Milton had a full share. He was not always, though he was most commonly,
just. Prudence, the only virtue, says Carlyle, which gets its reward on
earth, prudence he had, yet not a timid prudence. Of temperance—the
Puritan virtue—and all that it includes, chastity, self-reverence,
self-control, “Comus” is the beautiful hymn. But, above all, Milton had
the heroic virtue, fortitude; not only passively in the proud and
sublime endurance of the evil days and evil tongues on which he had
fallen; of the darkness, dangers, solitude that compassed him round; but
actively in “the unconquerable will . . . and courage never to submit or
yield”; the courage which “bates no jot of heart or hope, but still
bears up and steers right onward.”
There is nothing more bracing in English poetry than those passages in
the sonnets, in “Paradise Lost” and in “Samson Agonistes” where Milton
speaks of his blindness. Yet here it is observable that Milton, who is
never sentimental, is also never pathetic but when he speaks of himself,
in such lines, e.g., as Samson’s
My race of glory run, and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest.
Dante has this same touching dignity in alluding to his own sorrows; but
his hard and rare pity is more often aroused by the sorrows of others:
by Ugolino’s little starving children, or by the doom of Francesca and
her lover. Milton is untender. Yet virtue with him is not always
forbidding and austere. As he was a poet, he felt the “beauty of
holiness,” though in another sense than Archbishop Laud’s use of that
famous phrase. It was his “natural haughtiness,” he tells us, that saved
him from sensuality and base descents of mind. His virtue was a kind of
good taste, a delicacy almost womanly. It is the “Lady of Christ’s”
speaking with the lips of the lady in “Comus,” who says,
—That which is not good is not delicious
To a well governed and wise appetite.
But there is a special fitness in this commemoration at this place. For
Milton is the scholar poet. He is the most learned, the most classical,
the most bookish—I was about to say the most academic—of English
poets; but I remember that academic, through its use in certain
connections, might imply a timid conformity to rules and models, a lack
of vital originality which would not be true of Milton. Still, Milton
was an academic man in a broad sense of the word. A hard student of
books, he injured his eyes in boyhood by too close application, working
every day till midnight. He spent seven years at his university. He was
a teacher and a writer on education. I need not give the catalogue of
his acquirements further than to say that he was the best educated
Englishman of his generation.
Mark Pattison, indeed, who speaks for Oxford, denies that Milton was a
regularly learned man, like Usher or Selden. That is, I understand, he
had made no exhaustive studies in professional fields of knowledge such
as patristic theology or legal antiquities. Of course not: Milton was a
poet: he was studying for power, for self-culture and inspiration, and
had little regard for a merely retrospective scholarship which would not
aid him in the work of creation.
Be that as it may, all Milton’s writings in prose and verse are so
saturated with learning as greatly to limit the range of their appeal. A
poem like “Lycidas,” loaded with allusions, can be fully enjoyed only by
the classical scholar who is in the tradition of the Greek pastoralists,
who “knows the Dorian water’s gush divine.” I have heard women and young
people and unlettered readers who have a natural taste for poetry, and
enjoy Burns and Longfellow, object to this classical stiffness in Milton
as pedantry. Now pedantry is an ostentation of learning for its own
sake, and none has said harder things of it than Milton.
. . . Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior . . .
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself.
Cowley was the true pedant: his erudition was crabbed and encumbered the
free movement of his mind, while Milton made his the grace and ornament
of his verse.
How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo’s lute.
I think we may attribute Milton’s apparent pedantry, not to a wish for
display, but to an imagination familiarized with a somewhat special
range of associations. This is a note of the Renaissance, and Milton’s
culture was Renaissance culture. That his mind derived its impetus more
directly from books than from life; that his pages swarm with the
figures of mythology and the imagery of the ancient poets is true. In
his youthful poems he accepted and perfected Elizabethan, that is,
Renaissance, forms: the court masque, the Italian sonnet, the artificial
pastoral. But as he advanced in art and life, he became classical in a
severer sense, discarding the Italianate conceits of his early verse,
rejecting rhyme and romance, replacing decoration with construction; and
finally, in his epic and tragedy modelled on the pure antique, applying
Hellenic form to Hebraic material. His political and social, no less
than his literary, ideals were classical. The English church ritual,
with its Catholic ceremonies; the universities, with their scholastic
curricula; the feudal monarchy, the mediaeval court and peerage—of all
these barbarous survivals of the Middle Ages he would have made a clean
sweep, to set up in their stead a commonwealth modelled on the
democracies of Greece and Rome, schools of philosophy like the Academy
and the Porch, and voluntary congregations of Protestant worshippers
without priest, liturgy or symbol, practising a purely rational and
spiritual religion. He says to the parliament: “How much better I find
ye esteem it to imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece than the
barbaric pride of a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness.” And elsewhere:
“Those ages to whose polite wisdom and letters we owe that we are not
yet Goths and Jutlanders.”
