it wrought with me,--from that time forward their art I
still applauded, but the men I deplored; and above them all, preferred
the two famous renowners of _Beatrice_ and _Laura_, who never write but
honor of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and
pure thoughts without transgression. And long it was not after, when I
was confirmed in this opinion,--that he who would not be frustrate of
his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be
a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and
honorablest things: not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or
famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and the
practice of all that which is praiseworthy." [8]
It may be fanciful to add, and we may be laughed at, but we believe
that the self-reverencing propensity was a little aided by his singular
personal beauty. All the describers of his youth concur in telling us
that this was very remarkable. Mr. Masson has the following account of
it:--
"When Milton left Cambridge in July, 1632, he was twenty-three years
and eight months old. In stature, therefore, at least, he was already
whatever he was to be. 'In stature,' he says himself at a later
period, when driven to speak on the subject, 'I confess I am not tall,
but still of what is nearer to middle height than to little; and what
if I were of little, of which stature have often been very great men
both in peace and war--though why should that be called little which is
great enough for virtue?' ('Staturâ, fateor non sum procerâ, sed quae
mediocri tamen quàm parvae propior sit; sed quid si parvâ, quâ et summi
saepe tum pace turn bello viri fuere--quanquam parva cur dicitur, quae
ad virtutem satis magna est?') This is precise enough; but we have
Aubrey's words to the same effect. 'He was scarce so tall as I am,'
says Aubrey; to which, to make it more intelligible, he appends this
marginal note,--'_Qu. Quot_ feet I am high? _Resp._ Of middle
stature': _i. e._, Milton was a little under middle height. 'He had
light-brown hair,' continues Aubrey,--putting the word 'abrown'
(auburn) in the margin by way of synonym for 'light brown';--'his
complexion exceeding fair; oval face; his eye a dark gray.'"
We are far from accusing Milton of personal vanity: his character was
too enormous, if we may be allowed so to say, for a fault so petty.
But a little tinge of excessive self-respect will cling to those who
can admire themselves. Ugly men are and ought to be ashamed of their
existence; Milton was not so.
The peculiarities of the austere type of character stand out in Milton
more remarkably than in other men who partake of it, because of the
extreme strength of his nature. In reading him this is the first thing
that strikes us. We seem to have left the little world of ordinary
writers. The words of some authors are said to have "hands and feet";
they seem, that is, to have a vigor and animation which only belong to
things which live and move. Milton's words have not this animal
life,--there is no rude energy about them; but on the other hand, they
have or seem to have a soul, a spirit which other words have not. He
was early aware that what he wrote, "by certain vital signs it had,"
was such as the world would not "willingly let die." [9] After two
centuries we feel the same. There is a solemn and firm music in the
lines; a brooding sublimity haunts them; the spirit of the great writer
moves over the face of the page. In life there seems to have been the
same peculiar strength that his works suggest to us. His moral
tenacity is amazing: he took his own course, and he kept his own
course; and we may trace in his defects the same characteristics.
"Energy and ill temper," some say, "are the same thing;" and though
this is a strong exaggeration, yet there is a basis of truth in it.
People who labor much will be cross if they do not obtain that for
which they labor; those who desire vehemently will be vexed if they do
not obtain that which they desire. As is the strength of the impelling
tendency, so, other things being equal, is the pain which it will
experience if it be baffled. Those, too, who are set on what is high
will be proportionately offended by the intrusion of what is low.
Accordingly, Milton is described by those who knew him as "a harsh and
choleric man." "He had," we are told, "a gravity in his temper, not
melancholy, or not till the latter part of his life, not sour, not
morose or ill-natured, but a certain severity of mind; a mind not
condescending to little things;" [10] and this although his daughter
remembered that he was delightful company, the life of conversation,
and that he was so "on account of a flow of subject, and an unaffected
cheerfulness and civility." Doubtless this may have been so when he
was at ease, and at home; but there are unmistakable traces of the
harsher tendency in almost all his works.
Some of the peculiarities of the ascetic character were likewise
augmented by his studious disposition. This began very early in life,
and continued till the end. "My father," he says, "destined me . . .
to the study of polite literature, which I embraced with such avidity,
that from the twelfth year of my age I hardly ever retired to rest from
my studies till midnight; which was the first source of injury to my
eyes, to the natural weakness of which were added frequent headaches:
all of which not retarding my eagerness after knowledge, he took care
to have me instructed--" etc.[11] Every page of his works shows the
result of this education. In spite of the occupations of manhood, and
the blindness and melancholy of old age, he still continued to have his
principal pleasure in that "studious and select" reading, which, though
often curiously transmuted, is perpetually involved in the very texture
of his works. We need not stay to observe how a habit in itself so
austere conduces to the development of an austere character. Deep
study, especially deep study which haunts and rules the imagination,
necessarily removes men from life, absorbs them in themselves; purifies
their conduct, with some risk of isolating their sympathies; develops
that loftiness of mood which is gifted with deep inspirations and
indulged with great ideas, but which tends in its excess to engender a
contempt for others, and a self-appreciation which is even more
displeasing to them.
