had been but slightly taught him, yet a certain reservedness of
natural disposition and moral discipline, learned out of the
noblest philosophy, was enough to keep him in disdain of far less
incontinences than these,” that had been charged on him. In like
spirit, he replies to the suspicious calumny respecting his morning
haunts. “Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home; not
sleeping, or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up
and stirring, in winter, often ere the sound of any bell awake men
to labor or devotion; in summer, as oft with the bird that first
rouses, or not much tardier, to read good authors, or cause them to
be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have its perfect
fraught; then with useful and generous labors preserving the body’s
health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish
obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion and our country’s
liberty, when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand
and cover their stations. These are the morning practices.” This
native honor never forsook him. It is the spirit of “Comus,” the
loftiest song in the praise of chastity that is in any language.
It always sparkles in his eyes. It breathed itself over his decent
form. It refined his amusements, which consisted in gardening, in
exercise with the sword, and in playing on the organ. It engaged
his interest in chivalry, in courtesy, in whatsoever savored of
generosity and nobleness. This magnanimity shines in all his life. He
accepts a high impulse at every risk, and deliberately undertakes the
defence of the English people, when advised by his physicians that
he does it at the cost of sight. There is a forbearance even in his
polemics. He opens the war and strikes the first blow. When he had
cut down his opponents, he left the details of death and plunder to
meaner partisans. He said, “he had learned the prudence of the Roman
soldier, not to stand breaking of legs, when the breath was quite out
of the body.”
To this antique heroism, Milton added the genius of the Christian
sanctity. Few men could be cited who have so well understood what
is peculiar in the Christian ethics, and the precise aid it has
brought to men, in being an emphatic affirmation of the omnipotence
of spiritual laws, and, by way of marking the contrast to vulgar
opinions, laying its chief stress on humility. The indifferency of
a wise mind to what is called high and low, and the fact that true
greatness is a perfect humility, are revelations of Christianity
which Milton well understood. They give an inexhaustible truth to
all his compositions. His firm grasp of this truth is his weapon
against the prelates. He celebrates in the martyrs “the unresistible
might of weakness.” He told the bishops that “instead of showing the
reason of their lowly condition from divine example and command,
they seek to prove their high preëminence from human consent and
authority.” He advises that in country places, rather than to trudge
many miles to a church, public worship be maintained nearer home, as
in a house or barn. “For, notwithstanding the gaudy superstition of
some still devoted ignorantly to temples, we may be well assured,
that he who disdained not to be born in a manger, disdains not to
be preached in a barn.” And the following passage, in the “Reason
of Church Government,” indicates his own perception of the doctrine
of humility. “Albeit I must confess to be half in doubt whether I
should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to the eye of the
world, that I shall endanger either not to be regarded, or not to
be understood. For who is there, almost, that measures wisdom by
simplicity, strength by suffering, dignity by lowliness?” Obeying
this sentiment, Milton deserved the apostrophe of Wordsworth:—
“Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself did lay.”
He laid on himself the lowliest duties. Johnson petulantly taunts
Milton with “great promise and small performance,” in returning
from Italy because his country was in danger, and then opening a
private school. Milton, wiser, felt no absurdity in this conduct.
He returned into his revolutionized country, and assumed an honest
and useful task, by which he might serve the state daily, whilst he
launched from time to time his formidable bolts against the enemies
of liberty. He felt the heats of that “love” which “esteems no office
mean.” He compiled a logic for boys; he wrote a grammar; and devoted
much of his time to the preparing of a Latin dictionary. But the
religious sentiment warmed his writings and conduct with the highest
affection of faith. The memorable covenant, which in his youth, in
the second book of the “Reason of Church Government,” he makes with
God and his reader, expressed the faith of his old age. For the first
time since many ages, the invocations of the Eternal Spirit in the
commencement of his books are not poetic forms, but are thoughts, and
so are still read with delight. His views of choice of profession,
and choice in marriage, equally expect a divine leading.
