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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Milton, by John Bailey
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Milton
+
+Author: John Bailey
+
+Release Date: August 9, 2007 [EBook #22286]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MILTON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MILTON
+
+
+BY
+
+JOHN BAILEY
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY,"
+  "DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE," ETC.
+
+
+
+
+LONDON
+
+WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's note: Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers
+enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}.  They have been located where page
+breaks occurred in the original book, in accordance with Project
+Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99.  For its Index, a page number has been placed
+only at the start of that section.]
+
+
+
+
+First printed Spring 1915
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAP.
+
+   I INTRODUCTORY  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    7
+  II MILTON'S LIFE AND CHARACTER . . . . . . . . . . .   28
+ III THE EARLIER POEMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   89
+  IV _PARADISE LOST_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  143
+   V _PARADISE REGAINED_ AND _SAMSON AGONISTES_  . . .  190
+     BIBLIOGRAPHY  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  250
+     INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  254
+
+
+
+
+  Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
+  England hath need of thee; she is a fen
+  Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
+  Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
+  Have forfeited their ancient English dower
+  Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
+  Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
+  And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
+  Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
+  Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
+  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 herself did lay.
+          WORDSWORTH.
+
+
+
+  O Mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,
+  O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity,
+    God-gifted organ-voice of England,
+      Milton, a name to resound for ages;
+  Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
+  Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
+    Tower, as the deep-doomed 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 palm-woods
+      Whisper in odorous heights of even.
+          TENNYSON.
+
+
+
+
+{7}
+
+MILTON
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+When a man spends a day walking in hilly country he is often astonished
+at the new shape taken on by a mountain when it is looked at from a new
+point of view.  Sometimes the change is so great as to make it almost
+unrecognizable.  He who has seen Snowdon from Capel-Curig is reluctant
+to admit that what he sees from Llanberis is the same mountain: he who
+has seen the Langdale Pikes from Glaramara is amazed at their beauty as
+he gazes at them from the garden at Low Wood.  These are extreme cases.
+But to a less degree every traveller among the mountains is
+experiencing the same thing all day.  He finds the eternal hills the
+most plastic of forms.  At each change in his own position there is a
+change in the shape of a mountain under which he is passing.  He may
+keep his eye fixed upon it but insensibly, as he watches, the long {8}
+chain will become a vertical peak, the jagged precipice a round green
+slope.
+
+Much the same process goes on as the generations of men pass on their
+way, with their eyes fixed, as they cannot help being, on the great
+human heights of their own and earlier days.  Many of these look great
+only when you are close to them.  At a little distance they are seen to
+be small and soon they disappear altogether.  The true mountains remain
+but they do not keep the same shape.  Each succeeding generation sees
+the peaks of humanity from a new point of view which cannot be exactly
+the same as that of its predecessor.  Each age reshapes for itself its
+conception of art, of poetry, of religion, and of human life which
+includes them all.  Of some of the masters in each of these worlds it
+feels that they belong not to their own generation only but to all time
+and so to itself.  It cannot be satisfied, therefore, with what its
+predecessors have said about them.  It needs to see them again freshly
+for itself, and put into words so far as it can its own attitude
+towards them.
+
+That is the excuse for the new books which will always be written every
+few years about Hebrew Religion, or Greek Art, or the French
+Revolution, or about such men as Plato, {9} St. Paul, Shakspeare,
+Napoleon.  It is the excuse even for a much humbler thing, for the
+addition of a volume on Milton to the Home University Library.  The
+object of this Library is not, indeed, to say anything startlingly new
+about the great men with whom it deals.  Rather the contrary, in fact:
+for to say anything startlingly new about Shakspeare or Plato would
+probably be merely to say what is absurd or false.  The main outlines
+of these great figures have long been settled, and the man who writes a
+book to prove that Shakspeare was not a great dramatist, or was an
+exact and lucid writer, is wasting his own time and that of his
+readers.  The mountain may change its aspect from hour to hour, but
+when once we have ascertained that it is composed of granite, that
+matter is settled, and there is no use in arguing that it is sandstone
+or basalt.  The object of such volumes as those of this Library is no
+vain assault on the secure judgment-seat of the world, no hopeless
+appeal against the recorded and accepted decrees of time.  It is rather
+to re-state those decrees in modern language and from the point of view
+of our own day: to show, for instance, how Plato, though no longer for
+us what he was for the Neo-Platonists, is {10} still for us the most
+moving mind of the race that more than all others has moved the mind of
+the world; how Milton, though no longer for us a convincing justifier
+of the ways of God to men, is still a figure of transcendent interest,
+the most lion-hearted, the loftiest-souled, of Englishmen, the one
+consummate artist our race has produced, the only English man of
+letters who in all that is known about him, his life, his character,
+his poetry, shows something for which the only fit word is sublime.
+
+There was much else beside, of course.  The sublime is very near the
+terrible, and the terrible is often not very far removed from the
+hateful.  Dante giving his "daily dreadful line" to the private and
+public enemies with whom he grimly populates his hell is not exactly an
+amiable or attractive figure.  Still less so is Milton in those prose
+pamphlets in which he passes so rapidly, and to us so strangely, from
+the heights of heaven to the gutter mud of scurrilous personalities.
+This is a disease from which our more amiable age seems at last to have
+delivered the world.  But Milton has at least the excuse of a long and
+august tradition, from the days of Demosthenes, equally profuse of a
+patriotism as lofty and of personalities as {11} base as Milton's, to
+those of a whole line of the scholars of the Renaissance who lived with
+the noblest literature of the world and wrote of each other in the
+language of Billingsgate fishwives.  So the sublimity of his life is
+wholly that of an irresistible will, set from the first on achieving
+great deeds and victoriously achieving them in defiance of adverse men
+and fates.  But this is quite compatible with qualities the reverse of
+agreeable.  It is the business of sublimity to compel amazed
+admiration, not to be a pleasant companion.  Milton rejoicing over the
+tortures bishops will suffer in hell, Milton insulting Charles I,
+Milton playing the tyrant to his daughters, none of these are pleasant
+pictures.  But such incidents, if perhaps unusually grim in the case of
+Milton, are apt to happen with Olympians.  Experience shows that it is
+generally best to listen to their thunder from a certain distance.
+
+Such limitations must not be ignored.  But neither must they be unduly
+pressed.  The important thing about the sun is not its spots but its
+light and heat.  No great poet in all history, with the possible
+exception of Dante, has so much heat as Milton.  In prose and verse
+alike he burns and glows with fire.  At its worst it is a fire of anger
+and pride, at {12} its best a fire of faith in liberty, justice,
+righteousness, God.  Of the highest of all fires, the white flame of
+love, it has indeed little.  Milton had no Beatrice to teach him how to
+show men the loveliness of the divine law, the beauty of holiness.  He
+could describe the loss of Paradise and even its recovery, but its
+eternal bliss, the bliss of those who live in the presence of
+
+  l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle,
+
+he could not describe.  To do that required one who had seen the Vita
+Nuova before he saw the Inferno.  _In la sua volontade é nostra pace_.
+So Dante thought: but not altogether so Milton.  It is not a difference
+of theological opinion: it is a difference of temper.  For Dante the
+"will of God" at once suggested both the apostolic and the apocalyptic
+love, joy, peace, the supreme and ultimate beatific vision.  Bitter as
+his life on earth had been, no man ever suffering more from evil days
+and evil tongues, no man ever more bitterly conscious of living in an
+evil and perverse generation, he had yet within him a perpetual
+fountain of peace in the thought of God's will, and the faith that he
+was daily advancing nearer to the light of heaven and the divine
+presence.  Milton, a sincere believer in God {13} if man ever were,
+must also at times have had his moments of beatific vision in which the
+invisible peace of God became more real than the storms of earthly life
+and the vileness of men.  Indeed, we see the traces of such moments in
+the opening of _Comus_, in the concluding lines of _Lycidas_, in the
+sustained ecstasy of _At a Solemn Music_.  But they appear to have been
+only moments.  Milton was a lifelong Crusader who scarcely set foot in
+the Holy Land.  The will of God meant for him not so much peace as war.
+He is a prophet rather than a psalmist.  "Woe is me, my Mother, that
+thou hast born me a man of strife and contention," he himself complains
+in the _Reason of Church Government_.  He was not much over thirty when
+he wrote those words: and they remained true of him to the end.  For
+twenty years the strife was active and public; ever, in appearance at
+least, more and more successful: then for the final fourteen it became
+the impotent wrath of a caged and wounded lion.  Never for a moment did
+his soul bow to the triumph of the idolaters: but neither could it
+forget them, nor make any permanent escape into purer air.  _Paradise
+Lost_, _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson_, especially the last, are all
+plainly the works of a man conscious of {14} having been defeated by a
+world which he could defy but could not forget.  Sublimely certain of
+the righteousness of his cause, he has no abiding certainty of its
+victory.  He hears too plainly the insulting voices of the sons of
+Belial, and broods in proud and angry gloom over the ruin of all his
+hopes, personal, political and ecclesiastical.  And as his religion was
+a thing of intellect and conscience, not a thing of spiritual vision,
+he cannot make for himself that mystical trans-valuation of all earthly
+doings in the light of which the struggles of political and
+ecclesiastical parties are seen as things temporary, trivial and of
+little account.
+
+Such are the limitations of Milton.  They are those of a man who lived
+in the time of a great national struggle, deliberately chose his own
+side in it, and from thenceforth saw nothing in the other but folly,
+obstinacy and crime.  He has in him nothing whatever of the universal,
+and universally sympathetic, insight of Shakspeare.  And he has paid
+the price of his narrowness in the open dislike, or at best grudging
+recognition, of that half of the world which is not Puritan and not
+Republican, and still looks upon history, custom, law and loyalty with
+very different eyes from his.  But those who exact that {15} penalty do
+themselves at least as much injustice as they do Milton.  To deprive
+ourselves of Milton because we are neither Puritan moralists nor Old
+Testament politicians is an act of intellectual suicide.  The wise, as
+the world goes on, may differ more and more from some of Milton's
+opinions.  They can never escape the greatness either of the poet or of
+the man.  Men's appreciation of Milton is almost in proportion to their
+instinctive understanding of what greatness is.  Other poets, perhaps,
+have things of greater beauty: none in English, none, perhaps, in any
+language, fills us with a more exalting conviction of the greatness of
+human life.  No man rises from an hour with Milton without feeling
+ashamed of the triviality of his life and certain that he can, if he
+will, make it less trivial.  It is impossible not to catch from him
+some sense of the high issues, immediate and eternal, on which human
+existence ought to be conscious that it hangs.  The world will be very
+old before we can spare a man who can render us this service.  We have
+no one in England who renders it so imperiously as Milton.
+
+This part of his permanent claim upon our attention belongs to all that
+we know of him, to everything in his life so far as it is recorded,
+{16} even to his prose, where its appearances are occasional, as well
+as to his verse, where it is continuous and omnipresent.  It is, of
+course, in connection with the last that we are most conscious of it
+and that it is most important.  After all, the rest would have been
+unknown or forgotten if he had not been a great poet.  But it is not
+merely by his force of mind and character, nor merely by the influence
+they have upon us through the poetry, that he claims our attention
+to-day.  Altogether independently of that, the study of Milton is of
+immense and special value to Englishmen.  Except in poetry our English
+contribution to the life of the arts in Europe has been comparatively
+small.  That very Puritanism which had so much to do with the greatness
+of Milton has also had much to do with the general failure of
+Englishmen to produce fine art, or even to care about it, or so much as
+recognize it when they see it.  Now Milton, Puritan as he was, was
+always, and not least in his final Puritan phase, a supreme artist.
+Poetry has been by far our greatest artistic achievement and he is by
+far our greatest poetic artist.  No artist in any other field, no Inigo
+Jones or Wren, no Purcell, no Reynolds or Turner, holds such
+unquestioned eminence in any other art as he in his.  If {17} the world
+asks us where to look for the genius of England, so far as it has ever
+been expressed on paper, we point, of course, unhesitatingly to
+Shakspeare.  But Shakspeare is as inferior to Milton in art as he is
+superior in genius.  His genius will often, indeed, supply the place of
+art; but the possession of powers that are above art is not the same
+thing as being continuously and consciously a great artist.  We can all
+think of many places in his works where for hundreds of lines the most
+censorious criticism can scarcely wish a word changed; but we can also
+think of many in which the least watchful cannot fail to wish much
+changed and much omitted.  "Would he had blotted a thousand" is still a
+true saying, and its truth known and felt by all but the blindest of
+the idolaters of Shakspeare.  No one has ever uttered such a wish about
+the poetry of Milton.  This is not the place to anticipate a discussion
+of it which must come later.  But, in an introductory chapter which
+aims at insisting upon the present and permanent importance of Milton,
+it is in place to point out the immense value to the English race of
+acquaintance with work so conscientiously perfect as Milton's.  English
+writers on the whole have had a tendency to be rather slipshod in {18}
+expression and rather indifferent to the finer harmonies of human
+speech, whether as a thing of pure sound or as a thing of sounds which
+have more than mere meaning, which have associations.  Milton as both a
+lover of music and a scholar is never for a moment unconscious of
+either.  It would scarcely be going too far to say that there is not a
+word in his verse which owes its place solely to the fact that it
+expresses his meaning.  All the words accepted by his instinctive or
+deliberate choice were accepted because they provided him with the most
+he could obtain of three qualities which he desired: the exact
+expression of the meaning needed for the immediate purpose in hand, the
+associations fittest to enhance or enrich that meaning, the rhythmical
+or musical effect required for the verse.  The study of his verse is
+one that never exhausts itself, so that the appreciation of it has been
+called the last reward of consummate scholarship.  But the phrase does
+Milton some injustice.  It is true that the scholar tastes again and
+again in Milton some flavour of association or suggestion which is not
+to be perceived by those who are not scholars, and it is also true that
+he consciously understands what he is enjoying more than they possibly
+can.  But neither Milton's nor any other {19} great art makes its main
+appeal to learning.  What does that is not art at all but pedantry.
+Those who have never read a line of the Greek and Latin poets certainly
+miss many pleasures in reading Milton, but, if they have any ear for
+poetry at all, they do not miss either the mind or the art of Milton.
+The unconquerable will, the high soaring soul, are everywhere audibly
+present: and so, even to those who have little reading and no knowledge
+at all of matters of rhythm or metre, are the grave Dorian music, the
+stately verses rolling in each after the other like great ocean waves
+in eternal difference, in eternal sameness.  The ignorant ear hears and
+rejoices, with a delight that passes understanding, as the ignorant eye
+sees a fine drawing or a piece of Greek sculpture and without
+understanding enjoys, learns, and unconsciously grows in keenness of
+sight.  To live with Milton is necessarily to learn that the art of
+poetry is no triviality, no mere amusement, but a high and grave thing,
+a thing of the choicest discipline of phrase, the finest craftsmanship
+of structure, the most nobly ordered music of sound.  The ordinary
+reader may not be conscious of any such lessons: but he learns them
+nevertheless.  And from no one else in English can he learn them so
+well as from Milton.
+
+{20} For these reasons, these and others, we must cling to our great
+epic poet, Shelley's "third among the sons of light."  He is not easy
+reading: the greatest seldom are: but as with all the greatest, each
+new reading is not only easier than the last but fuller of matter for
+thought, wonder and delight.  At each new reading, too, the things in
+him that belonged to his own age, the Biblical literalism, the
+theological prepossessions, the political partisanship, recede more and
+more into the background and leave us freer to enjoy the things which
+belong to all time.  And to all peoples.  Milton is, indeed, intensely
+English and could not have been anything but an Englishman.  His
+profound conviction of the greatness of moral issues, and his
+passionate love of liberty, have both been characteristic of the
+Englishmen of whom England is most proud.  Till lately too, at any
+rate, we should have said that his fierce individualism, intellectual
+and political, was English too.  But his mind and soul, stored with the
+gathered riches of many languages and of an inward experience far too
+intense to be confined by national limitations, reach out to a world
+wider altogether than this island, wider even than Europe.  In _Samson
+Agonistes_ it is hard to say who is more vividly present, the English
+{21} politician, the Greek tragedian, or the Hebrew prophet.  And in
+one sense _Paradise Lost_ is the most universal of all poems.  Indeed,
+that word may be applied to it in its strictest meaning, for the field
+of Milton's action is not Greece, or Italy, or England, or even the
+whole earth; it is the universe itself.  That is one of its
+difficulties: but it is also a source of the uplifting and enlarging
+quality which is peculiarly Miltonic.  With him we are conscious of
+treading no petty scene.  We have in some respects travelled far from
+Milton's way both of stating and of solving his problem, but
+nevertheless it is still with us to-day and always: the problem of
+man's origin and destiny, of the ways of God to men.  And though Milton
+is more hampered by literal belief in a particular theological legend
+than the authors of the _Book of Job_ and the _Prometheus Vinctus_,
+yet, like these, he shows that a great mind and soul will leave the
+imprint of power and truth on the most incredible primitive story.  To
+read his great poem, or indeed any of his poems, is to live for a while
+in the presence of one of those royal souls, those natural kings of
+men, whom Plato felt to be born to rule and inspire their fellows: and
+the heroic temper of the man is in England less rare than the
+consummate {22} perfection of art which has eternalized its utterance.
+This is Milton: and, though we may be too weak to read him often, we
+shall never be able to do without him, never think of him without an
+added strength and exaltation of spirit.
+
+
+
+
+{23}
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+MILTON'S LIFE AND CHARACTER
+
+We know far more about Milton than about any other English poet born so
+long ago.  There are three reasons for this.  One is that from his
+earliest years he was very much interested in himself, was quite aware
+that he was a man above the stature of ordinary men, and had the most
+deliberate intention and expectation of doing great things.
+Consequently he is not only, like most good poets, fond of bringing
+more or less concealed autobiography into his poetry, but still more in
+his prose works he inclines often to insert long passages about
+himself, his studies, travels, projects, friends and character.  It is
+these more than anything else which now keep those works alive: and,
+coming from a man so proudly truthful as Milton evidently was, they are
+of the greatest interest and value.  The second reason why we know so
+much about him is that he played an active part in politics, a far more
+certain way of {24} attracting contemporary attention in England than
+writing _Hamlet_ or building St. Paul's Cathedral.  And the third is
+that his life has been made the subject of perhaps the most minute and
+elaborate biography in the language.  Mr. Masson's labours enable us to
+know, if we choose, every fact, however insignificant, which the most
+laborious investigation can discover, not only about Milton himself
+but, one may almost say, about everybody who was ever for five minutes
+in Milton's company.
+
+From this mass of material, all that can be touched here is a few of
+the most salient facts of the life and the most striking features of
+the character.
+
+Milton's life is naturally divided into three periods.  The first is
+that of his education and early poems.  It extends from his birth in
+1608 to his return from his foreign travels in 1639.  The second is
+that of his political activity, and extends from 1639 to the
+Restoration.  The third is that of _Paradise Lost_, _Paradise Regained_
+and _Samson_.  It concludes with his death, on November 8, 1674.
+
+Milton was born on December 9, 1608, at a house in Bread Street,
+Cheapside.  The house is gone, but the street is a very short one, and
+it is still pleasant to step out of the {25} roar of Cheapside into its
+quietness, and think that there, on the left, close by, under the
+shadow of Bow Church, was born the greatest poet to whom the greatest
+city of the modern world has given birth.  London ought to hold fast to
+the honour of Milton, for his honour is peculiarly hers.  He was not
+only born a Londoner but lived in London nearly all his life.  And his
+mind is throughout that of the citizen.  Neither agriculture nor sport
+means much to him; and, much as he loves the sights and sounds of the
+open country, his allusions to them are those of the delighted but
+still wondering alien, not those of the native.  None is more often
+quoted than the passage in the ninth book of _Paradise Lost_--
+
+  "As one who, long in populous city pent,
+  Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
+  Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe
+  Among the pleasant villages and farms
+  Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight--
+  The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
+  Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound--
+  If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,
+  What pleasing seemed for her now pleases more,
+  She most, and in her look sums all delight."
+
+{26} And the secret of its charm obviously lies partly in the note of a
+personal experience.  Just in that way must Milton, as boy and man,
+have often issued forth from the weariness of his studies and the noise
+and confinement of the streets, for a walk among the open fields that
+then lay so close at hand for the Londoner.  And perhaps, as the
+inhabitants of towns often do, he took a pleasure in the very hedgerows
+unknown to those who saw them every day.  The present Poet Laureate,
+who has spent most of his life in the country, has asked a question to
+which it is not easy for the countryman to give the answer he would
+like--
+
+  "Whose spirit leaps more high,
+  Plucking the pale primrose,
+  Than his whose feet must fly
+  The pasture where it grows?"
+
+If the town-dweller never attains to that mystical communion with the
+secret soul of Nature which Wordsworth and such as Wordsworth owe to a
+life spent in the "temple's inmost shrine," yet his eye, undulled by
+familiarity, commonly sees more in trees and flowers than the eyes of
+nearly all those who live every day among them.  At its highest
+familiarity breeds intimacy, but more often what it breeds is
+indifference.  A man who {27} reads the Bible for the first time in
+middle life will never live inside it as some saints have lived; but he
+will see much that is hidden from most of those who have been reading
+it every day since they could read at all.
+
+Milton remained in London, so far as we know, for the first sixteen
+years of his life.  He was educated at St. Paul's School by a private
+tutor, one Thomas Young, who was later a conspicuous Presbyterian
+figure, and by his father, to whom he owed far more than to any one
+except himself.  The elder John Milton was a remarkable man.  He had,
+to begin with, deserted the religious views of his family and taken a
+line of his own, a course which may not always indicate wisdom, but
+always indicates force of character.  The poet's grandfather, who lived
+in the Oxford country, had adhered very definitely to Roman Catholicism
+and is said to have cast off his son for becoming a Protestant and
+something of a Puritan.  The son went to London, set up in business as
+a scrivener, that is, as something like a modern solicitor, and
+prospered so much that by 1632 he was able to retire and live in the
+country.  He had considerable musical talents, and his compositions are
+found in collections of tunes to which such {28} men as Morley, Dowland
+and Orlando Gibbons contributed.  His house was no doubt full of music,
+as were, indeed, many others in that most musical of English centuries,
+and it must have been primarily to him that the poet owed the intense
+delight in music which appears in all his works.  No poet speaks of
+music so often, and none in his poetry so often suggests that art.  The
+untaught music of lark or nightingale he has not; but no poet has so
+much of the music which is one of the most consciously elaborate of
+those arts by which man expresses at once his senses, his mind and his
+soul.
+
+In the spring of 1625, just a month or two after the accession of the
+king whose tragical fate was to be the original source of Milton's
+European fame and very nearly the cause of his mounting a scaffold
+himself, the future author of _Paradise Lost_ went into residence at
+Cambridge where he remained for seven years.  The college that can
+boast his name among its members is Christ's.  Unlike so many poets he
+had a successful university career, took the ordinary degrees, and
+evidently made an impression on his contemporaries.  No doubt the
+strong natural bias to a studious life which he had from a child made
+him apter for university discipline {29} than is usually the case with
+genius.  From the beginning he had the passion of the student.  He says
+of himself that from his twelfth year he scarce ever went to bed before
+midnight; and Aubrey reports much the same and says that his father
+"ordered the maid to sit up for him."  And his studies were in the main
+the accepted studies of the time, not, like Shelley's, a defiance of
+them.  All through his life he had a scholar's respect for learning,
+and for the great tradition of literature which it is the true business
+of scholarship to maintain.  Radical and rebel as he was in politics
+and theology, contemptuous of law, custom and precedent, he was always
+the exact opposite in his art.  There he never attempted the method of
+the _tabula rasa_, or clean slate, which made his political pamphlets
+so barren.  The greatest of all proofs of the strength of his
+individuality is that it so entirely dominates the vast store of
+learning and association with which his poetry is loaded.  Such a man
+will at least give his university a chance; and, though Milton did not
+in later life look back on Cambridge with great affection or respect,
+there can be no doubt that the seven years he spent within the walls of
+a college were far from useless to the poet who more than any other
+{30} was to make learning serve the purposes of poetry.
+
+So strong, self-reliant and proudly virtuous a nature was not likely to
+be altogether popular either with the authorities or with his
+companions.  Nor was he, at any rate at first.  He had some difference
+with his tutor, had to leave Cambridge for a time, and is alleged, on
+very doubtful evidence, to have been flogged.  But, whatever his fault
+was, it was nothing that he was ashamed of, for he publicly alluded to
+the affair in his Latin poems, and was never afraid to challenge
+inquiry into his Cambridge career.  Nor did it injure him permanently
+with the authorities.  He took his degrees at the earliest possible
+dates, and ten years after he left Cambridge was able to write publicly
+and gratefully of "the more than ordinary respect which I found, above
+many of my equals, at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the
+Fellows of that college wherein I spent some years: who, at my parting
+after I had taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways
+how much better it would content them that I would stay: as by many
+letters full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and
+long after, I was assured of their singular good affection towards me."
+The {31} Fellows were no doubt clerical dons of the ordinary sort:
+indeed, we know they were; but they could not have Milton among them
+for seven years without discovering that he was something above the
+ordinary undergraduate.  Wood, who died in 1695 and therefore writes as
+a contemporary, says of Milton that while at Cambridge he was "esteemed
+to be a virtuous and sober person yet not to be ignorant of his own
+parts."  Such young men may not be popular, but if they have the real
+thing in them they soon compel respect.  By the undergraduates Milton
+was called "The Lady of Christ's."  And it is plain, from his own
+references to this nickname in a Prolusion delivered in the college,
+that he owed it not only to his fair complexion, short stature and
+great personal beauty, but also to the purity, delicacy and refinement
+of his manners.  He contemptuously asks the audience who had given him
+the nickname whether the name of manhood was to be confined to those
+who could drain great tankards of ale or to peasants whose hands were
+hard with holding the plough.  He disdains the implied charge of
+prudery, and indeed his language is what could not have been used by an
+effeminate or a coward.  No braver man ever held a pen.  Wood says {32}
+that "his deportment was affable, his gait erect, bespeaking courage
+and undauntedness," and he himself tells us that "he did not neglect
+daily practice with his sword," and that "when armed with it, as he
+generally was, he was in the habit of thinking himself quite a match
+for any one and of being perfectly at ease as to any injury that any
+one could offer him."  Evidently he owed his title of "Lady" to no
+weakness, but to a disgust at the coarse and barbarous amusements then
+common at the universities.  He says of himself that he had no faculty
+for "festivities and jests," as indeed was to be witnessed by all his
+writings.  The witticisms, if such they can be called, which occur in
+his poetry and oftener in his prose are akin to what are now called
+practical jokes, that is jokes made by the bodies of those whose minds
+are not capable of joking.  This was partly the common fault of an age
+whose jests, as may be seen sometimes even in Shakspeare, appear to us
+to alternate between the merely obvious, the merely verbal, and the
+merely barbarous; but it was partly also the peculiar temperament of
+Milton, whose sense of humour, like that of many learned and serious
+men, was so sluggish that it could only be moved by a very violent
+stimulus.  {33} But in the main with Milton there was no question of
+jests, good or bad.  It is evident from his own proud confessions that
+he was always intensely serious, at least from his Cambridge days,
+always conscious of the greatness of life's issues, always uplifted
+with the noblest sort of ambition.  He says of himself that, however he
+might admire the art of Ovid and poets of Ovid's sort, he soon learnt
+to dislike their morals and turned from them to the "sublime and pure
+thoughts" of Petrarch and Dante.  And his "reasonings, together with a
+certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness, and self-esteem
+either of what I was or what I might be (which let envy call
+pride) . . . kept me still above those low descents of mind beneath
+which he must deject and plunge himself that can agree to saleable and
+unlawful prostitutions."  And in repudiating an impudently false charge
+against his own character he boldly announces a doctrine far above his
+own age, one, indeed, to which ours has not yet attained.  "Having had
+the doctrine of Holy Scripture unfolding these chaste and high
+mysteries with timeliest care infused that 'the body is for the Lord
+and the Lord for the body,' thus also I argued to myself,--that, if
+unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be {34}
+such a scandal and dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the
+image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be
+much more deflowering and dishonourable. . . .  Thus large I have
+purposely been that, if I have been justly taxed with this crime, it
+may come upon me after all this my confession with a tenfold shame."
+
+Such was the man from the first, severe with others and with himself,
+conscious, almost from boyhood, in his own famous words, that "he who
+would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable
+things ought himself to be a true poem"; a somewhat strange figure, no
+doubt, among the tavern-haunting undergraduates of the seventeenth
+century, a stranger still to be honoured, a hundred and fifty years
+later, in the rooms which then and now were remembered as his, by the
+single act of drunkenness in the long and virtuous life of Wordsworth.