These same tendencies were aggravated also by two defects which are
exceedingly rare in great English authors, and which perhaps Milton
alone amongst those of the highest class is in a remarkable degree
chargeable with; we mean a deficiency in humor, and a deficiency in a
knowledge of plain human nature. Probably when, after the lapse of
ages, English literature is looked at in its larger features only, and
in comparison with other literatures which have preceded or which may
follow it, the critics will lay down that its most striking
characteristic as a whole is its involution, so to say, in life; the
degree to which its book life resembles real life; the extent to which
the motives, dispositions, and actions of common busy persons are
represented in a medium which would seem likely to give us peculiarly
the ideas of secluded and the tendencies of meditative men. It is but
an aspect of this fact, that English literature abounds--some critics
will say abounds excessively--with humor. This is in some sense the
imaginative element of ordinary life,--the relieving charm, partaking
at once of contrast and similitude, which gives a human and an
intellectual interest to the world of clowns and cottages, of fields
and farmers. The degree to which Milton is deficient in this element
is conspicuous in every page of his writings where its occurrence could
be looked for; and if we do not always look for it, this is because the
subjects of his most remarkable works are on a removed elevation, where
ordinary life, the world of "cakes and ale," is never thought of and
never expected. It is in his dramas, as we should expect, that Milton
shows this deficiency the most. "Citizens" never talk in his pages, as
they do in Shakespeare. We feel instinctively that Milton's eye had
never rested with the same easy pleasure on the easy, ordinary,
shopkeeping world. Perhaps, such is the complication of art, it is on
the most tragic occasions that we feel this want the most.
It may seem an odd theory, and yet we believe it to be a true
principle, that catastrophes require a comic element. We appear to
feel the same principle in life. We may read solemn descriptions of
great events in history,--say of Lord Stratford's trial, and of his
marvelous speech, and his appeal to his "saint in heaven"; but we
comprehend the whole transaction much better when we learn from Mr.
Baillie, the eye-witness, that people ate nuts and apples, and talked,
and laughed, and betted on the great question of acquittal and
condemnation. Nor is it difficult to understand why this should be so.
It seems to be a law of the imagination, at least in most men, that it
will not bear concentration. It is essentially a glancing faculty. It
goes and comes, and comes and goes, and we hardly know whence or why.
But we most of us know that when we try to fix it, in a moment it
passes away. Accordingly, the proper procedure of art is to let it go
in such a manner as to insure its coming back again. The force of
artistic contrasts effects exactly this result: skillfully disposed
opposites suggest the notion of each other. We realize more perfectly
and easily the great idea, the tragic conception, when we are
familiarized with its effects on the minds of little people, with the
petty consequences which it causes as well as with the enormous forces
from which it comes. The catastrophe of "Samson Agonistes" discloses
Milton's imperfect mastery of this element of effect. If ever there
was an occasion which admitted its perfect employment, it was this.
The kind of catastrophe is exactly that which is sure to strike, and
strike forcibly, the minds of common persons. If their observations on
the occasion were really given to us, we could scarcely avoid something
rather comic. The eccentricity, so to speak, of ordinary persons shows
itself peculiarly at such times, and they say the queerest things.
Shakespeare has exemplified this principle most skillfully on various
occasions: it is the sort of art which is just in his way. His
imagination always seems to be floating between the contrasts of
things; and if his mind had a resting-place that it liked, it was this
ordinary view of extraordinary events. Milton was under the great
[est] obligation to use this relieving principle of art in the
catastrophe of "Samson," because he has made every effort to heighten
the strictly tragic element, which requires that relief. His art,
always serious, was never more serious. His Samson is not the
incarnation of physical strength which the popular fancy embodies in
the character; nor is it the simple and romantic character of the Old
Testament. On the contrary, Samson has become a Puritan: the
observations he makes would have done much credit to a religious
pikeman in Cromwell's army. In consequence, his death requires some
lightening touches to make it a properly artistic event. The pomp of
seriousness becomes too oppressive.
"At length for intermission sake they led him
Between the pillars; he his guide requested
(For so from such as nearer stood we heard),
As over-tired, to let him lean awhile
With both his arms on those two massy pillars
That to the archèd roof gave main support.
He unsuspicious led him; which when Samson
Felt in his arms, with head awhile inclined,
And eyes fast fixed, he stood, as one who prayed,
Or some great matter in his mind revolved;
At last with head erect thus cried aloud:
'Hitherto, lords, what your commands imposed
I have performed, as reason was, obeying,
Not without wonder or delight beheld;
Now of my own accord such other trial
I mean to show you of my strength, yet greater,
As with amaze shall strike all who behold.'
This uttered, straining all his nerves he bowed,
As with the force of winds and waters pent
When mountains tremble, those two massy pillars
With horrible convulsion to and fro.
He tugged, he shook, till down they came, and drew
The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder,
Upon the heads of all who sat beneath,--
Lords, ladies, captains, counselors, or priests,
Their choice nobility and flower, not only
Of this, but each Philistian city round,
Met from all parts to solemnize this feast.
Samson with these immixed, inevitably
Pulled down the same destruction on himself;
The vulgar only 'scaped who stood without.
_Chor._ O dearly bought revenue, yet glorious!
