Doctor Johnson deemed "the knowledge of nature half the task of a poet,"
but not until he had written all his poetry did he repair to the
Highlands. Milton allows natural science and the observation of the
picturesque no place among the elements of a poetical self-education,
and his practice differs entirely from that which would in our day be
adopted by an aspirant happy in equal leisure. Such an one would
probably have seen no inconsiderable portion of the globe ere he could
resolve to bury himself in a tiny hamlet for five years. The poems which
Milton composed at Horton owe so much of their beauty to his country
residence as to convict him of error in attaching no more importance to
the influences of scenery. But this very excellence suggests that the
spell of scenery need not be exactly proportioned to its grandeur.
The beauties of Horton are characterized by Professor Masson as those of
"rich, teeming, verdurous flat, charming by its appearance of plenty,
and by the goodly show of wood along the fields and pastures, in the
nooks where the houses nestle, and everywhere in all directions to the
sky-bound verge of the landscape." He also notices "the canal-like
abundance and distribution of water. There are rivulets brimming through
the meadows among rushes and water-plants; and by the very sides of the
ways, in lieu of ditches, there are slow runnels, in which one can see
the minnows swimming." The distant keep of Windsor, "bosomed high in
tufted trees," is the only visible object that appeals to the
imagination, or speaks of anything outside of rural peace and
contentment. Milton's house, as Todd was informed by the vicar of the
parish, stood till about 1798. If so, however, it is very remarkable
that the writer of an account of Horton in the _Gentleman's Magazine_
for August, 1791, who speaks of Milton with veneration, and transcribes
his mother's epitaph, does not allude to the existence of his house. Its
site is traditionally identified with that of Berkyn Manor, near the
church, and an old pigeon-house is asserted to be a remnant of the
original building. The elder Milton was no doubt merely the tenant; his
landlord is said to have been the Earl of Bridgewater, but as there is
no evidence of the Earl having possessed property in Horton, the
statement may be merely an inference from Milton's poetical connection
with the family. If not Bridgewater, the landlord was probably
Bulstrode, the lord of the manor, and chief personage in the village.
The Miltons still kept a footing in the metropolis. Christopher Milton,
on his admission to the Inner Temple in September, 1632, is described as
second son of John Milton of London, and subsequent legal proceedings
disclose that the father, with the aid of his partner, was still doing
business as a scrivener in 1637. It may be guessed that the veteran cit
would not be sorry to find himself occasionally back in town. What with
social exclusiveness, political and religious controversy, and
uncongeniality of tastes, the Miltons' country circle of acquaintance
was probably narrow. After five years of country life the younger Milton
at all events thought seriously of taking refuge in an Inn of Court,
"wherever there is a pleasant and shady walk," and tells Diodati, "Where
I am now I live obscurely and in a cramped manner." He had only just
made the acquaintance of his distinguished neighbour, Sir Henry Wotton,
Provost of Eton, by the beginning of 1638, though it appears that he was
previously acquainted with John Hales.
Milton's five years at Horton were nevertheless the happiest of his
life. It must have been an unspeakable relief to him to be at length
emancipated from compulsory exercises, and to build up his mind without
nod or beck from any quarter. For these blessings he was chiefly
indebted to his father, whose industry and prudence had procured his
independence and his rural retirement, and whose tender indulgence and
noble confidence dispensed him from what most would have deemed the
reasonable condition that he should at least earn his own living. "I
will not," he exclaims to his father, "praise thee for thy fulfilment of
the ordinary duties of a parent, my debt is heavier (_me poscunt
majora_). Thou hast neither made me a merchant nor a barrister":--
"Neque enim, pater, ire jubebas
Qua via lata patet, qua pronior area lucri,
Certaque condendi fulget spes aurea nummi:
Nec rapis ad leges, male custoditaque gentis
Jura, nec insulsis damnas clamoribus aures."
