Transcriber's Notes: Words in italics in the original are surrounded by
_underscores_. A row of asterisks represents an ellipsis. Ellipses match
the original. Some indented lines of poetry and hemistichs will not
display properly unless the reader uses a mono-spaced font. Other notes
follow the text.
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PROSE
AND POETICAL WORKS OF
JOHN MILTON
AN INTRODUCTION
TO THE
PROSE AND POETICAL WORKS
OF
JOHN MILTON
_Comprising all the Autobiographic Passages in his Works, the more Explicit
Presentations of his Ideas of True Liberty_
_COMUS, LYCIDAS, and SAMSON AGONISTES_
_With Notes and Forewords_
BY
HIRAM CORSON, LL.D.
_Professor of English Literature in the Cornell University_
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1899
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1899,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
'Servant of God, well done! Well hast thou fought
The better fight, who single hast maintained
Against revolted multitudes the cause
Of truth, in word mightier than they in arms,
And for the testimony of truth hast borne
Universal reproach, far worse to bear
Than violence; for this was all thy care—
To stand approved in sight of God, though worlds
Judged thee perverse.'
—_Paradise Lost_, VI. 29-37.
'O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies,
O skilled to sing of Time or Eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice of England,
Milton, a name to resound for ages;
Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starred from Jehovah's gorgeous armories,
Tower as the deep-domed empyrean
Rings to the roar of an angel onset—
Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
And bloom profuse and cedar arches
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,
Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,
And crimson-hued the stately palmwoods
Whisper in odorous heights of even.'
—TENNYSON.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGES
INTRODUCTION xiii-xxxii
MILTON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1-103
From A Defence of the English People 2-6
From Second Defence of the People of England 6-27
To Charles Diodati (_Elegia Prima_) 28-30
To Alexander Gill, Jr. (Familiar Letters, No. III.) 30, 31
To Thomas Young (Familiar Letters, No. IV.) 31
To Charles Diodati (_Elegia Sexta_) 31-33
Prolusiones quædam Oratoriæ 33-35
To Father (_Ad Patrem_) 35-40
English letter to a friend (unknown) who, it appears, had
been calling him to account for his apparent indifference
as to his work in life 40-43
Sonnet: On his having arrived at the age of twenty-three 42, 43
To Alexander Gill, Jr. (Familiar Letters, No. V.) 43-44
To Charles Diodati (Familiar Letters, Nos. VI., VII.) 44-46
To Benedetto Bonmattei of Florence (Familiar Letters, No.
VIII.) 46
From Mansus, Latin poem addressed to Manso, Marquis of
Villa 47
From Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed
printing 48, 49
To Lucas Holstenius in the Vatican at Rome (Familiar
Letters, No. IX.) 49, 50
Epitaphium Damonis 50, 51
From Of Reformation in England 52-54
From Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence, etc. 54-56
From The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty 56-65
From Apology for Smectymnuus 65-82
To Carlo Dati, Nobleman of Florence (Familiar Letters,
No. X.) 82-84
Sonnet: On his Blindness 84, 85
To the most distinguished Leonard Philaras, of Athens,
Ambassador from the Duke of Parma to the King of France
(Familiar Letters, No. XII.) 85, 86
To Henry Oldenburg, agent for the city of Bremen in Lower
Saxony with the Commonwealth (Familiar Letters, No. XIV.) 87, 88
To Leonard Philaras, Athenian (Familiar Letters, No. XV.) 88-90
Sonnet: To Cyriac Skinner 91
Sonnet: On his deceased wife 91
To the most accomplished Emeric Bigot (Familiar Letters,
No. XXI.) 92
To Henry Oldenburg (Familiar Letters, No. XXIX.) 93
From Considerations touching the Likeliest Means to remove
Hirelings out of the Church (August, 1659) 94-96
Autobiographic passages in the Paradise Lost 96-102
To the very distinguished Peter Heimbach, Councillor to
the Elector of Brandenburg (Familiar Letters, No.