Living or dying thou hast fulfilled
The work for which thou wast foretold
To Israel, and now liest victorious
Among thy slain self-killed,
Not willingly, but tangled in the fold
Of dire necessity, whose law in death conjoined
Thee with thy slaughtered foes, in number more
Than all thy life bad slain before."
This is grave and fine; but Shakespeare would have done it differently
and better.
We need not pause to observe how certainly this deficiency in humor and
in the delineation of ordinary human feeling is connected with a
recluse, a solitary, and to some extent an unsympathizing life. If we
combine a certain natural aloofness from common men with literary
habits and an incessantly studious musing, we shall at once see how
powerful a force is brought to bear on an instinctively austere
character, and how sure it will be to develop the peculiar tendencies
of it, both good and evil. It was to no purpose that Milton seems to
have practiced a sort of professional study of life. No man could rank
more highly the importance to a poet of an intellectual insight into
all-important pursuits and "seemly arts." But it is not by the mere
intellect that we can take in the daily occupations of mankind: we must
sympathize with them, and see them in their human relations. A
chimney-sweeper, _quâ_ chimney-sweeper, is not very sentimental: it is
in himself that he is so interesting.
Milton's austere character is in some sort the more evident because he
possessed in large measure a certain relieving element, in which those
who are eminent in that character are very deficient. Generally such
persons have but obtuse senses: we are prone to attribute the purity of
their conduct to the dullness of their sensations. Milton had no such
obtuseness: he had every opportunity for knowing the "world of eye and
ear";[12] you cannot open his works without seeing how much he did know
of it. The austerity of his nature was not caused by the deficiency of
his senses, but by an excess of the warning instinct. Even when he
professed to delineate the world of sensuous delight, this instinct
shows itself. Dr. Johnson thought he could discern melancholy in
"L'Allegro";[13] if he had said "solitariness," it would have been
correct.
The peculiar nature of Milton's character is very conspicuous in the
events of his domestic life, and in the views which he took of the
great public revolutions of his age. We can spare only a very brief
space for the examination of either of these; but we will endeavor to
say a few words upon each of them.
The circumstances of Milton's first marriage are as singular as any in
the strange series of the loves of the poets. The scene opens with an
affair of business. Milton's father, as is well known, was a
scrivener,--a kind of professional money-lender, then well known in
London; and having been early connected with the vicinity of Oxford,
continued afterwards to have pecuniary transactions of a certain nature
with country gentlemen of that neighborhood. In the course of these he
advanced L500 to a certain Mr. Richard Powell, a squire of fair landed
estate, residing at Forest Hill, which is about four miles from the
city of Oxford. The money was lent on the 11th of June, 1627; and a
few months afterwards Mr. Milton the elder gave L312 of it to his son
the poet, who was then a youth at college, and made a formal memorandum
of the same in the form then usual, which still exists. The debt was
never wholly discharged; "for in 1650-1 we find Milton asserting on
oath that he had received only about L180, 'in part satisfaction of my
said just and principal debt, with damages for the same, and my costs
of suit.'" Mr. Keightley supposes him to have taken "many a ride over
to Forest Hill" after he left Cambridge and was living at Horton, which
is not very far distant; but of course this is only conjecture. We
only know that about 1643 "he took," as his nephew relates, "a journey
into the country, nobody about him certainly knowing the reason, or
that it was any more than a journey of recreation. After a month's
stay, home he returns a married man, that went out a bachelor; his wife
being Mary, the eldest daughter of Mr. Richard Powell, then a justice
of the peace" for the county of Oxford. The suddenness of the event is
rather striking; but Philips was at the time one of Milton's pupils,
and it is possible that some pains may have been taken to conceal the
love affair from the "young gentlemen." Still, as Philips was Milton's
nephew, he was likely to hear such intelligence tolerably early; and as
he does not seem to have done so, the _dénouement_ was probably rather
prompt. At any rate, he was certainly married at that time, and took
his bride home to his house in Aldersgate Street; and there was
feasting and gayety according to the usual custom of such events. A
few weeks after, the lady went home to her friends, in which there was
of course nothing remarkable; but it is singular that when the natural
limit of her visit at home was come, she absolutely refused to return
to her husband. The grounds of so strange a resolution are very
difficult to ascertain. Political feeling ran very high; old Mr.
Powell adhered to the side of the king, and Milton to that of the
Parliament: and this might be fancied to have caused an estrangement.
But on the other hand, these circumstances must have been well known
three months before. Nothing had happened in that quarter of a year to
change very materially the position of the two parties in the state.
Some other cause for Mrs. Milton's conduct must be looked for. She
herself is said to have stated that she did not like her husband's
"spare diet and hard study." [14] No doubt, too, she found it dull in
London: she had probably always lived in the country, and must have
been quite unaccustomed to the not very pleasant scene in which she
found herself. Still, many young ladies have married schoolmasters,
and many young ladies have gone from Oxfordshire to London; and
nevertheless, no such dissolution of matrimonial harmony is known to
have occurred.