Thus chosen, by the felicity of his nature and of his breeding, for
the clear perception of all that is graceful and all that is great
in man, Milton was not less happy in his times. His birth fell upon
the agitated years when the discontents of the English Puritans
were fast drawing to a head against the tyranny of the Stuarts. No
period has surpassed that in the general activity of mind. It is said
that no opinion, no civil, religious, moral dogma can be produced,
that was not broached in the fertile brain of that age. Questions
that involve all social and personal rights were hasting to be
decided by the sword, and were searched by eyes to which the love of
freedom, civil and religious, lent new illumination. Milton, gentle,
learned, delicately bred in all the elegancy of art and learning,
was set down in England in the stern, almost fanatic society of the
Puritans. The part he took, the zeal of his fellowship, make us
acquainted with the greatness of his spirit as in tranquil times we
could not have known it. Susceptible as Burke to the attractions
of historical prescription, of royalty, of chivalry, of an ancient
church illustrated by old martyrdoms and installed in cathedrals,—he
threw himself, the flower of elegancy, on the side of the reeking
conventicle; the side of humanity, but unlearned and unadorned. His
muse was brave and humane, as well as sweet. He felt the dear love
of native land and native language. The humanity which warms his
pages begins as it should, at home. He preferred his own English,
so manlike he was, to the Latin, which contained all the treasures
of his memory. “My mother bore me,” he said, “a speaker of what God
made mine own, and not a translator.” He told the Parliament, that
“the imprimaturs of Lambeth House had been writ in Latin; for that
our English, the language of men ever famous and foremost in the
achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enow
to spell such a dictatory presumption.” At one time he meditated
writing a poem on the settlement of Britain, and a history of England
was one of the three main tasks which he proposed to himself. He
proceeded in it no further than to the Conquest. He studied with
care the character of his countrymen, and once in the “History,” and
once again in the “Reason of Church Government,” he has recorded his
judgment of the English genius.
Thus drawn into the great controversies of the times, in them he is
never lost in a party. His private opinions and private conscience
always distinguish him. That which drew him to the party was his love
of liberty, ideal liberty; this therefore he could not sacrifice to
any party. Toland tells us, “As he looked upon true and absolute
freedom to be the greatest happiness of this life, whether to
societies or single persons, so he thought constraint of any sort to
be the utmost misery; for which reason be used to tell those about
him the entire satisfaction of his mind, that he had constantly
employed his strength and faculties in the defence of liberty, and in
direct opposition to slavery.” Truly he was an apostle of freedom;
of freedom in the house, in the state, in the church; freedom of
speech, freedom of the press, yet in his own mind discriminated from
savage license, because that which he desired was the liberty of
the wise man, containing itself in the limits of virtue. He pushed,
as far as any in that democratic age, his ideas of _civil_ liberty.
He proposed to establish a republic, of which the federal power was
weak and loosely defined, and the substantial power should remain
with primary assemblies. He maintained, that a nation may try, judge,
and slay their king, if he be a tyrant. He pushed as far his views
of _ecclesiastical_ liberty. He taught the doctrine of unlimited
toleration. One of his tracts is writ to prove that no power on
earth can compel in matters of religion. He maintained the doctrine
of _literary_ liberty, denouncing the censorship of the press, and
insisting that a book shall come into the world as freely as a man,
so only it bear the name of author or printer, and be responsible for
itself like a man. He maintained the doctrine of _domestic_ liberty,
or the liberty of divorce, on the ground that unfit disposition of
mind was a better reason for the act of divorce than infirmity of
body, which was good ground in law. The tracts he wrote on these
topics are, for the most part, as fresh and pertinent to-day as they
were then. The events which produced them, the practical issues
to which they tend, are mere occasions for this philanthropist to
blow his trumpet for human rights. They are all varied applications
of one principle, the liberty of the wise man. He sought absolute
truth, not accommodating truth. His opinions on all subjects are
formed for man as he ought to be, for a nation of Miltons. He would
be divorced when he finds in his consort unfit disposition; knowing
that he should not abuse that liberty, because with his whole heart
he abhors licentiousness and loves chastity. He defends the slaying
of the king, because a king is a king no longer than he governs
by the laws; “it would be right to kill Philip of Spain making an
inroad into England, and what right the king of Spain hath to govern
us at all, the same hath the king Charles to govern tyrannically.”