+When he left the university in 1632 Milton had conquered respect,
+though probably not popularity.  The tone of the sixth of the academic
+Orations, which he delivered at Cambridge and allowed to be published
+in his old age, shows that, being still aware that he was not popular,
+he was surprised and pleased at the applause with which a previous
+discourse of {35} his had been received and at the large gathering
+which had crowded to hear the one he was delivering.  He says that
+"nearly the whole flower of the university" was present; and, after
+allowing for compliments, it is plain that only a man whose name
+aroused expectations could draw an audience which could be so described
+without obvious absurdity.
+
+We may well then believe that there is no great exaggeration in his
+nephew's statement, substantially confirmed as it is by other evidence,
+that when Milton left Cambridge in 1632 he was already "loved and
+admired by the whole university, particularly by the Fellows and most
+ingenious persons of his House."  He had, as Wood says, "performed the
+collegiate and academical exercises to the admiration of all."  The
+power of his mind, the grave strength of his character, could not but
+be plain to all who had come into close contact with him, and even for
+those who had not he was a man who had distinction plainly written on
+his face.  It is possible, even, that he was already known as a poet.
+Before he left Cambridge he had written several of the poems which we
+still read in his works: the beautiful stanzas _On the Death of a Fair
+Infant_, so like and so unlike the early poems of Shakspeare, the noble
+_Ode {36} on the Nativity_ begun probably on Christmas Day 1629, though
+this is not certain; the pretty little _Song on May Morning_ which one
+likes to fancy having been sung at some such Cambridge greeting of the
+rising May Day sun as those which are still performed on Magdalen Tower
+at Oxford; certainly the remarkable lines which are his tribute to
+Shakspeare: certainly also the beautiful _Epitaph on the Marchioness of
+Winchester_; and, to mention no more, the autobiographical sonnet on
+attaining the age of twenty-three.  None of these except the lines on
+Shakspeare are known to have been published before they appeared in the
+volume of Milton's poems issued in 1645.  But the fact that those lines
+were printed, though without Milton's name, among the commendatory
+verses prefixed to the 1632 Folio Edition of Shakspeare, may imply that
+Milton was already known as a young poet.  There is also a story that
+the poem on the death of Lady Winchester was printed in a contemporary
+Cambridge collection.  But whether this were so or not (and no such
+volume is known to have existed), it seems almost certain that some of
+Milton's poems would have got known by being passed about in manuscript
+copies.  He himself from the first undervalued nothing he wrote, and
+was {37} not afraid to say publicly, in his _Reason of Church
+Government_, that, from his early youth, it had been found that,
+"whether aught was imposed me by them that had the overlooking, or
+betaken to of mine own choice in English or other tongue, prosing or
+versing, but chiefly this latter, the style, by certain signs it had,
+was likely to live."  He published these bold words in 1641, when he
+had given no public proof at all of their truth.  Such a man was not
+likely to be unwilling that his verses should be seen: and in
+particular such poems as the epitaph on Lady Winchester, whose death
+aroused much public interest, or the _Ode on the Nativity_, plainly
+challenging the greatest of his predecessors by its high theme and
+noble art, are almost sure to have got about and won him some fame.
+
+He had earned distinction, then, and aroused expectation before the end
+of his university career.  But what surprised his contemporaries was
+that for the next seven or eight years he appeared to do little or
+nothing to justify the one or fulfil the other.  Leaving Cambridge when
+he was twenty-three, he entered no profession, but lived till he was
+past twenty-nine in studious retirement at his father's country house
+at Horton near Windsor.  His father, and other friends, very {38}
+naturally remonstrated at this apparent inactivity.  To them all the
+answer is the same.  He cannot now enter the Church, as he had
+intended, because he would not "subscribe slave" and take oaths that he
+could not keep.  He is not surrendering himself to "the endless delight
+of speculation," or to the pleasure of "dreaming away his years in the
+arms of studious retirement."  No; he has other things in view than
+these: but for their performance he demands time for himself and
+patience from his friends: his own thought is not of being early or
+late but of being fit.  And the work for which he is preparing is in
+his own mind a settled thing.  It is literature, poetry, and, in
+particular, as will soon appear more definitely, a great poem to take
+its place among the great poems of the world.
+
+The writing of poetry has never been a recognized and seldom a
+lucrative profession.  Most poets, like other artists, have had to face
+family opposition and the danger of poverty in obeying their inward
+call.  In this matter Milton is one of the great exceptions.  Many
+poets have had fathers as rich as his, but it would not be easy to find
+one who resigned himself so cheerfully to the prospect of having a
+poetic son.  The elder Milton was, however, as we have seen, no
+ordinary man.  His sense {39} of the value of the things of the mind
+was almost as great as his faith in his son and far greater than his
+ambition for his son's visible success in the eyes of the world.  He
+had naturally hoped that that son's evident abilities would be
+exhibited in the ordinary course in a recognized profession; and he
+evidently made some protest against the apparently objectless studies
+which, even after leaving Cambridge, Milton seemed to regard as his
+sole business in life.  The record of this survives in the Latin poem
+_Ad Patrem_ which is plainly a reply to some such remonstrance.  It is
+an appeal, and one of very confident tone, to his father not to scorn
+the Muses to whom he himself owes his own great musical gifts.  Why
+should he, a musician, be astonished to find that his son is a poet?
+Poetry more than any of man's other gifts is the proof of his divine
+origin: music and poetry rank together; may it not be that he and his
+father have divided between them the two great gifts of Apollo?
+
+  "Dividuumque Deum genitorque puerque tenemus."
+
+The poem rings with the scorn of wealth, from which one must suppose
+that the old man of business had pointed out that the {40} scholar's
+life was not usually lived under the smiles of Fortune.  How can you,
+of all men, replies his son, ask me to care much for that?  You trained
+me from the first for learning, not for the City or the Bar; the father
+who had his son taught not only Latin, but Greek and Hebrew, French and
+Italian, astronomy and physical science, cannot ask him to regard money
+making as the object of life.  I have chosen a better part than that:
+and you were the inspirer of my choice.  And I know that at heart you
+agree with it and share it.
+
+The poem is one of the most interesting of Milton's Latin poems, being
+rather less affected than most of them by that artificiality of
+classical allusion which is the bane of such productions.  So far as we
+know, it was the last word on its subject.  From henceforth no one
+questioned Milton's right to be a poet and himself.  If he ever
+afterwards deserted his poetic vocation it was at what he believed to
+be a still higher call.  For the present he lived on quietly at Horton,
+near the Church where his mother's grave may still be seen; walking
+often, as we may suppose, about that quietly beautiful country washed
+by the Thames and crowned by Windsor Castle; and sometimes, as we know
+from his own words, travelling the seventeen or eighteen miles to {41}
+London to buy books or learn "anything new in Mathematics or in Music,
+in which sciences I then delighted."  Some of these visits to London
+evidently lasted days or weeks.
+
+The interesting thing about these six years at Horton is that they are
+the only part of his life during which the least rural of our poets
+lived continuously in the country.  And perhaps we may say that they
+bore their natural fruit; for it was while he was at Horton that Milton
+wrote _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, in which he touched rural life
+and rural scenes with a freshness and directness which he never again
+equalled.  And the most important of the other poems written during
+these years, _Arcades_, _Comus_, and above all, _Lycidas_, show the
+same influence.  _Arcades_ and _Comus_ point also to the effect of his
+visits to London and the musical world: for both of these were written
+for the music of his friend Henry Lawes, and probably at his
+suggestion; and, written as they were for entertainments given by
+members of the noble families of Stanley and Egerton, they show that
+Milton's plan of life did not involve cutting himself off from the
+great world, where they must have caused his name to be talked of.  His
+life at Horton was evidently not that of a mere recluse, {42}
+forgetting the world outside and forgotten by it.  _Arcades_ and
+_Comus_, and still more the wonderful outburst _At a Solemn Music_, are
+visible links with the cultivated circles of the town, as _Lycidas_,
+which followed them in 1637 and was printed in 1638 at Cambridge with
+other poems to the memory of Edward King, is a visible link with his
+old university.
+
+The mention of the poems of these years, the most delightful that
+Milton was ever to write, show that the six years spent at Horton were
+not entirely what he calls them, "a complete holiday spent in reading
+over the Greek and Latin writers."  If he had never written another
+line, he had written enough by the time he left Horton to give him a
+place among the very greatest men who have practised the art of poetry
+in England.  When he started abroad in 1638 he must have known, and his
+father too, that his daring choice had already justified itself.  "You
+ask what I am about, what I am thinking of," he writes to his friend
+Diodati at the end of the Horton time; "why, with God's help, of
+immortality."  It is the voice of a man who knows he has already done
+great things but counts them as nothing compared with what he is to do
+later on.
+
+Man proposes.  In 1637 Milton was "pluming {43} his wings" for the very
+mightiest of poetic flights, for such a poem as would give full scope
+to his genius and place him among the great poets of the world.  But in
+the result he actually wrote less poetry in the next twenty years than
+he had written in the previous five: less in quantity and far less in
+quality and importance.  The first interruption was the completion of
+his elaborate education by a grand tour.  His generous father, who was
+well-to-do rather than rich, had acquiesced in his not so far earning
+one penny for himself, and was now prepared to provide him with about a
+thousand pounds of our present money to enable him to go abroad for a
+year or two in comfortable style and with the attendance of a servant.
+Leaving England in the spring of 1638, he spent a few days in Paris,
+where he was civilly entertained by the famous Grotius, then Swedish
+Ambassador there, as well as by the English Ambassador, Lord Scudamore,
+but soon moved south, entering Italy by Nice and Genoa and arriving at
+Florence in August or September.  There he spent two months, and was
+enthusiastically received by the various academies or clubs of men of
+letters which then flourished in Florence, one of whose still existing
+minute {44} books records that at its meeting on September the 16th a
+certain John Milton, an Englishman, read to the members a Latin
+hexameter poem showing great learning.  There also he paid his famous
+visit to Galileo, now old and blind, and still a sort of nominal
+prisoner of the Inquisition, for the sin, as Milton says in the
+_Areopagitica_, of "thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan
+and Dominican licensers thought."  One may be sure that it was not
+merely the interest of the new theory about the motion of the earth
+which drew him back so often to that question in _Paradise Lost_.  The
+blind astronomer, whose scientific heresies had placed him in some
+danger of the thumbscrew, must have been a very near and moving memory
+to the blind poet whose political and ecclesiastical heresies had so
+nearly brought him to the gallows.
+
+From Florence Milton went on to Rome, where his scholarly tastes
+gratified themselves for two months in the study of what remained of
+the ancient city.  The famous picture of Rome in _Paradise Regained_
+may owe something to these weeks.  There, too, he was well received by
+several of Rome's most distinguished scholars who paid him compliments
+of Italian extravagance.  There, too, he heard the famous Leonora
+Baroni {45} sing, and was so moved as to write three Latin epigrams in
+her praise.  But it was at Naples, whither he passed on before winter,
+that he made the acquaintance which, except that of Galileo, is the
+most interesting his Italian tour brought him.  It was that of the
+Neopolitan patrician, Giovanni Manso, who had been intimate with Tasso
+and Marini and had been celebrated by Tasso in the _Gerusalemme
+Conquistata_.  His courtesy to a foreigner was soon to procure him a
+still greater honour; for before leaving Naples Milton addressed to him
+a Latin poem thanking him for his kindness, speaking openly of his own
+poetic ambitions and praying that, if he lives to write the great
+Arthurian Epic which he was then planning, he may find such a friend as
+Tasso found to welcome his poem, comfort his old age and cherish his
+fame.  The only difficulty which separated Manso and Milton was that of
+religion, where Milton's unguarded frankness embarrassed his host.  So,
+when he abandoned his intended tour in Greece because he thought it
+"base" to be "travelling abroad at case for intellectual culture while
+his fellow-countrymen were fighting at home for liberty," he was warned
+that the Jesuits at Rome had their eyes on him.  But he stayed there
+two {46} months nevertheless, fearlessly keeping his resolution, not
+indeed to introduce or invite religious controversy but, if questioned,
+then, as he says, "whatsoever I should suffer to dissemble nothing."
+By February he was again in Florence; and after visits to Bologna,
+Ferrara and Venice, whence he characteristically shipped "a chest or
+two of choice music books" for England, he crossed the Alps, spent a
+week or two at Geneva and in France, and was at home by August 1639.
+
+The elaborate education was now formally complete;  and what ordinary
+men call practical life was at last to begin for Milton.  Now for the
+first time he had an abode of his own, a lodging in St. Bride's, Fleet
+Street, and soon afterwards a house in Aldersgate Street where he
+settled with a young nephew whom he undertook to educate.  But the real
+work which he had in view was that of a poet, not of a schoolmaster.
+The high expectations which he knew he had excited among Italian men of
+letters had reinforced those of his English friends; and he was now
+more than ever inclined to follow that "inward prompting which now grew
+daily upon me that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my
+portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I
+might {47} perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes as they
+should not willingly let it die."  So, as his extant notes show, he was
+weighing a large number of subjects for the great poem, slowly settling
+on a Biblical one, and indeed on that of the Fall of Man, and perhaps
+writing some earliest lines of what we now know as _Paradise Lost_.
+
+But in November 1640 occurred an event which governed Milton's life for
+the next twenty years.  The Long Parliament met, and, from that time
+forward till its final meeting in 1660 to dissolve itself and prepare
+the way for Charles II, politics were the dominant interest of Milton's
+mind.  It is his age of prose; during it he wrote very little verse of
+any kind, and none of importance except the finer of his eighteen
+Sonnets which nearly all belong to these years.  On the other hand,
+most of his prose works were written between 1640 and 1660.  Of these
+it is enough to say that they are perhaps the most curious of all
+illustrations of the great things which a poet alone can bring to prose
+and of the dangers which he runs in bringing them.  A poet of the
+stature of Milton is ready at all times to catch all kinds of fire, not
+only the fires of faith and zeal and enthusiasm, but also, as a rule,
+those of a scorn {48} that knows no limit and a hatred that knows no
+mercy.  Such a man needs a strongly made vessel to control his boiling
+ardours.  Prose is not such a vessel: and they too often overflow from
+it in extravagance and violence.  Poetry in all its severer forms
+places a restraint upon the poet from which as the mood of art gains
+upon him he has no desire to escape.  Law and limitation, willing
+obedience to the prescribed conditions, are of the very essence of art.
+And this is as true of the greatest of the arts as of any other.  It is
+not merely that the poet accepts the bondage of rhymes, or stanzas, or
+numbered syllables, as the painter accepts those of a flat canvas and
+the sculptor those of bronze or marble; it is that they all alike
+submit to the mood of art which is always universal and eternal as well
+as individual and temporal and therefore disdains such crudities of
+personal violence as are to be found everywhere in Milton's prose and
+nowhere in his poetry.
+
+But if a poet's prose has its inevitable disadvantages it has also some
+great qualities which only a poet can supply.  In 1640 Milton plunged
+into a great struggle in which his attitude throughout was that of an
+angry and contemptuous partisan.  And his pamphlets exhibit all the
+distortion of facts, {49} injustice to opponents, and narrowness of
+view which are the inevitable if often unconscious vices of the man who
+writes in the interest of a party.  But they also contain flights of
+noble eloquence, in which, as in the passage about the City of London
+in the _Areopagitica_, the soul of partisanship has undergone a fiery
+purification and emerges free of all its grosser elements, a pure
+essence of zeal and faith and spiritual vision.
+
+The first stage of the struggle was largely ecclesiastical, and Milton
+plunged into it with five pamphlets in 1641 and 1642, fiercely
+demanding the abolition of Episcopacy and the establishment of a
+Presbyterian system in England.  Fortunately for himself, as he was
+soon to see, the views he advocated did not in the end prevail.  For
+the next step he took in the way of pamphlet writing would assuredly
+have got him into difficulties with any possible kind of ecclesiastical
+jurisdiction, whether after the model of Laud or of Calvin.  It grew
+out of the most important and disastrous event in the whole of his
+private life.  In the spring of 1643 he went into Oxfordshire, from
+which county his father had originally come, and, to the surprise of
+his friends, who knew nothing of his intention, returned a married man.
+His wife was one {50} Mary Powell, the daughter of a Justice of the
+Peace at Forest Hill, near Oxford.  The Powell family owed the Milton
+family five hundred pounds, which may have been the poet's introduction
+to them.  If so, the marriage to which it led had the results that
+might be expected from such a beginning.  The war had then already
+begun, the King was at Oxford and the Powells were Cavaliers; so that
+when Mrs. Milton, who had been accompanied to London by her relations,
+was to be left alone with a husband of twice her age, and of severe
+tastes, she shrank from the prospect, got away on a visit to her family
+and did not return till 1645, by which time the King was ruined and
+with him the Powells.
+
+When Shelley deserted his wife he wrote to her asking her to come and
+live with him and the lady who had supplanted her.  When Milton's wife
+deserted him he wrote a series of pamphlets advocating divorce at the
+will of the husband.  Such are the extravagances of those whose eyes
+are so accustomed to a brighter light that when brought into that of
+common day they see nothing, and make mistakes which are justly
+ridiculous to the children of this world.  It is an old story: Plato's
+philosopher in the cave, the saint in politics, the modern poet in the
+world of war, {51} commerce, or industry: the eye that sees heaven
+often blunders on earth.  Milton's divorce pamphlets, like nearly all
+his controversial writings, have three fatal defects.  They are utterly
+blind to the temper of those to whom they were addressed, to the
+reasonable arguments of opponents, and to the practical difficulties
+inherent in their proposals.  He argues that, as the law gives relief
+to a man whose wife disappoints him of the physical end of marriage, it
+is an outrage that he should have none when deprived of the social and
+intellectual companionship which is its moral end.  But he takes no
+note of the awkward fact that the dismissed wife is not and cannot be
+in the same position as she was before her marriage.  Nor does he give
+the wife any corresponding rights to get rid of her husband.  These,
+and a hundred other difficulties all too visible to duller eyes, he
+utterly ignores as he proceeds on his violent way of deliverance from
+what he calls "imaginary and scarecrow sins."  Nothing is allowed to
+stand in his path.  For instance, the awkward texts in the Bible, whose
+authority he accepts, are given new interpretations with which it is to
+be feared his temper had more to do than his knowledge of the meaning
+of Greek words.  But {52} there is not a hint of his own case in all he
+says, and it is not desertion that he discusses but incompatibility of
+temper.  Masson even sees reason to think that he began the first
+pamphlet before his wife left him, but when, no doubt, her unfitness to
+be his wife was only too evident.  However all that may be, we can only
+think with wondering pity of those summer weeks of 1643 and of the two
+years which followed.  Everything in Milton's life and writings shows
+him a man unusually susceptible to the attraction of women, one whose
+love was of that strongest sort which is built on a chastity born not
+of coldness but of purity and self-control.  Such a man, in such a
+plight, with the added misery of knowing that he owed it to his own
+rash folly, may be pardoned for forgetting the true bearing of his own
+doctrine that laws are made for the "common lump of men."  Cases like
+his are the real tragedies, the tragedies of life so much more bitter
+than the more visible ones of death; and no thinking or feeling man
+will lightly decide that they must remain unrelieved.  But neither
+Milton nor any of his successors must look at the problem from his own
+point of view alone.  Laws are made, and ought to be, as he himself
+says, for the "lump of men"; and the wisdom or {53} unwisdom of
+facilities for divorce must be judged, not merely by the relief they
+afford in unhappy marriages, but also by the danger of disturbance they
+produce in the far more numerous marriages which, though experiencing
+their days of doubt or difficulty, are on the whole happy or at least
+not unhappy.  Perhaps Milton himself might have hesitated if he could
+have foreseen the consequences of an application of his theories.
+Modern divorce laws have filled our newspapers with just that
+"clamouring debate of utterless things" which he dreaded and abhorred,
+while few will argue that they have increased the number of unions
+which answer to his conception of "the true intent of marriage."
+
+After all, Milton's own story illustrates the advantages of putting
+delays and difficulties in the way of divorce.  According to his nephew
+he had planned to act upon his principles and marry "a very handsome
+and witty gentlewoman"; but the lady had more regard than he to the
+world's opinion.  And she did Milton a service by her reluctance.  For
+the rumour of her, helped by their own misfortunes, brought the Powells
+to their senses; and with the help of Milton's friends they managed the
+well-known scene at a room in St. Martin's the Grand, in which he was
+{54} surprised by the sight of his wife on her knees before him.
+
+        "Soon his heart relented
+  Towards her, his life so late, and sole delight,
+  Now at his feet submissive in distress."
+
+So he glances back at the scene twenty years later when he was drawing
+to the close of his great poem.  Meanwhile he received back his wife,
+who bore him three daughters and died in 1653 or 1654.  He was to marry
+again in 1656; but this second wife, the "espoused saint" of his
+sonnet, lived little more than a year; and in 1663 he married his third
+wife who long survived him.  But to return to the house in the
+Barbican, to which he removed with his wife in 1645.  With him there
+were also his father, two nephews and other boys whom it was his
+principal occupation to teach.  It is somewhat surprising that he found
+pupils, as his views on the divorce question had naturally caused
+scandal in all quarters and received little support in any.  He could
+now see that the Presbyterian Church discipline which he had advocated
+so eagerly in his first pamphlets might have its inconveniences; the
+elders of an English kirk would be no more merciful than his detested
+bishops to such freedom of thought, speech and action as he now
+demanded.  {55} From henceforth he is an Independent and more than an
+Independent; for he was attached to no congregation, apparently
+attended no church regularly, and maintained that profoundly religious
+temper which is even more visible in his last works than in his first
+without the support of any authority, creed or companionship in prayer.
+With these views growing upon him it was natural that, when the
+struggle came between the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independent
+Army, he had no hesitation in supporting the Army; nor is it surprising
+that such a man of no compromise as he had shown himself to be was
+ready to come forward, even before the deed was done, with a defence of
+the execution of Charles I.  It is in connection with that event that
+his name first became known to all Europe and was soon so famous that
+foreigners visiting England desired to see two men above all others,
+Oliver Cromwell and John Milton.  This Milton, from henceforth a
+European celebrity, was not the author of _Paradise Lost_ which was not
+yet written, nor of his earlier poems which were little known in
+England and quite unknown elsewhere.  He was the apologist of the
+Regicides, the Foreign Secretary of the world-famed Protector.
+
+{56}
+
+For the next eleven years, from 1649 to 1660, Milton had a public and
+official as well as a private life.  Charles was executed on January
+30, 1649.  Within a few days after appeared Milton's _Tenure of Kings
+and Magistrates_, largely written, of course, before the execution, and
+justifying it and all the other proceedings of the Army without any
+hesitation or compromise.  It has some breathings of the Miltonic
+grandeur; but that is all.  For the rest it is a mere party polemic
+written for the moment; and, as is the case with all pamphlets, the
+very qualities which gave it its contemporary interest make it
+unreadable to posterity.  Part of it is a sweeping assertion of the
+inalienable right of the whole people to choose, judge and depose their
+rulers; a democratic doctrine which a few years later, when England had
+grown tired of the Army and the Puritans, he was to find as
+inconvenient as he had already found his early advocacy of the
+Presbyterian system in matters ecclesiastical.  For the moment,
+however, the pamphlet made him a person of importance.  Such a man,
+learned, eloquent, of high character, of visible sincerity, of utter
+fearlessness, was not an ally to be despised by a Government which had
+outraged public opinion at home and abroad.  Within a few {57} weeks he
+was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State;
+and from henceforth till after the death of Cromwell he wrote the
+weightiest of the vindications, remonstrances and authoritative demands
+which the great Protector addressed to an astonished and overawed
+Europe.  We can read them still.  Many are insignificant, dealing with
+petty personal details; but the best, especially those that deal with
+the universal cause of Protestantism and freedom, rise on spiritual
+wings far above the language of diplomacy and officialism, letting us
+hear the authentic voice of Milton preluding the thunders of Cromwell
+and Blake.
+
+But the first important work required of Milton belonged rather to the
+man of letters than to the Foreign Secretary.  The horror aroused both
+at home and abroad by the execution of Charles, already great enough in
+itself to be very inconvenient to the Government, was greatly increased
+by the publication of a book called _Eikon Basilike_ which purported to
+be the work of the king himself and appeared immediately after his
+death.  It is a kind of religious portrait of Charles, reporting his
+spiritual meditations and containing a justification of his life.  Its
+success was prodigious; fifty editions are said {58} to have appeared
+within a year.  It was obviously necessary that some reply should be
+attempted; and the task was naturally assigned to Milton, who published
+his _Eikonoklastes_, or Image-Breaker, in October.  It is a mere
+pamphlet, even more violent than the _Tenure of Kings_, not ashamed to
+rake up such absurdities as the alleged poisoning of James I by
+Buckingham, with the usual Miltonic inconsistencies, such as that which
+denounces Charles for the crime of refusing his consent to bills passed
+by Parliament and forgets that the Government on whose behalf he is
+writing established itself by a forcible suppression of the
+Parliamentary majority.  It survives now only by the curious passage in
+it which tells us that William Shakspeare was "the closet companion" of
+Charles I in the "solitudes" of the end of his life; and by the
+puritanical allusion to the "vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip
+Sidney's _Arcadia_" from which, however "full of worth and wit" in its
+own kind, it was a disgrace to the king to borrow a prayer at so grave
+an hour.  Perhaps as a mark of their approval of _Eikonoklastes_, the
+Council of State gave Milton lodgings in Whitehall; and soon
+afterwards, in January 1650, called upon him to reply to another
+Royalist book which was making a {59} great stir.  The result was the
+beginning of a political and personal controversy which lasted almost
+as long as it was safe for Milton to write about politics at all.
+
+In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries great scholars had a
+position which they are never likely to occupy again.  In those
+cosmopolitan days when an Italian governed France, and regiments and
+even armies were often commanded by foreigners, the honour of
+possessing a celebrated scholar was eagerly disputed not only by
+universities, but by cities, sovereign states, and even kings.
+Learning had then a market value in the world: for then, as always,
+especially since the invention of printing, European opinion was worth
+having on one's side; and in the days before journalism the practice
+was to hire distinguished scholars to write to a political brief.
+After the death of Charles I it was obviously the policy of Charles II
+to secure support by a powerful indictment of the iniquity of the
+rulers of the English Commonwealth.  For this purpose his advisers
+obtained the services of a certain Claude de Saumaise, or, as he was
+generally called, Salmasius.  This man, forgotten now except for
+Milton, was then a scholar of such fame that his presence was disputed
+between Oxford {60} and Venice, the French and the Dutch, between the
+Pope who wanted him at Rome and Christina of Sweden who was soon to
+persuade him to go to Stockholm.  So it is not altogether surprising
+that Charles II was advised to pay him, and perhaps paid him, much more
+than he could afford for writing a book called _Defensio Regia_, which
+was to be before all Europe the public statement of the case against
+the new rulers of England.  Milton spent a year in preparing his reply,
+which came out in the beginning of 1651.  The _Pro Populo Anglicano
+Defensio_ is now pleasanter reading for Milton's detractors than for
+those who honour his name.  The unbridled insults which it heaps upon
+Charles I and still more upon Salmasius, for whom its least offensive
+titles are such as "blockhead," "liar" and "apostate," exceed even the
+wide limits of abuse customary in these days.  _Corruptio optimi
+pessima_: such a man as Milton, if he once descends to the bandying of
+foul language, will beat the very bargemen themselves.  But what
+astonished his contemporaries was not his violence but his courage.  An
+unknown Englishman had dared to meet the giant of learning on his own
+ground and had at least held his own.  It may have been partly as the
+result of this {61} that Salmasius no longer found Holland a pleasant
+place of residence and removed to Sweden.  A more certain result is
+that the English David who had stood up to Goliath was from henceforth
+a European celebrity.  With his usual proud courage he had put his own
+name on the title-page of his book, challenging to himself both the
+glories and the dangers that might come of it.  He was not to be
+disappointed of either.
+
+From henceforth he was in the thick of a violent controversy, which
+made so much more noise than it deserved in its own day that it need
+make none here.  Replies came out both to his _Eikonoklastes_ and to
+his _Defensio_: new books grew out of the controversy; Milton's nephew
+wrote on his behalf, and anonymous friends of Salmasius on his; the
+adversaries of Milton no more spared his character than he had spared
+theirs; a _Defensio Secunda_ from his own hand seemed necessary, and
+appeared in 1654; and so with minor pamphlets and second editions we
+get on to the end of the weary controversy, in which for contemporaries
+there was perhaps some fire and light, but for us now little but smoke
+and darkness of confusion.
+
+Such was the work which was Milton's chief occupation during the
+Commonwealth, to the {62} doing of which he deliberately sacrificed his
+eyesight.  Within a year after the publication of his book against
+Salmasius its foreseen result was complete.  From henceforth Milton was
+dependent upon the eyes of others.  He was only forty-four when
+overtaken by this calamity.  Yet his courage seems never to have failed
+him.  "I argue not," he tells Cyriack Skinner in his sonnet--
+
+  "Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
+    Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
+  Right onward.  What supports me, dost thou ask?
+    The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
+    In Liberty's defence, my noble task,
+  Of which all Europe rings from side to side."