XXXI.) 102, 103
Passages in Milton's prose and poetical works in which his
idea of true liberty, individual, domestic, civil,
political, and religious, is explicitly set forth 104-125
Comus: a Masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, before
the Earl of Bridgewater, then President of Wales 126-164
Lycidas 165-179
Samson Agonistes 181-244
NOTES 245-303
INTRODUCTION
Milton's prose works are perhaps not read, at the present day, to the
extent demanded by their great and varied merits, among which may be
named their uncompromising advocacy of whatsoever things are true,
honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report; their eloquent assertion
of the inalienable rights of men to a wholesome exercise of their
intellectual faculties, the right to determine for themselves, with all
the aids they can command, what is truth and what is error; the right
freely to communicate their honest thoughts from one to another,—rights
which constitute the only sure and lasting foundation of individual,
civil, political, and religious liberty; the ever-conscious sentiment
which they exhibit, on the part of the poet, of an entire dependence
upon 'that Eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and
knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his
altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases'; the
ever-present consciousness they exhibit of that stewardship which every
man as a probationer of immortality must render an account, according to
the full measure of the talents with which he has been intrusted—of the
sacred obligation, incumbent upon every one, of acting throughout the
details of life, private or public, trivial or momentous, 'as ever in
his great Task-Master's eye.'
Some of his poetical works are extensively 'studied' in the schools, and
a style study of some of his prose works is made in departments of
rhetoric; but his prose works cannot be said to be much read in the best
sense of the word,—that is, with all the faculties alert upon the
subject-matter as of prime importance, with an openness of heart, and
with an accompanying interest in the general loftiness of their diction;
in short, as every one should train himself to read any great author,
with the fullest loyalty to the author—by which is not meant that all
his thoughts and opinions and beliefs are to be accepted, but that what
they really are be adequately, or _ad modum recipientis_, apprehended;
in other words, loyalty to an author means that the most favorable
attitude possible for each and every reader be taken for the reception
of his meaning and spirit.
Mark Pattison, in his life of Milton, in the 'English Men of Letters,'
while fully recognizing the grand features of the prose works as
monuments of the English language, notwithstanding what he calls their
'asyntactic disorder,' undervalues, or rather does not value at all,
Milton's services to the cause of political and religious liberty as a
polemic prose writer, and considers it a thing to be much regretted that
he engaged at all in the great contest for political, religious, and
other forms of liberty. This seems to be the one unacceptable feature of
his very able life of the poet. 'But for the Restoration,' he says, 'and
the overthrow of the Puritans, we should never have had the great
Puritan epic.' Professor Goldwin Smith, in his article in the _New York
Nation_ on Pattison's 'Milton,' remarks: 'Looking upon the life of
Milton the politician merely as a sad and ignominious interlude in the
life of Milton the poet, Mr. Pattison cannot be expected to entertain
the idea that the poem is in any sense the work of the politician. Yet
we cannot help thinking that the tension and elevation which Milton's
nature had undergone in the mighty struggle, together with the heroic
dedication of his faculties to the most serious objects, must have had
not a little to do both with the final choice of his subject and with
the tone of his poem. "The great Puritan epic" could hardly have been
written by any one but a militant Puritan.'
Dr. Richard Garnett, in his 'Life of Milton,' pp. 68, 69, takes
substantially the same view as does Professor Smith: 'To regret with
Pattison that Milton should, at this crisis of the State, have turned
aside from poetry to controversy, is to regret that "Paradise Lost"
should exist. Such a work could not have proceeded from one indifferent
to the public weal. . . . It is sheer literary fanaticism to speak with
Pattison of "the prostitution of genius to political party." Milton is
as much the idealist in his prose as in his verse; and although in his
pamphlets he sides entirely with one of the two great parties in the
State, it is not as its instrument, but as its prophet and monitor.'
Milton was writing prose when, Mr. Pattison thinks, he should have been
writing poetry, 'and that most ephemeral and valueless kind of prose,
pamphlets, extempore articles on the topics of the day. He poured out
reams of them, _in simple unconsciousness that they had no influence
whatever on the current of events_.'
But they certainly had an influence, and a very great influence, on the
current of events not many years after. The restoration of Charles II.
did not mean that the work of Puritanism was undone, and that Milton's
pamphlets were to be of no effect. It was in a large measure due to that
work and to those pamphlets that in a few years—fourteen only after
Milton's death—the constitutional basis of the monarchy underwent a
quite radical change for the better,—a change which would have been a
solace to Milton, if he could have lived to see it; and he could then
have justly felt that he had contributed to the change. He would have
been but eighty years old, if he had lived till the revolution of 1688.
A man constituted as Milton was could not have kept himself apart from
the great conflicts of his time. He was a patriot in every fibre of his
being. He realized in the cultivation of himself his definition of
education, given in his tractate 'Of Education. To Master S. Hartlib':
'I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to
perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both
private and public, of peace and war.' Of course he did not mean that
that was all of education. And in his 'Areopagitica,' he says, after
defining 'the true warfaring Christian,' 'I cannot praise a fugitive and
cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out
and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal
garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.'