He would remove hirelings out of the church, and support preachers
by voluntary contributions; requiring that such only should preach
as have faith enough to accept so self-denying and precarious a
mode of life, scorning to take thought for the aspects of prudence
and expediency. The most devout man of his time, he frequented no
church; probably from a disgust at the fierce spirit of the pulpits.
And so, throughout all his actions and opinions, is he a consistent
spiritualist, or believer in the omnipotence of spiritual laws. He
wished that his writings should be communicated only to those who
desired to see them. He thought nothing honest was low. He thought
he could be famous only in proportion as he enjoyed the approbation
of the good. He admonished his friend “not to admire military
prowess, or things in which force is of most avail. For it would not
be matter of rational wonder, if the wethers of our country should
be born with horns that could batter down cities and towns. Learn to
estimate great characters, not by the amount of animal strength, but
by the habitual justice and temperance of their conduct.”
Was there not a fitness in the undertaking of such a person to write
a poem on the subject of Adam, the first man? By his sympathy with
all nature; by the proportion of his powers; by great knowledge, and
by religion, he would reascend to the height from which our nature is
supposed to have descended. From a just knowledge of what man should
be, he described what he was. He beholds him as he walked in Eden:—
“His fair large front and eye sublime declared
Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad.”
And the soul of this divine creature is excellent as his form. The
tone of his thought and passion is as healthful, as even, and as
vigorous, as befits the new and perfect model of a race of gods.
The perception we have attributed to Milton, of a purer ideal of
humanity, modifies his poetic genius. The man is paramount to
the poet. His fancy is never transcendent, extravagant; but, as
Bacon’s imagination was said to be “the noblest that ever contented
itself to minister to the understanding,” so Milton’s ministers
to the character. Milton’s sublimest song, bursting into heaven
with its peals of melodious thunder, is the voice of Milton still.
Indeed, throughout his poems, one may see under a thin veil, the
opinions, the feelings, even the incidents of the poet’s life, still
reappearing. The sonnets are all occasional poems. “L’Allegro” and
“Il Penseroso” are but a finer autobiography of his youthful fancies
at Harefield; the “Comus” a transcript, in charming numbers, of that
philosophy of chastity, which, in the “Apology for Smectymnuus,” and
in the “Reason of Church Government,” he declares to be his defence
and religion. The “Samson Agonistes” is too broad an expression
of his private griefs to be mistaken, and is a version of the
“Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.” The most affecting passages in
“Paradise Lost” are personal allusions; and, when we are fairly in
Eden, Adam and Milton are often difficult to be separated. Again,
in “Paradise Regained,” we have the most distinct marks of the
progress of the poet’s mind, in the revision and enlargement of his
religious opinions. This may be thought to abridge his praise as a
poet. It is true of Homer and Shakspeare that they do not appear
in their poems; that those prodigious geniuses did cast themselves
so totally into their song, that their individuality vanishes, and
the poet towers to the sky, whilst the man quite disappears. The
fact is memorable. Shall we say that in our admiration and joy in
these wonderful poems we have even a feeling of regret that the men
knew not what they did; that they were too passive in their great
service; were channels through which streams of thought flowed from
a higher source, which they did not appropriate, did not blend with
their own being? Like prophets, they seem but imperfectly aware of
the import of their own utterances. We hesitate to say such things,
and say them only to the unpleasing dualism, when the man and the
poet show like a double consciousness. Perhaps we speak to no fact,
but to mere fables, of an idle mendicant Homer, and of a Shakspeare
content with a mean and jocular way of life. Be it how it may, the
genius and office of Milton were different, namely, to ascend by
the aids of his learning and his religion,—by an equal perception,
that is, of the past and the future,—to a higher insight and more
lively delineation of the heroic life of man. This was his poem;
whereof all his indignant pamphlets and all his soaring verses are
only single cantos or detached stanzas. It was plainly needful that
his poetry should be a version of his own life, in order to give
weight and solemnity to his thoughts; by which they might penetrate
and possess the imagination and the will of mankind. The creations
of Shakspeare are cast into the world of thought to no further end
than to delight. Their intrinsic beauty is their excuse for being.