+
+
+Whoever had begun to have doubts about the course taken in 1649 and
+since, he had none; and no one had suffered more in defence of it.  The
+other and greater sonnet on his blindness--
+
+  "When I consider how my light is spent
+    Ere half my days in this dark world and wide"
+
+shows him content if need be to take his place among those whose desire
+to serve {63} God must find its peace in the thought that
+
+  "They also serve who only stand and wait."
+
+In the same spirit, perhaps, is the motto which he appended to his
+signature in the album of a learned foreigner in 1651: "I am made
+perfect in weakness."  But nothing of weakness, not even its
+perfection, could ever come near Milton.  He played a greater part in
+this world without his eyes than ever he had played with them.  Without
+their help he did what prose could do towards justifying the ways of
+England to Europe, and was very soon to do what verse could do towards
+justifying the ways of God to men.  He cannot, perhaps, be said to have
+succeeded in either, but one at least of the failures is a whole heaven
+above what ordinary men call success.
+
+A few words may be said of his attitude towards men and measures during
+this political period of his life.  His unqualified and immediate
+support of the King's execution had, of course, united him with the
+Cromwellian party who had brought it about.  And his anti-Presbyterian
+views carried him in the same direction.  So we are not surprised to
+find that, when Cromwell got rid of the Parliament by military force
+and soon {64} afterwards became Protector, Milton approved his action
+and gladly continued to serve under him.  Nor was Milton the man to be
+disturbed by the Protector's rapid dissolution of his first Parliament,
+by the period of personal Government which followed, or by his angry
+breach with his second Parliament.  Poets have seldom understood
+politics, and Milton, the most political of poets, perhaps less than
+any.  No man ever had less of that sense of law and custom, of the need
+of continuity, which is the very centre and secret of politics.  Few
+great statesmen have been able to maintain perfect consistency; but the
+least consistent have generally been aware that there was something in
+inconsistencies that needed explanation.  Milton never shows any
+consciousness of the patent incongruity between his early exaltation of
+the indefeasible rights of Parliaments and his support of the
+Cromwellian attitude towards them: between his angry denunciation of
+Charles I for presuming to retain the ancient right of the kings to
+refuse their assent to Bills submitted to them and his approval of
+Cromwell's dismissal of a Parliament for attempting to deny the same
+right to the Protector: between the extreme doctrine of free printing
+claimed in the _Areopagitica_ and the fact that its author {65} was
+afterwards concerned in licensing books under a Government which
+vigorously suppressed "seditious" publications.  But inconsistencies by
+themselves are of little importance, particularly in revolutionary
+times; they would be of none, in Milton's case, if he had ever admitted
+that he had learnt from experience and consequently changed his mind.
+But he never did.  Parliaments remained sacred when they were for
+pulling down bishops, profane when they were for establishing
+Presbyterianism, and utterly detestable when they were for restoring
+Charles II.  The fact is, of course, that Milton, like most men of much
+imagination and no political experience, saw a vision of certain things
+in the value of which he believed with all his soul, and saw none of
+the objections to them and none of the difficulties that stood in their
+way.  At the very end, when the bonfires for Charles II were almost
+lighted in the streets, he could publish _A Ready and Easy Way to
+Establish a Free Commonwealth_; and the title he chose for that book
+was typical of his whole attitude in all practical matters.  He had to
+an extreme degree the man of vision's blindness to the all-important
+fact that the mass of men would not have what he aims at if they {66}
+could and could not if they would.  At least in a free country the
+statesman knows that he has got to work through stupid people, with
+their consent, and with regard to the measure of their capacities.  For
+such men as Milton stupid people either do not exist or are to be
+merely ignored.  That is his attitude all through.  Alike in the matter
+of divorce and in the matter of education, in the ecclesiastical
+problem and in the political, he was always eager to put forward a
+"ready and easy way" which entirely ignored the nature of the human
+material which was to walk in it.  He simply chose not to see that in
+all these matters men had for centuries been walking in a way which was
+not his, a way which had in fact by now diverged many miles from his;
+and that they could not possibly, even if they would, transport
+themselves in a moment, at a mere wave of his wand, across the
+intervening bogs and forests which the lapse of years had rendered
+impassable.  He never appears to have had a single glimpse of the truth
+that the essential business of the statesman is to be always moving
+from the past to the future without ever letting the bridge between
+them break down.  The principal food of a political people is custom,
+and to break the bridge is to cut off the only source {67} of its
+supply.  The greatest proof that Cromwell was really a statesman and
+not a mere political emergency man of unusual character and ability is
+that in his last years he was evidently seeing more and more plainly
+that the right metaphor for a statesman is taken from grafting and not
+from "root and branch" operations.  It is clear that he had seen that
+political branches may be pruned away but roots can very seldom be
+safely disturbed; and that among the roots in English politics were a
+hereditary Monarchy and an established Church.  Dynasty and formularies
+might perhaps be safely changed; but the things themselves were of the
+root, and the tree would not flourish if they were touched.  It is
+characteristic of Milton that in both these matters he was strongly
+opposed to the policy towards which Cromwell was feeling his way.  Ten
+years had taught him nothing, and the death of Cromwell found him as
+blind to political possibilities as the death of Charles I.
+
+One would like to know something of the relations between the two
+greatest men of the Commonwealth.  But there is little or nothing to
+know.  It is plain that in most matters they must have been in close
+agreement; and in a few, as in the business of the {68} Piedmont
+massacres, the two great hearts must have beaten as one, while the
+sword of Cromwell stood ready drawn behind the trumpet of Milton's
+noble prose and nobler verse.  The only surviving act of personal
+contact between them is to be found in Milton's sonnet; and that is a
+public tribute with no suggestion of private intimacy in it.  Indeed,
+as Masson has pointed out, it may easily be taken to mean more than it
+really does; for it was not written because Milton could not keep
+silence about his admiration of Cromwell, but rather, as its full title
+shows, as a petition or appeal to Cromwell to save the nation from
+parliamentary proposals for the setting up of a State Church and for
+limiting the toleration of dissent from it.  The sonnet, then, proves
+less than it has sometimes been made to prove; and in any case it
+proves no intimacy.  Perhaps after all, in the case of Milton as in
+that of most men who deal with public affairs, we are apt to exaggerate
+the importance in their daily lives of these visible official
+activities.  The world thinks it knows men who fight battles, or make
+speeches, or write books; but it knows nothing of their private
+thoughts or studies and still less of their private loves and joys and
+sorrows which to themselves {69} and in truth are much the most real
+part of their lives.  So with Milton during these years; his wife and
+little children may have been, his second wife and such friends as
+Cyriack Skinner and Henry Lawrence and Lady Ranelagh and the poet
+Marvell certainly were, much greater realities to him in his daily
+thoughts than either the hated Salmasius and Morus of the pamphlets or
+the admired Cromwell of the sonnet.  The "weekly table" he is said to
+have kept, at the expense of the State, for foreign ministers, must
+have provided interesting talk; but the true Milton cannot have lived
+in these gatherings so fully at the time or remembered them afterwards
+so affectionately as those other more intimate parties of which he
+gives us a picture in the two sonnets to Lawrence and Skinner which,
+for lovers of poetry, look so pleasantly back to Horace and so
+pleasantly forward to Cowper and Tennyson.
+
+  "Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,
+  Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire,
+  Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
+  Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
+  From the hard season gaining?  Time will run
+{70}
+  On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire
+  The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
+  The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun.
+  What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
+  Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
+  To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice
+  Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?
+  He who of those delights can judge, and spare
+  To interpose them oft, is not unwise."
+
+
+This is his own graver and older parallel to what his nephew tells us
+of his schoolmastering days when he would turn from "hard study and
+spare diet" to "drop once a month or so into the society of some young
+sparks of his acquaintance," and with them "would so far make bold with
+his body as now and then to keep a gawdy day."  The sonnet shows that
+the poet is still the poet of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, no narrow
+fanatic, but a lover of company and the arts, and of the richness and
+fulness of life.  Such occasions as that it describes must have been
+oases in the desert of controversy and public business abroad and of
+blindness and loneliness at home.  He did not live long in Whitehall,
+{71} moving in 1652 to a house overlooking St. James's Park, near what
+is now Queen Anne's Gate.  There his first wife died in 1653, or 1654,
+and her short-lived successor too; there he lived during the remaining
+years of the Commonwealth, working at his pamphlets and State papers,
+even beginning _Paradise Lost_, with young friends to read to him,
+write for him, lead their blind great man about in the Park or
+elsewhere, till the catastrophe of 1660 arrived and it was no longer
+safe for the defender of Regicide to be seen in the streets.
+
+Why Milton was not hanged at the Restoration is still something of a
+mystery.  His name must have been more hatefully known to the returning
+exiles than that of any one except the dead Cromwell whose death did
+not save his body from a grim ceremony at Tyburn.  He had not only
+defended Charles I's execution before all Europe, and in a tone almost
+of exultation, but he had pursued the whole Stuart family with
+vituperation and contempt.  Even in the very last weeks, when the bells
+were already almost ringing for Charles II, he had dared to raise his
+voice against the "abjured and detested thraldom of kingship";
+declaring that he would not be silent though he should but speak "to
+trees and stones: and had none to cry to, but {72} with the prophet 'O
+Earth, Earth, Earth!' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse
+inhabitants are deaf to,"--a passage, if interpreted by its original
+context, of awful imprecation upon Charles I.  A man so famous, so
+utterly unrepentant, so defiant to the very end, seemed to challenge to
+himself the gallows.  That his challenge would receive its natural
+answer was the openly expressed opinion of his enemies.  No doubt it
+was also the fear of his friends, who concealed him in Smithfield from
+May till August 1660.  By the 24th of August the danger was over.  The
+Act of Indemnity, which was a pardon to all political offenders not by
+name excepted in it, became law on that day; and Milton's was not one
+of the excepted names.  How was that managed?  There are various
+stories; perhaps each has some truth in it; many influences may have
+combined.  One is that he had saved Davenant in his danger some years
+before and now the Cavalier poet in his turn saved the Puritan.  But
+Davenant was not in Parliament, and the real work must have been done
+by a group of friends who were.  The most important of them seem to
+have been Annesley (afterwards Lord Anglesey), Sir Thomas Clarges, who
+was Monk's brother-in-law, Monk's secretary Morrice, and the poet's
+less powerful but {73} still more devoted friend Andrew Marvell.
+Between them somehow they saved him, aided no doubt by the general pity
+for a blind man, the general respect for his learning which found
+expression even in that moment and even in Royalist pamphlets, and, one
+may hope, by the knowledge of a few of them that this was a man of
+genius from whom there might be great things yet to come.  The names of
+those who thus made possible the greatest poem in the English language
+deserve lasting record; and a word of gratitude may be added to
+Clarendon and to Charles II for refraining from saying the easy and not
+unnatural word which would have been instantly fatal to their old enemy.
+
+The odd thing is that he was arrested after all.  There had been an
+order of the House of Commons for his arrest and for the burning of his
+books, possibly, as Masson thinks, obtained by his friends to make it
+seem unnecessary to except him in the Indemnity Bill.  The books were
+duly burnt, or such copies of them as came to the hands of the hangman;
+and ultimately, at some uncertain date, Milton himself was got into the
+custody of the Sergeant-at-Arms.  He was soon released, and the story
+would not be worth relating but for a curious proof it gives of the
+{74} obstinate courage of the poet.  The House ordered his release on
+December 15; and one would have supposed that he would have been glad
+to escape into obscurity and safety again on any terms.  But no; the
+Sergeant-at-Arms demanded high fees which Milton thought unreasonable;
+and even then, when he had almost felt the hangman's rope on his neck,
+he would not be bullied by any man.  He refused to pay: and though the
+Solicitor-General ominously remarked that he deserved hanging, his
+friends got the fees referred to a committee and presumably reduced.
+Before the beginning of 1661 he was definitely a free man to live his
+final fourteen years of political defeat, isolation and silence, of
+unparalleled poetic fertility, and, before the end, of acknowledged
+poetic fame.
+
+He did not return any more to the fashionable and therefore dangerous
+neighbourhood of Whitehall, but lived the rest of his life in a
+succession of houses in or near the city, ending in Artillery Walk,
+Bunhill Fields, where he died.  His friends must for years have feared
+that he might be attacked and perhaps murdered by some drunken Cavalier
+revellers accidentally coming across the old regicide.  And in spite of
+the Act of Indemnity he can hardly have felt absolutely comfortable on
+{75} the side of the law when so late as 1664 his _Tenure of Kings_ was
+denounced by the censor as still extant and an unfortunate printer was
+hanged, drawn and quartered for issuing a sort of new version of it.
+Misfortunes without and fears within might be the summing up, if not of
+the poet's, at least of the man's life during these first years after
+the Restoration.  To begin with, he was a much poorer man.  His salary
+as Secretary was, of course, gone.  But besides that he had lost 2000
+pounds, equal to about 7000 pounds now, which he had invested in
+Commonwealth Securities, as well as some confiscated property he had
+bought of the Chapter of Westminster; and he was soon to lose, at least
+temporarily, the rent he received from his father's house in Bread
+Street which was destroyed by the Fire of London.  Masson calculates
+that he was left after the Restoration with an income about equal to
+700 pounds of our money which his further losses and outlay on his
+daughters had reduced to 300 pounds or 350 pounds before his death; not
+quite poverty even at the end, but something very different from what
+the eldest son of a rich man had been accustomed to.  A graver
+misfortune was the gout which afflicted him for the rest of his life
+and gave him so much pain that he made little of his blindness in {76}
+comparison with it.  Worst of all was his unhappy relation to his
+daughters.  That is the ugliest thing in the story of his life.  How
+things might have gone with his son, if the baby boy had lived, one
+does not know; but his oriental views of the moral and intellectual
+inferiority of women, which doubled the dangers of their fascinations,
+made him certain to be a despotic father to three motherless girls.
+And so he was.  He had plenty of young men eager for the privilege of
+reading to him: but of course they could not be always with him, and
+the result was that dreadful picture which comes to us from his nephew,
+no unfriendly witness, of the daughters "condemned to the performance
+of reading and exactly pronouncing of all the languages of whatever
+book he should at one time or other think fit to peruse; viz. the
+Hebrew (and, I think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the Italian,
+Spanish and French," none of which languages they understood.  Nor did
+he show any desire that they should; saying grimly that one tongue was
+enough for a woman.  History and fiction are alike full of the
+tragedies that result from the blindness of extraordinary minds to
+ordinary duties; and Milton's case is one of the saddest.  The
+daughters cheated him and made away with {77} his books; he spoke of
+them gravely and repeatedly as his "unkind children"; one of them is
+even reported, on very good evidence, to have said, at his third
+marriage in 1663, that "that was no news to hear of his wedding but, if
+she could hear of his death, that was something."  At last it was
+thought better that he and they should part; and they were put out, at
+considerable expense to their father, to learn embroidery work and
+other "curious and ingenious manufactures" for their living.  It is
+pleasant to hear that the youngest, Deborah, who was visited by Addison
+not long before he died, and received fifty guineas from Queen
+Caroline, was "in a transport" of delight when shown a portrait of her
+father, crying out "'Tis my father, 'tis my dear father, I see him;
+'tis him; 'tis the very man! here, here!" as she pointed to some of the
+features.  So one likes to be told, on her authority, that he was
+delightful company and "the life of the conversation, full of
+unaffected cheerfulness and civility" when he had his little parties of
+friends.  And to us, if not to her, it is a pleasant story that she
+could still repeat many lines from Homer, Euripides and Ovid, though
+she said she did not understand Greek or Latin.  The wife of a
+Spitalfields weaver must at last have felt {78} some pride in these
+survivals of her childish drudgery, proof audible to all men, if to her
+unintelligible, that she was the daughter of Mr. Milton, the great
+scholar and poet.
+
+No more need to be said of sorrow or failure.  The rest is a serene and
+productive old age.  _Paradise Lost_ was published in 1667, _Paradise
+Regained_ and _Samson_ in 1671.  Besides these there was, in 1673, a
+new edition of his earlier poems reprinted, with additions from that of
+1645; and many publications of prose works mostly written in earlier
+years but never printed, such as his _History of Britain_, and little
+books on Education, Logic and Grammar.  He kept up his strenuous life
+of study and composition apparently to the end.  He is said to have got
+up at four or five in the morning, and, after hearing a chapter or two
+from the Hebrew Bible and breakfasting, to have passed the five hours
+before his midday dinner dictating or having some book read to him.  In
+the afternoon he would walk a little in his garden; all his life a
+garden had been one of the things he would not do without.  Then music
+and more private study carried him on to an Horatian supper of olives
+or other "light things"; and so to a pipe of tobacco, a glass of water
+and bed.  He drank but little wine, and that only with his meals.  {79}
+Such a way of life deserved a healthful old age, which, but for that
+healthy man's disease the gout, he had, and a death such as he had, so
+easy as to be imperceptible to the bystanders.  That was on November 8,
+1674.  Four days later his body was buried in the church of St. Giles,
+Cripplegate, where his grave may still be seen; the funeral being
+accompanied by "all his learned and great friends in London, not
+without a concourse of the vulgar."
+
+By that time the battle of his life had been won.  The astonishing
+achievements of his last years had more than fulfilled the high promise
+and proud words of his long distant youth.  Perhaps no seven years in
+all literary history provide a finer record of poetic genius triumphing
+over difficulties external and internal than these last seven of
+Milton's life from 1667 to 1674.  They had their reward and not only
+from posterity.  There is a still lingering delusion, based chiefly on
+the five pounds paid for the first edition of _Paradise Lost_, that
+Milton's greatness was little recognized in his lifetime.  The truth is
+the exact reverse.  He had far more chance of hearing his own praises,
+if he cared for that, than most of the great English poets: than Keats
+and Shelley, for instance; than Wordsworth, {80} at least till he was
+old; nay, in all probability than Shakspeare himself.  Which of them
+heard the most popular poet of their day say of them anything at all
+like Dryden's famous and generous "This man cuts us all out and the
+ancients too"?  It is not even true that _Paradise Lost_ sold badly.
+On the contrary, in a year and a half from the day of publication over
+thirteen hundred copies had been sold, from which the author received
+10 pounds and the publisher, it is believed, 50 pounds or 60 pounds.
+He would be a sanguine publisher to-day who would be quite certain of
+making in eighteen months the modern equivalent of this sum, say 180
+pounds, out of a new epic, even if it were as great as Milton's.
+
+But the money question was not of the first importance to Milton and is
+of none to us.  The interesting thing is the almost immediate
+recognition of the greatness of the poem.  Nothing in the world could
+be more alien to the tone of the society and literature of the London
+of Charles II than this long Biblical Puritan poem with its scarcely
+veiled attacks on the revived Monarchy and Episcopacy and its entirely
+unveiled attacks on the fashionable men of Belial.  Yet it was from the
+very high priests of this society that the most unstinted praise came.
+Of its professional men of {81} letters Dryden was already rapidly
+advancing to the unquestioned primacy which was soon to be his, and to
+remain his for his life; of its amateurs Lord Dorset had perhaps the
+most brilliant reputation.  It was these two men who, more than any
+others, made the town recognize the greatness of Milton.  Both were as
+unlike Milton as men could be, and Dryden had just committed himself to
+a strong championship of rhymed verse as against blank.  There is
+nowhere a finer proof of the compelling power of great art upon those
+who know it when they see it than the unbounded praise with which
+Dryden at once saluted Milton.  The fact that his admiration at first
+took the absurd form of turning Milton's epic into a "heroic opera" in
+rhyme does not detract from the significance of his writing publicly
+within a year of Milton's death that the blind old regicide's poem was
+"one of the greatest, most noble and sublime which either this age or
+nation has produced," and to this he was to add, thirteen years later,
+the still bolder tribute of the well-known epigram about "three poets
+in three distant ages born" which gives Milton a place above Homer and
+Virgil.  The lines are in detail absurd; but their absurdity does not
+destroy the fact that the intellectual life of England was never {82}
+keener, or more eager to welcome talent in art or letters, than in the
+reign of Charles II; and nothing is clearer proof of it than the
+honours received by the rebel Milton from a Court composer like Henry
+Lawes, a Court physician like Samuel Barrow, a statesman and minister
+like Lord Anglesey, and a poet laureate like Dryden.
+
+So we may think of him happily enough in these last years.  He had now
+done the work which from his early manhood he had felt it was his task
+in life to do.  When he was not much over thirty he had boldly written
+in public of what his mind, "in the spacious circuits of her musing,
+hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest
+attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and
+those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse and the book of Job
+a brief model . . . or whether those dramatic constitutions, wherein
+Sophocles and Euripides reign, shall be found more doctrinal and
+exemplary to a nation."  For the moment nothing seemed to come of these
+high words; but before he died not one only, but both of his dreams,
+the drama as well as the epic, were accomplished facts.  _Paradise
+Lost_, begun as a drama, had become the greatest of modern {83} epics;
+and the abandoned drama had reappeared in _Samson_, not the greatest of
+English tragedies, but the one which best recalls the peculiar
+greatness of the drama of Greece.  Self-confident young men have always
+been common enough, but there are two differences between them and
+Milton: their performance falls far short of their promise instead of
+exceeding it; and neither promise nor performance is marked by this
+exalting and purifying sense of a thing divinely inspired and divinely
+aided.  Such work can wait, as his did, being such as is "not to be
+raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine; like that which
+flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher
+fury of a rhyming parasite; nor to be obtained by the invocation of
+dame memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that
+eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and
+sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch
+and purify the lips of whom he pleases."
+
+Now the task is done; and he can sit alone in his upstairs room in
+Artillery Walk and thank God that in spite of blindness, private
+sorrows and public disappointments, he had been enabled at last to bear
+the witness of a work of immortal beauty to the high truth {84} that
+had been in him even from a boy.  So it may have been in the graver
+moments of solitude; while, as we know from several sources, there were
+other times, when he would enjoy the companionship of friends and the
+homage of learned strangers by whom we are told he was "much visited,
+more than he did desire."  The picture suggested to us is that of a man
+who at sixty-five, then a greater age than now, retained all his powers
+of mind and much of the physical beauty which had been so remarkable in
+his youth; who was gracious but somewhat reserved and dignified with
+strangers; a delightful companion to friends and especially to younger
+men; full of literature, especially of poetry, and with a memory that
+enabled him to recite long passages from Homer and Virgil; above all,
+an ardent lover of music, making a practice, so far as possible, of
+hearing some, whether vocal or instrumental, every afternoon.  His ears
+were eyes to him; and when he heard a lady sing finely he would say:
+"Now will I swear this lady is handsome."  All kinds of music, and not
+only the severer, were delightful to the "organ-voice of England."
+
+That is not the least interesting thing about him.  The greatest of
+England's Puritans {85} was also the greatest of her artists.  He had
+nothing in him of the morbid scrupulosity which is such an inhuman
+feature in French Jansenism and some of the English sects.  His was a
+large nature which demanded a free expansion of life.  Lonely figure as
+he is in our literary history, with no real predecessors or followers,
+his mighty arch yet bridges the gulf between Elizabeth and the
+Revolution, and is of nearer or less distant kin to Shakspeare than to
+Pope.  His prose is the swan song of the old eloquence, as inspired and
+as confused as an oracle.  To read it when it is at its best is to soar
+on wings through the empyrean and despise Swift and Addison walking in
+neat politeness on the pavement.  There as everywhere, in his verse, in
+his character, in his mind, in his life, he has the strength and the
+weakness of an aristocrat.  The youth who in his Cambridge days was
+"esteemed a virtuous person yet not to be ignorant of his parts" did
+not belie the opinion formed of him in either of those respects.  His
+Republicanism was of the proud Roman sort, and at least as near
+Coriolanus as Gracchus; a boundless faith in the State and a boundless
+desire to spend and be spent in its service, a total and scornful
+indifference to the opinions of all {86} those, though they might be
+five-sixths of the nation, who did not desire to be served in the way
+which he had decided to be for their good.  The modern way of deciding
+matters of State by counting heads may very likely be the best of many
+unsatisfactory ways of accomplishing a very difficult business; but it
+has always been peculiarly exasperating to men of genius who see their
+way plainly and cannot understand why a million blind men are to keep
+them out of it.  Milton liked the voice of the majority well enough
+when he could plead it against Charles I; but when he found it calling
+for Charles II he treated it as a mere impertinent absurdity; the vain
+babble of a "misguided and abused multitude" with whom wise men have
+nothing to do except to keep them in their place.  And it is in the
+latter attitude that he is most really himself.  His is, of course, an
+aristocracy of mind and character, not of birth and wealth; but the
+self-sufficient scorn which was almost a virtue in Aristotle's eyes,
+and is in ours the besetting sin of even the noblest of aristocrats, is
+too frequent a note in all his prose, and even in his poetry; and it is
+sometimes poured out upon those who are fitter subjects for tenderness
+than for contempt.  One can scarcely imagine a child {87} or an
+ignorant man being quite at ease in Milton's company.
+
+But these are the penalties that greatness has too often to pay for
+being itself.  So long as we remain human beings and not divine, it
+will be found hard to unite humility, ease of manner, and the glad
+sufferance of fools with a mind struggling in a storm of sublime
+thoughts, with powers that are and know themselves to be far above
+those of ordinary men.  It will never be easy for men of supreme genius
+to behave to their inferiors as if they were their equals.  But that is
+not the side of Milton of which we ought to think most often now.  It
+is more just as well as more merciful to him, and it is of more use to
+ourselves, to fix our eyes on his strength, and not on the weakness
+that more or less inevitably accompanied it.  The ancients admired
+strength more than the moderns have, at least until lately.  But no one
+can refuse to admire such strength as Milton's, so continuous, so
+triumphant over exceptional obstacles, so disdainful of all petty or
+personal ends.  There is a majesty about it to which one scarcely knows
+any real parallel.  Strength implies purpose and art implies unity of
+conception; the instinct of art was only less strong in Milton than the
+resolute will; so that it {88} is not surprising that scarcely any life
+has such unity as his.  It is itself a perfect work of art.  If we put
+aside, as we may fairly, the partial political inconsistencies, the
+rest is absolutely of one piece; a great building, nobly planned from
+the beginning and nobly executed to the last harmonious detail of the
+original design.  We men are, most of us, weak creatures who accomplish
+but the tiniest fragments of even such poor designs as we make for our
+lives.  There is something that uplifts us in the spectacle of the
+triumphant completion of so great a plan as the life of Milton.  We are
+exalted by the thought that, after all, we are of the same flesh and
+blood, nay, even of the same breed, as this wonderful man.  To read the
+_Paradise Lost_ is to realize, in the highest degree, how the poet's
+imagination can impose a majestic order on the tumultuous confusion of
+human speech and knowledge.  To read its author's life is to realize,
+with equally exalting clearness, how a strong man's will can so
+victoriously mould a world of adverse circumstances that affliction,
+defeat--nay, even the threatening shadow of death itself--are made the
+very instruments by which he becomes that which he has, from the
+beginning of his years, chosen for himself to be.
+
+
+
+
+{89}
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE EARLIER POEMS
+
+We think to-day of Milton chiefly as the author of _Paradise Lost_, as
+we think of Wren as the builder of St. Paul's.  And we are right.  When
+a man has been the creator of the only very great building in the world
+which bears upon it from the first stone to the last the mark of a
+single mind, his other achievements, even though they include
+Greenwich, Hampton Court, Trinity College Library, and some fifty
+churches, inevitably fall into the background.  So when the world has
+admitted that a poet has disputed the supreme palm of epic with Homer
+and Virgil, it hardly cares to remember that he has also challenged all
+rivals in such forms as the Pastoral Elegy, the Mask, and the Sonnet.
+_De minimis non curat_ might be applied to such cases without any very
+violent extravagance.  The first thought that must always rise to the
+mind at the mention of Milton's name must be the stupendous achievement
+of _Paradise Lost_.
+
+Yet if Milton had been hanged at Tyburn {90} in 1660 he would still
+unquestionably rank with the half-dozen greatest of the English poets.
+Chaucer and Spenser would then have ranked after Shakspeare as higher
+names than his: and possibly also Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley.  But
+he could have feared no other rival: for Dryden is too much a mere man
+of letters, Pope too much a mere wit, Byron too exclusively a
+rhetorician, Tennyson too exclusively an artist, to rank with a man in
+whom burned the divine fire of _Lycidas_ and the great Ode.  What would
+Milton's fame have rested upon if he had not lived to write _Paradise
+Lost_ and its two successors?  Upon the volume published in the year
+1645, the year of Naseby, when people, one would have supposed, were
+not thinking much of poetry, and those who were most likely to be doing
+so were just those least inclined to look for it from John Milton, the
+Puritan pamphleteer.  Yet in that little book was heard for the last
+time the voice, now raised above itself, of the old poetry which the
+Cavaliers and courtiers had loved.