The fact we believe to be, that the bride took a dislike to her
husband. We cannot but have a suspicion that she did not like him
before marriage, and that pecuniary reasons had their influence. If,
however, Mr. Powell exerted his paternal influence, it may be admitted
that he had unusual considerations to advance in favor of the alliance
he proposed. It is not every father whose creditors are handsome young
gentlemen with fair incomes. Perhaps it seemed no extreme tyranny to
press the young lady a little to do that which some others might have
done without pressing. Still all this is but hypothesis: our evidence
as to the love affairs of the time of King Charles I. is but meager.
But whatever the feelings of Miss Powell may have been, those of Mrs.
Milton are exceedingly certain. She would not return to her husband;
she did not answer his letters; and a messenger whom he sent to bring
her back was handled rather roughly. Unquestionably she was deeply to
blame, by far the most to blame of the two. Whatever may be alleged
against him is as nothing compared with her offense in leaving him. To
defend so startling a course, we must adopt views of divorce even more
extreme than those which Milton was himself driven to inculcate; and
whatever Mrs. Milton's practice may have been, it may be fairly
conjectured that her principles were strictly orthodox. Yet if she
could be examined by a commission to the ghosts, she would probably
have some palliating circumstances to allege in mitigation of judgment.
There were perhaps peculiarities in Milton's character which a young
lady might not improperly dislike. The austere and ascetic character
is of course far less agreeable to women than the sensuous and
susceptible. The self-occupation, the pride, the abstraction of the
former are to the female mind disagreeable; studious habits and unusual
self-denial seem to it purposeless; lofty enthusiasm, public spirit,
the solitary pursuit of an elevated ideal, are quite out of its way:
they rest too little on the visible world to be intelligible, they are
too little suggested by the daily occurrences of life to seem possible.
The poet in search of an imaginary phantom has never been successful
with women,--there are innumerable proofs of that; and the ascetic
moralist is even less interesting. A character combined out of the
two--and this to some extent was Milton's--is singularly likely to meet
with painful failure; with a failure the more painful, that it could
never anticipate or explain it. Possibly he was absorbed in an austere
self-conscious excellence: it may never have occurred to him that a
lady might prefer the trivial detail of daily happiness.
Milton's own view of the matter he has explained to us in his book on
divorce; and it is a very odd one. His complaint was that his wife
would not talk. What he wished in marriage was "an intimate and
speaking help": he encountered "a mute and spiritless mate." One of
his principal incitements to the "pious necessity of divorcing" was an
unusual deficiency in household conversation. A certain loquacity in
their wives has been the complaint of various eminent men; but his
domestic affliction was a different one. The "ready and reviving
associate," whom he had hoped to find, appeared to be a "coinhabiting
mischief," who was sullen, and perhaps seemed bored and tired. And at
times he is disposed to cast the blame of his misfortune on the
uninstructive nature of youthful virtue. The "soberest and best
governed men," he says, "are least practiced in these affairs," are not
very well aware that "the bashful muteness" of a young lady "may
ofttimes hide all the unliveliness and natural sloth which is really
unfit for conversation," and are rather in too great haste to "light
the nuptial torch": whereas those "who have lived most loosely, by
reason of their bold accustoming, prove most successful in their
matches; because their wild affections, unsettling at will have been as
so many divorces to teach them experience." And he rather wishes to
infer that the virtuous man should, in case of mischance, have his
resource of divorce likewise.
In truth, Milton's book on divorce--though only containing principles
which he continued to believe long after he had any personal reasons
for wishing to do so--was clearly suggested at first by the unusual
phenomena of his first marriage. His wife began by not speaking to
him, and finished by running away from him. Accordingly, like most
books which spring out of personal circumstances, his treatises on this
subject have a frankness and a mastery of detail which others on the
same topic sometimes want. He is remarkably free from one peculiarity
of modern writers on such matters. Several considerate gentlemen are
extremely anxious for the "rights of woman"; they think that women will
benefit by removing the bulwarks which the misguided experience of ages
has erected for their protection. A migratory system of domestic
existence might suit Madame Dudevant, and a few cases of singular
exception; but we cannot fancy that it would be, after all, so much to
the taste of most ladies as the present more permanent system. We have
some reminiscence of the stories of the wolf and the lamb, when we hear
amiable men addressing a female auditory (in books, of course) on the
advantages of a freer "development." We are perhaps wrong, but we
cherish an indistinct suspicion that an indefinite extension of the
power of selection would rather tend to the advantage of the sex which
more usually chooses. But we have no occasion to avow such opinions
now. Milton had no such modern views: he is frankly and honestly
anxious for the rights of the man. Of the doctrine that divorce is
only permitted for the help of wives, he exclaims, "Palpably uxorious!
who can be ignorant that woman was created for man, and not man for
woman? . . . What an injury is it after wedlock not to be beloved!
what to be slighted! what to be contended with in point of house-rule
who shall be the head; not for any parity of wisdom, for that were
something reasonable, but out of female pride! 'I suffer not,' saith
St. Paul, 'the woman to usurp authority over the man.' If the Apostle
could not suffer it," he naturally remarks, "into what mold is he
mortified that can?" He had a sincere desire to preserve men from the
society of unsocial and unsympathizing women; and that was his
principal idea.