Milton, fired “with dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of good
things into others,” tasked his giant imagination and exhausted the
stores of his intellect for an end beyond, namely, to teach. His
own conviction it is which gives such authority to his strain. Its
reality is its force. If out of the heart it came, to the heart it
must go. What schools and epochs of common rhymers would it need to
make a counterbalance to the severe oracles of his muse:
“In them is plainest taught and easiest learnt,
What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so.”
The lover of Milton reads one sense in his prose and in his metrical
compositions; and sometimes the muse soars highest in the former,
because the thought is more sincere. Of his prose in general, not
the style alone but the argument also is poetic; according to Lord
Bacon’s definition of poetry, following that of Aristotle, “Poetry,
not finding the actual world exactly conformed to its idea of good
and fair, seeks to accommodate the shows of things to the desires
of the mind, and to create an ideal world better than the world of
experience.” Such certainly is the explanation of Milton’s tracts.
Such is the apology to be entered for the plea for freedom of
divorce; an essay, which, from the first until now, has brought a
degree of obloquy on his name. It was a sally of the extravagant
spirit of the time, overjoyed, as in the French Revolution, with the
sudden victories it had gained, and eager to carry on the standard
of truth to new heights. It is to be regarded as a poem on one of
the griefs of man’s condition, namely, unfit marriage. And as many
poems have been written upon unfit society, commending solitude, yet
have not been proceeded against, though their end was hostile to the
state; so should this receive that charity which an angelic soul,
suffering more keenly than others from the unavoidable evils of human
life, is entitled to.
We have offered no apology for expanding to such length our
commentary on the character of John Milton; who, in old age, in
solitude, in neglect, and blind, wrote the Paradise Lost; a man whom
labor or danger never deterred from whatever efforts a love of the
supreme interests of man prompted. For are we not the better; are
not all men fortified by the remembrance of the bravery, the purity,
the temperance, the toil, the independence and the angelic devotion
of this man, who, in a revolutionary age, taking counsel only of
himself, endeavored, in his writings and in his life, to carry out
the life of man to new heights of spiritual grace and dignity,
without any abatement of its strength?
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Reprinted from the _North American Review_, July, 1838.
PAPERS FROM THE DIAL.
The tongue is prone to lose the way;
Not so the pen, for in a letter
We have not better things to say,
But surely say them better.
[Illustration: (decorative banner)]
PAPERS FROM THE DIAL.
I.
THOUGHTS ON MODERN LITERATURE.[5]
In our fidelity to the higher truth we need not disown our debt, in
our actual state of culture, in the twilights of experience, to these
rude helpers. They keep alive the memory and the hope of a better
day. When we flout all particular books as initial merely, we truly
express the privilege of spiritual nature, but alas, not the fact
and fortune of this low Massachusetts and Boston, of these humble
Junes and Decembers of mortal life. Our souls are not self-fed, but
do eat and drink of chemical water and wheat. Let us not forget the
genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book. We go
musing into the vault of day and night; no constellation shines, no
muse descends, the stars are white points, the roses brick-colored
leaves, and frogs pipe, mice cheep, and wagons creak along the road.
We return to the house and take up Plutarch or Augustine, and read a
few sentences or pages, and lo! the air swims with life, secrets of
magnanimity and grandeur invite us on every hand, life is made up of
them. Such is our debt to a book. Observe moreover that we ought to
credit literature with much more than the bare word it gives us. I
have just been reading poems which now in memory shine with a certain
steady, warm, autumnal light. That is not in their grammatical
construction which they give me. If I analyze the sentences it
eludes me, but is the genius and suggestion of the whole. Over every
true poem lingers a certain wild beauty, immeasurable; a happiness
lightsome and delicious fills the heart and brain, as they say
every man walks environed by his proper atmosphere, extending to
some distance around him. This beautiful result must be credited to
literature also in casting its account.