Although the direct subjects of his polemic prose works may not have an
interest for the general reader at the present day, they are all,
independently of their direct subjects, charged with 'truths that perish
never,' most vitally expressed. And this is as true of the 'Treatises on
Divorce' as it is of any of the other prose works. They are full of
bright gems of enduring truth.
Lord Macaulay's article on Milton, first published in the _Edinburgh
Review_ for August, 1825, is a brilliant and, in many respects, a
valuable production, but he certainly says some things on the
favorableness of an uncivilized age, and the unfavorableness of a
civilized and learned age, to poetical creativeness, which are quite
remote from the truth, and which Milton would certainly have regarded as
abundantly absurd. So, too, he would have regarded what is said of the
necessary struggle which a great poet must make against the spirit of
his age. All these views are as completely at variance with Milton's own
as are those of Mark Pattison in regard to Milton the politician.
Lord Macaulay's article was occasioned by the publication of an English
version, by Rev. Charles Richard Sumner, afterwards Bishop of
Winchester, of Milton's 'Treatise on Christian Doctrine,' the existence
of which was unknown up to the year 1823, when the original manuscript
in Latin was found in a press of the old State Paper office, in
Whitehall.
In this essay the author sets forth an opinion, still widely
entertained, it may be, by a large number of cultivated people, namely,
that as learning and general civilization, and science, with its
applications to the physical needs and comforts of life, advance, Poetry
recedes, and 'hides her diminished head,' and men become more and more
subject to facts as facts, losing sight more and more of the poetical,
that is, spiritual, relations of facts.
'Milton knew,' Macaulay tells us, 'that his poetical genius derived no
advantage from the civilization which surrounded him, or from the
learning which he had acquired; and he looked back with something of
regret to the ruder age of simple words and vivid impressions.'
But it appears from Milton's own authority that he did not know this;
that, on the contrary, he thought the poet should be master of all human
learning, ancient and modern, should know many languages and many
literatures; that 'by labour and _intense study_, which,' he adds, 'I
take to be my portion in this life, joined with the strong propensity of
nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as
they should not willingly let it die.' Some of the autobiographic
passages contained in this book will be found a sufficient refutation of
what has been quoted from Macaulay.
The view which Milton took of learning, and acted upon, is one which
should be kept before the minds of students at the present day, when the
tendency is so strong toward learning for its own sake. As well talk of
beefsteak for its own sake. Learning was with Milton a means of
enlarging his capacity—a means toward _being_ and _doing_. Mark
Pattison well says, 'He cultivated, not letters, but himself, and sought
to enter into possession of his own mental kingdom, not that he might
reign there, but that he might royally use its resources in building up
a work which should bring honour to his country, and his native tongue.'
'Though we admire,' Lord Macaulay continues, 'those great works of
imagination which have appeared in dark ages, we do not admire them the
more because they have appeared in dark ages. On the contrary, we hold
that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem
produced in a civilized age. We cannot understand why those who believe
in that most orthodox article of literary faith, that the earliest poets
are generally the best, should wonder at the rule as if it were the
exception. Surely the uniformity of the phenomenon indicates a
corresponding uniformity in the cause.'
Further on he says: 'He who, in an enlightened and literary society,
aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.' The most
highly learned and cultured (eternalized), the most fully developed in
every direction, are the most _childlike_, the least knowledge-proud,
and the more spiritual vitality they have, the greater will be their
humility and simplicity—the gates to true wisdom. 'He [the poet] must
take to pieces,' says Macaulay, 'the whole web of his mind.' Rather a
difficult piece of unravelling to impose upon the poor fellow! 'He must
unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto
his chief title of superiority.' Oh, who would be a poet in a civilized
age! 'His very talents will be a hindrance to him.' What an irredeemable
numskull he would have a poet to be! According to this doctrine, our
institutions for feeble-minded children are likely to send forth the
best poets into the world. 'His difficulties will be proportioned to
his proficiency in the pursuits which are fashionable among his
contemporaries, and that proficiency will in general be proportioned to
the vigor and activity of his mind. . . . We have seen in our own time,
great talents, intense labor, and long meditation, employed in this
struggle against the spirit of the age, and employed, we will not say
absolutely in vain, but with dubious success and feeble applause.'