+
+No single volume has ever contained so much fine English verse by an
+unknown or almost unknown poet.  It is true that _Lycidas_ and _Comus_
+had been printed before, but _Comus_ had appeared anonymously and {91}
+_Lycidas_ had been signed only with initials.  So that only friends, or
+people behind the scenes in the literary world, could know anything of
+Milton's poetry.  Nor does he seem to have been very anxious that they
+should.  The other contributors to the volume in memory of Edward King
+gave their names: the only signature to _Lycidas_ is J. M.  It was
+Lawes the composer, not Milton the author, who published _Comus_ in
+1637.  Milton's feelings about it are indicated by the motto on the
+title page--
+
+  "Eheu quid volui misero mihi! floribus Austrum
+  Perditus--"
+
+Quotations can often say for us what we cannot say for ourselves.  What
+Virgil says for Milton is "Alas what is this that I have done? poor
+fool that I am, could not I have kept my tender buds of verse a little
+longer from the cutting blasts of public criticism?"  Yet no one knew
+better than Milton that _Comus_ was incomparably the greatest of the
+masks.  So in the sonnet on reaching the age of twenty-three he says
+that his "late spring no bud or blossom shew'th."  Yet he had already
+written the _Ode on the Nativity_, a performance sufficient, one would
+have {92} thought, to give a young poet reasonable self-satisfaction in
+what he had done, as well as confidence in what he would be able to do.
+Nor was Milton in the ordinary sense, or perhaps in any, a humble man.
+Of that false kind of humility, too often recommended from the pulpit,
+which consists in a beautiful woman trying to suppose herself plain, or
+an able man trying to be unaware of his ability, no man ever had less
+than Milton.  Neither from himself nor from others did he ever conceal
+the fact that he was a man of genius.  In his eyes no kind of untruth,
+however specious, could be a virtue.  But of a finer humility, built on
+truth, he was not without his share.  The truly humble man may be a
+genius and may know it and may never affect to deny it: he may know
+that he has done great things, far greater than have been done by the
+men he sees around him: but he is not judging himself by the standard
+of other men: he has another standard, that of "the perfect witness of
+all-judging Jove," that of "as ever in my great Taskmaster's eye," and
+of that he knows how very far he has fallen short.  Of this nobler
+humility Milton had something all his life and in his youth much.  It
+is this which reconciles the apparent inconsistency between his many
+proud {93} confessions that he knows himself to be a man called to do
+great things and his reluctance to let the world see what he had
+already done: between his keeping _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ ten
+years unpublished and his preserving and ultimately publishing almost
+everything he had ever written, even to scraps of boyish and
+undergraduate verse.  From one point of view his best was nothing: from
+the other, more than equally true, the humblest line that had come from
+his pen had received a passport to immortality.
+
+What does the famous volume contain?  It opens with the noble _Ode on
+the Nativity_, as if to give the discerning reader invincible proof in
+the first twenty lines put before him that the proud words of the
+publisher's preface were amply justified.  "Let the event guide itself
+which way it will, I shall deserve of the age by bringing into the
+light as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous
+Spenser wrote; whose poems in these English ones are as rarely imitated
+as sweetly excelled.  Reader, if thou art eagle-eyed to censure their
+worth, I am not fearful to expose them to thy exactest perusal."  So
+the preface ends: and then what follows is--
+
+  "This is the month, and this the happy morn,
+  Wherein the Son of Heaven's Eternal King,
+{94}
+  Of wedded maid and virgin mother born,
+  Our great redemption from above did bring;
+  For so the holy sages once did sing,
+  That he our deadly forfeit should release,
+  And with his Father work us a perpetual peace."
+
+_Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo_.  No one had ever written
+such English verse as this before: no one ever would again.  Here was a
+poet, writing at the age of twenty-one, for whom it was evident that no
+theme could be so high that he could not find it fit utterance.  Fit
+and also peculiar to himself.  The peculiar Miltonic note which none of
+his innumerable imitators have ever caught for more than a few lines,
+which he himself never in all his works loses for more than a moment,
+is instantly struck.  As Mr. Mackail has said, "there is not a square
+inch of his poetry from first to last of which one could not
+confidently say, 'This is Milton and no one else.'"  One may even go
+further than Mr. Mackail.  For he seems to make an exception where
+certainly none is needed.  He is justly insisting that one of the most
+remarkable things about Milton is that, while English poetry spoke one
+language in his youth and another in his age, he himself spoke neither.
+His "accent and speech" alike in _Lycidas_ and in _Paradise Lost_ {95}
+are his own, and in marked contrast to those of contemporary poets.
+But here Mr. Mackail adds the qualification "if we exclude a few slight
+juvenile pieces of his boyhood and those metrical versions of the
+Psalms in which he elected not to be a poet."  He asserts, that is,
+that neither in the Psalms nor in the "juvenile pieces" is Milton
+characteristically himself and that in the Psalms he is not a poet at
+all.  And no one will care to deny that many of the versions of the
+Psalms have little Milton and less poetry in them.  But is this true of
+all?  And in particular is it true of the paraphrase of Psalm cxxxvi.
+which, with its companion version of Psalm cxiv. is the most "juvenile"
+of all?  A boy of fifteen has not usually much power of "electing" to
+be or not to be a poet.  But it can only be inadvertence on Mr.
+Mackail's part that would deny that the boy Milton at that age, though
+not a great poet, was already himself and, more than that, was already
+promising what he was soon to perform.  Who, looking back from the
+_Ode_ and _Comus_ and _Paradise Lost_, does not hear some preluding of
+the authentic strain of Milton in
+
+  "Who by his all-commanding might
+  Did fill the new-made world with light"?
+
+{96} Is it fanciful to note that we have here, no doubt in their barest
+primitive form, two of Milton's life-long themes?  The Authorized
+Version speaks of "him that made great lights": how Miltonically
+transformed those words already are in the two quoted lines!  De
+Quincey said that Milton was "not an author amongst authors, not a poet
+amongst poets, but a power amongst powers."  However that may be, it is
+certain that he, so occupied all his life with thinking and writing
+about God, thought of God habitually as a power.  For him God is
+Creator, Sovereign, Judge, much more often than Father: we hear from
+Milton more of his might than of his love.  So at once here, at the age
+of fifteen, he inserts into the Psalm he is paraphrasing that
+characteristic phrase, so splendid and potent itself, so gladly
+speaking of potency and splendour,
+
+  "Who by his all-commanding might."
+
+And, if power be one of the most frequent elements in the Miltonic
+thought, what is more frequent than light in the Miltonic vision?  And
+is not that substitution of "did fill the new-made world with light"
+for the bare scientific statement of the original, a foretaste of the
+Milton who, all his life, blind or seeing, felt {97} the joy and wonder
+of light as no other man ever did?  Do we not rightly hear in it a note
+that will soon be enriched into the "Light unsufferable" of the _Ode_,
+the "endless morn of Light" of the _Solemn Music_, the "bosom bright of
+blazing Majesty and Light" of the _Epitaph on Lady Winchester_, and,
+not to multiply quotations, of the "Hail, holy Light" which opens the
+great invocation of the third book of _Paradise Lost_?
+
+It may be as well, before discussing the _Ode_ and the other contents
+of the volume issued in 1645, to mention another poem which is of
+earlier date than the _Ode_, though it was not printed till 1673: the
+beautiful Spenserian lines _On the Death of a Fair Infant_.  They
+afford the most real of the exceptions to the rule that Milton is
+always from the beginning to the end unmistakably and solely himself.
+In this poem he shows himself at the age of seventeen so soaked in
+Spenser and Spenser's school that, when his baby niece dies and he sets
+himself to make her an elegy, what he gives us is these graceful verses
+conveying as much as a boy of seventeen can catch of the lovely elegiac
+note of Spenser.
+
+  "O noble Spirit: live there ever blessed
+  The world's late wonder, and the heaven's new joy;
+{98}
+  Live ever there, and leave me here distressed
+  With mortal cares and cumbrous world's annoy."
+
+So sings Spenser of Sidney: and, though Milton is scarcely yet more the
+equal of Spenser than his baby niece was of Sidney, it is a beautiful
+echo of his master that he gives us in his
+
+  "O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted,
+  Soft silken primrose fading timelessly,"
+
+and in
+
+  "Yet can I not persuade me thou art dead,
+  Or that thy corse corrupts in earth's dark womb,
+  Or that thy beauties lie in wormy bed,
+  Hid from the world in a low delvèd tomb."
+
+The poem is full of the then fashionable conceits, which appear again a
+little in the _Ode_, after which they are for ever put aside by
+Milton's imaginative severity and high conception of poetry as a finer
+sort of truth than prose, not a more ingenious kind of lying.  Once,
+and perhaps once only, one hears in it the voice of the Milton of later
+years--
+
+  "Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire
+  To scorn the sordid world, and unto Heaven aspire."
+
+
+But with the _Ode_ the age of imitation is over for Milton and he
+stands forward at once {99} as himself.  The soft graces, somewhat
+lacking in outline, of the _Fair Infant_, are forgotten in the sonorous
+strength of the _Ode_.  The half-hesitating whisper has become a strain
+of mighty music; the uncertain hand has gained self-confidence so that
+the design now shows the boldness and decision of a master.  At once,
+in the second stanza, he is away to heaven, with a curious anticipation
+of what was to occupy him so much thirty years later--
+
+  "That glorious form, that light unsufferable,
+  And that far-beaming blaze of majesty,
+  Wherewith he wont at Heaven's high council-table
+  To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
+  He laid aside; and, here with us to be,
+  Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
+  And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay."
+
+
+Milton's genius was universal, in the strict sense of the word, that
+is, living in or occupied with the universe.  He is as supramundane in
+his way as Shelley in his.  And no part of the universe was more real
+to him than heaven, the abode of God and angels and spirits, the
+original and ultimate home of his beloved music and light.  It is
+noticeable that there is hardly a single poem of his--_L'Allegro_ and
+_Samson_ are the only important ones--in {100} which he does not at one
+point or other make his escape to heaven.  In most of them, as all
+through this _Ode_ and the _Solemn Music_, in the conclusions of
+_Lycidas_ and _Il Penseroso_, in the opening of _Comus_, this heavenly
+flight provides passages of exceptional and peculiarly Miltonic beauty.
+The fact is that, though little of a mystic, he was from the first
+entirely of that temper, intellectually descended from Plato, morally
+from Stoicism and Christianity but more from Stoicism, which cannot be
+content to be "confined and pestered in this pinfold here," disdains
+the "low-thoughted cares" of mere bodily and temporal life, and
+habitually aspires to live the life of the mind and the spirit,
+
+  "Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
+  Which men call Earth."
+
+
+So here at once, in his first important poem, what in other hands might
+have been a mere telling of the old human and earthly story of the
+first Christmas night becomes in Milton's a vision of all time and all
+space, with heaven in it, and the stars, and the music of the spheres,
+and the great timeless scheme of redemption with which he was to have
+so much to do later, with history, too, and literature, the false gods
+of the Old Testament and of the Greek and Roman classics already {101}
+anticipating the parts they were to play in _Paradise Lost_.
+
+And note one other thing.  Milton is only twenty-one, but he is already
+an incomparable artist.  The stanza had been so far the usual form for
+lyrics, and he adopts it here for the first and last time.  But if he
+accepts the instrument prescribed by tradition, with what a master's
+hand this wonderful boy of twenty-one touches it, and to what
+astonishing music!  It seems that the stanza itself is his own.  Every
+one has felt the combination in it, as he manages it, of the romantic
+movement and suggestion which he loved and renounced with the classical
+strength which is the chief element in the final impression he made on
+English poetry.  As yet the romantic quality is the stronger, and even
+one of the mighty closing Alexandrines is dedicated to the lovely
+Elizabethan fancy of the "yellow skirted fayes" who
+
+  "Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze."
+
+How such a line as that, or still more plainly the two which end the
+most romantic stanza of all--
+
+  "No nightly trance, or breathèd spell,
+  Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell"
+{102} found a rejoicing echo in Keats is obvious.  This, of course, has
+often been noticed.  But has it ever been remarked that there are also
+lines in the poem which might have been written by another
+nineteenth-century poet of equal but very different genius?
+
+  "The winds, with wonder whist,
+  Smoothly the waters kissed,
+  Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean;"--
+
+should we be surprised to come upon these elemental loves and joys
+heralding a new reign of justice and peace in the _Prometheus Unbound_?
+
+But neither Keats nor Shelley, who both had their affinities to Milton,
+had it in him to reach the concentrated Miltonic energy of such lines
+as--
+
+  "The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep,"
+
+or--
+
+  "Than his bright throne or burning axletree could bear."
+
+Almost every one of these final Alexandrines, it is to be observed,
+sums up the note of its stanza in a chord of majestic power.  They are
+the most Miltonic lines in the poem; for it is precisely "majesty"
+{103} which is the unique and essential Miltonic quality; and Dryden in
+the famous epigram ought to have kept it for him and not given it to
+Virgil, though by doing so he would have made his splendid compliment
+impossible.
+
+Among the poems that followed in the 1645 edition were the _Passion_, a
+failure which Milton recognized as a failure and abandoned, but yet,
+characteristically, did not refuse to publish; the _Epitaph on the
+Marchioness of Winchester_, which, still youthful as it is and is seen
+to be by the frigid and false antithesis of Queen and Marchioness with
+which it ends, has yet very beautiful lines--
+
+  "Gentle Lady, may thy grave
+  Peace and quiet ever have!
+  After this thy travail sore,
+  Sweet rest seize thee evermore";
+
+the famous lines on Shakspeare, contributed anonymously to the second
+Folio; and the noble outburst of heavenly music which begins--
+
+  "Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy
+  Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse."
+
+{104} This was written some years later; and even after _Paradise Lost_
+it may rank as the most daring and entirely successful of Milton's
+long-sustained wheelings of musical flight.  The stanza no longer
+provides him with space enough: and here his whole twenty-eight lines
+are one continuous strain, with no break in them and scarcely any
+pause, in ten-syllabled lines of boldly varied rhyme and accent.  His
+task here is not so difficult as it was to be in _Paradise Lost_, for
+he has rhyme to provide him with variety and he admits two verses of
+six syllables among his twenty-eight; but already he is completely
+master of the possibilities of the ten-syllable line, and can make it
+yield as lavish a wealth of variety in unity as was later on to make
+the great passages of _Paradise Lost_ an eternal amazement to lovers
+and practisers of the art of verse.
+
+  "Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ,
+  Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce;
+  And to our high-raised phantasy present
+  That undisturbèd song of pure concent."
+
+They are all the same line, and yet how different.  It is difficult to
+believe that this is the same metre which Waller and Dryden {105} were
+soon, amid universal applause, to file down into the smooth monotony
+of--
+
+  "Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
+  And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
+  Else why should he, with wealth and honour blest,
+  Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?"
+
+
+For Dryden, as still more for Pope and the school of Pope, the thing to
+accomplish, so far as possible, is to prevent any of the natural
+accents falling upon the third, fifth or other odd syllables; there is,
+for instance, not one which does so in the first fifty lines of
+_Absalom and Achitophel_ or of the _Epistle to Arbuthnot_.  The object
+of Milton, on the contrary, is to vary the position of his accents to
+the utmost possible extent compatible with the preservation of the
+verse.  In these four lines his first accent falls on the first
+syllable in the first two, probably on the fourth in the third, and on
+the second in the last.  And the other accents are similarly varied in
+place and, it may be added, in number.  In Milton's case the listener's
+wonder is at the number and intricacy of the variations he can play
+upon the theme of his verse; in Pope's it is at the amazing cleverness
+with which it can be exactly repeated in {106} different words.
+Milton's music, too, is continuous, not broken into couplets sharply
+divided from each other.  His verses pass into each other as wave melts
+into wave on the sea-shore; there is a constant breaking on the beach,
+but which will break and which will glide imperceptibly into its
+successor we cannot guess though we sit watching for an hour; the
+sameness of rise and fall, crash and silence, is unbroken, yet no one
+wave is exactly like its predecessor, no two successive minutes give
+either eye or ear exactly the same experience.  So with Milton's verse;
+even the ocean of _Paradise Lost_ has few or no waves of music of more
+varied unity, of more continuous variety than such lines as--
+
+  "As once we did, till disproportioned sin
+  Jarred against Nature's chime and with harsh din
+  Broke the fair music that all creatures made
+  To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed
+  In perfect diapason whilst they stood
+  In first obedience and their state of good."
+
+
+The chief remaining minor poems of Milton are the _Allegro_ and
+_Penseroso_, _Comus_, _Lycidas_ and the Sonnets.  The two first are
+written {107} in those rhymed eight-syllable lines which he had already
+used in part of his _Song on May Morning_.  Like that beautiful little
+poem, they represent him in his simplest mood, the mood of the quiet
+years at Horton, spent, more than any other part of his life, in the
+open air, and among plain folk unlettered and unpolitical.  It is
+natural enough, therefore, that they are the most popular as they are
+the easiest of all his poems.  Their two titles, which mean The
+Cheerful Man and The Thoughtful or Meditative Man, point to the two
+moods from which they regard life.  Both moods are, of course,
+described as they might actually be experienced by a highly cultivated
+and serious man like Milton himself.  The gravity is the gravity of a
+man of thought, not of a man of affairs; the pleasures are those of a
+scholar and a poet, not those of a trifler, a sportsman, or a
+sensualist.  Like all Milton's works they borrow freely from earlier
+poets, remain entirely original and Miltonic, and are imitated only at
+the peril of the imitator.  Any one who looks at the parallel passages
+in Marlowe and Fletcher will see how very like they are and how very
+little the likeness matters.  The poems stand alone; there is nothing
+of quite the same kind in English.  {108} The least unlike pair of
+poems is perhaps the two Spring Odes of the present Poet Laureate, than
+whom no one has owed more to Milton or repaid the debt with more verse
+which Milton would have been glad to inspire.  But Mr. Bridges has, of
+course, avoided anything approaching a direct imitation; he has merely
+used the hint of two contrasted poems on one subject, touching
+inevitably, as Milton had touched, upon some of the opposite pleasures
+of town and country, and bringing Milton's mood of cheerful gravity to
+bear upon them both.
+
+It is unnecessary to discuss in detail poems so well known.  But a few
+words may be said.  Milton was never again to be so genial as he is
+here.  Never again does he place himself so sympathetically close to
+the daily tasks and pleasures of ordinary unimportant men and women.
+After characteristically choosing the West Wind and the Dawn as
+likelier parents of true mirth than any god of wine or sensual
+pleasure, he will go on for once to call for the company of--
+
+  "Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
+  And Laughter holding both his sides";
+
+he will cast a pleased eye on the birds and flowers and the
+sunrise--the latter moving {109} him to the characteristic magnificence
+which in this poem he has elsewhere forgone; he will recognize, with
+the gratefulness of the tired student, the careless gladness in the
+voices of ploughman and milkmaid, as he passes them in his early
+morning walk.  Then he will give a glance to beauty which such as they
+cannot see, or cannot be fully conscious of seeing--
+
+  "Mountains on whose barren breast
+  The labouring clouds do often rest";
+
+will touch on the romance of old towers and poetic memories of which
+they have only dimly heard, and look back at Thyrsis and Corydon and
+all the pastoral poetry which such scenes recall to the scholar's
+memory.  The next section of the poem is taken from a different world,
+that of the merry England of the Middle Age with its ale and dances and
+Faery Mab; while the final one carries us quite away from the rustics
+to the town and the town's pleasures, pageantry and drama and
+music--this last, as always, moving the poet to peculiar rapture, and
+an answering music of verse--
+
+  "The melting voice through mazes running,
+  Untwisting all the chains that tie
+  The hidden soul of harmony."
+
+
+{110}
+
+_Il Penseroso_ is the praise of Melancholy as _L'Allegro_ of Mirth.
+But Milton was not a melancholy man in our sense of the word.  When
+Keats declares that--
+
+        "in the very temple of Delight
+  Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,"
+
+he is interpreting a mood into which Milton could not even in
+imagination enter, that of the intellectual sensualist who dreams his
+life away and cannot act.  Milton was a man of action and character,
+and his Melancholy, quite unlike this, is that of the Spirit in his own
+_Comus_, who "began--
+
+  "Wrapt in a pleasing fit of melancholy,
+  To meditate my rural minstrelsy."
+
+He hails her at once as a "Goddess sage and holy" and as a "Nun devout
+and pure"; and it is evident from the first that her sorrows, so far as
+she is sorrowful, are those of aspiring spirit, not those of
+self-indulging and disappointed flesh.  Her life of quiet studies and
+pleasures is self-chosen; there is a note of will and self-control in
+the words in which the poet bids her call about her Peace and Quiet and
+Spare Fast, Retired Leisure and Contemplation and Silence; and the
+descriptions which follow of his walks {111} and studies and pleasures,
+in town and country, by night and morning, are those of a man who has
+deliberately shaped his life, and means so to live it that he shall
+leave it without regret or shame and with the hope of passing from it
+to a better.
+
+Nor is it any mood of mere melancholy that has given us in this poem
+such pleasant glimpses of his walks abroad and studies at home in these
+Horton years.  He pays his tribute to Plato, the Greek tragedians and
+the dramatists of Elizabethan and Jacobean England; and to his own two
+most famous predecessors, Chaucer and Spenser; and we think of the
+scholarly hours spent gravely and quietly but far from unhappily.  More
+delightful still, with more beauty and more happiness in them, are the
+poem's well-known landscapes--
+
+        "the wandering moon,
+  Riding near her highest noon,
+  Like one that had been led astray
+  Through the heaven's wide pathless way."
+
+Perhaps no one again, till Shelley came, felt the vastness, the
+pathlessness, of the heaven as Milton did.  Or, to come to earth again,
+where does poetry set the ear more instantly and actively at the work
+of imaginative {112} creation than in those finely suggestive lines
+about the curfew--
+
+  "Over some wide-watered shore,
+  Swinging slow with sullen roar"?
+
+And what of that woodland solitude at noon, with memories in it of so
+many poets of Greece, Rome, Italy and England, the
+
+        "shadows brown, that Sylvan loves,
+  Of pine, or monumental oak,
+  Where the rude axe with heavèd stroke
+  Was never heard the Nymphs to daunt
+  Or fright them from their hallowed haunt,"
+
+which carries us on to perhaps the loveliest lines in all the _Paradise
+Lost_--
+
+        "In shadier bower,
+  More sacred and sequestered, though but feigned,
+  Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymph
+  Nor Faunus haunted."
+
+There is in the two passages just the difference between the youth and
+maturity of genius; but that is all.  So _Il Penseroso_ passes on its
+delightful way, ending, of course, in music and heaven.
+
+There, too, "before the starry threshold of Jove's court," the next of
+these earlier works of Milton, the mask _Comus_, begins.  {113} It
+strikes its high note at once in what an old lover of literature boldly
+called "the finest opening of any theatrical piece ancient or modern."
+
+  "Before the starry threshold of Jove's court
+  My mansion is, where those immortal shapes
+  Of bright aerial spirits live insphered
+  In regions mild of calm and serene air,
+  Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
+  Which men call Earth, and, with low-thoughted care,
+  Confined and pestered in this pinfold here,
+  Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being,
+  Unmindful of the crown that Virtue gives,
+  After this mortal change, to her true servants
+  Amongst the enthroned gods on sainted seats."
+
+That looks forward to _Paradise Lost_, not backward to the masks of the
+previous generation of poets.  The "loud uplifted angel-trumpet" is
+sounded in it, and we know that we have travelled a long way from the
+trivial, superficial and often coarse entertainments which would have
+been the models of _Comus_ if Milton had been the man to accept models
+of any kind, least of all of such a kind.  Like them his mask was an
+aristocratic entertainment, played to a noble {114} audience by the
+scions of a great house.  But the resemblance scarcely goes further.
+The older masks were mainly spectacles; magnificent spectacles indeed,
+designed sometimes, as one may see in the Chatsworth Library, by such
+artists as Inigo Jones and produced at immense expense; but just for
+that reason addressed to the eye much more than to the ear, and
+scarcely at all to the mind.  Even when written by such a man as Ben
+Jonson, the words, except in the lyrics, are of almost no importance.
+The business was to show a number of pretty scenes, and noble ladies,
+and to give them a chance of exhibiting their clothes, and their
+voices.  The last gave Jonson his chance; the fine Horatian workman
+that he was could always produce a lyric that would fit any situation
+and give some dignity to any trivial personage.  But the taint of
+vanity and fashion, pomp and externality, inevitably clung to the whole
+thing.  Too many personages were introduced, probably because in such
+plays there were always a great many applicants for parts; and the
+inevitable result was that in a short piece none of them had space to
+develop any character or life.  But Milton knew, as the Greeks knew and
+Shakspeare did not always, that in the few hours of a {115} stage
+performance only a very few characters have time to develop themselves
+in such a way as to interest and convince the hearer's imagination, and
+that if there are many they never become more than a list of names.  So
+he, who could not touch anything without giving it character, limits
+his personages to four or five that they may at least be human beings
+and not mere singers of songs or allegorical abstractions.  And, like
+some of his predecessors, he takes an ethical theme, the praise and
+power of Chastity.  Fletcher in _The Faithful Shepherdess_ had taken
+the same; as Jonson had taken the praise of Temperance, which is also
+partly Milton's subject, in _Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue_, in which a
+grosser Comus is one of the characters.  But to get any parallel to the
+power of conviction with which Milton handles it one has to go behind
+Jonson, whose mask is an entirely superficial performance, and even
+behind Fletcher, in whose _Shepherdess_ the many beautiful and moving
+touches are lost in a crowd of characters and a wilderness of
+artificial intrigue; one has to go back to the man whom Milton once
+called his "original," to the author of the _Faerie Queen_.  No one but
+Spenser could have anticipated the scene between Comus and the Lady,
+where indeed {116} Milton, like Spenser in the bower of Acrasia, has
+lavished such wealth upon his sinner that he has hardly been able to
+give a due over-balance to his saint.  Yet she is no lay figure, and
+one is not surprised that Comus should twice show his consciousness
+that she has within her some holy, some more than mortal power.  Milton
+has given her a song of such astonishing music that one wonders whether
+the composer Lawes, for whom the whole was written, could touch it
+without injury--
+
+  "Sweet Echo, sweetest Nymph, that liv'st unseen
+      Within thy airy shell
+    By slow Meander's margent green,
+  And in the violet-embroidered vale
+    Where the love-lorn nightingale
+  Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well;
+  Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pair
+    That likest thy Narcissus are?
+      O, if thou have
+    Hid them in some flowery cave,
+      Tell me but where,
+    Sweet Queen of Parley, Daughter of the Sphere!
+    So mayst thou be translated to the skies,
+  And give resounding grace to all Heaven's harmonies."
+
+The lyrics were the chief beauty of the old masks, but the best of them
+sink into {117} insignificance before such a masterpiece of art as
+this.  Perhaps nothing in a modern language comes nearer to giving the
+peculiar effect which is the glory of Pindar.  Of course there is in it
+more of the fanciful, and more of the romantic, than there was in
+Pindar; and its style is tenderer, prettier and perhaps altogether
+smaller than his.  But the elaborate and intricate perfection of its
+art and language, the way in which the intellect in it serves the
+imagination, is exactly Pindar.  In any case it is certainly one of the
+most entirely beautiful of English lyrics.  One listens with delight to
+the musician working out his intricately beautiful theme; or is it
+nearer the impression we get to say that we watch the skilful dancer
+executing his elaborate figure?  In either case we await with sure
+confidence the triumphant close.  The final couplet, by the way, and
+particularly the great Alexandrine, is a curious anticipation of
+Dryden's finest manner.  But the rest is a music Dryden's ear never
+heard.  No wonder Comus cries--
+
+  "Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould
+  Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment?
+  Sure something holy lodges in that breast,
+  And with these raptures moves the vocal air
+  To testify his hidden residence.
+{118}
+  How sweetly did they float upon the wings
+  Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night,
+  At every fall smoothing the raven down
+  Of darkness till it smiled!"
+
+The last lines show that Milton has not yet outgrown the Jacobean taste
+for conceits.  So a little later on we find him writing that--
+
+        "Silence
+  Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might
+  Deny her nature, and be never more
+  Still to be so displaced";
+
+a piece of intellectual trickery such as Shakspeare too often played
+with, and Donne laboured at; and one of a special interest because we
+see it again later transformed and purified in the famous passage of
+_Paradise Lost_, in which "Silence was pleased" not only with the
+stillness of evening, but also with the song of the bird whose "amorous
+descant" alone interrupts it.  Yet even that seemed to Warton, the best
+of Milton's early critics, a conceit unworthy of the poet.  So
+difficult it is for "rational" criticism to see the distinction between
+an intellectual extravagance and a flight of the imagination.
+
+There are other things in _Comus_ beside conceits which recall
+Shakspeare.  What can {119} be more exactly in his freshest youngest
+manner than such a line as--
+
+  "Love-darting eyes and tresses like the morn"?
+
+And what can be closer to the note of the great Histories and Tragedies
+than the Elder Brother's outburst of faith--
+
+        "If this fail,
+  The pillared firmament is rottenness,
+  And earth's base built on stubble"?