His theory, to a certain extent, partakes of the same notion. The
following passage contains a perspicuous exposition of it:--
"Moses, Deut. xxiv. i, established a grave and prudent law, full of
moral equity, full of due consideration towards nature, that cannot be
resisted, a law consenting with the wisest men and civilest nations:
that when a man hath married a wife, if it come to pass that he cannot
love her by reason of some displeasing natural quality or unfitness in
her, let him write her a bill of divorce. The intent of which law
undoubtedly was this: that if any good and peaceable man should
discover some helpless disagreement or dislike, either of mind or body,
whereby he could not cheerfully perform the duty of a husband without
the perpetual dissembling of offense and disturbance to his
spirit,--rather than to live uncomfortably and unhappy both to himself
and to his wife, rather than to continue undertaking a duty which he
could not possibly discharge, he might dismiss her whom he could not
tolerably, and so not conscionably, retain. And this law the Spirit of
God by the mouth of Solomon, Prov. xxx. 21, 23, testifies to be a good
and a necessary law, by granting it that 'a hated woman' (for so the
Hebrew word signifies, rather than 'odious,' though it come all to
one),--that 'a hated woman, when she is married, is a thing that the
earth cannot bear.'"
And he complains that the civil law of modern states interferes with
the "domestical prerogative of the husband."
His notion would seem to have been that a husband was bound not to
dismiss his wife, except for a reason really sufficient; such as a
thoroughly incompatible temper, an incorrigible "muteness," and a
desertion like that of Mrs. Milton. But he scarcely liked to admit
that in the use of this power he should be subject to the correction of
human tribunals. He thought that the circumstances of each case
depended upon "utterless facts"; and that it was practically impossible
for a civil court to decide on a subject so delicate in its essence,
and so imperceptible in its data. But though amiable men doubtless
suffer much from the deficiencies of their wives, we should hardly like
to intrust them, in their own cases, with a jurisdiction so prompt and
summary.
We are far from being concerned, however, just now, with the doctrine
of divorce on its intrinsic merits: we were only intending to give such
an account of Milton's opinions upon it as might serve to illustrate
his character. We think we have shown that it is possible there may
have been in his domestic relations, a little overweening pride; a
tendency to overrate the true extent of masculine rights, and to dwell
on his wife's duty to be social towards him rather than on his duty to
be social towards her,--to be rather sullen whenever she was not quite
cheerful. Still, we are not defending a lady for leaving her husband
for defects of such inferior magnitude. Few households would be kept
together, if the right of transition were exercised on such trifling
occasions. We are but suggesting that she may share the excuse which
our great satirist has suggested for another unreliable lady: "My
mother was an angel; but angels are not always _commodes à vivre_."
This is not a pleasant part of our subject, and we must leave it. It
is more agreeable to relate that on no occasion of his life was the
substantial excellence of Milton's character more conclusively shown
than in his conduct at the last stage of this curious transaction.
After a very considerable interval, and after the publication of his
book on divorce, Mrs. Milton showed a disposition to return to her
husband; and in spite of his theories, he received her with open arms.
With great Christian patience, he received her relations too. The
Parliamentary party was then victorious; and old Mr. Powell, who had
suffered very much in the cause of the king, lived until his death
untroubled, and "wholly to his devotion," as we are informed, in the
house of his son-in-law.
Of the other occurrences of Milton's domestic life we have left
ourselves no room to speak; we must turn to our second source of
illustration for his character,--his opinions on the great public
events of his time. It may seem odd, but we believe that a man of
austere character naturally tends _both_ to an excessive party spirit
and to an extreme isolation. Of course the circumstances which develop
the one must be different from those which are necessary to call out
the other: party spirit requires companionship; isolation, if we may be
pardoned so original a remark, excludes it. But though, as we have
shown, this species of character is prone to mental solitude, tends to
an intellectual isolation where it is possible and as soon as it can,
yet when invincible circumstances throw it into mental companionship,
when it is driven into earnest association with earnest men on
interesting topics, its zeal becomes excessive. Such a man's mind is
at home only with its own enthusiasm; it is cooped up within the narrow
limits of its own ideas, and it can make no allowance for those who
differ from or oppose them. We may see something of this excessive
party zeal in Burke. No one's reasons are more philosophical; yet no
one who acted with a party went farther in aid of it or was more
violent in support of it. He forgot what could be said for the tenets
of the enemy; his imagination made that enemy an abstract incarnation
of his tenets. A man, too, who knows that he formed his opinions
originally by a genuine and intellectual process is but little aware of
the undue energy those ideas may obtain from the concurrence of those
around. Persons who first acquired their ideas at second hand are more
open to a knowledge of their own weakness, and better acquainted with
the strange force which there is in the sympathy of others. The
isolated mind, when it acts with the popular feeling, is apt to
exaggerate that feeling for the most part by an almost inevitable
consequence of the feelings which render it isolated. Milton is an
example of this remark. In the commencement of the struggle between
Charles I. and the Parliament, he sympathized strongly with the popular
movement, and carried to what seems now a strange extreme his
partisanship. No one could imagine that the first literary Englishman
of his time could write the following passage on Charles I.:--
"Who can with patience hear this filthy, rascally fool speak so
irreverently of persons eminent both in greatness and piety? Dare you
compare King _David_ with King _Charles_: a most religious king and
prophet with a superstitious prince, and who was but a novice in the
Christian religion; a most prudent, wise prince with a weak one; a
valiant prince with a cowardly one; finally, a most just prince with a
most unjust one? Have you the impudence to commend his chastity and
sobriety, who is known to have committed all manner of lewdness in
company with his confidant the Duke of _Buckingham_? It were to no
purpose to inquire into the private actions of his life, who publicly
at plays would embrace and kiss the ladies." [15]
Whatever may be the faults of that ill-fated monarch,--and they
assuredly were not small,--no one would now think this absurd invective
to be even an excusable exaggeration. It misses the true mark
altogether, and is the expression of a strongly imaginative mind, which
has seen something that it did not like, and is unable in consequence
to see anything that has any relation to it distinctly or correctly.