So, in his treatment of public questions, Milton had what Bacon calls
“the humor of a scholar.” He was an idealist and a doctrinaire, with
little historic sense and small notion of what is practicable here and
now. England is still a monarchy; the English church is still prelatical
and has its hireling clergy; parliament keeps its two chambers, and the
bishops sit and vote in the house of peers; ritualism and tractarianism
gain apace upon low church and evangelical; the “Areopagitica” had no
effect whatever in hastening the freedom of the press; and, ironically
enough, Milton himself, under the protectorate, became an official book
licenser.
England was not ripe for a republic; she was returning to her idols,
“choosing herself a captain back to Egypt.” It took a century and a half
for English liberty to recover the ground lost at the Restoration.
Nevertheless, that little group of republican idealists, Vane, Bradshaw,
Lambert and the rest, with Milton their literary spokesman, must always
interest us as Americans and republicans. Let us, however, not mistake.
Milton was no democrat. His political principles were republican, or
democratic if you please, but his personal feelings were intensely
aristocratic. Even that free commonwealth which he thought he saw so
easy and ready a way to establish, and the constitution of which he
sketched on the eve of the Restoration, was no democracy, but an
aristocratic, senatorial republic like Venice, a government of the
_optimates_, not of the populace. For the trappings of royalty, the pomp
and pageantry, the servility and flunkeyism of a court, Milton had the
contempt of a plain republican:
How poor their outworn coronets
Beside one leaf of that plain civic wreath!
But for the people, as a whole, he had an almost equal contempt. They
were “the ungrateful multitude,” “the inconsiderate multitude,” the
_profanum vulgus_, “the throng and noises of vulgar and irrational men.”
There was not a popular drop of blood in him. He had no faith in
universal suffrage or majority rule. “More just it is,” he wrote, “that
a less number compel a greater to retain their liberty, than that a
greater number compel a less to be their fellow slaves,” i.e., to bring
back the king by a _plébescite_. And again: “The best affected and best
principled of the people stood not numbering or computing on which side
were most voices in Parliament, but on which side appeared to them most
reason.”
Milton was a Puritan; and the Puritans, though socially belonging, for
the most part, among the plain people, and though made by accident the
champions of popular rights against privilege, were yet a kind of
spiritual aristocrats. Calvinistic doctrine made of the elect a chosen
few, a congregation of saints, set apart from the world. To this feeling
of religious exclusiveness Milton’s pride of intellect added a personal
intensity. He respects distinction and is always rather scornful of the
average man, the _pecus ignavum silentûm_, the herd of the obscure and
unfamed.
Nor do I name of men the common rout
That, wandering loose about,
Grow up and perish like the summer fly,
Heads without names, no more remembered.
Hazlitt insisted that Shakespeare’s principles were aristocratic,
chiefly, I believe, because of his handling of the tribunes and the
plebs in “Coriolanus.” Shakespeare does treat his mobs with a kindly and
amused contempt. They are fickle, ignorant, illogical, thick-headed,
easily imposed upon. Still he makes you feel that they are composed of
good fellows at bottom, quickly placated and disposed to do the fair
thing. I think that Shakespeare’s is the more democratic nature; that
his distrust of the people is much less radical than Milton’s. Walt
Whitman’s obstreperous democracy, his all-embracing _camaraderie_, his
liking for the warm, gregarious pressure of the crowd, was a spirit
quite alien from his whose “soul was like a star and dwelt apart.”
Anything vulgar was outside or below the sympathies of this Puritan
gentleman. Falstaff must have been merely disgusting to him; and fancy
him reading Mark Twain! In Milton’s references to popular pastimes there
is always a mixture of disapproval, the air of the superior person. “The
people on their holidays,” says Samson, are “impetuous, insolent,
unquenchable.” “Methought,” says the lady in “Comus,”
. . . it was the sound
Of riot and ill managed merriment,
Such as the jocund flute or gamesome pipe
Stirs up among the loose, unlettered hinds
When, for their teeming flocks and granges full,
In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan
And thank the gods amiss.