The stroke at the subserviency of the lawyers to the Crown (_male
custodita jura gentis_) would be appreciated by the elder Milton, nor
can we doubt that the old Puritan fully approved his son's resilience
from a church denied by Arminianism and prelacy. He would not so easily
understand the dedication of a life to poetry, and the poem from which
the above citation is taken seems to have been partly composed to smooth
his repugnance away. He was soon to have stronger proofs that his son
had not mistaken his vocation: it would be pleasant to be assured that
the old man was capable of valuing "Comus" and "Lycidas" at their worth.
The circumstances under which "Comus" was produced, and its subsequent
publication with the extorted consent of the author, show that Milton
did not wholly want encouragement and sympathy. The insertion of his
lines on Shakespeare in the Second Folio (1632) also denotes some
reputation as a wit. In the main, however, remote from urban circles and
literary cliques, with few correspondents and no second self in
sweetheart or friend, he must have led a solitary intellectual life,
alone with his great ambition, and probably pitied by his acquaintance.
"The world," says Emerson to the Poet, "is full of renunciations and
apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and a
churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has
protected his well-beloved flower." The special nature of Milton's
studies cannot now be exactly ascertained. Of his manner of studying he
informs Diodati, "No delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of
anything holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round
off, as it were, some great period of my studies." Of his object he
says: "God has instilled into me, at all events, a vehement love of the
beautiful. Not with so much labour is Ceres said to have sought
Proserpine as I am wont day and night to seek for the idea of the
beautiful through all the forms and faces of things, and to follow it
leading me on as with certain assured traces." We may be sure that he
read the classics of all the languages which he understood. His copies
of Euripides, Pindar, Aratus, and Lycophron, are, or have been recently,
extant, with marginal notes, proving that he weighed what he read. A
commonplace book contains copious extracts from historians, and he tells
Diodati that he has read Greek history to the fall of Constantinople. He
speaks of having occasionally repaired to London for instruction in
mathematics and music. His own programme, promulgated eight years later,
but without doubt perfectly appropriate to his Horton period, names
before all else--"Devout prayer to the Holy Spirit, that can enrich with
all utterance and knowledge, and send out His Seraphim with the hallowed
fire of His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases. To
this must be added select reading, steady observation, and insight into
all seemly and generous arts and affairs, till which in some measure be
compassed, I refuse not to sustain this expectation." This is not the
ideal of a mere scholar, as Mark Paulson thinks he at one time was, and
would wish him to have remained. "Affairs" are placed fully on a level
with "arts." Milton was kept from politics in his youth, not by any
notion of their incompatibility with poetry; but by the more cogent
arguments at their command "under whose inquisitious and tyrannical
duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish."
Milton's poetical development is, in many respects, exceptional. Most
poets would no doubt, in theory, agree with Landor, "febriculis non
indicari vires, impatientiam ab ignorantia non differre," but their
faith will not be proved by lack of works, as Landor's precept and
example require. He, who like Milton lisps in numbers usually sings
freely in adolescence; he who is really visited by a true inspiration
generally depends on mood rather than on circumstance. Milton, on the
other hand, until fairly embarked on his great epic, was comparatively
an unproductive, and literally an occasional poet. Most of his pieces,
whether English or Latin, owe their existence to some impulse from
without: "Comus" to the solicitation of a patron, "Lycidas" to the death
of a friend. The "Allegro" and the "Penseroso" seem almost the only two
written at the urgency of an internal impulse; and perhaps, if we knew
their history, we should discover that they too were prompted by
extraneous suggestion or provoked into being by accident. Such is the
way with Court poets like Dryden and Claudian; it is unlike the usual
procedure of Milton's spiritual kindred. Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, write
incessantly; whatever care they may bestow upon composition, the
impulse to produce is never absent. With Milton it is commonly dormant
or ineffectual; he is always studying, but the fertility of his mind
bears no apparent proportion to the pains devoted to its cultivation. He
is not, like Wordsworth, labouring at a great work whose secret progress
fills him with a majestic confidence; or, like Coleridge, dreaming of
works which he lacks the energy to undertake; or, save once, does he
seem to have felt with Keats:--
"Fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before that books, in high piled charactery,
Hold in rich garners the full ripened grain."