Of all the flimsy theories in regard to the conditions of poetic
creativeness that the mind of man could devise, this is certainly the
flimsiest. It is only necessary to give a hasty glance at the works of
those poets who are regarded as Masters of Song in the various
literatures of the ancient and the modern world, to learn the secret of
their vitality and power—that secret being, first, that they all
possessed the best knowledge and learning of their times and places;
and, secondly, that they all held the widest and most intimate relations
with their several ages and countries, and drank deepest of, and most
intensely reflected, the spirit of those ages and countries. If
Shakespeare was not a learned man, he was the best educated man that
ever lived. He had a fulness of life, intellectual and spiritual, and an
easy command of all his faculties, to which but few of the sons of men
have ever attained; and he lived in an age the most favorable in human
history for the exercise of dramatic genius, and an age, on the whole,
more civilized than any that had ever preceded it.
No true poet could live in any age without imbibing and reflecting its
spirit, and that to a much greater degree than other men. For the poetic
nature is distinguished from ordinary natures by its greater
impressibility and its keener, more penetrating insight, and to suppose
that a poet can keep apart from the spirit of his age and the state of
society around him is to lose sight of the very _differentia_ of the
poetic nature, and implicitly to admit its feebleness. In one respect he
may be said to keep apart from his age, in the sense of rejecting, in
having no affinities for, what in it is ephemeral, while appropriating
what of vital and eternal is in it. His affinities, by virtue of his
poetic nature, are for what is enduring in the transient. And every age
must have the vital and eternal in it, as the vital and eternal are
omnipresent at all times and in all places.
The great poet is great because he is intensely _individual_, and there
can be no intense individuality, paradoxical as it may appear, that is
not subject, in a more than ordinary degree, to impressions of time and
place. An individual in the fullest sense of the word, one who
legitimates, as it were, in the eyes of his country or his age, his
decisive influence over its destiny, is generally characterized, not so
much by his rejecting power, though he will always, and necessarily,
have this in a high degree, as by his appropriating power. He brings to
the special unity of his nature all that that nature, in its healthiest
activity, can assimilate, and throws off only the to him non-assimilable
dross of things. The more complete his life becomes, the more it is
bound up with what surrounds it, and he is susceptible of impressions
the more numerous and the more profound.
The greater impressibility (spiritual sensitiveness) and its resultant,
the keener, more penetrating insight ('the vision and the faculty
divine'), which preëminently distinguish poetic genius from ordinary
natures, render great poets the truest historians of their times and the
truest prophets. The poetic and dramatic literature of a people is a
mirror in which is most clearly reflected their real and essential life.
History gives rather their phenomenal life. It is the essential spirit
only of an age, the permanent, the absolute, in it, as assimilated and
'married to immortal verse' by a great poet, that can retain a hold upon
the interests and sympathies of future generations.
Milton was most emphatically a man of his age, and its clearest
reflector, sustaining to it the most intimate and sympathetic and
intensely active relationship; and, of all that was enduring in it, his
works, both prose and poetical, are the best existing exponent. His
intimate relationship with his age has been set forth in Dr. Masson's
exhaustive and grandly monumental work, in six large octavo volumes,
'The Life of John Milton: narrated in connexion with the political,
ecclesiastical, and literary history of his time.' No other poet in
universal literature, unless Dante be an exception, ever sustained such
a relationship to the great movements of his time and country that an
exhaustive biography of him would need to be, to the same extent,
'narrated in connexion with the political, ecclesiastical, and literary
history of his time.'
Milton might justly and proudly have said of himself, with reference to
the fierce political and ecclesiastical conflicts of his time, '_quorum
pars magna fui_.' And who can doubt that by these conflicts, and even,
also, by his loss of sight therein, he was _tempered_ to write the
'Paradise Lost,' the 'Paradise Regained,' and the 'Samson Agonistes'? He
might have written some other great work, if he had kept himself apart
from these conflicts, as Pattison thinks he ought to have done, but he
certainly could not have written the 'Paradise Lost.' Of the principles
involved in the great contest for civil and religious liberty his prose
works are the fullest exponent. In the 'Paradise Lost' can be seen the
influence of his classical and Italian studies. Homer and Virgil and
Dante are in it, but its essential, vitalizing, controlling spirit is
that of a refined exalted Puritanism, freed from all that was in it of
the contingent and the accidental; and thus that spirit will be
preserved for ever in the pure amber of the poem.
It was not within the scope of this little book, as a primary
introduction to the study of Milton, to include any extended
presentation of the 'Paradise Lost.' But two grand features may be
alluded to here. It is, in some respects, one of the most _educating_ of
English poems. The grand feature of the poem, that feature which
distinguishes it from all other works of genius, both ancient and
modern, is its essential, constitutional sublimity. So universally has
this feature been recognized as peculiar to the poem, that the word
Miltonic has become synonymous with the sublime. The loftiness of the
diction, which is without all touch of bombast, every sympathetic reader
must feel to be an emanation from the august personality of the poet.