Milton liked to be in the minority, to bear up against the pressure of
hostile opinion. “God intended to prove me,” he wrote, “whether I durst
take up alone a rightful cause against a world of disesteem, and found I
durst.” The seraph Abdiel is a piece of self-portraiture; there is no
more characteristic passage in all his works:
. . . The Seraph Abdiel, faithful found
Among the faithless, faithful only he . . .
Nor number nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth or change his constant mind,
Though single. From amidst them forth he past
Long way through hostile scorn which he sustained
Superior, nor of violence feared aught;
And with retorted scorn his back he turned
On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.
Milton was no democrat; equality and fraternity were not his trade,
though liberty was his passion. Liberty he defended against the tyranny
of the mob, as of the king. He preferred a republic to a monarchy, since
he thought it less likely to interfere with the independence of the
private citizen. Political liberty, liberty of worship and belief,
freedom of the press, freedom of divorce, he asserted them all in turn
with unsurpassed eloquence. He proposed a scheme of education reformed
from the clogs of precedent and authority. Even his choice of blank
verse for “Paradise Lost” he vindicated as a case of “ancient _liberty_
recovered to heroic song from this troublesome and modern bondage of
riming.”
There is yet one reason more why we at Yale should keep this
anniversary. Milton was the poet of English Puritanism, and therefore he
is _our_ poet. This colony and this college were founded by English
Puritans; and here the special faith and manners of the Puritans
survived later than at the other great university of New
England—survived almost in their integrity down to a time within the
memory of living men. When Milton left Cambridge in 1632, “church-outed
by the prelates,” it was among the possibilities that, instead of
settling down at his father’s country house at Horton, he might have
come to New England. Winthrop had sailed, with his company, two years
before. In 1635 three thousand Puritans emigrated to Massachusetts,
among them Sir Henry Vane, the younger,—the “Vane, young in years, but
in sage counsels old,” of Milton’s sonnet,—who was made governor of the
colony in the following year. Or in 1638, the year of the settlement of
New Haven, when Milton went to Italy for culture, it would not have been
miraculous had he come instead to America for freedom. It was in that
same year that, according to a story long believed though now
discredited, Cromwell, Pym, Hampden and Hazelrig, despairing of any
improvement in conditions at home, were about to embark for New England
when they were stopped by orders in council. Is it too wild a dream that
“Paradise Lost” might have been written in Boston or in New Haven? But
it was not upon the cards. The literary class does not willingly
emigrate to raw lands, or separate itself from the thick and ripe
environment of an old civilization. However, we know that Vane and Roger
Williams were friends of Milton; and he must have known and been known
to Cromwell’s chaplain, Hugh Peters, who had been in New England; and
doubtless to others among the colonists. It is, at first sight,
therefore rather strange that there is no mention of Milton, so far as I
have observed, in any of our earlier colonial writers. It is said, I
know not on what authority, that there was not a single copy of
Shakespeare’s plays in New England in the seventeenth century. That is
not so strange, considering the Puritan horror of the stage. But one
might have expected to meet with mention of Milton, as a
controversialist if not as a poet. The French Huguenot poet Du Bartas,
whose poem “La Semaine” contributed some items to the account of the
creation in “Paradise Lost,” was a favorite author in New England—I
take it, in Sylvester’s translation, “The Divine Weeks and Works.” It is
also said that the “Emblems” of Milton’s contemporary, Francis Quarles,
were much read in New England. But Tyler supposes that Nathaniel Ames,
in his Almanac for 1725, “pronounced there for the first time the name
of Milton, together with chosen passages from his poems.” And he thinks
it worth noting that Lewis Morris, of Morrisania, ordered an edition of
Milton from a London bookseller in 1739.[7]
The failure of our forefathers to recognize the great poet of their
cause may be explained partly by the slowness of the growth of Milton’s
fame in England. His minor poems, issued in 1645, did not reach a second
edition till 1673. “Paradise Lost,” printed in 1667, found its fit
audience, though few, almost immediately. But the latest literature
travelled slowly in those days into a remote and rude province.
Moreover, the educated class in New England, the ministers, though a
learned, were not a literary set, as is abundantly shown by their own
experiments in verse. It is not unlikely that Cotton Mather or Michael
Wigglesworth would have thought Du Bartas and Quarles better poets than
Milton if they had read the latter’s works.
We are proud of being the descendants of the Puritans; perhaps we are
glad that we are their descendants only, and not their contemporaries.