+
+
+I see no reason whatever to doubt, in spite of what has lately been
+said by a modern critic and poet, that these speeches of the Brothers
+and the Lady, rather than those of Comus, represent Milton's own
+conception of life.  It is true, of course, that _Comus_ was one of
+several masks performed as an aristocratic counterblast to the attack
+of Prynne and the Puritans on all stage performances.  But that only
+strengthens the proof of Milton's own leaning to a grave and temperate
+mode of life.  Even when he writes a mask he will insist that it shall
+be a thing of noble art and serious moral.  He was no narrow-minded
+fanatic and will write a piece for great ladies to perform when asked
+by his accomplished friend Lawes: but he is already {120} the man who
+was later to denounce "court amours, Mix'd dance and wanton masque";
+and if he writes a mask himself it will be to take the old "high-flown
+commonplace" of the magic power of chastity and give it an entirely new
+seriousness and beauty.  The notion of Mr. Newbolt that there were two
+Miltons, one before and the other after the Civil War, and that the one
+was "sincerely engaged on the side of liberal manners" while the other
+was an ill-tempered enemy of civilization and the arts of life, is a
+complete delusion.  The "Lady of Christ's" who was unpopular on account
+of his severe chastity, was already a strict Puritan of the only sort
+he ever became; and the author of _Paradise Lost_, as all the evidence
+shows, was no morbid sectary but a lover of learning and music and
+society.  Of course, no man goes unchanged through a great struggle
+such as that to which Milton gave twenty years of life.  There is a
+development, or a difference, call it what you will, between the Dante
+who wrote the _Vita Nuova_ and him who wrote the _Divina Commedia_.
+That could not but be; a body that had gone into exile and a soul that
+had visited hell must leave their traces on a man.  But the essential
+Dante remains one and the same all the while.  And {121} so does
+Milton.  Nothing can be more certain than that the grave boy whose
+gravity impressed all Cambridge, and had taken immortal shape in the
+_Nativity Ode_ and the sonnet of the "great Taskmaster's eye" before he
+was much past twenty, did not mean to hold up a drunken sensualist like
+Comus as a model for youth.  He was not an ascetic, then or later; and
+he was writing a dramatic poem; and, of course, had no difficulty in
+giving Comus a fine speech about the follies of total abstinence which,
+indeed, he loved no better than other monkeries.  The Lady, in reply,
+as she is dramatically bound, over-exalts her "sage and serious
+doctrine of Virginity" as Comus had overstated the case against it; but
+what she praises is Temperance, not Abstinence.  Her virginity is that
+of a free maiden, not that of a vowed nun, and there is nothing in it
+to unfit her to play the part which, when Eve plays it, gives Milton
+occasion for his well-known apostrophe to true love.  Nor is there any
+inconsistency between his denunciation of "wanton masks" in that
+passage, and his being the author of _Comus_.  His own mask was as
+different as possible from those others, the common sort, in which he
+saw the purveyors of "adulterous lust," and with which, now as then, he
+would have nothing whatever {122} to do.  His "Lady" alone, even
+without her brothers, makes that clear.  What she says may not be so
+poetically attractive as the speech of Comus; but it has just the note
+of exaltation which is heard in all Milton's great ethical and
+spiritual outbursts, and plainly utters the other and stronger side of
+his convictions.  The truth is that from the very beginning to the very
+end of his life Milton had all the intensity of Puritanism, more than
+all its angry contempt of vice, but nothing whatever of its uncivilized
+narrow-mindedness.  A large part of the peculiar interest of his
+character lies in the fact that he, almost alone of Englishmen, managed
+to unite the strength of the Reformation with the breadth of the
+Renaissance.  We have both in the lovely verses which are the Epilogue
+of _Comus_; and if it begins with--
+
+        "the gardens fair
+  Of Hesperus, and his daughters three
+  That sing about the golden tree:"
+
+and the--
+
+  "Beds of hyacinth and roses
+  Where young Adonis oft reposes,
+  Waxing well of his deep wound
+  In slumber soft, and on the ground
+  Sadly sits the Assyrian queen";
+
+{123} it ends with the Stoic Puritan motto, "Love Virtue, she alone is
+free."  And that these last six lines were no formal compliment to the
+conventions is proved by the fact that Milton chose the final couplet--
+
+        "if Virtue feeble were
+  Heaven itself would stoop to her,"
+
+as the motto he appended to his signature in the album of an Italian
+Protestant at Geneva in 1639, adding the significant Latin which claims
+the sentiment as utterly his own--
+
+  "Caelum, non animum, muto dum trans mare curro."
+
+These words we, looking back on his whole life, may fitly translate: "I
+am always the same John Milton, whether in Rome, Geneva, or London,
+whether I write _Comus_ or _Allegro_ or _Paradise Lost_."  For never
+were unity and continuity of personality more complete than in Milton.
+
+There remains _Lycidas_, in which Milton out-distances all previous
+English elegy almost as easily as in _Comus_ he had out-distanced all
+the earlier masks.  It stands with the great passages of _Paradise
+Lost_ as the most consummate blending of scholarship and poetry in
+Milton and therefore in English.  All {124} pastoral poetry is in it,
+Theocritus and Virgil, Spenser and Sidney, Drayton and Drummond, with
+memories, too, of Ovid and Shakspeare and the Bible; and yet it is pure
+and undiluted Milton, with the signet of his peculiar mind and temper
+stamped on its every phrase.  It was his contribution to a volume of
+verses published at Cambridge in 1638 to the memory of Edward King, a
+younger contemporary of his at Christ's who was drowned off the Welsh
+coast in August 1637.  King was already a Fellow of his college, and
+one of the most promising young clergymen of his day.  Milton had liked
+and respected him, no doubt, but had certainly not been so intimate
+with him as with young Charles Diodati who died almost exactly a year
+later, and was lamented by his great friend in the _Epitaphium Damonis_
+which is the finest of the Latin poems.  Those who read Latin will
+enjoy its close parallelism with _Lycidas_ and its touches of a still
+closer bond of affection, as that in which the poet contrasts the easy
+friendships of birds and animals, soon won, soon lost and soon replaced
+by others, with their hard rareness among men who scarcely find one
+kindred spirit in a thousand, and too often lose that one by premature
+fate before the fruit of {125} friendship has had time to ripen.  But
+if the death of Diodati aroused the deeper sorrow in Milton, that of
+King produced unquestionably the greater poem.  It is a common mistake
+to think that to write a great elegy a man must have suffered a great
+sorrow.  That is not the case.  Shelley wrote _Adonais_ about Keats
+whom he knew very little; Spenser _Daphnaïda_ about a lady whom he did
+not know at all.  It is not the actual experience of sorrow that the
+elegiac poet needs; but the power of heart and imagination to conceive
+it and the power of language to give it fit expression.  Moreover, the
+poet's real subject is not the death of Keats or King or Mrs. Gorges:
+it is the death of all who have been or will be loved in all the world,
+and the sorrow of all the survivors, the tragic destiny of youth and
+hope and fame, the doom of frailty and transience which has been
+eternally pronounced on so many of the fairest gifts of Nature and all
+the noblest works of man.
+
+About _Lycidas_ criticism has less to say than to unsay.  Johnson's
+notorious attack upon it is only the extremest instance of the futility
+of applying to poetry the tests of prose and of the general incapacity
+of that generation to apply any other.  Even {126} Warton, who really
+loved these early poems of Milton and did so much to recall them to
+public notice, could speak of him as appearing to have had "a very bad
+ear"!  At such a time it was inevitable that the artificial absurdity
+of pastoral poetry which is a prose fact should blind all but the
+finest judges to the poetic fact that living spirit can animate every
+form it finds prepared for its indwelling.  Johnson and the rest were
+right in perceiving that pastoral elegy had very commonly been an
+insincere affectation, a mere exercise in writing; the age into which
+they were born denied them the ear that could hear the amazing music of
+_Lycidas_, or perceive the sensuous, imaginative, spiritual intensity
+which drowns its incongruities in a flood of poetic life.  There is a
+still more important truth which that generation could not see.  Prose
+aims at expressing facts directly, and sometimes succeeds.  That is
+what Johnson liked, and practised himself with masterly success.  But
+when he and his asked that poetry should do the same they were asking
+that she should deny her nature.  She knows that her truth can only be
+expressed or suggested by its imaginative equivalents.  It is with
+poetry as with religion.  Religious truth stated directly becomes
+philosophy or science, {127} conveying other elements of truth,
+perhaps, but failing to convey the element which is specifically
+religious; and therefore religion employs parable, ceremony, sacrament,
+mystery, to express what scientifically exact prose cannot express.  So
+poetry can neither deal directly with King's death or Milton's grief
+nor be content with a subject which is a mere fact in time and space.
+If it did, the effect produced would not be a poetic effect; the
+experience of the reader would not be a poetic experience.  The poet
+must transform or transcend the facts which have set his powers to
+work; he must escape from them or rather lift them up with him
+new-created into the world of the imagination; he must impose upon them
+a new form, invented or accepted by himself, and in any case so heated
+by his own fire of poetry that it can fuse and reshape the matter
+submitted to it into that unity of beauty which is a work of art.  That
+is what Milton does in _Lycidas_ by the help of the pastoral fiction;
+and what he could not have done without it or some imaginative
+substitute for it.
+
+The truest criticism on his pastoralism is really that that mould was
+too small and fragile to hold all he wanted to put into it.  The great
+outburst of St. Peter, with its {128} scarcely disguised assault upon
+the Laudian clergy, strains it almost to bursting.  Yet no one would
+wish it away; for it adds a passage of Miltonic fire to what but for
+Phoebus and St. Peter would be too plaintive to be fully characteristic
+of Milton whose genius lay rather in strength than in tenderness.  Yet
+perhaps we love _Lycidas_ all the more for giving us our almost
+solitary glimpse of a Milton in whom the affections are more than the
+will, and sorrow not sublimated into resolution.  Its modesty, too, is
+astonishing.  He had already written the _Nativity Ode_, _Comus_ and
+_Allegro_ and _Penseroso_, and yet he fancies himself still unripe for
+poetry and is only forced by the "bitter constraint" of the death of
+his friend to pluck the berries of his laurel which seem to him still
+"harsh and crude"; for of course these allusions refer to his own
+immaturity and not, as Todd thought, to that of his dead friend.  And
+the presence of the same over-mastering emotion which compelled him to
+begin is felt throughout.  There is no poem of his in which he appears
+to make so complete a surrender to the changing moods of passion.  The
+verses seem to follow his heart and fancy just where they choose to
+lead.  We watch him as he thinks first of his friend's death and then
+of the {129} duty of paying some poetic tribute to him; and so of his
+own death and of some other poet of the future who may write of it and--
+
+  "bid fair peace be to my sable shroud."
+
+How natural it is in all its superficial unnaturalness!  The walks and
+talks and verses made together at Cambridge so inevitably leading to
+the "heavy change now thou art gone.  Now thou art gone and never must
+return"; and the fancy, partly but not wholly a reminiscence of their
+classical studies, that the trees and flowers which they had loved
+together must now be sharing the survivor's grief; the reproach to
+Nature and Nature's divinities following on the thought of Nature's
+sympathy, and followed by the first of the two incomparable returns
+upon himself which are among the chief beauties of the poem--
+
+  "Ay me!  I fondly dream!
+    'Had ye been there,' for what could that have done?"
+
+And so to the vanity of earthly fame and the thought of another fame
+which is not vanity.  Twice he seems to be going to escape out of the
+world of pastoral, as he strikes his own trumpet note of confident
+{130} faith and stern judgment; twice the unfailing instinct of art
+calls him back and makes a beauty of what might have been a mere
+incongruity--
+
+  "Return, Alpheus; the dread voice is past,
+  That shrunk thy streams: return, Sicilian Muse,
+  And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
+  Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues."
+
+The flowers come, in their amazing beauty, as poetry knows and names
+them, not altogether after the order of nature; till the fine flight is
+once more recalled to earth in that second return to the sad reality of
+things which provides the most beautiful, and as the manuscript shows,
+one of the most carefully elaborated passages in the whole--
+
+  "Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
+  And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
+  To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
+  For so, to interpose a little ease,
+  Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
+  Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
+  Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled,
+  Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
+{131}
+  Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
+  Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world."
+
+The least critical reader, when he is told that the daffodil and
+amaranthus lines were once in the reverse order, that the "frail
+thoughts" were at first "sad," and the "shores" "floods," and above all
+that the "whelming tide" was once a thing so insignificant as the
+"humming tide," can judge for himself by what a succession of
+inspirations a work of consummate art is produced.
+
+There remain the sonnets, whose sufficient praise is given in an
+immortal line of Wordsworth, while all that a fine critic had thought
+or learnt about them is contained in the scholarly edition of Mark
+Pattison.  Technically they are remarkable, like everything else of
+Milton's, at once for their conservatism and their originality; while
+their content has all his characteristic sincerity.  They occupy a most
+important place in the history of the English sonnet, which had so far
+been almost entirely given up to a single theme, that of the poet's
+unhappy love, which had commonly little existence outside his verses.
+The shadowy mistresses who emulated the glories of Beatrice and Laura
+were even less substantial than they; and, though that could {132} not
+hinder great poets from making fine poetry out of them, it was fatal to
+the ordinary sonnetteer, and gave the sonnet a tradition of overblown
+and insincere verbiage.  From all this Milton emancipated it and, as
+Landor said, "gave the notes to glory."  To glory and to other things;
+for not all his sonnets are consecrated to glory.  They deal with
+various subjects; but each, whether its topic be his blindness, the
+death of his wife, or the fame of Fairfax or Cromwell, is the product
+of a personal experience of his own.  No one can read them through
+without feeling that he gets from them a true knowledge of the man.  At
+their weakest, as in that _To a Lady_, they convey, in the words of
+Mark Pattison, "the sense that here is a true utterance of a great
+soul."  The rather commonplace thought and language somehow do not
+prevent the total effect from being impressive.  He entirely fails only
+when he goes below the level of poetry altogether and repeats in verse
+the angry scurrility of his divorce pamphlets.  And even there some
+remnant of his artist's sense of the self-restraint of verse preserves
+him from the worst degradations of his prose.  For the rest, they give
+us his musical and scholarly tastes, his temperate pleasures and his
+love of that sort of company which Shelley {133} confessed to
+preferring, "such society as is quiet, wise and good"; they give us the
+high ideal with which he became a poet, the high patriotism that drew
+him into politics, and that sense, both for himself and for others, of
+life as a thing to be lived in the presence and service of God which
+was the eternally true part of his religion.  The four finest are those
+on the Massacre in Piedmont, On his Blindness, On attaining the age of
+twenty-three, and that addressed to Cromwell, which perhaps has the
+finest touch of all in the pause which comes with such tremendous
+effect after "And Worcester's laureate wreath."  But that to the memory
+of his wife and "Captain or Colonel or Knight in Arms," the one
+addressed to Lawrence and the first of those addressed to Skinner, come
+very near the best; and the whole eight would be included by any good
+judge in a collection of the fifty best English sonnets, to which
+Milton would make a larger contribution than any one except, perhaps,
+Wordsworth and Shakspeare.
+
+And both of these poets, Shakspeare always and Wordsworth often, sinned
+as Milton did not against the true genius of the sonnet.  No doubt they
+had nearly all precedent with them, and their successors down to
+Rossetti {134} and Meredith have followed in the same path.  But not
+even Shakspeare and Petrarch can alter the fact that the genius of the
+sonnet is solitary and self-contained.  A series of sonnets is an
+artistic contradiction in terms.  There may be magnificent individual
+sonnets in it which can stand alone, without reference to those that
+precede or follow; and so far so good; but on the bulk of the series
+there inevitably rests the taint of incompleteness.  They do not
+explain themselves.  They are chapters not books, parts of a
+composition and not the whole.  It is scarcely possible to doubt that,
+fine as they may be, the effect they produce is not that of the finest
+single sonnets, beginning and ending within their own limits.  Milton
+may never have been under any special temptation to write a set of
+consecutive sonnets; but it is in any case like his habitual submission
+of all authority to his own judgment that he wrote sonnets and yet
+defied the tradition of writing them as a continuous series, as he had
+also disdained the amorous affectations which had been their
+established subject.  But in this, as in everything else where art was
+concerned, he was as much a conservative as a revolutionary.  And so
+his scholarly interest in the Italian sonnet, and, we may be sure, his
+consummate {135} critical judgment, made him set aside the various
+sonnet forms adopted by Shakspeare, Spenser and other famous English
+poets, and follow the original model of Petrarch more strictly than it
+had been followed by any English poet of importance before him; for the
+Petrarchan sonnets of Sidney, Constable and Drummond all end with the
+unItalian concluding couplet.  But here again Milton's example has not
+proved decisive.  Wordsworth did not always follow it, though he never
+deserted it with success.  Keats began with it and gave it up for the
+Shakspearean model with the concluding couplet.  But of him again, it
+may be said that, while he only wrote three great sonnets and two of
+them are Shakspearean, his single masterpiece is Petrarchan or
+Miltonic.  Rossetti, on the other hand, has no Shakspearean sonnets,
+and his finest are among the best proofs of how much a sonnet gains in
+unity by the single pause between the eight lines and the six instead
+of Shakspeare's fourfold division, and especially by the interlocking
+of the rhymes in the second half of the sonnet as opposed to
+Shakspeare's isolated and half-epigrammatic final couplet.
+
+There can be little doubt, though attempts have been made to deny it,
+that nothing but {136} the prestige of the greatest of all poetic names
+has prevented the superiority of the Petrarchan model from being
+universally recognized.  Shakspeare could do anything.  But the
+greatness of his sonnets is due not to their form but simply to their
+being his; and the fact that he could triumph over the defects of that
+form ought not to make other people fancy that these defects do not
+exist.  They do; and but for the courage and genius of Milton they
+might have dominated the history of the English sonnet to this day.
+That is part of our great debt to Milton.  He could not give the sonnet
+the supple and insinuating sweetness with which Shakspeare often filled
+it.  He had not got that in him, and perhaps it would scarcely have
+proved tolerable except as part of a sequence in which it could be
+balanced by sterner matter.  Nor, again, could he give it Shakspeare's
+infinite tenderness, nor his sense of the world's brooding mystery.
+But he could and did give it his own high spirit of courage, sincerity
+and strength, and his own masterly cunning of craftsmanship.  And no
+just reader of the greatest sonnets of the nineteenth century forgets
+Milton's share in their greatness.  Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie has
+lately remarked that it is in the _Prelude_ and _Excursion_ of {137}
+Wordsworth that "more profoundly than anywhere out of Milton himself
+Milton's spiritual legacy is employed."  The same thing may be as truly
+said of Wordsworth's sonnets.  If, as he said, in Milton's hands "the
+thing became a trumpet," there is no doubt that it remained one in his
+own.  He is a greater master of the sonnet than Milton; the greatest on
+the whole that England has known.  He used it far more freely than
+Milton and for more varied purposes.  Perhaps it hardly afforded room
+enough for one the peculiar note of whose genius was vastness.  It is
+seldom possible to do justice to a quotation from _Paradise Lost_
+without giving at least twenty lines.  The sense, and especially the
+musical effect, is incomplete with less; for a Miltonic period is a
+series of intellectual and rhythmical actions and reactions which
+cannot be detached from each other without loss.  It is obvious that a
+poet whose natural range is so great can hardly be fully himself in the
+sonnet.  But Wordsworth had little of this spacious freedom of poetic
+energy; to him--
+
+        "'twas pastime to be bound
+  Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground."
+
+And so he could use it for everything; for great events and also for
+very small; not {138} exhausting great or small, but finding in each,
+whatever it might be, some single aspect or quality which he could
+touch to new power by that meditative tenderness of his to which Milton
+was, to his great loss, an entire stranger.  The natural mysticism, for
+instance, of such sonnets as, "It is a beauteous evening, calm and
+free," or, "Earth has not anything to show more fair," is quite out of
+Milton's reach.  In this and other ways Wordsworth could do much more
+with the sonnet than Milton could.  But without Milton some of his very
+greatest things would scarcely have been attempted.  All the sonnets
+that utter his magnanimous patriotism, his dauntless passion for
+English liberty, his burning sympathy with the oppressed, the "holy
+glee" of his hatred of tyranny, are of the right lineage of Milton
+himself.  One can almost hear Milton crying--
+
+  "It is not to be thought of that the Flood
+  Of British freedom, which to the open sea
+  Of the world's praise from dark antiquity
+  Hath flowed 'with pomp of waters unwithstood,'
+  Roused though it be full often to a mood
+  Which spurns the checks of salutary bands,
+  That this most famous Stream in Bogs and Sands
+  Should perish; and to evil and to good
+  Be lost for ever."
+
+{139} There and in the "Two Voices" and in the "Inland within a Hollow
+Vale" and in the Toussaint l'Ouverture sonnet, and others, we cannot
+fail to catch an echo of the poet who first "gave the sonnet's notes to
+glory."  No one can count up all the things which have united in the
+making of any poem, but among those which made these sonnets possible
+must certainly be reckoned the Fairfax and Cromwell sonnets, and above
+all the still more famous one on the Massacre in Piedmont.  The forces
+which animated England to defy and defeat Napoleon were only partly
+moral; but so far as they were that they found perfect expression
+through only one voice, that of Wordsworth.  And there is no doubt as
+to where he caught the note which he struck again to such high purpose.
+He has told us himself--
+
+  "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour;
+  England hath need of thee."
+
+And, what seems stranger, he has now had in return a kind of reflected
+influence upon Milton.  The total experience of a reader of poetry is a
+thing of many actions and reactions, co-operating and intermingling
+with each other.  And as we can hardly read Virgil or the Psalms now
+without thinking of all {140} that has come of them, and reading some
+of it back into the old words whose first creator could not foresee all
+that would be found in them, so it is with Milton and Wordsworth.
+There are many things in Milton which no Wordsworthian can now read
+exactly as they were read in the seventeenth century.  Wordsworth's line
+
+  "Thy Soul was like a Star and dwelt apart"
+
+was strangely true of Milton as he lived in his own day.  But it is
+less true now that his place is among the spiritual company of the
+English poets and that Wordsworth stands by his side, or sits at his
+feet.  That does not detract from his greatness.  Indeed, it adds to
+it; for it is only the greater poets who thus transcend their own day
+and cannot be read as if they belonged to it alone.  Read the great
+sonnet on the Massacre--
+
+  "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
+    Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
+    Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
+    When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
+{141}
+  Forget not; in thy book record their groans
+    Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
+    Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled
+    Mother with infant down the rocks.
+      Their moans
+  The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
+    To heaven.  Their martyred blood and ashes sow
+    O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
+  The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
+    A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,
+    Early may fly the Babylonian woe."
+
+Is there not more in it than the Hebrew prophet or psalmist and the
+English Puritan?  Is there not, for us now, something beside the past
+of which Milton had read, and the present which he knew by experience?
+Is there not an anticipation of another struggle against another
+tyrant--nay, the creation of the very spirit in which that struggle was
+to be faced?  So Milton influences Wordsworth and the England of
+Wordsworth's day; and they in their turn inevitably influence our minds
+as we read him.  There lies one part of the secret of his greatness; a
+part which is seen at its highest in his sonnets.
+
+
+
+
+{142}
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+_PARADISE LOST_
+
+_Paradise Lost_ is in several ways one of the most wonderful of the
+works of man.  And not least in the circumstances of its composition.
+The Restoration found Milton blind, and to blindness it added
+disappointment, defeat, obscurity, and fear of the public or private
+revenge of his victorious enemies.  Yet out of such a situation as this
+the most indomitable will that ever inhabited the soul of a poet
+produced three great poems, every one of which would have been enough
+to give him a place among the poets who belong to the whole world.
+
+The first and greatest of these was, of course, _Paradise Lost_.
+Unlike many great poems, but like all the great epics of the world, it
+obtained recognition at once.  It sold well for a work of its bulk and
+seriousness, and it received the highest praise from those whose word
+was and deserved to be law in questions of literature.  Throughout the
+eighteenth {143} century its fame and popularity increased.  Literary
+people read it because Dryden and Addison and all the established
+authorities recommended it to them, and also because those of them
+whose turn for literature was a reality found that these
+recommendations were confirmed by their own experience.  But the poem
+also appealed to another and a larger public.  To the serious world it
+appeared to be a religious book and as such enjoyed the great advantage
+of being thought fit to be read on the only day in the week on which
+many people were accustomed to read at all.  This distinction grew in
+importance with the progress of the Wesleyan revival and with it grew
+the number of Milton's admirers.  When Sunday readers were tired of the
+Bible they were apt to turn to _Paradise Lost_.  How many of them did
+so is proved by the influence Milton has had on English religious
+beliefs.  To this day if an ordinary man is asked to give his
+recollections of the story of Adam and Eve he is sure to put Milton as
+well as Genesis into them.  For instance, the Miltonic Satan is almost
+sure to take the place of the scriptural serpent.  The influence Milton
+has had is unfortunately also seen in less satisfactory ways.  He
+claimed to justify the ways of God to men.  Perhaps he did so to his
+own mind {144} which, in these questions, was curiously matter-of-fact,
+literal, legal and unmystical.  He was determined to explain everything
+and provide for all contingencies by his legal instrument of the
+government of the world: and he did so after the cold fashion of a
+lawyer defining rights on each side, and assuming that the stronger
+party will exert his strength.  So far as his genius made his readers
+accept his views of the relation between God and man it cannot be
+denied that he did a great injury to English religious thought.
+Everybody who stops to reflect now feels that the attitude of his God
+to the rebel angels and to man is hard and unforgiving, below the
+standard of any decent human morality, far below the Christian charity
+of St. Paul.  The atmosphere of the poem when it deals with these
+matters is often suggestive of a tyrant's attorney-general whose
+business is to find plausible excuses for an arbitrary despot.  Milton
+had his share in creating that bad sort of fear of God which is always
+appearing as the thorn in the theological rose-bed of the eighteenth
+century, and, later on, becomes the nightmare of the Evangelical
+revival.  None of these conceptions, the capricious despot, the
+remorseless creditor, the Judge whose {145} invariable sentence is hell
+fire, have proved easy to get rid of: and part of their permanence may
+be laid to the account of _Paradise Lost_.
+
+But Milton, who is like the Bible in so many ways, is not least like it
+in his happy unconsciousness of his own immorality.  The writer of the
+story of Samuel and Agag, or that of Rebekah and Jacob, was perfectly
+unaware that he was immoral: and so was Milton in _Paradise Lost_: and
+so also and for that very reason were the majority of their readers.
+Happily most of us when we read a book that makes for righteousness are
+like children reading Shakspeare, who simply do not notice the things
+that make their elders nervous.  It is not that we refuse the evil and
+choose the good: we are quite unaware of the presence of the evil at
+all.  No doubt that sometimes makes its influence the more powerful
+because unperceived: and for this kind of subtle influence both Milton
+and the Old Testament have to answer.  But with many happy natures an
+escape is made by the process of selection: and, as they manage to
+acquire the God-fearing righteousness of the Old Testament without its
+ferocity, so they manage to receive from Milton his high emotional
+consciousness of life as the glad and {146} free service of God and to
+ignore altogether his intellectual description of it as a very
+one-sided bargain with a very dangerous Potentate.
+
+Nor must Milton be made, as he often is, to bear more blame in this
+matter than he deserves.  Divine tyranny with hell as its sanction was
+no invention of his.  The Catholic Church, as all her art shows, had
+always made full use of it.  And the new horror of his own day, the
+Calvinist predestination, he expressly and frequently repudiates.  The
+free will of man is the very base of his system.  In it men may suffer,
+as it seems to us, out of all proportion to their guilt; but at least
+they suffer only for deeds done of their own free will.
+
+But the true answer to the charge of corrupting English religious
+thought so often brought against Milton is that while the harm he did
+must be admitted it was far outweighed by the good.  It could not be
+for nothing that generations of readers, as they turned over Milton's
+pages, found themselves listening to the voice of a man to whom God's
+presence was the most constant of realities, the most active of daily
+and hourly influences: who, from his youth up, visibly glowed with an
+ardent desire for the service of God and man: who, whatever his faults
+were, had nothing {147} base or mean about him, habitually thought of
+life as a thing to be lived on the heights, and by his exalted spirit
+and unconquerable will enlarges for those who know him the whole
+conception of what a human being may achieve.  It could not be for
+nothing that on the topmost heights of English poetry stood a man who
+could scarcely finish a single one of his poems without some soaring
+ascent to heaven and heavenly things: whose most characteristic
+utterances for himself are such lines as
+
+  "Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven";
+
+or--
+
+  "As ever in my great Task-Master's eye:"
+
+and for others as well as for himself such a hope as that which
+concludes his _At a Solemn Music_--
+
+  "O, may we soon again renew that song,
+  And keep in tune with Heaven, till God ere long
+  To his celestial concert us unite,
+  To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of light!"
+
+_Tu habe Deum prae oculis tuis_, says the author of _The Imitation_:
+"Have thou God {148} before Thine eyes."  And so by his poetry and by
+his life says Milton.  The influence of such a man, whatever the faults
+of his intellectual creed, can hardly on the whole have been anything
+but a good one, either on those who heard his living voice or on those
+who for two hundred years have caught what they may of it from the
+printed pages of his books.