He neither writes nor wishes to write; he simply studies, piling up the
wood on the altar, and conscious of the power to call down fire from
Heaven when he will. There is something sublime in this assured
confidence; yet its wisdom is less evident than its grandeur. "No man,"
says Shelley, "can say, 'I will compose poetry.'" If he cannot say this
of himself to-day, still less can he say it of himself to-morrow. He
cannot tell whether the illusions of youth will forsake him wholly;
whether the joy of creation will cease to thrill; what unpropitious
blight he may encounter in an enemy or a creditor, or harbour in an
uncongenial mate. Milton, no doubt, entirely meant what he said when he
told Diodati: "I am letting my wings grow and preparing to fly, but my
Pegasus has not yet feathers enough to soar aloft in the fields of air."
But the danger of this protracted preparation was shown by his narrow
escape from poetical shipwreck when the duty of the patriot became
paramount to that of the poet. The Civil War confounded his
anticipations of leisurely composition, and but for the disguised
blessing of his blindness, the mountain of his attainment might have
been Pisgah rather than Parnassus.
It is in keeping with the infrequency of Milton's moods of overmastering
inspiration, and the strength of will which enabled him to write
steadily or abstain from writing at all, that his early compositions
should be, in general, so much more correct than those of other English
poets of the first rank. The childish bombast of "Titus Andronicus," the
commonplace of Wordsworth, the frequent inanity of the youthful
Coleridge and the youthful Byron, Shelley's extravagance, Keats's
cockneyism, Tennyson's mawkishness, find no counterpart in Milton's
early compositions. All these great writers, though the span of some of
them was but short, lived long enough to blush for much of what they had
in the days of their ignorance taken for poetry. The mature Milton had
no cause to be ashamed of anything written by the immature Milton,
reasonable allowance being made for the inevitable infection of
contemporary false taste. As a general rule, the youthful exuberance of
a Shakespeare would be a better sign; faults, no less than beauties,
often indicate the richness of the soil. But Milton was born to confute
established opinions. Among other divergencies from usage, he was at
this time a rare example of an English poet whose faculty was, in large
measure, to be estimated by his essays in Latin verse. England had up to
this time produced no distinguished Latin poet, though Scotland had:
and had Milton's Latin poems been accessible, they would certainly have
occupied a larger place in the estimation of his contemporaries than his
English compositions. Even now they contribute no trifling addition to
his fame, though they cannot, even as exercises, be placed in the
highest rank. There are two roads to excellence in Latin verse--to write
it as a scholar, or to write it as a Roman. England has once, and only
once, produced a poet so entirely imbued with the Roman spirit that
Latin seemed to come to him like the language of some prior state of
existence, rather remembered than learned. Landor's Latin verse is hence
greatly superior to Milton's, not, perhaps, in scholarly elegance, but
in absolute vitality. It would be poor praise to commend it for fidelity
to the antique, for it is the antique. Milton stands at the head of the
numerous class who, not being actually born Romans, have all but made
themselves so. "With a great sum obtained I this freedom." His Latin
compositions are delightful, but precisely from the qualities least
characteristic of his genius as an English poet. Sublimity and
imagination are infrequent; what we have most commonly to admire are
grace, ease, polish, and felicitous phrases rather concise in expression
than weighty with matter. Of these merits the elegies to his friend
Diodati, and the lines addressed to his father and to Manso, are
admirable examples. The "Epitaphium Damonis" is in a higher strain, and
we shall have to recur to it.