Which side would you have been on, if you had lived during the English
civil war of the seventeenth century? Doubtless it would have depended
largely on whether you lived in Middlesex or in Devon, whether your
parents were gentry or tradespeople, and on similar accidents. We think
that we choose, but really choices are made for us. We inherit our
politics and our religion. But if free to choose, I know in which camp I
would have been, and it would not have been that in which Milton’s
friends were found. The New Model army had the discipline—and the
prayer meetings. I am afraid that Rupert’s troopers plundered, gambled,
drank, and swore most shockingly. There was good fighting on both sides,
but the New Model had the right end of the quarrel and had the victory,
and I am glad that it was so. Still there was more fun in the king’s
army, and it was there that most of the good fellows were.
The influence of Milton’s religion upon his art has been much discussed.
It was owing to his Puritanism that he was the kind of poet that he was,
but it was in spite of his Puritanism that he was a poet at all. He was
the poet of a cause, a party, a sect whose attitude towards the graces
of life and the beautiful arts was notoriously one of distrust and
hostility. He was the poet, not only of that Puritanism which is a
permanent element in English character, but of much that was merely
temporary and local. How sensitive then must his mind have been to all
forms of loveliness, how powerful the creative instinct in him, when his
genius emerged without a scar from the long struggle of twenty years,
during which he had written pamphlet after pamphlet on the angry
questions of the day, and nothing at all in verse but a handful of
sonnets mostly provoked by public occasions!
The fact is, there were all kinds of Puritans. There were dismal
precisians, like William Prynne, illiberal and vulgar fanatics, the
Tribulation Wholesomes, Hope-on-high Bombys, and Zeal-of-the-land Busys,
whose absurdities were the stock in trade of contemporary satirists from
Jonson to Butler. But there were also gentlemen and scholars, like
Fairfax, Marvell, Colonel Hutchinson, Vane, whose Puritanism was
consistent with all elegant tastes and accomplishments. Was Milton’s
Puritanism hurtful to his art? No and yes. It was in many ways an
inspiration; it gave him _zeal_, a Puritan word much ridiculed by the
Royalists; it gave refinement, distinction, selectness, elevation to his
picture of the world. But it would be uncritical to deny that it also
gave a certain narrowness and rigidity to his view of human life.
It is curious how Milton’s early poems have changed places in favor with
“Paradise Lost.” They were neglected for over a century. Joseph Warton
testifies in 1756 that they had only “very lately met with a suitable
regard”; had lain “in a sort of obscurity, the private enjoyment of a
few curious readers.” And Dr. Johnson exclaims: “Surely no man could
have fancied that he read ‘Lycidas’ with pleasure, had he not known its
author.” There can be little doubt that nowadays Milton’s _juvenilia_
are more read than “Paradise Lost,” and by many—perhaps by a majority
of readers—rated higher. In this opinion I do not share. “Paradise
Lost” seems to me not only greater work, more important, than the minor
pieces, but better poetry, richer and deeper. Yet one quality these
early poems have which “Paradise Lost” has not—charm. Milton’s epic
astonishes, moves, delights, but it does not fascinate. The youthful
Milton was sensitive to many attractions which he afterwards came to
look upon with stern disapproval. He went to the theatre and praised the
comedies of Shakespeare and Jonson; he loved the romances of chivalry
and fairy tales; he had no objection to dancing, ale drinking, the music
of the fiddle, and rural sports; he writes to Diodati of the pretty
girls on the London streets; he celebrates the Catholic and Gothic
elegancies of English church architecture and ritual, the cloister’s
pale, the organ music and full-voiced choir, the high embowed roof, and
the storied windows which his military friends were soon to smash at
Ely, Salisbury, Canterbury, Lichfield, as popish idolatries. But in
“Iconoclastes” we find him sneering at the king for keeping a copy of
Shakespeare in his closet. In his treatise “Of Reformation” he denounces
the prelates for “embezzling the treasury of the church on painted and
gilded walls of temples, wherein God hath testified to have no delight.”
Evidently the Anglican service was one of those “gay religions, rich
with pomp and gold,” to which he alludes in “Paradise Lost.” A chorus
commends Samson the Nazarite for drinking nothing but water. Modern
tragedies are condemned for “mixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and
gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar persons”—as Shakespeare
does. In “Paradise Lost” the poet speaks with contempt of the romances
whose “chief mastery” it was
. . . to dissect,
With long and tedious havoc, fabled knights
In battles feigned.
And in “Paradise Regained” he even disparages his beloved classics,
preferring the psalms of David, the Hebrew prophecies and the Mosaic
law, to the poets, philosophers, and orators of Athens.