+
+So much it seemed worth while to say in defence of Milton whose sins in
+these matters have always been exaggerated by his ecclesiastical and
+political opponents.  But the effect, good or bad, which a great poem
+produces on opinion is a mere by-product: its essential business is
+nothing of that sort but the production in the minds of competent
+readers of the pleasure proper to a great work of the imagination.  And
+this is the criterion by which the _Paradise Lost_, like every other
+work of the kind, must primarily be judged.
+
+The poem, as we have it, is the long delayed result of an intention
+formed in Milton's strangely ripe and resolute youth.  Before he was
+thirty he spoke openly to his friends of writing a great poem which
+was, as he shortly afterwards had no hesitation in telling the public,
+to be of the sort that the world does not willingly let die.  At first
+the subject was to have been the Arthurian legend which {149} poets of
+all ages have found so fruitful.  But that was soon abandoned,
+apparently for the reason that a little examination of the authorities
+convinced the poet that it was not historically true.  This fact has a
+literary as well as a biographical importance.  Great artist as Milton
+was, he seems to have confused truth of art with truth of fact.  He
+preferred a Biblical subject because it was his belief that every
+statement in the Bible was literally true.  This belief, except from
+the emotional fervour it inspired in him, was a positive disadvantage
+to him as a poet.  It circumscribed his freedom of invention, it
+compelled him to argue that the action of his drama as he found it was
+already reasonable and probable instead of letting his imagination work
+upon it and make it so; it made him aim too often at producing belief
+instead of delight in his hearers.  This, of course, had obvious
+drawbacks as soon as people ceased to regard the first chapters of
+Genesis as a literal prose record of events which actually happened.
+For a hundred and fifty years many people read the _Paradise Lost_ and
+supposed themselves to be enjoying the poem when what they were really
+enjoying was simply the pleasure of reading their own beliefs expressed
+in magnificent verse.  In the same way many {150} religious people
+imagine that they enjoy early Italian art when they in fact enjoy
+nothing but its religious sentiment.  But neither art nor poetry can
+live permanently on these extraneous supports.  So when less interest
+came to be felt in Adam and Eve there were fewer readers for _Paradise
+Lost_.  But the readers who were lost were not those that matter.  For
+it is a complete mistake to say, as is sometimes said, that the fact
+that the story of _Paradise Lost_ was once believed and now is so no
+longer is fatal to the interest of the poem.  That is not so for the
+right reader: or at least, so far as it is so, it is Milton's fault and
+not that of his subject.  The _Aeneid_ loses no more by our disbelief
+in the historical reality of Aeneas or Dido than _Othello_ loses by our
+ignorance whether such a person ever existed.  The difficulty, so far
+as there is one, is not that many readers disbelieve the story of
+Milton's poem: it is that he himself passionately believed it.  If he
+had been content with offering us his poem as an imaginative creation,
+if he had not again and again insisted on its historical truth and
+theological importance, no changes in the views of his readers, no
+merely intellectual or historical criticism, could have touched him
+more than they can Virgil.  As a poet he is {151} perfectly
+invulnerable by any such attacks: it is only so far as he deserted
+poetry for the pseudo-scientific matter-of-fact world of prose that he
+fails and irritates us.  All the poetry of _Paradise Lost_ is as true
+to-day as when it was first written: it is only the science and logic
+and philosophy, in a word the prose, which has proved liable to decay.
+There is always that difference between the works of the imagination
+and those of the intellect.  A hundred theories about the Greek legends
+of the Centaurs or the Amazons may establish themselves, have a vogue,
+undergo criticism and finally be exploded as absurdities: that is the
+common fate of intellectual products after they have done their work.
+But the Centaurs of the Parthenon and the Amazons of the Mausoleum are
+immortally independent of all changes of opinion.
+
+This is the first disadvantage of the subject chosen by Milton, that he
+believed in it too much.  The fact that he did so and thought its prose
+truth all-important at once limited the freedom of his imagination and
+diverted him from the single-minded pursuit of the proper end of
+poetry.  He was evidently quite unaware of this drawback and it has
+been little, if at all, noticed by his critics.  {152} On the other
+hand, he was perfectly aware of what would appear to other people to be
+the disadvantages involved in the choice of a subject so unlike those
+of previous epics.  He speaks more than once of the novelty of this
+theme, the best-known allusion being the beautiful introduction to Book
+IX., in which he describes his subject, that of the human sin and the
+divine anger
+
+  "That brought into this World a world of woe,
+  Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery,
+  Death's harbinger:"
+
+and contrasts it with those other sins and other angers on which Homer
+and Virgil built their poems.  But he is not afraid of the contrast: he
+thinks it is all to his own advantage--
+
+  "Sad task! yet argument
+  Not less but more heroic than the wrath
+  Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
+  Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
+  Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;
+  Or Neptune's ire or Juno's, that so long
+  Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea's son:
+  If answerable style I can obtain
+  Of my celestial Patroness who deigns
+  Her nightly visitation unimplored,
+  And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
+  Easy my unpremeditated verse,
+{153}
+  Since first this subject for heroic song
+  Pleased me, long choosing and beginning late,
+  Not sedulous by nature to indite
+  Wars, hitherto the only argument
+  Heroic deemed--"
+
+The whole passage is too long for quotation.  Indeed, as we have
+already had occasion to notice, it is one of the difficulties of
+discussing Milton that quotation is almost always compelled to do him
+an injury by giving less than the whole of any one of those
+long-sustained flights of music in which he rises and falls, turns to
+the left hand or the right, as his imagination leads him, but always on
+unflagging wings of undoubted and easy security.  But enough has been
+quoted here to illustrate the poet's direct challenge of Homer and
+Virgil in this matter of subject.  He was perfectly well aware that he
+was making an entirely new departure, not only from the subject of the
+ancients but also, as is shown by his detailed condemnation of "tilting
+furniture, emblazoned shields" and the rest, from those of such poets
+as Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser.  He did it deliberately, with open eyes.
+And there is no doubt that he was at least partly right.  To this day
+he and Dante, in their different ways, enjoy a common advantage {154}
+over Homer, and still more over a poet mainly of fancy like Tasso, in
+the fact that their subject, that of the meaning and destiny of human
+life, is one in itself of profound and absorbing interest to all
+thinking men and women.  Even if their treatment of it be in some parts
+and for some people unsatisfying or irritating they at least have
+started with that advantage.  A dangerous advantage because, as we have
+seen in Milton's case and might also see in Dante's, tempting them to
+go outside the pure business of their art; but still in itself an
+advantage.  Milton was probably also right in feeling that the fighting
+element in the old poets had been greatly overdone.  The most
+interesting parts of the _Iliad_ for us to-day are not battles, but
+such things as the parting of Hector and Andromache and the scene
+between Priam and Achilles.  Where the fighting still moves us, as in
+the case of Hector and Achilles, or Virgil's Turrus and Pallas, it is
+mainly for the sake of an accompanying human and moral interest
+altogether above its own.  The miscellaneous details of weapons and
+wounds which evidently once gave so much pleasure are now equally
+tedious to us whether it is Homer or Malory or Morris who narrates
+them.  They can no longer give interest; they can only receive it {155}
+from such intrinsic interest as may belong to the combatants.
+
+So far Milton had some justification for preferring his own subject to
+those of Homer and Virgil.  But, so far as we can judge, he was
+entirely unconscious of its disadvantages: as well of those which it
+shares with the _Iliad_ and _Aeneid_ as of those peculiar to itself.
+Of the former, the most conspicuous is that inevitably involved in the
+introduction of divine persons into the action.  Everybody feels that
+Homer's gods constantly spoil the interest and probability of his
+story, while very rarely enhancing its dignity.  One never understands
+why they can do so much, and yet do no more, to affect the action.
+Their interference is always irritating, generally immoral, and on the
+whole ineffective.  Their omnipotence is occasional and irrational:
+they are limited in the use of it by each other, and all alike, even
+Zeus, are limited by a shadowy Law or Fate in the background.  Their
+interventions only make the struggle seem unfair or unreal, and we are
+glad to be rid of them.
+
+Milton is still more deeply involved in the same difficulty.  All his
+personages except two are superhuman.  It is his great disadvantage as
+compared with Dante that the {156} main lines of his story are all
+scriptural and therefore outside the influence of his invention, that
+his actors are divine, angelic, or sinless beings, and therefore such
+as can provide little of the uncertainty of issue or variety of temper
+and experience which are the stuff of drama.  He is hampered by having
+constantly to assert the true free will and responsibility of Satan for
+his rebellion and of Adam for his disobedience, even to the extent of
+putting argumentative soliloquies confessing it into their own mouths.
+So far he succeeds: both are felt to be free in their fatal choice.
+But the war in heaven can arouse no interest because its issue is
+obviously foregone, and much of the action of the rebel angels
+necessarily conflicts with the frequent statements that they can do
+nothing except as permitted by their Conqueror.  At one moment they
+know their powerlessness, at another they hope for revenge and victory.
+These are grave difficulties which deprive large parts of the poem of
+that illusion of probability or truth without which poetry cannot do
+its proper work.  A further difficulty, from which ancient poets were
+free, arises from the purely intellectual and spiritual nature of the
+Christian God.  It is as if Homer had had to deal with the divine unity
+of Plato instead of {157} with his family of loving, quarrelling,
+fighting gods and goddesses.  A being who is Incomprehensible as well
+as Almighty and Omniscient can hardly be an actor in a poem written for
+human readers.  The gods in the _Iliad_ shock us because they are too
+like ourselves: Milton's God may sometimes shock us too: but He is more
+often in danger of fatiguing us by His utter remoteness from our
+experience, by His dwelling not merely, not indeed so often as we could
+wish, in clouds and darkness, but in a world of theological mysteries
+which necessarily lose more in sublimity than they gain in clearness by
+being perpetually discussed and explained.  Dante's poem is at least as
+full as Milton's of obscure theological doctrines and attempts at their
+explanation; but, either by virtue of the plan of the _Divina Commedia_
+or by some finer instinct of reserve and reverence in the poet, we
+never find ourselves in Dante as we do in Milton exercising our
+critical faculties, whether we will or no, on the very words of God
+Himself.  If we reject an argument as unconvincing or fallacious, it is
+on Virgil or Statius, Beatrice or Thomas Aquinas, that we sit in
+judgment.  The Divine Mind, intensely and constantly felt as its
+presence is from the first canto of the poem to the last, is yet felt
+always as from behind a {158} curtain which can never be raised for the
+sight of mortal eyes.
+
+Still, it must be admitted that, impossible as was the task of making
+the Infinite and Eternal an actor and speaker in a human poem, Milton's
+very failure in it is sublime.  His prodigious powers are nowhere more
+wonderfully displayed than in trying to do what no one, not even
+himself, could do.  The second half of his third book, for instance, is
+far more interesting than the first, but it may well be doubted whether
+the mere fact of his accomplishing the first at all is not a greater
+proof of his poetic genius.  Nowhere does that unfailing certainty of
+style, in which he has scarcely an equal among the poets of the whole
+world, stand him in such astonishing stead as in these difficult
+dialogues in heaven.
+
+  "Father, thy word is passed, Man shall find grace;
+  And shall Grace not find means, that finds her way,
+  The speediest of thy wingèd messengers.
+  To visit all thy creatures, and to all
+  Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought?
+  Happy for Man, so coming;"
+
+On the side of invention there is nothing remarkable; but, on the side
+of art, what a {159} divine graciousness there is in its tone and
+manner; what incomparable skill in the management of the verse!  Note
+the quiet monosyllabic beginning, taking note, as it were, of the
+decree of mercy, and then the expansion of it, the loving voice
+pressing forward in freer movement as it confidently proclaims the
+happy results that cannot fail to follow.  And observe the peculiarly
+Miltonic interlacing of the whole, line leading to line and word to
+word: the "grace" of the first line giving the key to the "grace" of
+the second, the repeated "find" of the second line and the repeated
+"all" of the fourth, the "comes" of the fifth line leading on to the
+"coming" of the sixth.  To make a list of such details as these is not
+to explain the effect which they produce; that is the secret of
+Milton's genius.  So is that cunning variety in the rhythm of the
+verses: three pauses in the first line, two in the second, only one in
+the third: the principal pause after the sixth syllable in both the
+first two lines, and yet the words and their accents so artfully varied
+that not the slightest monotony is felt; the suggestion of easy flight
+in the smooth unbroken movement of the third line--
+
+  "The speediest of thy wingèd messengers."
+
+{160} Milton knew that an utterance of this kind, in which the Bible
+had anticipated him a hundred times, admitted of no novelty in itself;
+and his reverence forbade him to give his invention free rein in these
+high matters.  But what he could do he did.  The matter of the speech
+he leaves as he found it; what the Son says every reader has heard
+before: but after this manner he has not heard it.  In passing through
+Milton's hands all has been transformed into a new birth by the
+consummate craftsmanship of a supreme artist.
+
+Thus the poet escapes, as far as it was possible to escape, from the
+difficulties created for him by his acceptance of divine Persons as
+actors in his drama.  But the escape could only be partial.  It is true
+that as Johnson says, "whatever be done the poet is always great": but
+greatness of style often struggles in vain against the incongruity of a
+verbose and argumentative Deity.  Such gods as Virgil's Venus and Juno
+may hurl rhetorical speeches at each other without much ill effect, but
+we feel that it was a lack of the sense of mystery in Milton that kept
+him from realizing that the one God, Creator, Father and Judge of all,
+cannot with fitness debate or argue: He can only decree.  "Let thy
+words be few"; that is even truer, we {161} instinctively feel, of
+words put into His mouth than of words addressed to Him.  Milton's God
+suffers even more than Shakspeare's Ghosts from a garrulity which
+destroys the sense of the awe properly belonging to a supernatural
+being; and the grim laughter of the Miltonic heaven is in its different
+way even more fatal to that awe than the Jack-in-the-box appearances
+and disappearances of the dead Hamlet and Banquo.
+
+Such are some of the difficulties, in part overcome by the poet and in
+part unperceived, inherent in the subject of _Paradise Lost_.  One
+more, the greatest of all, remains.  Poetry is a human art and its
+subject is human life.  In the story Milton set himself to tell there
+are only two human figures; and how can they, living as they do in
+isolated perfection and sinlessness, without children or friends,
+without learning or art or business, without hopes or fears or
+memories, without the experience of disease or the expectation of
+death, and therefore without the joy, as we know it, of life and
+health, how can they provide material for a poem that can interest
+beings so utterly unlike them as ourselves?  The answer is twofold.  It
+is partly that they do fail to provide that material.  The _Paradise
+Lost_ has in fact far less of ordinary human life in {162} it, far less
+variety of action, than the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_.  This was probably
+unavoidable but it was probably also Milton's deliberate intention.  It
+was not his nature to care much about the small doings of ordinary
+people in everyday life.  The line which he most often repeats in
+_Paradise Lost_ is the very opposite of those which are repeated so
+often in the _Iliad_, verses of no noticeable poetic quality, just
+doing their plain duty of linking two speeches or two paragraphs
+together: such as--
+
+_hos oi men toiauta pros allêlous agoreuon_
+
+What Milton chooses for repetition is, on the other hand, one of his
+stateliest lines, the magnificent--
+
+  "Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers."
+
+The choice is characteristic of the man.  His "natural port," as
+Johnson well said, "is gigantic loftiness," and his end to "raise the
+thoughts above sublunary cares or pleasures."  So it may well be that
+this disadvantage of his subject did not weigh with him as much as it
+would have done with most poets.  But he was not altogether blind to
+it, and the amazing skill he shows in partly getting over it is the
+other half of the answer to {163} the question asked just now.  His
+action up to the moment of the Fall is the inhuman one of a few days in
+hell, heaven, and a small sinless spot of earth: and the Fall does not
+increase the number of actors.  Yet into the mouths of this tiny group
+of persons Milton may be said to have brought all the history of the
+world and all its geography, art, science and learning, the Jew, the
+Christian and the Pagan, Greek philosophy and Roman politics, classical
+myth, mediaeval romance, and even the contemporary life of his own
+experience.  This is partly done, as Virgil had done it, by the way of
+a prophecy of future ages: but to a much greater extent by the way of
+similes which are more elaborate and learned in Milton than in any
+poet.  By their assistance he gives rest to the imagination exhausted
+by the sublimity of heaven and hell, bringing it home to its own
+familiar earth, to scenes whose charm, unlike that of Eden or
+Pandemonium, lies not, in the wonder their strangeness excites but in
+the old habits, experiences and memories which they recall.  So, after
+the strain of the great debate with which the second book opens, he
+soothes us with the beautiful simile of the evening after storm--
+
+  "Thus they their doubtful consultations dark
+  Ended, rejoicing in their matchless Chief;
+{164}
+  As, when from mountain-tops the dusky clouds
+  Ascending, while the North-wind sleeps, o'erspread
+  Heaven's cheerful face, the louring element
+  Scowls o'er the darkened landskip snow or shower,
+  If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet,
+  Extend his evening beam, the fields revive,
+  The birds their notes renew, and bleating herds
+  Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings."
+
+
+Note how large and general it is.  Its method is the classical appeal
+to universal knowledge and feeling, not the romantic method of
+strangeness of sentiment and detailed particularity of truth.  Matthew
+Arnold once recommended those who cannot read Greek or Latin to read
+Milton as a far better key than any translation can be to the secret of
+the greatness of the ancient poets.  This is the truth: and not only
+for the reason on which Arnold laid just stress--the "sure and flawless
+perfection of rhythm and diction" in which, as he truly says, Milton is
+unique among English poets: but also for his classical habit of mind,
+for his central sanity, for the sureness with which he makes his call
+on the thoughts and emotions, not of eccentric {165} or exceptional
+individuals, but of the men and women of all times and all nations.
+
+Yet he can use his similes, as we said, to introduce the life of his
+own day and still generally carry his classical manner with him.  So in
+the following simile he begins with the Homeric wolf and ends with the
+Roman and Laudian clergy.  Satan has leapt over the wall of Paradise:
+and the simile begins--
+
+        "As when a prowling wolf,
+  Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,
+  Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve
+  In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,
+  Leaps o'er the fence with ease into the fold:
+  Or as a thief bent to unhoard the cash
+  Of some rich burgher, whose substantial doors,
+  Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault,
+  In at the window climbs, or o'er the tiles:
+  So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold:
+  So since into his Church lewd hirelings climb."
+
+The last line smacks perhaps more of the angry pamphleteer than fits
+with classical sanity: but how admirably the London citizen's house
+gives vivid reality to the beautiful remoteness of the wolf which
+English shepherds had long forgotten to fear; how the recollection,
+present to every reader's {166} mind, of that very same simile in the
+Gospel of St. John, prepares the way for its religious application
+here: how the attention is seized by that magnificent line of arresting
+mono-syllables, each heavy with the sense of fate--
+
+  "So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold!"
+
+
+It used to be said that Milton uses mono-syllables to express slowness
+of action.  But that is notably not the case here.  And in the main it
+seems that he uses them, as Shakspeare often did, for expressing the
+solemnity of grave crisis, or for deep emotion, when anything fanciful,
+ornate or verbose would be fatal to the simplicity, akin to silence,
+which all men find fitting at great moments.  So Shakspeare makes Kent
+say at Lear's death--
+
+  "Vex not his ghost; O let him pass! he hates him
+  That would upon the rack of this tough world
+  Stretch him out longer."
+
+And so Milton uses these tremendous mono-syllables, like a bell tolling
+into the silence of midnight, to force our attention on the doom of all
+the world that took its beginning when Satan entered Paradise--
+
+{167}
+
+  "So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold."
+
+So again, with less solemnity as befitting a less awful person but
+still with arresting and delaying emphasis, he records the actual
+eating of the fatal apple--
+
+        "she plucked, she eat:
+  Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
+  Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe,
+  That all was lost."
+
+So he suspends the flow of the richest and most elaborate of his
+similes by the slow-moving monosyllables of
+
+        "which cost Ceres all that pain
+  To seek her through the world:"
+
+So he strikes the deepest note, beyond all politics, of his debate in
+hell:
+
+  "And that must end us; that must be our cure--
+  To be no more:"
+
+So again he closes the first Act of _Paradise Regained_ with a verse of
+solitary awe--
+
+  "And now wild beasts come forth the woods to roam."
+
+
+{168}
+
+But to return to the similes.  Milton uses them, as we have seen, to
+introduce things familiar and contemporary into the remote and majestic
+theme of his poem.  But he also uses them to introduce the whole world
+into Eden, all later history into the beginning of the world, all the
+varied glories of art and war, poetry and legend, with which his memory
+was stored, into an action which was only partly human and provided no
+scope at all for any human activities except of the most primitive
+order.  So the palace of Hell is, he tells us, something far beyond the
+magnificence of "Babylon, or great Alcairo"; and the army of rebel
+angels far exceeds those
+
+  "That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each side
+  Mixed with auxiliar gods; and what resounds
+  In fable or romance of Uther's son,
+  Begirt with British and Armoric knights;
+  And all who since, baptized or infidel,
+  Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban,
+  Damasco, or Marocco or Trebisond,
+  Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore,
+  When Charlemain with all his peerage fell
+  By Fontarabbia."
+
+So, in another of his returns to those tales and fancies of the Middle
+Age which, in spite {169} of his intellectual and moral rejection of
+their falsity, yet always moved him to unusual beauty of verse, he
+compares the dwarfed rebels of Hell to the
+
+        "faery elves,
+  Whose midnight revels, by a forest side
+  Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
+  Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon
+  Sits arbitress, and nearer to the Earth
+  Wheels her pale course; they, on their mirth and dance
+  Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
+  At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds."
+
+So Eve at her gardening recalls Pales, or Pomona or
+
+        "Ceres in her prime,
+  Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove."
+
+And so, in an earlier book, the beauty of Paradise itself, too great to
+be directly told, is, like the splendour of Pandemonium, conveyed to us
+by the most perfect of those negative similes which, forced upon Milton
+by the narrow bounds of his story, are perhaps the most distinctive of
+all the glories of _Paradise Lost_.  It is too long to quote in full:
+but a few lines may be given: and they must include the first four, one
+of which has just {170} been quoted, verses of such amazing beauty
+that, if Milton could be represented by four lines, these might well be
+the chosen four--
+
+        "Not that fair field
+  Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers.
+  Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
+  Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
+  To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove
+  Of Daphne by Orontes, and the inspired
+  Castalian spring, might with this Paradise
+  Of Eden strive."
+
+
+But it is time to leave Milton's similes, though similes play a more
+important part in _Paradise Lost_ than in any other epic.  Indeed their
+necessary absence is a great element in the comparative dulness of the
+books given over to the discourses of Raphael and Michael.  A single
+chapter in a little book of this kind can only deal with one or two
+aspects of so great a subject as _Paradise Lost_.  That being so, it is
+best, perhaps, to touch on points in which Milton stands pre-eminent or
+unique.  The similes are one of these.  Another is the splendour of the
+Miltonic speeches.  It is one of the defects of _Paradise Lost_ that
+its actors are seldom soldiers whom all the ages agree to admire, and
+often theologians whom all fear or dislike, or politicians whom all
+obey {171} and despise.  Yet how magnificently Milton turns this
+weakness into a strength!  His speeches have not the eternal humanity
+of Homer's: but as oratory, above all as debating oratory, they have no
+poetic rivals outside the drama.  The poet who had lived through the
+Long Parliament and the trial of Strafford knew the art of speech as
+Homer could not know it.  It may seem strange to us that the political
+struggle of his day affected him so much more than the military; but
+the fact is so.  Pym and Hampden are felt in _Paradise Lost_ far more
+than Fairfax or Cromwell.  The speeches of the second book could only
+have been written by the citizen of a free state who had lived through
+a crisis in its fortunes.  Other speeches in the poem--that
+incomparable one of Eve to Adam in the fourth book, "Sweet is the
+breath of morn," those that pass between Eve and Adam after the Fall
+and Adam's Job-like lament in the tenth book--have a purer human beauty
+about them: but of the oratory of debate no poem in the world provides
+a more magnificent display than the second book of _Paradise Lost_.
+The debate is a real debate.  The opening of Moloch, "My sentence is
+for open war," would be instantly effective in any Parliament in the
+world.  It {172} rouses attention by its directness, it compels
+adherence as only courage can.  To undo its effect Belial has to employ
+the most subtle of all oratorical arts, that of accepting the arguments
+which he dare not directly combat and then gradually turning them to
+the confusion of their author.  So he and Mammon bring the assembly
+completely round to the mood of ease and acquiescence.  Then follows
+the tremendous figure of Beelzebub, an aged Chatham or Gladstone, who
+
+        "in his rising seemed
+  A pillar of state.  Deep on his front engraven
+  Deliberation sat and public care;
+  And princely counsel in his face yet shone,
+  Majestic though in ruin.  Sage he stood,
+  With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear
+  The weight of mightiest monarchies; his look
+  Drew audience and attention still as night,
+  Or summer's noon-tide air."
+
+Yet Milton's consciousness of the situation as it really would be is
+such that Beelzebub does not dare to revive Moloch's defeated policy of
+war.  To talk of fighting to cowed rebels who have just been taught the
+too pleasant lesson of the folly of further resistance would have been
+useless.  So he begins by telling them that the ease promised to them
+is a delusion: they may submit, but submission {173} will never win
+them peace, or deliver them from their victorious enemy.  Peace, then,
+they cannot have; and must have war: but it need not be open or
+dangerous: craft has its weapons as well as force: "what if we find
+Some easier enterprise" than the perilous folly of assaulting heaven?
+
+Such a sketch may just serve to show that the great debate is a living
+thing in which we feel the temper of the audience submitting to the
+successive orators and in its turn reacting upon them.  Another proof
+of the actuality of Milton's oratory is the way in which it can be
+quoted.
+
+  "I give not Heaven for lost;"
+
+  "Which, if not victory, is yet revenge:"
+
+        "What though the field be lost?
+  All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
+  And study of revenge, immortal hate,
+  And courage never to submit or yield,
+  And what is else not to be overcome:"
+
+        "what peace can we return
+  But, to our power, hostility and hate?"
+
+        "This would surpass
+  Common revenge, and interrupt his joy
+  In our confusion:"
+
+{174}
+
+        "Advise if this be worth
+  Attempting, or to sit in darkness here
+  Hatching vain empires:"
+
+  "What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
+  If not, what resolution from despair:"
+
+        "on whom we send
+  The weight of all and our last hope relies:"
+
+        "This enterprise
+  None shall partake with me."
+
+All these have been or could well be hurled by contending
+Parliamentarians across the table of the House of Commons, often with a
+fine irony, the Miltonic magnificence emphasizing the pettiness of the
+ordinary political squabbles.  But, of course, the theological
+questions which are at the root of Milton's debate make many of the
+arguments inapplicable to politics: indeed, what is probably the most
+remembered passage in all the speeches has nothing to do with social or
+political activities but draws its poignant interest from the secret
+thoughts that visit the hearts of men when they are most alone--
+
+  "And that must end us; that must be our cure,
+  To be no more.  Sad cure! for who would lose,
+  Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
+{175}
+  Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
+  To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
+  In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
+  Devoid of sense and motion?"
+
+Here we obviously go outside the dramatic probabilities: it is no
+longer Belial who is speaking: it is the voice of a highly cultivated
+and intellectual human being with all Greek thought behind him; it is,
+in short, Milton himself.  The whole poem is full of such
+autobiographical confessional passages, either indirect like this or
+open and undisguised like the great introductions to the first, third,
+seventh and ninth books.  This constant intervention of the poet in his
+epic is one of the originalities of _Paradise Lost_, and certainly not
+the least successful.  The passages which are due to it have been
+criticized as irregularities or superfluities, but, as Johnson justly
+asked, "superfluities so beautiful who would take away?"  Homer may be
+said never to allow us to do more than guess obscurely at what he
+himself was or thought or felt: so leaving room for the follies of the
+criticism which supposes him to be a kind of limited company of poets.
+Virgil spoke directly to his readers at least once in the _Aeneid_, in
+the most magnificent, and {176} most magnificently fulfilled, of all
+the poetic promises of eternal fame--
+
+  "Fortunati ambo!  Si quid mea carmina possunt
+  Nulla dies unquam memori vos eximet aevo
+  Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum
+  Accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit."
+
+But it is less in such a direct intervention as this than in the whole
+tone and temper of his poem that he reveals to us his delicate and
+beautiful nature.  Milton confesses himself in both ways.  His high
+seriousness, his proud and resolute will, his grave sadness at the
+folly of mankind, are interwoven in the whole of his story.  Then in
+the speeches he will often, as in this of Belial, forget altogether who
+is speaking and where and when, forget Satan and Adam, Eden and Hell,
+and make his human escape to his own time and country and to himself.