Except for his formal incorporation with the University of Oxford, by
proceeding M.A. there in 1635, and the death of his mother on April 3,
1637, Milton's life during his residence at Horton, as known to us, is
entirely in his writings. These comprise the "Sonnet to the
Nightingale," "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," all probably written in 1633;
"Arcades," probably, and "Comus" certainly written in 1634; "Lycidas" in
1637. The first three only are, or seem to be, spontaneous overflowings
of the poetic mind: the others are composed in response to external
invitations, and in two instances it is these which stand highest in
poetic desert. Before entering on any criticism, it will be convenient
to state the originating circumstances of each piece.
"Arcades" and "Comus" both owe their existence to the musician Henry
Lawes, unless the elder Milton's tenancy of his house from the Earl of
Bridgewater can be accepted as a fact. Both were written for the
Bridgewater family, and if Milton felt no special devotion to this
house, his only motive could have been to aid the musical performance of
his friend Henry Lawes, whose music is discommended by Burney, but who,
Milton declares:
"First taught our English music how to span
Words with just note and accent."
Masques were then the order of the day, especially after the splendid
exhibition of the Inns of Court in honour of the King and Queen,
February, 1634. Lawes, as a Court musician, took a leading part in this
representation, and became in request on similar occasions. The person
intended to be honoured by the "Arcades" was the dowager Countess of
Derby, mother-in-law of the Earl of Bridgewater, whose father, Lord
Keeper Egerton, she had married in 1600. The aged lady, to whom more
than forty years before Spenser had dedicated his "Teares of the Muses,"
and who had ever since been an object of poetic flattery and homage,
lived at Harefield, about four miles from Uxbridge; and there the
"Arcades" were exhibited, probably in 1634. Milton's melodious verses
were only one feature in a more ample entertainment. That they pleased
we may be sure, for we find him shortly afterwards engaged on a similar
undertaking of much greater importance, commissioned by the Bridgewater
family. In those days Milton had no more of the Puritanic aversion to
the theatre--
"Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild,"
than to the pomps and solemnities of cathedral ritual:--
"But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloisters pale,
And love the high-embowed roof,
With antique pillars massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light:
There let the pealing organ blow,
To the full-voic'd quire below,
In service high and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness through mine ear
Dissolve me into ecstacies,
And bring all heaven before mine eyes."
He therefore readily fell in with Lawes's proposal to write a masque to
celebrate Lord Bridgewater's assumption of the Lord Presidency of the
Welsh Marches. The Earl had entered upon the office in October, 1633,
and "Comus" was written some time between this and the following
September. Singular coincidences frequently linked Milton's fate with
the north-west Midlands, from which his grandmother's family and his
brother-in-law and his third wife sprung, whither the latter retired,
where his friend Diodati lived, and his friend King died, and where now
the greatest of his early works was to be represented in the
time-hallowed precincts of Ludlow Castle, where it was performed on
Michaelmas night, in 1634. If, as we should like to think, he was
himself present, the scene must have enriched his memory and his mind.
The castle--in which Prince Arthur had spent with his Spanish bride the
six months of life which alone remained to him, in which eighteen years
before the performance Charles the First had been installed Prince of
Wales with extraordinary magnificence, and which, curiously enough, was
to be the residence of the Cavalier poet, Butler--would be a place of
resort for English tourists, if it adorned any country but their own.
The dismantled keep is still an imposing object, lowering from a steep
hill around whose base the curving Teme alternately boils and gushes
with tumultuous speed. The scene within must have realized the lines in
the "Allegro ":
"Pomp, and feast, and revelry,
Mask and antique pageantry,
Where throngs of knights and barons bold,
In weeds of peace high triumphs hold,
With store of ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain influence."
Lawes himself acted the attendant Spirit, the Lady and the Brothers
were performed by Lord Bridgewater's youthful children, whose own
nocturnal bewilderment in Haywood Forest, could we trust a tradition,
doubted by the critics, but supported by the choice of the neighbourhood
of Severn as the scene of the drama, had suggested his theme to Milton.