The Puritans were Old Testament men. Their God was the Hebrew Jehovah,
their imaginations were filled with the wars of Israel and the militant
theocracy of the Jews. In Milton’s somewhat patronizing attitude toward
women, there is something Mosaic—something almost Oriental. He always
remained susceptible to beauty in women, but he treated it as a
weakness, a temptation. The bitterness of his own marriage experience
mingles with his words. I need not cite the well-known passages about
Dalila and Eve, where he who reads between the lines can always detect
the figure of Mary Powell. There is no gallantry in Milton, but a deal
of common sense. The love of the court poets, cavaliers and sonneteers,
their hyperboles of passion, their abasement before their ladies he
doubtless scorned as the fopperies of chivalry, fantastic and unnatural
exaggerations, the insincerities of “vulgar amourists,” the fume of
. . . court amour,
Mixt dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenate which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.
To the Puritan, woman was at best the helpmate and handmaid of man. Too
often she was a snare, or a household foe, “a cleaving mischief far
within defensive arms.” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” are the only
poems of Milton in which he surrenders himself spontaneously to the joy
of living, to “unreproved pleasures free,” with no _arrière pensée_, or
intrusion of the conscience. Even in those pleasant Horatian lines to
Lawrence, inviting him to spend a winter day by the fire, drink wine,
and hear music, he ends with a fine Puritan touch:
He who of these delights can judge, yet spare
To interpose them oft, is truly wise.
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more
cakes and ale?” inquires Sir Toby of Shakespeare’s only Puritan.
“Yes,” adds the clown, “and ginger shall be hot in the mouth, too.” And
“wives may be merry and yet honest,” asserts Mistress Page.
It is not without astonishment that one finds Emerson writing, “To this
antique heroism Milton added the genius of the Christian sanctity . . .
laying its chief stress on humility.” Milton had a zeal for
righteousness, a noble purity and noble pride. But if you look for
saintly humility, for the spirit of the meek and lowly Jesus, the spirit
of charity and forgiveness, look for them in the Anglican Herbert, not
in the Puritan Milton. Humility was no fruit of the system which Calvin
begot and which begot John Knox. The Puritans were great invokers of the
sword of the Lord and of Gideon—the sword of Gideon and the dagger of
Ehud. There went a sword out of Milton’s mouth against the enemies of
Israel, a sword of threatenings, the wrath of God upon the ungodly. The
temper of his controversial writings is little short of ferocious. There
was not much in him of that “sweet reasonableness” which Matthew Arnold
thought the distinctive mark of Christian ethics. He was devout, but not
with the Christian devoutness. I would not call him a Christian at all,
except, of course, in his formal adherence to the creed of Christianity.
Very significant is the inferiority of “Paradise Regained” to “Paradise
Lost.” And in “Paradise Lost” itself, how weak and faint is the
character of the Saviour! You feel that he is superfluous, that the poet
did not need him. He is simply the second person of the Trinity, the
executive arm of the Godhead; and Milton is at pains to invent things
for him to do—to drive the rebellious angels out of heaven, to preside
over the six days’ work of creation, etc. I believe it was Thomas
Davidson who said that in “Paradise Lost” “Christ is God’s good boy.”
We are therefore not unprepared to discover, from Milton’s “Treatise of
Christian Doctrine,” that he had laid aside the dogma of vicarious
sacrifice and was, in his last years, a Unitarian. It was this Latin
treatise, translated and published in 1824, which called out Macaulay’s
essay, so urbanely demolished by Matthew Arnold, and which was
triumphantly reviewed by Dr. Channing in the _North American_. It was
lucky for Dr. Channing, by the way, that he lived in the nineteenth
century and not in the seventeenth. Two Socinians, Leggatt and Wightman,
were burned at the stake as late as James the First’s reign, one at
Lichfield and the other at Smithfield.
Milton, then, does not belong with those broadly human, all tolerant,
impartial artists, who reflect, with equal sympathy and infinite
curiosity, every phase of life: with Shakespeare and Goethe or, on a
lower level, with Chaucer and Montaigne; but with the intense, austere
and lofty souls whose narrowness is likewise their strength. His place
is beside Dante, the Catholic Puritan.
-----
[7] Mr. Charles Francis Adams informs me that a letter of inquiry sent
by him to the _Evening Post_ has brought out three or four references to
Milton in the “Magnalia,” besides other allusions to him in the
publications of the period. Mr. Adams adds, however, that there is
nothing to show that “Paradise Lost” was much read in New England prior
to 1750. The “Magnalia” was published in 1702.