There is no perceptible strain anywhere, as there is no perceptible
lapse of power, on the part of the poet. He keeps ever up to the height
of his great argument. To come into the fullest possible sympathetic
relationship with the poem's constitutional sublimity, to be impressed
by its loftiness of diction, by the contriving spirit of its eloquence,
are educating experiences of the highest order—experiences which imply
an exercise, most vitalizing and uplifting, of the reader's higher
organs of apprehension and discernment. The theology of the poem need
not obstruct for any one these educating influences. They are quite
independent of the theology, as are the educating influences of the
'Divina Commedia' independent of its mediæval Catholicism. The absolute
man was in the ascendent in both Dante and Milton; and by virtue of that
ascendency, they are, and ever will continue to be, great educating
personalities, whatever false science and false opinions on various
subjects are embodied in their works, and however much the world's faith
in things which they most vitally believed may decline and entirely
cease to be. Their personalities and their works are consubstantial.
This fact—an immortal fact—was, perhaps, not taken sufficient account
of by Mark Pattison when he wrote in his 'Life of Milton' that 'the
demonology of the poem has already, with educated readers, passed from
the region of fact into that of fiction. Not so universally, but with a
large number of readers, the angelology can be no more than what the
critics call machinery. And it requires a violent effort from any of our
day to accommodate our conceptions to the anthropomorphic theology of
"Paradise Lost." Were the sapping process to continue at the same rate
for two more centuries, the possibility of epic illusion would be lost
to the whole scheme and economy of the poem.' But there is a power in
'Paradise Lost' which is, and ever will be, independent of all manner of
obsolete beliefs.
Both the 'Paradise Lost' and the 'Divina Commedia' belong, in a
supereminent degree, to what Thomas De Quincey calls, in his 'Essay on
Pope,' the literature of _power_, as distinguished from the literature
of _knowledge_; and, as a consequence, the statement of Mark Pattison
that 'there is an element of decay and death in poems which we vainly
style immortal,' is not applicable to them. By the literature of power
is meant that which is, in whatever form, an adequate embodiment of
eternal verities—verities of the human soul and of the divine
constitution of things, and their mutual adaptation, however much the
former may be estranged from the latter. Such embodiment will maintain
its individual existence.
'In that great social order, which collectively we call literature,'
says De Quincey, 'there may be distinguished two separate offices that
may blend and often _do_ so, but capable severally of a severe
insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion. There is,
first, the literature of knowledge, and, secondly, the literature of
_power_. The function of the first is to _teach_; the function of the
second is to _move_. . . . The first speaks to the _mere_ discursive
understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the
higher understanding or reason, but always _through_ affections of
pleasure and sympathy. . . . Whenever we talk in ordinary language of
seeking information or gaining knowledge, we understand the words as
connected with something of absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of
all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests, that it
is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds: it exists eternally
by way of germ or latent principle in the lowest as in the highest,
needing to be developed, but never to be planted. To be capable of
transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth that ranges on a
lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth, namely,
_power_ or deep sympathy with truth.'
By the truth which 'is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds,'
De Quincey means absolute, eternal truth, inherent in the human soul, as
distinguished from relative, temporal truth, the former being more or
less 'cabined, cribbed, confined' in all men. As Paracelsus is made to
express it, in Browning's poem 'Paracelsus,' 'There is an inmost centre
in us all, where truth abides in fulness; . . . and "to know" rather
consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,
than in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.'