+The extreme limitations of his subject made something of this kind
+almost necessary.  When all had been done that simile and prophecy
+could do to bring in the life of men and women as Milton's readers knew
+it there still remained the difficulty that Adam and his angel visitors
+must talk, and that before the Fall there was almost {177} nothing for
+them to talk about.  So they constantly talk as if they had all history
+behind them and the world's processes were to them, as to us, old and
+familiar things.  "War seemed a civil game To this uproar," says
+Raphael, as if he were fresh from reading Livy or Gibbon and had all
+the wars of Europe and Asia in his memory.  Often Milton calls
+attention, as it were, to his own inconsistencies, putting in an
+apology like that of Michael when he talks to Adam about Hamath and
+Hermon--
+
+  "Things by their names I call though yet unnamed;"
+
+but more often he leaves them unexplained, perhaps not even noticing
+them himself.  These difficulties are seen at their worst in the very
+earthly geography of heaven and its very unheavenly military
+operations: and, interesting as the passages are, it is difficult to
+forget the incongruity of Raphael and Adam discussing the Ptolemaic and
+Copernican theories of the universe, or Adam moralizing on the
+unhappiness of marriage as if he had studied the divorce reports or
+gone through a course of modern novels.  Yet few and foolish are the
+readers who can dwell on dramatic improbabilities when Adam {178} is
+pouring out the bitter cry wrung from Milton by the still unforgotten
+miseries of his first marriage--
+
+        "Oh! why did God,
+  Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven
+  With Spirits masculine, create at last
+  This novelty on Earth, this fair defect
+  Of Nature, and not fill the World at once
+  With men as Angels, without feminine,
+  Or find some other way to generate
+  Mankind?  This mischief had not then befallen,
+  And more that shall befall; innumerable
+  Disturbances on Earth through female snares,
+  And strait conjunction with this sex.  For either
+  He never shall find out fit mate, but such
+  As some misfortune brings him, or mistake;
+  Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain,
+  Through her perverseness, but shall see her gained
+  By a far worse, or, if she love, withheld
+  By parents; or his happiest choice too late
+  Shall meet, already linked and wedlock-bound
+  To a fell adversary, his hate or shame;
+  Which infinite calamity shall cause
+  To human life, and household peace confound."
+
+It is obvious that in all this we hear the poet's own voice.  But it is
+scarcely fair to quote it without pointing out that it must {179} not
+be taken alone.  The common notion that Milton's own melancholy
+experience had made him a purblind misogynist is a complete mistake.
+No one has praised marriage as he has.  The chastest of poets is as
+little afraid as the Prayer Book of frank acceptance of the physical
+facts which must commonly be the basis of its spiritual relation.  It
+is the whole union for which he stands, of body, mind, and spirit.  He
+puts into the mouth of this same Adam the most eloquent praise woman
+ever received, culminating in
+
+  "All higher Knowledge in her presence falls
+  Degraded.  Wisdom in discourse with her
+  Loses discountenanced, and like Folly shows;
+  Authority and Reason on her wait,
+  As one intended first, not after made
+  Occasionally: and, to consummate all,
+  Greatness of mind and nobleness their seat
+  Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
+  About her, as a guard angelic placed."
+
+It is true that the reply of the Angel moderating these ardours is more
+evidently Miltonic--
+
+        "what transports thee so?
+  An outside? fair no doubt and worthy well
+  Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love;
+  Not thy subjection.  Weigh with her thyself;
+  Then value.  Oft-times nothing profits more
+  Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right."
+
+{180} But, though in these last words Raphael entirely disappears in
+Milton, the poet who could conceive the panegyric to which Raphael
+replies, who could elsewhere make his hero say that he received "access
+in every virtue" from the looks of Eve, had assuredly no low ideal of
+what a woman may be.  Adam speaks for him when he praises love as
+
+  "not the lowest end of human life;"
+
+and he gives us a true corrective of the over-severe picture of Milton
+which half-knowledge is apt to draw when he goes on to declare that
+
+  "not to irksome toil, but to delight,
+  He made us, and delight to reason joined."
+
+
+But this is only one of many subjects on which Milton lets us hear his
+own voice speaking through his characters.  We hear it when Satan cries
+to Beelzebub--
+
+  "Fallen Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
+  Doing or suffering:"
+
+when Raphael reports Nisroch as saying of pain and pleasure what may
+well have been felt by the blind poet who owed his knowledge of
+pleasure to memory only, while he knew {181} pain by the frequent
+experience of one of the most painful of diseases--
+
+        "sense of pleasure we may well
+  Spare out of life, perhaps, and not repine,
+  But live content, which is the calmest life;
+  But pain is perfect misery, the worst
+  Of evils, and, excessive, overturns
+  All patience:"
+
+we hear it when Adam, like a weary scholar, says that
+
+        "not to know at large of things remote
+  From use, obscure and subtle, but to know
+  That which before us lies in daily life,
+  Is the prime wisdom;"
+
+when Raphael asks, like a Platonic philosopher,
+
+        "what if Earth
+  Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein
+  Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?"
+
+when Adam, like a doubting Christian in an age of speculation,
+hesitates for a moment about the efficacy of prayer--
+
+        "that from us aught should ascend to Heaven
+  So prevalent as to concern the mind
+  Of God high-blest, or to incline his will,
+  Hard to belief may seem:"
+
+{182} and once more when Adam cries--
+
+  "solitude sometimes is best society,"
+
+as if he, like the blind Milton, was worn out by twenty years of
+contending voices, and longed for the relief of silent and lonely
+thought.
+
+To the direct interventions of the poet there is less need to call
+attention as, of course, no reader can miss them.  They are probably
+the most universally admired passages of the poem.  Every reader who
+deserves to read them at all finds himself unable to do so without
+wishing to get them by heart.  They do not rival the daring splendour
+of the scenes in hell: nor perhaps the suave and gracious perfection of
+the evening scene in Paradise in the fourth book; nor can they, of
+course, exhibit the dramatic power of the scene that precedes and still
+more of those that follow the Fall.  But nothing in the whole poem
+moves us so much.  It is not merely that Milton has exerted his whole
+mastery of his art to make their every line and every word please the
+ear, awaken the memory, stimulate the imagination, lift the whole
+mental and emotional nature of the reader up to a height of being
+unknown to its ordinary experience.  This he has {183} done in some
+other parts of his poem.  But, fine as some of his dramatic touches
+are, the essence of his genius was lyrical and not dramatic or
+objective at all.  And so none of his characters, divine, diabolic or
+human, will ever move us quite as he moves us himself.
+
+Let us hear the most beautiful of all these confessions: and for once
+let us indulge ourselves with the whole.  The themes that make up
+Milton's great symphony ought in truth always to be given unbroken, if
+only that were possible.  Indeed, there is a sense in which it may be
+said that nothing less than the whole poem can do justice to a design
+so majestic as that of _Paradise Lost_.  But in any case it is certain
+that no fragment of a few lines can convey a full impression of the
+rhythmical, intellectual, imaginative unity of the Miltonic paragraph
+or section.  This is above all conspicuous in the great speeches and in
+the elaborate introductions that precede the first, third, seventh and
+ninth books.  Here is the greatest of the four; the most famous of
+Milton's personal interventions in his poem, and one of the most
+wonderful things he ever wrote.
+
+  "Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born!
+  Or of the Eternal coeternal beam
+{184}
+  May I express thee unblamed?  Since God is light,
+  And never but in unapproached light
+  Dwelt from eternity; dwelt then in thee,
+  Bright effluence of bright essence increate!
+  Or hearest thou rather pure Ethereal stream,
+  Whose fountain who shall tell?  Before the Sun,
+  Before the Heavens, thou wert, and at the voice
+  Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest
+  The rising World of waters dark and deep,
+  Won from the void and formless Infinite!
+  Thee I revisit now with bolder wing,
+  Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detained
+  In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight,
+  Through utter and through middle Darkness borne,
+  With other notes than to the Orphean lyre,
+  I sung of Chaos and eternal Night,
+  Taught by the Heavenly Muse to venture down
+  The dark descent, and up to re-ascend,
+  Though hard and rare; thee I revisit safe,
+  And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou
+  Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
+  To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
+  So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
+  Or dim suffusion veiled.  Yet not the more
+  Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
+{185}
+  Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
+  Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
+  Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
+  That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow,
+  Nightly I visit; nor sometimes forget
+  Those other two equalled with me in fate,
+  So were I equalled with them in renown,
+  Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
+  And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old:
+  Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
+  Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
+  Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,
+  Tunes her nocturnal note.  Thus with the year
+  Seasons return; but not to me returns
+  Day or the sweet approach of even or morn,
+  Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
+  Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
+  But cloud instead and ever-during dark
+  Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
+  Cut off, and, for the book of knowledge fair,
+  Presented with a universal blank
+  Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
+  And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
+  So much the rather thou, Celestial Light,
+  Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
+  Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
+  Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
+  Of things invisible to mortal sight."
+
+{186}
+
+Not all the poetry of all the world can produce more than a few
+passages that equal this in moving power.  Tears are not very far from
+the eye that is passing over its page: tears in which sympathy plays a
+smaller part than joy at the discovery that human words can be so
+beautiful.  But if Milton moves us more by his own personality than by
+that of any of his creations, it is still true that he is not so
+entirely without dramatic power as has sometimes been alleged.  No one
+would claim for him that he was one of the great narrative or dramatic
+masters.  But his weakness on these sides is so obvious that there has
+been a tendency to exaggerate it.  We notice the undramatic speeches of
+Satan and Adam: we notice such things as Eve's dream in the fifth book
+which, anticipating, as it does, so many of the details of her
+temptation, renders her fall much less probable, and goes far to
+destroy its interest when it occurs.  But we are slower to notice the
+admirable dramatic management of such a scene as that between Eve and
+the Serpent in the ninth book.  And yet how finely imagined it is, in
+all its successive stages!  Satan, at first "stupidly good," overawed
+at Eve's beauty and innocence; then, recovering his natural malice, and
+beginning his attempt by appealing to {187} two things, curiosity and
+the love of flattery, which have always been supposed especially
+powerful with women; and Eve, taking no direct notice of his
+compliments and in appearance surrendering only to the other bait of
+novelty and surprise; "how cam'st thou speakable of mute?"  So the
+scene begins.  Flattery has ensured the tempter a favourable reception;
+curiosity gives him the chance of an apparently telling argument.  I
+ate, he says, of the fruit of a certain tree and received from it
+speech and reason.  But I have found nothing to satisfy my new-won
+powers till I saw thee, whom I now desire to worship as the sovran of
+creation.  She affects to rebuke the flattery, but naturally asks to be
+shown the tree on which the wonderful fruit grows.  It of course turns
+out to be the Forbidden Tree: and Eve mentions the prohibition as a
+thing final and unquestionable.  He meets her refusal by giving a
+sinister and plausible explanation of the prohibition.  Why did God
+forbid her the fruit?  "Why, but to keep ye low and ignorant, His
+worshippers?"  God, he suggests, knows too well that as the fruit had
+raised the serpent from brute to human, so it would raise the woman
+from human to divine.  Noon and hunger come to fortify his {188}
+arguments; and, after a speech in which she adds one more of her own
+drawn from the name, the Tree of Knowledge, given to the tree by God
+Himself, she plucks and eats.  In the first ecstasy of pleasure she
+luxuriates in joy and self-confidence.  Then she considers whether she
+shall use her new powers to make herself the equal and even the
+superior of Adam.  The prospect tempts her: but she is not quite free
+from fear that the threatened punishment of death may after all descend
+upon her.  And that suggests the picture of "Adam wedded to another
+Eve," which brings her swiftly to the decision that Adam shall share
+with her her fate, whichever it be, bliss or woe.  In this, as later in
+her hasty proposal of suicide, Eve is a living and convincing human
+figure.  To the stronger and wiser Adam it was harder to give life.
+But what could be finer or truer than his instant repudiation of her
+plausible tale--
+
+  "How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost,
+  Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!"
+
+followed by his immediate resolution to die with her--
+
+  "And me with thee hath ruined: for with thee
+  Certain my resolution is to die.
+  How can I live without thee?"
+
+{189} The rest follows with equal probability.  Once resolved to unite
+his lot with hers, he soon finds arguments to prove that that lot is
+not likely after all to be so dreadful.  Having talked himself into the
+surrender of his judgment he eats, and having eaten he goes at once all
+lengths of extravagance, folly and sin.  Then comes the reaction and
+the inevitable mutual reproaches; with the fine natural touch of Eve
+upbraiding Adam for his weakness in yielding to her request and
+granting her the freedom which had proved so fatal.  So the ninth book
+closes.  When the story is resumed in the second half of the tenth book
+we get the tremendous lamentation of Adam, so strangely undramatic in
+its argumentative justification of his own punishment, so full of true
+drama as well as of magnificent lyrical power in its cry of human
+misery and despair.  Then follows the bitter attack upon Eve, as the
+cause of all his woe: and the whole scene is concluded by her humble
+and beautiful submission--
+
+  "While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps,
+  Between us two let there be peace:"
+
+by their reconciliation, and by their quiet and resigned acceptance of
+their common fate.
+
+{190}
+
+It was perhaps worth while to go through one act of Milton's drama in
+this detail to give some idea of the skill which he has shown in
+working up a few verses of Genesis into an elaborate story.  But no
+detail, no fragmentary notes of any kind, even when they deal with
+matters in which Milton was far stronger than he was on the side of
+narrative or drama, can do much to exhibit the greatness of _Paradise
+Lost_.  For that there is only one way, to read it.  And, as we said
+just now, to read the whole.  It is true that you cannot read it for
+the interest of the story as you can all the _Odyssey_, much of the
+_Iliad_ and some of the _Aeneid_: but the poem is still a whole and you
+need the whole to judge and understand it.  And even the weaker books,
+the fifth, the seventh and twelfth, contain episodes, like the scene
+between Abdiel and Satan and the incomparable conclusion of the whole
+poem, which are among the last a wise reader would wish to miss.
+Moreover, where the story is dullest it has things which give, perhaps,
+the most astonishing proof of Milton's power of style.  It is true that
+he does himself occasionally fall into the empty pomposity which
+characterized his eighteenth-century imitators who fancied that big
+words could turn prose into poetry.  So he talks of dried fruits as
+"what by frugal {191} storing firmness gains To nourish, and
+superfluous moist consumes."  But the thing most remarkable about this
+is its extreme rarity.  Taking the poem as a whole, the mighty music
+scarcely ceases: the majestic flight of the poet continues
+uninterrupted: no contrary winds disturb it, no weariness brings it
+flagging down to earth.  There is nothing, not even theological
+disputes, out of which he cannot make fine verse, and occasionally
+great poetry.  There is nothing, however great, that he cannot make his
+own.  Just as Shakspeare took the noble prose of North's _Plutarch_,
+and hardly altering a word made noble poetry of it, so Milton can take
+the Bible.  "For now," says Job, "I should have lain still and been
+quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest."  North could not
+rise to the height of this.  But even this Milton will dare to lay his
+hand upon: and, if even he cannot lift it any higher, only he could
+have touched it at all without desecration.  "How glad," says Adam--
+
+        "how glad would lay me down
+  As in my mother's lap!  There I should rest,
+  And sleep secure."
+
+Or take a passage like that of the Son of God clothing Adam and Eve
+after the Fall, where {192} many Biblical suggestions are gathered
+together--
+
+  "As when he washed his servants' feet, so now
+  As father of his family he clad
+  Their nakedness with skins of beasts, or slain,
+  Or, as the snake, with youthful coat repaid;
+  And thought not much to clothe his enemies."
+
+The full appreciation of a passage like this, so very simple, so
+apparently obvious, yet so entirely in the grand style which, whether
+his subject stoops or soars, very rarely fails Milton, is not a thing
+of one reading or of two.  Milton, the greatest artist of our language,
+is naturally the most conspicuous instance of the law which applies to
+all great art.  Only natures as rarely endowed with the receptive gift
+as he was himself with the creative can fully appreciate his work at
+the first reading.  Like all great works of the imagination it has
+generally to train, sometimes almost to create, the faculties which are
+to appreciate it aright.  This is particularly true in the case of
+classical art, where the emotional appeal, though just as real, is much
+less apparent because it is so much more controlled by intellectual
+sanity.  Gothic {193} and Romantic art are commonly far more
+instantaneous in the impression they make, perhaps because, according
+to the ingenious suggestion of the Poet Laureate, they admit at once of
+more daring flights of the imagination and of stronger realism than
+classical art can bear.  But it may well be doubted whether the wonder
+and delight which every man of the most modest aesthetic capacity owes
+to them can in the end keep pace with the slower growing appreciation
+of the universality and sanity of classical work.  But this is an old
+dispute not likely to be settled this year or next.  Nor does it affect
+the fact that all great work, even Romantic or Gothic, gains by time in
+proportion to its greatness.  It is the only absolutely certain test of
+greatness in art.  The instantly popular tune is unendurable in six
+months, the instantly popular novel or poem is totally forgotten in a
+year or two.  No one perceives the whole greatness of St. Paul's
+Cathedral, or Sansovino's Library at Venice, or the music of Bach, or
+the poetry of Milton, at the first sight or hearing.  No competent eye,
+ear or mind fails to perceive more and more of it at each renewed
+experience.  Whatever be the art, a picture, a piece of sculpture, a
+book, the test is the same: the cheap, the sentimental, {194} the
+sensational, the merely pretty, lose something, be it little or much,
+at each renewal of acquaintance: the great work steadily gains.  To
+this test _Paradise Lost_ can fearlessly appeal.  It is not meant for
+idle hours or empty people.  It is not amusing in the lower sense of
+the word.  It is not as exciting as it might well have been.  It is
+probably true that, as Johnson said with his usual honesty, "No one
+ever wished it longer than it is": yet there is equal truth in another
+remark of his, "I cannot wish Milton's work other than it is," and in
+the implied answer to his bold question, "What other author ever soared
+so high or sustained his flight so long?"  The difficulty for Milton's
+readers is that they do not easily soar, and still less easily sustain
+their soaring.  The great gifts which Johnson brought to the criticism
+of literature lay far more in common sense and in a profound insight
+into human life than in any real turn for poetry.  Of that nearly every
+one who to-day gives much time to reading poetry will probably have as
+much as he.  Such people are sometimes mistakenly content with a single
+reading of _Paradise Lost_.  They remember a few of its glories and the
+rest of the poem they acquiesce in forgetting.  Let them put it to the
+test to which lovers of music {195} put the Symphonies of Beethoven and
+lovers of sculpture the remains of the Parthenon and the temple of the
+Ephesian Artemis.  Let them give the little time required to read it
+through every year, or every second year.  They will find more in it
+the second time than they did the first, and much more the fifth or the
+tenth time.  It will issue triumphantly from the trial: and before they
+reach middle age they will know by their own personal experience, what
+the best authorities have always told them, that this is one of those
+rare works of human genius whose power and beauty may in sober truth be
+called inexhaustible.
+
+
+
+
+{196}
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+_PARADISE REGAINED_ AND _SAMSON AGONISTES_
+
+_Paradise Regained_, like the _Odyssey_, the _Aeneid_ and the second
+part of _Faust_, has been an inevitable victim of the human taste for
+comparison.  It cannot fail to be compared with _Paradise Lost_ and
+cannot fail to suffer by it.  The poets and critics have indeed been
+kinder to it than the public.  Johnson said that if it had not been
+written by Milton "it would receive universal praise."  Wordsworth
+thought it "the most perfect in execution of anything written by
+Milton."  But the great body of readers finds an epic with only two
+main actors in it, and hardly anything that can be called a story, too
+severe a demand upon its poetic taste.  And when unprofessional opinion
+remains constant for several generations, as it has in this case, it is
+never wise to ignore or defy it.  _Paradise Regained_ is a very bare
+poem.  It has none of the splendours of its predecessor: no {197}
+scenes in which we hear the full voice of that Milton
+
+  "Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
+  Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
+    Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean
+    Rings to the roar of an angel onset;"
+
+nor yet any of those others which delighted Tennyson even more, the
+scenes of Adam's
+
+        "bowery loneliness,
+  The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
+  And bloom profuse and cedar arches."
+
+It has no love, no sin, no quarrel, no reconciliation, no central
+moment of tragic suspense, indeed no human action at all.  And Milton
+has refrained almost absolutely from adorning it with the similes which
+are among the chief glories of _Paradise Lost_.  It is, in fact, as
+Mark Pattison has said, "probably the most unadorned poem extant in any
+language."
+
+At the very beginning of _Paradise Lost_ Milton had cast his eye on to
+that second chapter in the Christian history of man without which the
+first is a mere picture of despair.  His subject was to be man's first
+disobedience and its results; death, woe and loss of Eden
+
+        "till one greater Man
+  Restore us and regain the blissful seat."
+
+{198} Whether he then had any thought of attempting to deal with that
+restoration we do not know.  Nor do we know what motives induced him to
+choose the story of the Temptation in the Wilderness as the action in
+which the new order of things was to be manifested.  Some critics have
+been surprised that he did not take the Crucifixion or the
+Resurrection.  And it is obvious that the first, with the Tree of
+Calvary pointing back to the Tree in the Garden, would have afforded a
+natural sequence to _Paradise Lost_.  Others have wondered that he did
+not use the Descent into Hell in which the liberation of Satan's
+captives would have followed on the story of how they fell into his
+power.  And it is obvious that there were great poetic, and especially
+Miltonic, possibilities in the theme of the victorious Son of God
+entering the very kingdom in which the Satan of _Paradise Lost_ had
+exercised such splendid rule, and setting free the saints and prophets
+and kings of the Old Testament.  But it is possible, as Sir Walter
+Raleigh has suggested, that Milton was no longer in the vein for
+grandiose themes of external majesty and might such as this story would
+have afforded.  "His interest was now centred rather in the sayings of
+the wise than in the deeds of the mighty."  That {199} may be so:
+though his _Samson_ which was yet to come is certainly not without its
+mighty deeds.  But, whatever were his reasons for putting aside such
+subjects as the Descent into Hell, it is not difficult to discover
+several which he probably found decisive in inducing him to prefer the
+Temptation to the Passion.  To begin with, he must have been conscious
+of the immensely greater difficulty of handling the story of the
+Passion in such a way that Christian readers could bear to read it.
+Then, even more certainly operative on his mind was the fact that the
+Passion is related to us in great detail, the Temptation in a few words
+of mysterious import; so that the one leaves almost no freedom of
+invention to the poet, while the other scarcely binds him at all.  Then
+again there is the close parallelism between the temptation in the
+Garden and the temptation in the Wilderness; and finally, most
+important of all, the fact that the Temptation is the only event in the
+life of Christ in which Satan plays a visible and important part.  A
+poem that was to be a second part of _Paradise Lost_ could not do
+without Satan; and in fact he is even more prominent in _Paradise
+Regained_, where he is present throughout, than in its predecessor of
+which there are several books which scarcely so {200} much as mention
+him.  This was no doubt decisive.
+
+So Milton chose the Temptation in the Wilderness as his subject, with
+Satan once more as one of the two principal actors in his story.  But
+the actor is even more changed than the story.  The Satan of the later
+poem is no longer the splendid rebel of _Paradise Lost_.  _Paradise
+Regained_ has in it no heavenly battles and its council of devils is a
+mere shadow of the great parliament of hell.  It has, therefore, no
+place either for the general of the infernal armies or for the Prime
+Minister of the infernal Senate.  The magnificent figure who imposes
+himself on the imagination--
+
+  "Like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved"--
+
+becomes in it something far less impressive, a political theorist
+instead of a statesman, a student of the balance of power instead of a
+soldier, a casuistical disputant about culture and morals in place of a
+devil venturing all for empire and revenge.  It is as if Alexander were
+exchanged for Aristotle: almost as if St. George were replaced by Mr.
+Worldly Wiseman.  The imagination is affected by the inevitable loss of
+colour, and _Paradise Regained_ is the sufferer in fame and popularity.
+It also suffers from the old difficulty {201} inherent in supernatural
+personages which affects it even more than _Paradise Lost_.  The whole
+action is a succession of Temptations.  The question how far such
+attempts by a devil upon a Divine Being can afford any hope to the one
+or any fear or danger to the other is a mystery of which the Church
+itself scarcely claims to offer a full explanation.  Into the
+theological difficulty this is not the place to enter.  It is only with
+the corresponding poetic difficulty which we are concerned.  Just as in
+_Paradise Lost_ it is impossible not to feel the unreality of the war
+in heaven, so in _Paradise Regained_ it is impossible not to feel, in
+spite of some inconsistency of language on the subject, that Satan
+commonly knows who it is whom he is assailing and is known by Him in
+return, and that consequently the whole action has for poetic purposes
+a certain unreality.  He knows that Jesus is the Son of God; with a
+right to the homage of all nature and the power to take all as His own.
+He asks--
+
+  "Hast thou not right to all created things?
+  Owe not all creatures, by just right, to thee service?"
+
+Yet he discusses with Him various very human methods of arriving at
+power, just as {202} if He were subject to the same conditions as other
+men who desire to rule or influence the world.  The consequence is
+that, although the speeches contain much interesting thought and much
+fine poetry, they are seldom or never dramatically convincing.  Our
+Lord, in particular, instead of the gracious and winning figure of the
+Gospels, becomes a kind of self-sufficient aristocratic moralist.  His
+speeches, as Milton gives them, display rather the defiant virtue of
+the Stoic, or the self-conscious righteousness of the Pharisee, than
+the simple and loving charity of the Christian.  The weapon of moral
+and intellectual contempt, so freely employed in them and so natural
+both to Jew and to Greek, strikes to us a false and jarring note when
+put into the mouth of Him who taught His disciples that the only way of
+entry into His kingdom was that of being born again and becoming as
+little children.
+
+These are all serious drawbacks and they are not the only ones.  If
+from one point of view Milton in _Paradise Regained_ is too little of a
+Christian, from another he is too much.  One of the gravest
+difficulties with which Christian apologists have always had to contend
+is the entire indifference of the New Testament and, generally
+speaking, of the {203} Church in all ages, especially the most devout,
+not only to economic and material progress, but to all elements except
+the ethical and spiritual in the higher civilization of humanity.  At
+its friendliest the Church has hardly ever been willing to allow to
+such things any inherent or independent importance of their own.  Those
+who feel that they owe an incalculable debt to art and poetry and
+philosophy and therefore to the Greeks, have inevitably found this
+attitude a stumbling-block.  And they will always read with exceptional
+surprise and indignation the narrow obscurantism of the speech which
+Milton, scholar and artist as he was, is not ashamed to put into the
+mouth of Christ in the fourth book.  He cannot himself have been a
+victim of the shallow fallacy expressed in line 325 (he who reads gets
+little benefit unless he brings judgment to his reading "and what he
+brings what need he elsewhere seek?"); and his lifelong practice shows
+that he did not think Greek poetry was
+
+  "Thin-sown with aught of profit or delight."
+
+Nor could he have seriously thought that the Hebrew prophets taught
+"the solid rules of civil government," of which in fact they knew
+nothing except on the moral side, better than the statesmen and
+philosophers of Rome and {204} Athens.  The explanation is, perhaps,
+partly that Milton was an Arian, and therefore felt at liberty to
+emphasize the Jewish limitations of Christ: limitations the possibility
+of which, as recent controversies have shown, even Athanasian opinion
+has been forced to face.  But, in any case, in the _Paradise Regained_
+stress is necessarily, for dramatic purposes, laid on the Hebrew and
+Messianic character of Christ, and from that point of view it is not
+unnatural to make Him the spokesman of Hebrew resistance to the
+intellectual encroachments of Greece and Rome.  Another part of the
+explanation is that the strong Biblical and Hebraic element in Milton's
+character does seem to have increased in strength during his later
+years.  It was far from getting exclusive possession even then, and all
+the evidence shows that he was always the very opposite of the
+narrow-minded Puritan fanatics of his day.  But his tendencies in that
+direction would be exaggerated while he was occupied with a purely
+Biblical subject.  And he may have thought, if he thought about the
+question at all, that the contemptuous tone adopted about classical
+culture in the speech of Christ was not only dramatically defensible,
+but balanced by the far finer passage, evidently written from his {205}
+heart, in which Satan exalts the glories of Athens.  It is, perhaps,
+the most famous thing in the poem.
+
+  "Look once more, ere we leave this specular mount,
+  Westward, much nearer by south-west; behold
+  Where on the Aegean shore a city stands,
+  Built nobly, pure the air and light the soil--
+  Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
+  And eloquence, native to famous wits
+  Or hospitable, in her sweet recess,
+  City or suburban, studious walks and shades.
+  See there the olive-grove of Academe,
+  Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird
+  Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long;
+  There flow'ry hill Hymettus, with the sound
+  Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites
+  To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls
+  His whispering stream.  Within the walls then view
+  The schools of ancient sages, his who bred
+  Great Alexander to subdue the world,
+  Lyceum there; and painted Stoa next.
+  There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power
+  Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit
+  By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,
+  Aeolian charms and Dorian lyric odes,
+  And his who gave them breath, but higher sung,
+{206}
+  Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called,
+  Whose poem Phoebus challenged for his own.