He is evidently indebted for many incidents and ideas to Peele's "Old
Wives' Tale," and the "Comus" of Erycius Puteanus; but there is little
morality in the former production and little fancy in the latter. The
peculiar blending of the highest morality with the noblest imagination
is as much Milton's own as the incomparable diction. "I," wrote Sir
Henry Wootton on receiving a copy of the anonymous edition printed by
Lawes in 1637, "should much commend the tragical part if the lyrical did
not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your songs and odes,
whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in
our language." "Although not openly acknowledged by the author," says
Lawes in his apology for printing prefixed to the poem, "it is a
legitimate offspring, so lovely and so much desired that the often
copying of it hath tired my pen to give my several friends satisfaction,
and brought me to a necessity of producing it to the public view." The
publication is anonymous, and bears no mark of Milton's participation
except a motto, which none but the author could have selected,
intimating a fear that publication is premature. The title is simply "A
Maske presented at Ludlow Castle," nor did the piece receive the name of
"Comus" until after Milton's death.
It has been remarked that one of the most characteristic traits of
Milton's genius, until he laid hand to "Paradise Lost," is the
dependence of his activity upon promptings from without. "Comus" once
off his mind, he gives no sign of poetical life for three years, nor
would have given any then but for the inaccurate chart or unskilful
seamanship which proved fatal to his friend Edward King, August 10,
1637. King, a Fellow of Milton's college, had left Chester, on a voyage
to Ireland, in the stillest summer weather:--
"The air was calm, and on the level brine
Sleek Panope and all her sisters played."
Suddenly the vessel struck on a rock, foundered, and all on board
perished except some few who escaped in a boat. Of King it was reported
that he refused to save himself, and sank to the abyss with hands folded
in prayer. Great sympathy was excited among his friends at Cambridge,
enough at least to evoke a volume of thirty-six elegies in various
languages, but not enough to inspire any of the contributors, except
Milton, with a poetical thought, while many are so ridiculous that
quotation would be an affront to King's memory. But the thirty-sixth is
"Lycidas." The original manuscript remains, and is dated in November. Of
the elegy's relation to Milton's biography it may be said that it sums
up the two influences which had been chiefly moulding his mind of late
years, the natural influences of which he had been the passive recipient
during his residence at Horton, and the political and theological
passion with which he was becoming more and more inspired by the
circumstances of the time. By 1637 the country had been eight years
without a parliament, and the persecution of Puritans had attained its
acme. In that year Laud's new Episcopalian service book was forced, or
rather was attempted to be forced, upon Scotland; Prynne lost his ears;
and Bishop Williams was fined eighteen thousand pounds and ordered to be
imprisoned during the King's pleasure. Hence the striking, if
incongruous, introduction of "The pilot of the Galilean lake," to
bewail, in the character of a shepherd, the drowned swain in conjunction
with Triton, Hippotades, and Camus. "The author," wrote Milton
afterwards, "by occasion, foretells the ruin of the corrupted clergy,
then in their height." It was a Parthian dart, for the volume was
printed at the University Press in 1638, probably a little before his
departure for Italy.
The "Penseroso" and the "Allegro," notwithstanding that each piece is
the antithesis of the other, are complementary rather than contrary, and
may be, in a sense, regarded as one poem, whose theme is the praise of
the reasonable life. It resembles one of those pictures in which the
effect is gained by contrasted masses of light and shade, but each is
more nicely mellowed and interfused with the qualities of the other than
it lies within the resources of pictorial skill to effect. Mirth has an
undertone of gravity, and melancholy of cheerfulness. There is no
antagonism between the states of mind depicted; and no rational lover,
whether of contemplation or of recreation, would find any difficulty in
combining the two. The limpidity of the diction is even more striking
than its beauty. Never were ideas of such dignity embodied in verse so
easy and familiar, and with such apparent absence of effort. The
landscape-painting is that of the seventeenth century, absolutely true
in broad effects, sometimes ill-defined and even inaccurate in minute
details. Some of these blemishes are terrible in nineteenth-century
eyes, accustomed to the photography of our Brownings and Patmores.