To continue with De Quincey: 'What you owe to Milton [and he has the
'Paradise Lost' specially in his mind] is not any knowledge, of which a
million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the
same earthly level; what you owe is _power_, that is, exercise and
expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite,
where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards—a step
ascending as upon a Jacob's ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes
above the earth. _All_ the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry
you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot
above your ancient level of earth; whereas the very _first_ step in
power is a flight—is an ascending into another element where earth is
forgotten. . . . The very highest work that has ever existed in the
literature of knowledge is but a _provisional_ work: a book upon trial
and sufferance, and _quamdiu bene se gesserit_. Let its teaching be even
partially revised, let it be but expanded, nay, even let its teaching be
but placed in a better order, and instantly it is superseded. Whereas
the feeblest works in the literature of power, surviving at all, survive
as finished and unalterable amongst men. For instance, the "Principia"
of Sir Isaac Newton was a book _militant_ on earth from the first. In
all stages of its progress it would have to fight for its existence;
first, as regards absolute truth; secondly, when that combat is over, as
regards its form or mode of presenting the truth. And as soon as a La
Place, or anybody else, builds higher upon the foundations laid by
this book, effectually he throws it out of the sunshine into decay
and darkness; by weapons won from this book he superannuates and
destroys this book, so that soon the name of Newton remains as a mere
_nominis umbra_, but his book, as a living power, has transmigrated
into other forms. Now, on the contrary, the "Iliad," the "Prometheus" of
Æschylus,—the "Othello" or "King Lear,"—the "Hamlet" or "Macbeth,"—and
the "Paradise Lost," are not militant, but triumphant forever as long as
the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak. They
never _can_ transmigrate into new incarnations. . . . All the literature
of knowledge builds only ground-nests, that are swept away by floods, or
confounded by the plough; but the literature of power builds nests in
aërial altitudes of temples, sacred from violation, or of forests
inaccessible to fraud.'
I would not give these extended quotations from De Quincey were it not
that there may be many students who will read this book, and who will
not have access to the works of De Quincey. Those who have, should read
all that he says on the subject. The distinction which he makes between
the literature of knowledge and the literature of power was never before
so clearly and eloquently made, and it is a distinction which needs to
be especially emphasized in these days of excessive knowledge-mongery,
apart from education. Literature is largely made in the schools a
knowledge subject. The great function of literature, namely, to bring
into play the spiritual faculties, is very inadequately recognized, and
the study of English Literature is made too much an objective job—the
fault of teachers, not students. When the literature is studied as a
life-giving power, students are always more interested than when
everything else except the one thing needful receives attention,—the
sources of works of genius, the influences under which they were
produced, their relations to history and to time and place, and whatever
else may be made to engage the minds of students in the absence of the
teacher's ability to bring them into a sympathetic relationship with the
informing life of the works 'studied'—with that which constitutes their
absolute power.
Another important feature of the 'Paradise Lost' to which I would call
attention, and of which much should be made in the study of the poem, as
a condition of assimilating its educating power, is the verse, which
more fully realizes Wordsworth's definition and notion of harmonious
verse, given by Coleridge in the third of his 'Satyrane's Letters,' than
any other blank verse in the language. The definition, it is evident,
was meant to apply more particularly to non-dramatic blank verse.
Wordsworth's definition is, as given by Coleridge, that 'harmonious
verse consists (the English iambic blank verse above all) in the apt
arrangement of pauses and cadences and the sweep of whole paragraphs,
"with many a winding bout
Of linkèd sweetness long drawn out,"
and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence or antithetic
vigor of single lines, which are indeed injurious to the total effect,
except where they are introduced for some specific purpose.'
In my 'Primer of English Verse' (Ginn & Co., Boston), I have presented
the two grand features of Milton's blank verse, namely: (1) The
melodious variety of his cadences closing within verses, this being one
of the essentials of 'true musical delight' which Milton mentions, in
his remarks on 'The Verse,' 'the sense variously drawn out from one
verse into another'; and (2) the melodious and harmonious grouping of
verses into what may, with entire propriety, be called stanzas—stanzas
which are more organic than the uniformly constructed stanzas of rhymed
verse. The latter must be more or less artificial, by reason of the
uniformity which is maintained. But the stanzas of Milton's blank verse
are waves of melody and harmony which are larger or smaller, and with
ever varied cadences, according to the propulsion of the thought and
feeling which produces them, which propulsion may be sustained through a
dozen verses or more, or may expend itself in two or three. No other
blank verse in the language exhibits such a masterly skill in the
variation of its pauses—pauses, I mean, where periodic groups, or
logical sections of groups, terminate after, or within, it may be, the
first, second, third, or fourth foot of a verse. There are five cases
where the termination is within the fifth foot.
Stanza is quite exclusively applied to uniform groups of rhymed verses,
but it can be with equal propriety applied to the _varied_ groups of
blank verses, especially those of the 'Paradise Lost.' For the proper
appreciation of the individual verses in Milton's blank verse, they must
be read in groups,—a group sometimes, perhaps generally, beginning
within a verse and ending within a verse. These groups are due to the
unifying action of feeling, just as much as rhymed stanzas are, and,
indeed, often, if not generally, more so.
The autobiographical passages which have been brought together from the
prose and poetical works, occupying 103 pages of the book, exhibit the
man, Milton, better than could any regular biography of the same extent.