But with the supremacy of the Long Parliament Milton's attachment to
their cause ceased. No one has drawn a more unfavorable picture of the
rule which they established. Years after their supremacy had passed
away, and the restoration of the monarchy had covered with a new and
strange scene the old actors and the old world, he thrust into a most
unlikely part of his "History of England" [Book iii.] the following
attack on them:--
"But when once the superficial zeal and popular fumes that acted their
New Magistracy were cooled and spent in them, straight every one betook
himself (setting the Commonwealth behind, his private ends before) to
do as his own profit or ambition led him. Then was justice delayed,
and soon after denied; spite and favor determined all: hence faction,
thence treachery, both at home and in the field; everywhere wrong and
oppression; foul and horrid deeds committed daily, or maintained, in
secret or in open. Some who had been called from shops and warehouses,
without other merit, to sit in supreme councils and committees (as
their breeding was), fell to huckster the Commonwealth. Others did
thereafter as men could soothe and humor them best; so he who would
give most, or under covert of hypocritical zeal insinuate basest,
enjoyed unworthily the rewards of learning and fidelity, or escaped the
punishment of his crimes and misdeeds. Their votes and ordinances,
which men looked should have contained the repealing of bad laws, and
the immediate constitution of better, resounded with nothing else but
new impositions, taxes, excises,--yearly, monthly, weekly; not to
reckon the offices, gifts, and preferments bestowed and shared among
themselves."
His dislike of this system of committees, and of the generally dull and
unemphatic administration of the Commonwealth, attached him to the
Puritan army and to Cromwell; but in the continuation of the passage we
have referred to, he expresses--with something, let it be said, of a
schoolmaster's feeling--an unfavorable judgment on their career:--
"For _Britain_, to speak a truth not often spoken, as it is a land
fruitful enough of men stout and courageous in war, so it is naturally
not over-fertile of men able to govern justly and prudently in peace,
trusting only in their mother-wit; who consider not justly that
civility, prudence, love of the public good more than of money or vain
honor, are to this soil in a manner outlandish,--grow not here, but in
minds well implanted with solid and elaborate breeding; too impolitic
else and rude, if not headstrong and intractable to the industry and
virtue either of executing or understanding true civil government.
Valiant indeed, and prosperous to win a field; but to know the end and
reason of winning, unjudicious and unwise: in good or bad success,
alike unteachable. For the sun, which we want, ripens wits as well as
fruits; and as wine and oil are imported to us from abroad, so must
ripe understanding and many civil virtues be imported into our minds
from foreign writings and examples of best ages; we shall else miscarry
still, and come short in the attempts of any great enterprise. Hence
did their victories prove as fruitless as their losses dangerous, and
left them still, conquering, under the same grievances that men suffer
conquered: which was indeed unlikely to go otherwise, unless men more
than vulgar--bred up, as few of them were, in the knowledge of ancient
and illustrious deeds, invincible against many and vain titles,
impartial to friendships and relations--had conducted their affairs;
but then, from the chapman to the retailer, many whose ignorance was
more audacious than the rest were admitted with all their sordid
rudiments to bear no mean sway among them, both in church and state."
We need not speak of Milton's disapprobation of the Restoration.
Between him and the world of Charles II. the opposition was inevitable
and infinite. Therefore the general fact remains, that except in the
early struggles, when he exaggerated the popular feeling, he remained
solitary in opinion, and had very little sympathy with any of the
prevailing parties of his time.
Milton's own theory of government is to be learned from his works. He
advocated a free commonwealth, without rule of a single person or House
of Lords; but the form of his projected commonwealth was peculiar. He
thought that a certain perpetual council, which should be elected by
the nation once for all, and the number of which should be filled up as
vacancies might occur, was the best possible machine of government. He
did not confine his advocacy to abstract theory, but proposed the
immediate establishment of such a council in this country. We need not
go into an elaborate discussion to show the errors of this conclusion.