Milton would probably have made light of them, and perhaps we owe him
some thanks for thus practically refuting the heresy that inspiration
implies infallibility. Yet the poetry of his blindness abounds with
proof that he had made excellent use of his eyes while he had them, and
no part of his poetry wants instances of subtle and delicate observation
worthy of the most scrutinizing modern:--
"Thee, chantress, oft the woods among,
I woo, to hear thy evensong;
And, missing thee, I walk unseen
On the dry, smooth-shaven green."
"The song of the nightingale," remarks Peacock, "ceases about the time
the grass is mown." The charm, however, is less in such detached
beauties, however exquisite, than in the condensed opulence--"every
epithet a text for a canto," says Macaulay--and in the general
impression of "plain living and high thinking," pursued in the midst of
every charm of nature and every refinement of culture, combining the
ideal of Horton with the ideal of Cambridge.
"Lycidas" is far more boldly conventional, not merely in the treatment
of landscape, but in the general conception and machinery. An initial
effort of the imagination is required to feel with the poet; it is not
wonderful that no such wing bore up the solid Johnson. Talk of Milton
and his fellow-collegian as shepherds! "We know that they never drove
afield, and that they had no flocks to batten." There is, in fact,
according to Johnson, neither nature nor truth nor art nor pathos in the
poem, for all these things are inconsistent with the introduction of a
shepherd of souls in the character of a shepherd of sheep. A
nineteenth-century reader, it may be hoped, finds no more difficulty in
idealizing Edward King as a shepherd than in personifying the ocean calm
as "sleek Panope and all her sisters," which, to be sure, may have been
a trouble to Johnson. If, however, Johnson is deplorably prosaic,
neither can we agree with Pattison that "in 'Lycidas' we have reached
the high-water mark of English Poesy and of Milton's own production."
Its innumerable beauties are rather exquisite than magnificent. It is an
elegy, and cannot, therefore, rank as high as an equally consummate
example of epic, lyric, or dramatic art. Even as elegy it is surpassed
by the other great English masterpiece, "Adonais," in fire and grandeur.
There is no incongruity in "Adonais" like the introduction of "the pilot
of the Galilean lake"; its invective and indignation pour naturally out
of the subject; their expression is not, as in "Lycidas," a splendid
excrescence. There is no such example of sustained eloquence in
"Lycidas" as the seven concluding stanzas of "Adonais" beginning, "Go
thou to Rome." But the balance is redressed by the fact that the
beauties of "Adonais" are the inimitable. Shelley's eloquence is even
too splendid for elegy. It wants the dainty thrills and tremors of
subtle versification, and the witcheries of verbal magic in which
"Lycidas" is so rich--"the opening eyelids of the morn;" "smooth-sliding
Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds;" Camus's garment, "inwrought with
figures dim;" "the great vision of the guarded mount;" "the tender stops
of various quills;" "with eager thought warbling his Doric lay." It will
be noticed that these exquisite phrases have little to do with Lycidas
himself, and it is a fact not to be ignored, that though Milton and
Shelley doubtless felt more deeply than Dryden when he composed his
scarcely inferior threnody on Anne Killegrew, whom he had never seen,
both might have found subjects of grief that touched them more nearly.
Shelley tells us frankly that "in another's woe he wept his own." We
cannot doubt of whom Milton was thinking when he wrote:
"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise,
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life. 'But not the praise,'
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears;
'Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies;
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
much fame in heaven expect thy meed.'"