The latter could give more of the details of his outward life and
experiences, but could not so reflect his personality, his inmost being.
He was most emphatically a _person_. He realized in himself what is
expressed in the following verses from Tennyson's 'Œnone':
'Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
Yet not for power (power of herself
Would come uncalled for), but to live by law,
Acting the law we live by without fear;
And, because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.'
He also realized in himself what he says in his 'Areopagitica': 'He that
can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming
pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that
which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.'
What he says of himself in reply to the base and scurrilous and utterly
unfounded charges against his private character is more than what Mark
Pattison truly characterizes as 'a superb and ingenuous egotism'; is
more than an _apologia pro vita sua_; it was also prompted by the
consideration that what he was agonizingly contending for in the cause
of civil, political, and religious liberty might suffer, if his private
character were not freed from the charges made against it. In the
extended autobiographical passage in the 'Second Defence of the People
of England,' he assigns two other reasons for acquitting himself of the
charges made against his private character, namely, 'that those
illustrious worthies, who are the objects of my praise, may know that
nothing could afflict me with more shame than to have any vices of mine
diminish the force or lessen the value of my panegyric upon them; and
that the people of England, whom fate or duty, or their own virtues,
have incited me to defend, may be convinced from the purity and
integrity of my life, that my defence, if it do not redound to their
honour, can never be considered as their disgrace.'
A noble motive nobly presented!
There are no authors in the literature more distinctly revealed in their
writings than is John Milton. His personality is felt in his every
production, poetical and prose, and felt almost as much in the earliest
as in the latest period of his authorship. And there is no epithet more
applicable to his personality than the epithet august. He is therefore
one of the most educating of authors, in the highest sense of the word,
that is, educating in the direction of sanctified character.
''Tis human fortune's happiest height to be
A spirit melodious, lucid, poised, and whole:
Second in order of felicity
I hold it, to have walked with such a soul.'
The prime value attaching to the prose works of Milton at the present
day is their fervent exposition of true freedom,—a freedom which
involves a deep sympathy with truth; a freedom which is induced by a
willing and, in its final result, a spontaneous obedience to one's
higher nature. Without such obedience no one can be truly free. Outward
freedom, so called, may only afford an opportunity to one with evil
inward tendencies to become, morally, an invertebrate. Lord Byron speaks
of his Lara as
'Left by his sire, too young such loss to know,
_Lord of himself; that heritage of woe_,
That fearful empire which the human breast
But holds to rob the heart within of rest!—
With none to check, and few to point in time
The thousand paths that slope the way to crime.'
There is more outward freedom at the present time than there was ever
before, perhaps, in the world's history, and the temptations which it
involves can be adequately resisted only by the subjective freedom which
Milton so strenuously advocated. His ideas of all kinds of true freedom
(explicit expressions of which have been brought together in the second
section of this book) need to be instilled into all young minds, first,
for their own intrinsic value, and, secondly, as a means—the sole
means—of checking the present and ever increasing tendency toward
unrestrained desires, toward what many mistake for true freedom, namely,
_license_. Of such, Milton says, in one of his sonnets,
'License they mean when they cry liberty;
For who loves that must first be wise and good.'
The passage on Discipline (pp. 108-111) from 'The Reason of Church
Government urged against Prelaty,' should be learned _by heart_ (in the
vital sense of the phrase, not in the sense of merely memorizing) by all
young people in our schools. Everything should be done to induce a
sympathetic assimilation on their part of the lofty utterances in this
passage on Discipline, 'whose golden surveying rod,' says Milton, 'marks
out and measures every quarter and circuit of New Jerusalem.'
The translations (not acknowledged in the text) of the two Latin poems
addressed to the poet's Anglo Italian friend, Charles Diodati ('_Elegia
Prima. Ad Carolum Diodatum_,' p. 28, and '_Elegia Sexta. Ad Carolum
Diodatum, ruri commorantem_,' p. 31), and of the Familiar Letters
('_Epistolæ Familiares_'), Nos. III.-X., XII., XIV., XXI., XXIX., and
XXXI. are by Dr. Masson. His translations of the latter are much closer
to the meaning and tone of the original than those by Robert Fellowes,
given in the Bohn edition of the prose works, which hardly warrant the
characterization of them by the editor, J. A. St. John, as 'the very
elegant translation of Mr. Fellowes, of Oxford, who, in most instances,
has happily and with much feeling entered into and expressed the views
of Milton.' The translation of No. XV. of the Familiar Letters, 'To
Leonard Philaras, Athenian,' is by my colleague, Professor Charles E.