Hardly any one, then or since, has probably adopted it. The interest
of the theoretical parts of Milton's political works is entirely
historical. The tenets advocated are not of great value, and the
arguments by which he supports them are perhaps of less; but their
relation to the times in which they were written gives them a very
singular interest. The time of the Commonwealth was the only period in
English history in which the fundamental questions of government have
been thrown open for popular discussion in this country. We read in
French literature, discussions on the advisability of establishing a
monarchy, on the advisability of establishing a republic, on the
advisability of establishing an empire; and before we proceed to
examine the arguments, we cannot help being struck at the strange
contrast which this multiplicity of open questions presents to our own
uninquiring acquiescence in the hereditary polity which has descended
to us. "Kings, Lords, and Commons" are, we think, ordinances of
nature. Yet Milton's political writings embody the reflections of a
period when, for a few years, the government of England was nearly as
much a subject of fundamental discussion as that of France was in 1851.
An "invitation to thinkers," to borrow the phrase of Necker, was given
by the circumstances of the time; and with the habitual facility of
philosophical speculation, it was accepted, and used to the utmost.
Such are not the kind of speculations in which we expect assistance
from Milton. It is not in its transactions with others, in its
dealings with the manifold world, that the isolated and austere mind
shows itself to the most advantage. Its strength lies in itself. It
has "a calm and pleasing solitariness." It hears thoughts which others
cannot hear. It enjoys the quiet and still air of delightful studies;
and is ever conscious of such musing and poetry "as is not to be
obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her twin daughters, but
by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all
utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed
fire of his altar."
"Descend from heaven, Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine
Following, above th' Olympian hill I soar.
Above the flight of Pegaséan wing.
The meaning, not the name, I call; for thou
Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top
Of old Olympus dwell'st, but heavenly born:
Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed,
Thou with eternal Wisdom didst converse,
Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play
In presence of th' Almighty Father, pleased
With thy celestial song. Up led by thee,
Into the heaven of heavens I have presumed,
An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air,
Thy tempering. With like safety guided down,
Return me to my native element:
Lest from this flying steed unreined (as once
Bellerophon, though from a lower clime),
Dismounted, on th' Aleian field I fall,
Erroneous there to wander, and forlorn.
Half yet remains unsung, but narrower bound
Within the visible diurnal sphere:
Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude: yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when morn
Purples the east. Still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few;
But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revelers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard
In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears
To rapture, till the savage clamor drowned
Both harp and voice, nor could the Muse defend
Her son. So fail not thou, who thee implores;
For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream." [16]
"An ancient clergyman of Dorsetshire, Dr. Wright, found John Milton in
a small chamber hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow-chair, and
dressed neatly in black; pale, but not cadaverous. . . . He used also
to sit in a gray coarse-cloth coat at the door of his house near
Bunhill Fields, in warm sunny weather;" [17] and the common people said
he was inspired.
If from the man we turn to his works, we are struck at once with two
singular contrasts. The first of them is this:--The distinction
between ancient and modern art is sometimes said, and perhaps truly, to
consist in the simple bareness of the imaginative conceptions which we
find in ancient art, and the comparatively complex clothing in which
all modern creations are embodied. If we adopt this distinction,
Milton seems in some sort ancient, and in some sort modern. Nothing is
so simple as the subject-matter of his works. The two greatest of his
creations, the character of Satan and the character of Eve, are two of
the simplest--the latter probably the very simplest--in the whole field
of literature. On this side Milton's art is classical. On the other
hand, in no writer is the imagery more profuse, the illustrations more
various, the dress altogether more splendid; and in this respect the
style of his art seems romantic and modern. In real truth, however, it
is only ancient art in a modern disguise: the dress is a mere dress,
and can be stripped off when we will,--we all of us do perhaps in
memory strip it off for ourselves. Notwithstanding the lavish
adornments with which her image is presented, the character of Eve is
still the simplest sort of feminine essence,--the pure embodiment of
that inner nature which we believe and hope that women have. The
character of Satan, though it is not so easily described, has nearly as
few elements in it. The most purely modern conceptions will not bear
to be unclothed in this manner: their romantic garment clings
inseparably to them. Hamlet and Lear are not to be thought of except
as complex characters, with very involved and complicated embodiments.
They are as difficult to draw out in words as the common characters of
life are; that of Hamlet, perhaps, is more so. If we make it, as
perhaps we should, the characteristic of modern and romantic art that
it presents us with creations which we cannot think of or delineate
except as very varied and so to say circumstantial, we must not rank
Milton among the masters of romantic art. And without involving the
subject in the troubled sea of an old controversy, we may say that the
most striking of the poetical peculiarities of Milton is the bare
simplicity of his ideas and the rich abundance of his illustrations.
Another of his peculiarities is equally striking. There seems to be
such a thing as second-hand poetry: some poets, musing on the poetry of
other men, have unconsciously shaped it into something of their own.
The new conception is like the original, it would never probably have
existed had not the original existed previously: still, it is
sufficiently different from the original to be a new thing, not a copy
or a plagiarism; it is a creation, though so to say, a suggested
creation.