In looking at the library of the Present Age, we are first
struck with the fact of the immense miscellany. It can hardly be
characterized by any species of book, for every opinion, old and new,
every hope and fear, every whim and folly has an organ. It exhibits
a vast carcass of tradition every year with as much solemnity as a
new revelation. Along with these it vents books that breathe of new
morning, that seem to heave with the life of millions, books for
which men and women peak and pine; books which take the rose out of
the cheek of him that wrote them, and give him to the midnight a sad,
solitary, diseased man; which leave no man where they found him, but
make him better or worse; and which work dubiously on society and
seem to inoculate it with a venom before any healthy result appears.
In order to any complete view of the literature of the present age,
an inquiry should include what it quotes, what it writes and what it
wishes to write. In our present attempt to enumerate some traits of
the recent literature, we shall have somewhat to offer on each of
these topics, but we cannot promise to set in very exact order what
we have to say.
In the first place it has all books. It reprints the wisdom of the
world. How can the age be a bad one which gives me Plato and Paul and
Plutarch, St. Augustine, Spinoza, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher,
Donne and Sir Thomas Browne, beside its own riches? Our presses groan
every year with new editions of all the select pieces of the first
of mankind,—meditations, history, classifications, opinions, epics,
lyrics, which the age adopts by quoting them. If we should designate
favorite studies in which the age delights more than in the rest of
this great mass of the permanent literature of the human race, one
or two instances would be conspicuous. First; the prodigious growth
and influence of the genius of Shakspeare, in the last one hundred
and fifty years, is itself a fact of the first importance. It almost
alone has called out the genius of the German nation into an activity
which spreading from the poetic into the scientific, religious and
philosophical domains, has made theirs now at last the paramount
intellectual influence of the world, reacting with great energy on
England and America. And thus, and not by mechanical diffusion, does
an original genius work and spread himself.
The poetry and speculation of the age are marked by a certain
philosophic turn, which discriminates them from the works of earlier
times. The poet is not content to see how “Fair hangs the apple
from the rock,” “What music a sunbeam awoke in the groves,” nor
of Hardiknute, how “Stately steppes he east the way, and stately
steppes he west,” but he now revolves, What is the apple to me? and
what the birds to me? and what is Hardiknute to me? and what am I?
And this is called subjectiveness, as the eye is withdrawn from the
object and fixed on the subject or mind.
We can easily concede that a steadfast tendency of this sort appears
in modern literature. It is the new consciousness of the one mind,
which predominates in criticism. It is the uprise of the soul, and
not the decline. It is founded on that insatiable demand for unity,
the need to recognize one nature in all the variety of objects, which
always characterizes a genius of the first order. Accustomed always
to behold the presence of the universe in every part, the soul will
not condescend to look at any new part as a stranger, but saith,—“I
know all already, and what art thou? Show me thy relations to me, to
all, and I will entertain thee also.”
There is a pernicious ambiguity in the use of the term _subjective_.
We say, in accordance with the general view I have stated, that the
single soul feels its right to be no longer confounded with numbers,
but itself to sit in judgment on history and literature, and to
summon all facts and parties before its tribunal. And in this sense
the age is subjective.
But, in all ages, and now more, the narrow-minded have no interest
in anything but in its relation to their personality. What
will help them to be delivered from some burden, eased in some
circumstance, flattered or pardoned or enriched; what will help to
marry or to divorce them, to prolong or to sweeten life, is sure
of their interest; and nothing else. Every form under the whole
heaven they behold in this most partial light or darkness of
intense selfishness, until we hate their being. And this habit of
intellectual selfishness has acquired in our day the fine name of
subjectiveness.
Nor is the distinction between these two habits to be found in the
circumstance of using the first person singular, or reciting facts
and feelings of personal history. A man may say I, and never refer
to himself as an individual; and a man may recite passages of his
life with no feeling of egotism. Nor need a man have a vicious
subjectiveness because he deals in abstract propositions.