"Comus," the richest fruit of Milton's early genius, is the epitome of
the man at the age at which he wrote it. It bespeaks the scholar and
idealist, whose sacred enthusiasm is in some danger of contracting a
taint of pedantry for want of acquaintance with men and affairs. The
Elder Brother is a prig, and his dialogues with his junior reveal the
same solemn insensibility to the humorous which characterizes the
kindred genius of Wordsworth, and would have provoked the kindly smile
of Shakespeare. It is singular to find the inevitable flaw of "Paradise
Lost" prefigured here, and the wicked enchanter made the real hero of
the piece. These defects are interesting, because they represent the
nature of Milton as it was then, noble and disinterested to the height
of imagination, but self-assertive, unmellowed, angular. They disappear
entirely when he expatiates in the regions of exalted fancy, as in the
introductory discourse of the Spirit, and the invocation to Sabrina.
They recur when he moralizes; and his morality is too interwoven with
the texture of his piece to be other than obtrusive. He fatigues with
virtue, as Lucan fatigues with liberty; in both instances the scarcely
avoidable error of a young preacher. What glorious morality it is no one
need be told; nor is there any poem in the language where beauties of
thought, diction, and description spring up more thickly than in
"Comus." No drama out of Shakespeare has furnished such a number of the
noblest familiar quotations. It is, indeed, true that many of these
jewels are fetched from the mines of other poets: great as Milton's
obligations, to Nature were, his obligations to books were greater. But
he has made all his own by the alchemy of his genius, and borrows little
but to improve. The most remarkable coincidence is with a piece
certainly unknown to him--Calderon's "Magico Prodigioso," which was
first acted in 1637, the year of the publication of "Comus," a great
year in the history of the drama, for the "Cid" appeared in it also. The
similarity of the situations of Justina tempted by the Demon, and the
Lady in the power of Comus, has naturally begotten a like train of
thought in both poets.
"_Comus._ Nay, Lady, sit; if I but wave this wand,
Your nerves are all chained up in alabaster,
And you a statue, or, as Daphne was,
Root-bound, that fled Apollo.
_Lady._ Fool, do not boast
Thou can'st not touch the freedom of my mind
With all thy charms, although this corporal rind
Thou hast immanacled, while Heaven sees good."
"_Justina._ Thought is not in my power, but action is.
I will not move my foot to follow thee.
_Demon._ But a far mightier wisdom than thine own
Exerts itself within thee, with such power
Compelling thee to that which it inclines
That it shall force thy step; how wilt thou then
Resist, Justina?
_Justina._ By my free will.
_Demon._ I
Must force thy will.
_Justina._ It is invincible.
It were not free if thou had'st power upon it."
It must be admitted that where the Spaniard and the Englishman come
directly into competition the former excels. The dispute between the
Lady and Comus may be, as Johnson says it is, "the most animating and
affecting scene in the drama;" but, tried by the dramatic test which
Calderon bears so well, it is below the exigencies and the possibilities
of the subject. Nor does the poetry here, quite so abundantly as in the
other scenes in this unrivalled "suite of speeches," atone for the
deficiencies of the play.
It is a just remark of Pattison's that "in a mind of the consistent
texture of Milton's, motives are secretly influential before they emerge
in consciousness." In September, 1637, Milton had complained to Diodati
of his cramped situation in the country, and talked of taking chambers
in London. Within a few months we find this vague project matured into a
settled scheme of foreign travel. One tie to home had been severed by
the death of his mother in the preceding April; and his father was to
find another prop of his old age in his second son, Christopher, about
to marry and reside with him. "Lycidas" had appeared meanwhile, or was
to appear, and its bold denunciation of the Romanizing clergy might well
offend the ruling powers. The atmosphere at home was, at all events,
difficult breathing for an impotent patriot; and Milton may have come to
see what we so clearly see in "Comus," that his asperities and
limitations needed contact with the world. Why speak of the charms of
Italy, in themselves sufficient allurement to a poet and scholar? His
father, trustful and unselfish as of old, found the considerable sum
requisite for a prolonged foreign tour; and in April, 1638, Milton,
provided with excellent introductions from Sir Henry Wootton and others,
seeks the enrichment and renovation of his genius in Italy:--
"And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."