Gray is as good an example as can be found of a poet whose works abound
in this species of semi-original conceptions. Industrious critics
track his best lines back, and find others like them which doubtless
lingered near his fancy while he was writing them. The same critics
have been equally busy with the works of Milton, and equally
successful. They find traces of his reading in half his works; not,
which any reader could do, in overt similes and distinct illustrations,
but also in the very texture of the thought and the expression. In
many cases doubtless, they discover more than he himself knew. A mind
like his, which has an immense store of imaginative recollections, can
never know which of his own imaginations is exactly suggested by which
recollection. Men awake with their best ideas; it is seldom worth
while to investigate very curiously whence they came. Our proper
business is to adapt and mold and act upon them. Of poets perhaps this
is true even more remarkably than of other men: their ideas are
suggested in modes, and according to laws, which are even more
impossible to specify than the ideas of the rest of the world.
Second-hand poetry, so to say, often seems quite original to the poet
himself; he frequently does not know that he derived it from an old
memory: years afterwards it may strike him as it does others. Still,
in general, such inferior species of creation is not so likely to be
found in minds of singular originality as in those of less. A
brooding, placid, cultivated mind, like that of Gray, is the place
where we should expect to meet with it. Great originality disturbs the
adaptive process, removes the mind of the poet from the thoughts of
other men, and occupies it with its own heated and flashing thoughts.
Poetry of the second degree is like the secondary rocks of modern
geology,--a still, gentle, alluvial formation: the igneous glow of
primary genius brings forth ideas like the primeval granite, simple,
astounding, and alone. Milton's case is an exception to this rule.
His mind has marked originality, probably as much of it as any in
literature: but it has as much of molded recollection as any mind, too.
His poetry in consequence is like an artificial park, green and soft
and beautiful, yet with outlines bold, distinct, and firm, and the
eternal rock ever jutting out; or better still, it is like our own lake
scenery where nature has herself the same combination, where we have
Rydal Water side by side with the everlasting upheaved mountain.
Milton has the same union of softened beauty with unimpaired grandeur;
and it is his peculiarity.
These are the two contrasts which puzzle us at first in Milton, and
which distinguish him from other poets in our remembrance afterwards.
We have a superficial complexity in illustration and imagery and
metaphor; and in contrast with it we observe a latent simplicity of
idea, an almost rude strength of conception. The underlying thoughts
are few, though the flowers on the surface are so many. We have
likewise the perpetual contrast of the soft poetry of the memory, and
the firm--as it were, fused--and glowing poetry of the imagination.
His words, we may half fancifully say, are like his character: there is
the same austerity in the real essence, the same exquisiteness of
sense, the same delicacy of form which we know that he had, the same
music which we imagine there was in his voice. In both his character
and his poetry there was an ascetic nature in a sheath of beauty.
No book, perhaps, which has ever been written is more difficult to
criticize than "Paradise Lost." The only way to criticize a work of
the imagination is, to describe its effect upon the mind of the
reader,--at any rate, of the critic; and this can only be adequately
delineated by strong illustrations, apt similes, and perhaps a little
exaggeration. The task is in its very nature not an easy one: the poet
paints a picture on the fancy of the critic, and the critic has in some
sort to copy it on the paper; he must say what it is before he can make
remarks upon it. But in the case of "Paradise Lost" we hardly like to
use illustrations. The subject is one which the imagination rather
shrinks from. At any rate, it requires courage and an effort to compel
the mind to view such a subject as distinctly and vividly as it views
other subjects. Another peculiarity of "Paradise Lost" makes the
difficulty even greater. It does not profess to be a mere work of art;
or rather, it claims to be by no means that and that only. It starts
with a dogmatic aim: it avowedly intends to
"assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men."
In this point of view we have always had a sympathy with the Cambridge
mathematician who has been so much abused. He said, "After all,
'Paradise Lost' _proves_ nothing"; and various persons of poetical
tastes and temperament have been very severe on the prosaic
observation. Yet, "after all," he was right: Milton professed to prove
something; he was too profound a critic--rather, he had too profound an
instinct of those eternal principles of art which criticism tries to
state--not to know that on such a subject he must prove something. He
professed to deal with the great problem of human destiny: to show why
man was created, in what kind of universe he lives, whence he came and
whither he goes. He dealt of necessity with the greatest of subjects;
he had to sketch the greatest of objects. He was concerned with
infinity and eternity even more than with time and sense: he undertook
to delineate the ways and consequently the character of Providence, as
well as the conduct and the tendencies of man. The essence of success
in such an attempt is to satisfy the religious sense of man; to bring
home to our hearts what we know to be true; to teach us what we have
not seen; to awaken us to what we have forgotten; to remove the
"covering" from all people, and the "veil" that is spread over all
nations: to give us, in a word, such a conception of things divine and
human as we can accept, believe, and trust. The true doctrine of
criticism demands what Milton invites,--an examination of the degree in
which the great epic attains this aim. And if, in examining it, we
find it necessary to use unusual illustrations, and plainer words than
are customary, it must be our excuse that we do not think the subject
can be made clear without them.
The defect of "Paradise Lost" is that, after all, it is founded on a
_political_ transaction. The scene is in heaven very early in the
history of the universe, before the creation of man or the fall of
Satan. We have a description of a court [Book v.]. The angels,
"by imperial summons called,"
appear:--
"Under their hierarchs in orders bright
Ten thousand thousand ensigns high advanced;
Standards and gonfalons 'twixt van and rear
Stream in the air, and for distinction serve
Of hierarchies, or orders, and degrees."