Bennett.
Students who are sufficiently good Latin scholars should read Milton's
Latin poems in the original, especially the '_In Quintum Novembris: anno
ætatis 17_,' the '_Ad Patrem_,' and the '_Epitaphium Damonis_.' The '_In
Quintum Novembris_' (On the fifth of November, that is, the anniversary
of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot) is described by Masson as 'one
of the very cleverest and most poetical of all Milton's youthful
productions, and certainly one of the most characteristic.' The
'_Epitaphium Damonis_' has been admirably edited with notes by C. S.
Jerram, M.A. Trin. Coll. Oxon., along with 'Lycidas.'
The student should first read carefully all the selections, prose and
poetical, without referring to the notes. Notes are a necessary evil,
and should not be read until after a requisite general impression has
been received from an independent reading; often two or more independent
readings should precede any attention to explanatory notes. Even such a
poem as Browning's 'The Ring and the Book,' abounding as it does in out
of the way allusions, difficult syntactical constructions, etc.,
requiring explanation, should be so read. The student would thus get a
better impression of the poem as a whole, and would derive from it a
greater pleasure (the pleasure resulting from the less interrupted
exercise of his higher faculties) than if he should read it at first
with the aid of abundant notes explanatory of details. A special
attention to the details should be given only after the reader has, in a
general way, taken in the articulating thought and the informing life of
the poem.
There are thousands of allusions in the 'Paradise Lost' which a reader
might not know, and yet be able to read the whole poem for the first
time and enjoy it, and, what is all-important, be uplifted by it,
without a single explanatory note.
The portrait of Milton is from that first drawn in crayons by William
Faithorne, and afterward engraved by him for the poet's 'History of
Britain,' published in 1670. Underneath the original engraving is the
inscription, '_Joannis Miltoni Effigies Ætat: 62. 1670. Gul. Faithorne
ad Vivum Delin. et Sculpsit_' (John Milton's effigy at the age of 62.
1670. Drawn from life and engraved by William Faithorne).
Faithorne was the most distinguished portrait artist and engraver of the
time. He appears to have especially excelled in crayon-drawing rather
than in painting. His numerous engravings are both from his own studies
and from those of other artists, especially of Vandyke. 'No one,' says
Masson, 'can desire a more impressive and authentic portrait of Milton
in his later life. The face is such as has been given to no other human
being; it was and is uniquely Milton's. Underneath the broad forehead
and arched temples there are the great rings of eye-socket, with the
blind, unblemished eyes in them, drawn straight upon you by your voice,
and speculating who and what you are; there is a severe composure in the
beautiful oval of the whole countenance, disturbed only by the singular
pouting round the rich mouth; and the entire expression is that of
English intrepidity mixed with unutterable sorrow.'
H. C.
CASCADILLA COTTAGE, July, 1899.
MILTON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
_made up of all the more important autobiographical passages contained
in his prose and poetical works_
It was found quite impossible to avoid somewhat of a jumble in bringing
together the many autobiographic passages scattered throughout Milton's
prose and poetical works. The passage in the 'Second Defence of the
People of England,' in reply to the scurrilous abuse and utterly
unfounded charges against his private character contained in the _Regii
Sanguinis Clamor ad Cœlum, adversus Parricidas Anglicanos_, 1652,
which occasioned the 'Second Defence,' covers a larger period of
Milton's life than any other, extending, as it does, from his birth to
the time of his writing the 'Second Defence,' published in 1654, Milton
being then in his forty-sixth year; and as there is an autobiographic
passage of some importance in the preface to the 'First Defence'
(published in 1651), this passage and that in the 'Second Defence' are
kept together and given first. In the former he expresses his sense of
the honor done him in his having been engaged to reply to the _Defensio
Regia pro Carolo I._, by Salmasius; and he evidently felt, and justly,
too, that no abler man could have been engaged for that important
function. The extract from 'A Defence of the People of England' is from
the translation ascribed by Milton's biographer, John Toland, to Mr.
Washington, a gentleman of the Temple, and that from the 'Second
Defence,' from the translation by Robert Fellowes, A.M., Oxon. These
are very free translations, and sometimes far from being adequate
representations of Milton's thought. It is much to be regretted that
Milton did not himself make an English translation, for the general
English reader, of these two noble Defences.
The other autobiographic passages are given, as far as may be, in their
chronological order,—that is, not always according to the dates of
their composition, but according to their order in Milton's life.
_From the Preface to 'A Defence of the English People'_