+  Thence what the lofty grave Tragedians taught
+  In chorus or iambic, teachers best
+  Of moral prudence, with delight received
+  In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
+  Of fate, and chance, and change in human life,
+  High actions and high passions best describing."
+
+It is plainly the very voice of the poet himself, and he may have felt
+certain that we should so understand it.  But it is difficult not to
+regret that it is the Devil who is made to pay Milton's great debt to
+Athens and Christ who is made to repudiate it.
+
+Yet, in spite of all this, in spite of its disdain of the obvious
+attractions open to poetry, in spite of much in it that alienates the
+sympathies of many, the _Paradise Regained_ has received very high
+praise from the finest judges of English poetry.  Johnson and
+Wordsworth have already been quoted, and to them may be added
+Coleridge, who says of it that "in its kind it is the most perfect poem
+extant," and Mr. Mackail, who has spoken of its "unique poetic
+qualities."  Why have the poets and critics been so much {207} more
+favourable to it than the public?  Perhaps because artists are always
+inclined to value work in proportion to its difficulties.  Indeed, this
+fallacy seems natural to all classes of men about their own work.
+Gardeners in England tend to admire a man who grows indifferent oranges
+more than a man who grows good strawberries.  It is like what Johnson
+said of the preaching lady: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's
+walking on his hinder legs.  It is not done well; but you are surprised
+to find it done at all."  This tendency to let surprise sit in the seat
+which belongs to judgment is greatly intensified by professional
+knowledge.  The architect is apt to exaggerate the merit of a building
+placed on a very awkward site, the artist to think a piece of very
+difficult foreshortening more beautiful than it really is.  The public
+may not be so good a judge either of the building or of the drawing:
+but, knowing nothing of the technical difficulties, it at least forms
+its judgment on the true criterion which is, of course, the value of
+the product, not the surprisingness of its having been produced or the
+difficulties overcome in its production.
+
+Something of this kind may account for the fact that _Paradise
+Regained_ has been more appreciated by the poets than by the public.
+{208} The public finds it rather bare and dry and judges accordingly.
+The poets know how infinitely hard a task it was that Milton set
+himself, and find no praise too great for the man who did not fail in
+it.  They see a poem of two thousand lines whose single subject is the
+attempt of a devil who knows himself doomed to defeat to persuade a
+divine Person who knows Himself assured of victory to be false to the
+law of His being.  And into this barren theme they see art and nature,
+ethics and politics, luxury and splendour and empire, cunningly
+interwoven and
+
+  "Eden raised in the waste Wilderness."
+
+They see a style stripped of almost all ornament especially in the
+speeches of our Lord: the poet deliberately walking always on the very
+edge of the gulf of prose and yet always as one perfectly assured that
+into that gulf his feet can never fall.  Here and there, as when we
+come upon such lines as
+
+  "I never liked thy talk, thy offers less,"
+
+we are nervous as we watch: but the poet passes on his way serenely
+unconscious of our fears, and in the very next speech is on the heights
+of poetry with the great description {209} of Athens.  Once only,
+perhaps, in the reply to Satan after the storm--
+
+  "Me worse than wet thou find'st not,"
+
+we feel that the cunningly maintained balance has failed and that the
+limit has been passed which divides the severe from the grotesque.
+
+The truth is that, if the narrowness of its subject and the austerity
+of its style be admitted, _Paradise Regained_ is a poetic achievement
+as great as it is surprising.  It cannot be _Paradise Lost_, of course,
+and that is the fault for which it has not been forgiven.  And its fine
+things are even less evident, much less evident, at a first reading
+than those of _Paradise Lost_.  But Milton has left nothing more
+Miltonic.  He did greater things but nothing in which he stands so
+entirely alone.  There is no poem in English, perhaps none in any
+language of the world, which exhibits to the same degree the inherent
+power of style itself, in its naked essence, unassisted by any of its
+visible accessories.  There are in it, of course, some passages of
+characteristic splendour, the banquet in the wilderness, the vision of
+Rome, and others; but a large part of the poem is as bare as the
+mountains and, to the luxurious and conventional, as bleak and
+forbidding.  Its grave Dorian music, scarcely {210} heard by the
+sensual ear, is played by the mind to the spirit and by the spirit to
+the mind.  Ever present as its art is, it is an art infinitely removed
+from that to which all the world at once responds and surrenders.  It
+is not at first seen to be art at all.  The verse which in truth dances
+so cunningly appears to the uninitiated to stumble and halt.  The
+music, which the common ear is so slow to catch, makes us think of
+those Platonic mysteries of abstract number seen only in their
+perfection by some godlike mathematician who lives rapt above sense and
+matter in the contemplation of the Idea of Good.
+
+But, if there is much in an art so consummate as Milton's which escapes
+analysis, there are also elements which can be measured and weighed.
+Here as in the _Paradise Lost_ students of metre can count and compare
+his stresses and pauses, and set out some finite portion of the
+infinite variety of rhythms which, even more needed here than in
+_Paradise Lost_, sustain the poem in its difficult flight over so
+apparently barren a country.  The art of the poet as distinct from the
+musician is less difficult to trace.  An avowed sequel has to recall
+its predecessor and yet not to recall it too much.  _Paradise Regained_
+recalls _Paradise Lost_ by its central action, a {211} temptation, by
+its council of devils, by its assembly of the heavenly host, by a
+hundred echoes of phrase and circumstance.  But though the heavenly
+host is itself unchanged, though it is still the old "full frequence
+bright Of Angels" yet there is now no real council.  The Son, the only
+spokesman who can address the Father, is no longer present, and even
+the hymn of the angels gets no more than a vague description.  A
+greater change has come over the infernal council: scarcely any longer
+infernal, for their leader can now open his address to them with
+
+  "O ancient Powers of Air and this wide World,"
+
+and the meeting is held in mid air and no longer in hell.  Nor is any
+rivalry attempted with the great debate of _Paradise Lost_: only enough
+to awaken its memory in the reader and to enable the poet to find a
+place in the second meeting for the most obvious of temptations which
+yet reverence forbade him to introduce into the main action.  And note
+how this contains at least one of those small dramatic touches for
+which, except from Mr. Mackail, Milton has got too little credit.
+Satan asks how he is to assail the new enemy: and Belial, who stands
+for the sensualist man of the world, at once offers his suggestion.
+{212} He is sure, as such men always are, that the lowest motive is
+invariably the true mainspring and explanation of all human actions:
+there is no beating about the bush with him: he is frank and cynical,
+and begins at once without shame, apology or preface--
+
+  "Set women in his eye and in his walk."
+
+What could be more exactly in the downright manner affected by men of
+his type in the world of to-day and every day?  And there are other
+similar touches.  Then again the sequel recalls its predecessor when we
+hear Satan strike the very note he struck so often in _Paradise Lost_--
+
+  "'Tis true, I am that Spirit unfortunate,"
+
+and when we see him fall in ruin at the awful end of the long debate--
+
+  "Now shew thy progeny; if not to stand
+  Cast thyself down; safely, if Son of God;
+  For it is written: 'He will give command
+  Concerning thee to his Angels: in their hands
+  They shall uplift thee, lest at any time
+  Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.'
+  To whom thus Jesus: Also it is written
+  'Tempt not the Lord thy God.'  He said, and stood:
+  But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell."
+
+{213}
+
+Nor must it be supposed by those who have not read the _Paradise
+Regained_ that the bareness of its style is invariable.  Most
+conspicuous, for reasons of reverence no doubt, in the speeches of
+Christ, it is far less marked in those of Satan and disappears
+altogether in some of the descriptive passages.  Take, for instance,
+the famous temptation of the banquet--
+
+  "He spake no dream; for, as his words had end,
+  Our Saviour, lifting up his eyes, beheld
+  In ample space under the broadest shade,
+  A table richly spread in regal mode,
+  With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort
+  And savour; beasts of chase, or fowl of game,
+  In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,
+  Grisamber-steamed; all fish from sea or shore
+  Freshet or purling brook, of shell or fin,
+  And exquisitest name, for which was drained
+  Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast.
+  Alas, how simple, to these cates compared,
+  Was that crude apple that diverted Eve!
+  And at a stately sideboard, by the wine,
+  That fragrant smell diffused, in order stood
+  Tall stripling youths rich-clad, of fairer hue
+  Than Ganymed or Hylas; distant more,
+  Under the trees now tripped, now solemn stood,
+  Nymphs of Diana's train, and Naiades
+  With fruits and flowers from Amalthea's horn,
+{214}
+  And ladies of the Hesperides, that seemed
+  Fairer than feigned of old, or fabled since
+  Of faery damsels met in forest wide
+  By knights of Logres, or of Lyones,
+  Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore."
+
+_Paradise Lost_ itself contains no more intricately beautiful passage
+than this.  It is one of those things that have been the delight and
+despair of poets ever since.  For all his disdain of the follies of the
+Middle Age Milton can never touch the old romances, as Joseph Warton
+well noted, without immediately rising into the most exquisite poetry:
+and this reluctant homage of classical genius is the greatest tribute
+ever paid to their undying fascination.
+
+But of course such a passage as this is not typical of the poem: it is
+one of its far-shining heights which cannot be altogether missed even
+by eyes quite blind to the beauties of the lower country through which
+_Paradise Regained_ takes the most part of its course.  Ordinarily the
+poem is grave, plain and unadorned, engaged in the discussion of moral
+problems which give little opportunity for the more obvious graces of
+poetry.  The interest of the speeches which constitute the bulk of it
+is threefold: technical, in the rhythmical or metrical skill by which
+Milton sustains an {215} abstract discourse expressed in unadorned
+language and keeps it at the level of high poetry; moral or
+intellectual, the interest of the subjects discussed; and, the greatest
+of all for many readers, autobiographical, the interest of the evidence
+they afford of the poet's own thoughts and character.  All may be seen,
+for instance, in such a confession as that of Satan in the first book--
+
+  "Envy, they say, excites me, thus to gain
+  Companions of my misery and woe!
+  At first it may be; but, long since with woe
+  Nearer acquainted, now I feel by proof
+  That fellowship in pain divides not smart,
+  Nor lightens aught each man's peculiar load."
+
+There is scarcely a word in it that prose cannot use even to-day.  The
+thought is one that might come from any moralist; there is nothing
+daring or imaginative about it.  Yet out of this what poetry Milton has
+made!  The personal emotion of it, the note of confession and
+individual experience, has lifted it altogether above the level of the
+cold maxims of the preacher who gives no sign of having suffered, or
+sinned, or so much as lived, himself.  Then the art of it: so entirely
+unperceived by the ordinary reader, so invincible in its effect upon
+him.  The whole secret of it defies analysis: but a few ingredients can
+{216} be detected.  There is comparatively little of Milton's favourite
+alliteration: the tone of the passage is too quiet for the free use of
+an artistic device so instantly visible.  But note the beautiful line--
+
+  "Companions of my misery and woe"--
+
+itself free flowing without a pause of any kind, so as to prepare the
+better for the full pause both of sense and of rhythm which separates
+it from what follows.  Then there is the vivid conversational "At first
+it may be," and its pause, contrasting so finely with the next line
+where the pause is also after the fifth syllable, but with a totally
+different effect.  Note again the variety of rhythm which distinguishes
+the last two lines.  Neither has any strong pause in it: and they might
+so easily have been a monotonous repetition.  Is it fanciful to think
+that, perhaps half unconsciously, Milton has suggested the quick stab
+of pain or sorrow in the swift movement of the first: and that the
+long-drawn rhythm of the second is meant to convey something of the
+dull years of misery which so often follow?  Its first six syllables--
+
+  "Nor lightens aught each man's,"
+
+if given their full effect of sound, take perhaps half as long again to
+read as the first six of the {217} preceding line.  In any case,
+whatever was meant by it, the line is a most beautiful one in itself,
+as well as full of one of the most moving of human things, a strong
+man's confession that his strength does not always suffice him.
+
+These obviously autobiographical passages are to be found all through
+the poem.  There are the stately Roman embassies coming and going in
+all their pomp: in which it is surely Cromwell's Foreign Secretary who
+sees nothing but
+
+  "tedious waste of time, to sit and hear
+  So many hollow compliments and lies,
+  Outlandish flatteries."
+
+There is the old contempt of war and those who in virtue of their
+victories
+
+  "swell with pride, and must be titled Gods,"
+
+and of the mob who praise and admire
+
+        "they know not what,
+  And know not whom, but as one leads the other;
+  And what delight to be by such extolled,
+  To live upon their tongues and be their talk?
+  Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise,
+  His lot who dares be singularly good."
+
+There is the contempt of wealth--
+
+  "Extol not riches then, the toil of fools,
+  The wise man's cumbrance, if not snare;"
+
+{218} a contempt which Milton shares with nearly all saints and heroes
+and most philosophers; a little ungratefully, perhaps, as if forgetting
+that, compared with the mass of men, he had himself always been rich,
+and that what he owed to the toil of his father had not proved in his
+case a snare or a cumbrance, but the necessary condition of the
+learning and the leisure he had used so nobly.  Finally, to give no
+more instances, there is the confession at once so personal and so
+representative of the feeling of all men who have ever made the
+smallest effort to live well--
+
+  "Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk,
+  Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing to the ear,
+  And tunable as sylvan pipe or song."
+
+Who knows whether behind such words as these there lies the memory of
+some rapturous vision of the new world of love as St. Paul saw it,
+which had been cooled only too soon by humbling experience of the
+difficulty of "bearing all things" when all things included Salmasius,
+or an unthankful daughter?
+
+This grave introspective note, present from the first in everything
+written by Milton and far more conspicuous in _Paradise Regained_ than
+in _Paradise Lost_, is felt still more in the {219} last of his works,
+the drama _Samson Agonistes_.  It is in the Greek form with a Chorus:
+and is as broodingly full as Aeschylus or Sophocles of the folly of man
+and the uncertainty and sadness of human life; but Milton has added an
+angry sternness of judgment on the one hand, and on the other an
+assured faith in divine deliverance, both of which are rather Hebrew
+than Greek.  Into this strange drama, so alien from all the literature
+of his day, Milton has poured all the thoughts and emotions with which
+the spectacle of his own life filled him.  All through it we hear a
+faith that was strong but never blind battling with the spectacle of
+the wickedness of men and the dark uncertainty of the ways of God.  The
+Philistines have triumphed, lords sit "lordly in their wine" at
+Whitehall, the Dagon of prelatism is once more enthroned throughout the
+land, the saints are dispersed and forsaken, and he himself, who had as
+he thought so signally borne his witness for God, sits blind and sad in
+his lonely house, "to visitants a gaze Or pitied object," with no hope
+left of high service to his country and no prospect but that of a
+"contemptible old age obscure."  No doubt he did not always feel like
+that, for the evidence shows him cheerful and friendly in company: and,
+of {220} course, the picture has undergone the imaginative heightening
+of art besides being coloured by the story of Samson, so much sadder
+than Milton's own.  But the lonely hours of a blind man of genius who
+has fought for a great cause and been utterly defeated must often be
+full of the hopeless half-resigned and half-rebellious broodings in
+which throughout _Samson_ we hear so plainly the voice of Milton
+himself.
+
+    "God of our fathers! what is Man,
+  That thou towards him with hand so various--
+  Or might I say contrarious?--
+  Temper'st thy providence through his short course;
+  Not evenly, as thou rulest
+  The angelic orders and inferior creatures mute,
+  Irrational and brute?
+  Nor do I name of men the common rout,
+  That wandering loose about
+  Grow up and perish as the summer fly,
+  Heads without name, no more remembered;
+  But such as thou hast solemnly elected,
+  With gifts and graces eminently adorned,
+  To some great work, thy glory,
+  And people's safety, which in part they effect:
+  Yet toward these thus dignified thou oft,
+  Amidst their highth of noon,
+  Changest thy countenance and thy hand, with no regard
+  Of highest favours past
+  From thee on them, or them to thee of service."
+
+{221} This is Milton undisguised speaking of and for himself.  And so
+is the still sadder outburst in the very first speech of Samson--
+
+  "O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
+  Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
+  Without all hope of day!
+  O first-created beam, and thou great Word,
+  'Let there be light, and light was over all';
+  Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?
+  The Sun to me is dark
+  And silent as the Moon
+  When she deserts the night,
+  Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
+  Since light so necessary is to life,
+  And almost life itself, if it be true
+  That light is in the soul,
+  She all in every part, why was the sight
+  To such a tender ball as the eye confined,
+  So obvious and so easy to be quenched,
+  And not, as feeling, through all parts diffused,
+  That she might look at will through every pore?
+  Then had I not been thus exiled from light,
+  As in the land of darkness, yet in light,
+  To live a life half dead, a living death,
+  And buried; but, O yet more miserable!
+  Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave;
+  Buried, yet not exempt,
+  By privilege of death and burial,
+  From worst of other evils, pains, and wrongs,
+  But made hereby obnoxious more
+{222}
+  To all the miseries of life,
+  Life in captivity
+  Among inhuman foes."
+
+
+This sublime music in which the soul's emotion finds and obeys its own
+law was scarcely audible to the age which followed Milton's death, when
+poets had concentrated all their art on the effort to make both
+language and metre as instantaneously intelligible as possible.  They
+succeeded much better in the second task than in the first: for the
+truth is that the exact meaning of a verse is much more often difficult
+to ascertain in the case of Pope than in the case of Milton.  But no
+one has ever doubted how to read aloud a line of Pope or Dryden.  And
+this has obvious advantages and was, of course, at first a great source
+of pleasure.  It made Pope's poetry the most immediately popular we
+have ever had, as it still is the most effective for public quotation.
+Almost everybody, as Mr. Bridges has said, "has a natural liking for
+the common fundamental rhythms" and "it is only after long familiarity
+with them that the ear grows dissatisfied and wishes them to be
+broken."  But in poetry as in music the more cultivated the ear the
+sooner it gets tired of being given too little to do: and as soon as
+every warbler had Pope's {223} tune by heart critical readers began to
+wish for something less obvious.  The ultimate result of that
+dissatisfaction was the metrical experiments of Coleridge and the rich
+harvest of varied rhythms and melody with which Shelley and Tennyson
+and Swinburne enriched the nineteenth century.  And all this movement
+had also, of course, a retrospective effect.  It may be true that, as
+Mr. Bridges says, "there are very few persons indeed who take such a
+natural delight in rhythm for its own sake that they can follow with
+pleasure a learned rhythm which is very rich in variety, and the beauty
+of which is its perpetual freedom to obey the sense and diction;" but
+it could not fail to be the case that their number was increased by the
+comparative sensitiveness to the more intricate music of words which
+was inevitably produced in those who had learnt much Shelley or
+Tennyson by heart.  And such people at once heard things in Milton
+which were absolutely inaudible to the ears of Dr. Johnson's
+generation.  The comparative subtlety, both in imagination and in form,
+of the poetry of the nineteenth century made it impossible for poets to
+compete with journalists for the attention of the big public as Pope
+had done triumphantly; but as a set off against that loss it gave a far
+{224} richer delight to those who were capable of that interaction of
+the natural ear and the spiritual to which all great poetry makes its
+appeal.  This led straight back to Milton who made that double appeal
+as only a very few poets in all the world have ever made it.  And the
+more poetry is studied and loved as the greatest of the arts, as the
+medium through which that combination of the vision of genius with the
+slow trained cunning of the craftsman, which is what great art is,
+finds its most perfect expression, the more will men, or at least
+Englishmen, return to Milton.  And especially, in some ways, to
+_Samson_, where his art is at its boldest and freest, and where it
+suffered longest from the indifference of dull ears.
+
+A little book of this kind is not the place for a discussion of English
+metre, or even, in any detail, of Milton's.  Those who wish to go into
+such studies will find much of what they want in the Poet Laureate's
+book on _Milton's Prosody_.  It is possible to disagree with some of
+his proposed scansions of doubtful lines, but it is impossible not to
+learn a great deal from suggestions as to the rhythmical effects
+intended by Milton which come, as these do, from one who is himself a
+master of rhythm and has never concealed the fact {225} that Milton's
+was one of the schools in which he passed his apprenticeship.  So his
+analysis, line by line, of the opening of the first chorus of _Samson_
+will be a revelation to many of what they have, perhaps, never felt at
+all, or felt only unconsciously without understanding anything of what
+it was which they felt or why.  But even without such help no one whose
+ear has had the smallest training can fail to notice some of the more
+daring of Milton's metrical effects.  In the lines quoted above, for
+instance, who can miss the triple stab of passionate agony in the
+thrice repeated, strongly accented "dark, dark, dark"?  The most
+careless reader cannot fail to be arrested by the line, though he may
+not realize the means employed by Milton to enforce attention, the rare
+six stresses in a ten-syllabled line, the still rarer effect of three
+strongly stressed syllables following immediately upon one another, the
+inversion of three out of the five stresses of the next line,
+"irrecoverably dark" suggesting the spasmodic disorder of violent
+grief.  These are certainly devices deliberately chosen for producing
+the required effects.  And so, probably, are the more regular rhythm of
+the words which express the calming aspiration up to the throne of God,
+and the quiet {226} mono-syllabic simplicity of the divine utterance,
+"Let there be light," which continues its softening influence over the
+return in the following lines to his own sad conditions.  How smoothly
+the complaint now goes: "The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon."
+It is in comparison with the earlier abruptness as if he had gone
+through something like the process of the psalmist, "until I went into
+the sanctuary of God: then understood I" what had before been "too
+painful for me."  Then there is the comparatively unmarked rhythm of
+the intellectual argumentative passage which follows: till emotion
+begins again to overwhelm reflection, and shows itself in the strong
+alliteration of "light," "land," "light," "live," "life," "living," and
+in the strong caesura after "buried," the more marked for coming so
+early in the verse.
+
+Such poor noting of technicalities as this gives, of course, no more of
+the secret of Milton's wonderful poetry than anatomy gives of the power
+and beauty of the human body.  But it has its interest and even its
+use: provided that too much importance is not attributed to it and that
+no one makes the mistake of the lady who, according to the story,
+hopefully asked the painter what he mixed {227} his paints with, and
+received the crushing reply, "With my brains, Madam."
+
+_Samson Agonistes_ stands in marked contrast to its predecessor,
+_Paradise Regained_.  And not only in being a drama.  Its intense
+omnipresent emotion makes a still more important difference.  In
+passing from one to the other we pass from the least to the most
+emotional of Milton's works.  This would in any case have been a gain
+for most readers: but the gain is made more important by the extreme
+severity of Milton's final poetic manner.  A style which excludes
+almost all ornament stands in especial need of the support of a visibly
+felt emotion.  It has been said by a living writer that "when reason is
+subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means of expression, and, when
+emotion to reason, prose."  This is roughly true, though the poetry of
+mere emotion is poor stuff.  The special faculty of the poet, as
+Johnson well said, is that of joining music with reason.  That is to
+say that the poet unites thought and feeling and gives them perfect
+expression.  They are not distinct: they become in his hands a new
+single life, a unity.  You cannot separate the emotion from the thought
+in any great line of poetry.  When Wordsworth talks of the
+"unimaginable touch of time," there is {228} plainly emotion as well as
+thought and memory in his words: when Shelley cries in his despair--
+
+  "Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
+  Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
+  No more--O never more!"
+
+it is no mere cry of the heart: the mind is in it too: and neither in
+him nor in Wordsworth can you get the two apart again after the poet
+has joined them together.
+
+Now, though in _Paradise Regained_ the intellect is not allowed, as in
+much eighteenth-century poetry, to become so dominant as to make us
+feel that prose and not verse was the proper medium for what the poet
+had to say, yet it does play a greater part than it can commonly play
+with safety, perhaps a greater part than it plays in any other English
+poem of the first rank.  It is only Milton's unfailing gift of poetic
+style which saves the situation.  He could do what Wordsworth could
+not: conduct long discussions on abstract questions without descending
+from the note of poetry to that of the lecture-room.  The gallant
+explorer who fights his way through the _Prelude_ and the _Excursion_
+wins, as he deserves, a great reward, and a greater still if he does it
+a second time and a third, {229} when he has learnt that they both have
+marshy valleys into which he need not twice descend.  But he has paid a
+price for the lesson, paid it in the endurance of a great deal of solid
+and heavy prose.  That is partly because Wordsworth often thinks
+without feeling or imagining: he gives us his thought as it is in
+itself, as a professor of moral philosophy gives it, without passing it
+through the transforming processes of the emotions and the imagination.
+These hardly fail Milton half a dozen times in all his poetry: and the
+result is the difference between such lines as--
+
+  "This is the genuine course, the aim, and end
+  Of prescient reason; all conclusions else
+  Are abject, vain, presumptuous, and perverse:"
+
+and such as Milton writes when he is nearest to bare thinking--
+
+        "Who therefore seeks in these
+  True wisdom, finds her not, or by delusion
+  Far worse, her false resemblance only meets,
+  An empty cloud."
+
+The difference is also partly due to what, indeed, is another side of
+the same distinction; the fact that Wordsworth has not and Milton has a
+constant possession of the great or grand style.  This is plain in such
+passages as those just quoted: it is plainer still where the poets come
+close to each other in {230} descriptive passages; as, for instance, in
+Wordsworth's--
+
+  "Negro ladies in white muslin gowns,"
+
+and Milton's--
+
+  "Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed;"
+
+between which yawns an obviously impassable gulf.
+
+Milton is sometimes harsh, crabbed, grim in expression as in thought:
+but these things are not at all necessarily fatal to poetry as is the
+cool and contented obviousness of Wordsworth's weak moments.  Milton is
+occasionally contented in his own lofty fashion, but he is never cool,
+and never less so than in _Samson_.  All through it he is face to face
+with a tremendous issue in which he himself is supremely interested: he
+is "enacting hell," to use Goethe's curious phrase, which fits Milton
+so much better than it fits the serenity of Homer.  Twenty years before
+he had written, in quite another connection, "No man knows hell like
+him who converses most in heaven": and now in his old age he embodies
+that tremendous truth in his last poem.  All his poems are intensely
+emotional and personal: but none so much so as _Samson Agonistes_,
+where he is fixing all eyes on the {231} tragedy of his own life.  The
+parallel between Samson and Milton does not extend, of course, to all
+the details.  But even of them many correspond, such as the blindness,
+the disastrous marriage with "the daughter of an infidel," the old age
+of a broken and defeated champion of God become a gazing-stock to
+triumphant profanity.  But more than any special circumstance it is the
+whole general position of Samson as a man dedicated from his birth to
+the service of God, and gladly accepting the dedication, yet failing in
+his task and apparently deserted by his God, which makes of him a type
+in which Milton can see himself and the Cromwellian saints who lie
+ground under the heels of the victorious Philistines of the
+Restoration.  To him as to Samson the situation is one that makes
+questionings on the dark and doubtful ways of God unavoidable: darker
+to him even than to Samson: for he has no guilty memory of a supreme
+act of folly to explain the divine desertion.
+
+The action of the drama is extremely simple.  Samson is found enjoying
+a brief respite from his punishment.  The day is a feast of Dagon, and
+the Philistine "superstition" allows no work to be done on it.
+Accordingly an attendant who is a mute person is leading {232} him to a
+bank where he is accustomed to take what rest he is allowed and enjoy
+
+  "The breath of heaven fresh blowing, pure and sweet
+  With day-spring born;"
+
+that sensation of delicate scents and cool breezes which, as Milton
+knew only too well, mean so much more to the blind than to those who
+can see.  Then his restless thoughts begin to crowd upon him--
+
+  "Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed
+  As of a person separate to God,
+  Designed for great exploits?"
+
+The whole passage belongs naturally enough to Samson: but obviously
+here, as well as in the blindness, the poet is already thinking of
+himself.  So again, when Samson proceeds to speak of being
+
+        "exposed
+  To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,"
+
+one can scarcely miss a reference to the daughters who purloined and
+sold the blind father's books.  When the soliloquy draws to an end the
+Chorus, men of his tribe, come to visit Samson.  Not even Milton ever
+made the arrangement and sound of words do more to enforce their
+meaning than he does in this wonderful opening chorus--
+
+{233}
+
+  "This, this is he; softly a while;
+  Let us not break in upon him.
+  O change beyond report, thought, or belief!"
+
+They chant their inevitable wonder at the contrast between what Samson
+was and what he is.
+
+  "O mirror of our fickle state,
+  Since man on earth, unparalleled!
+  The rarer thy example stands,
+  By how much from the top of wondrous glory,
+  Strongest of mortal men,
+  To lowest pitch of abject fortune thou art fallen."
+
+No reader of Greek can fail to be reminded of more than one chorus in
+the _Oedipus_ of Sophocles--
+
+  _io geneai broton_
+  _hôs hymas isa chai to mêden zôsas enarithmô--_
+
+"Alas, ye generations of men, how utterly a thing of nought I count the
+life ye have to live!  For what man is there who wins more of happiness
+than just the seeming and after the semblance a falling away.  With thy
+fate before mine eyes, unhappy Oedipus, I can call no earthly creature
+blest."  Here and there, as in this passage, the parallel is very
+close.  But Milton's genius is too great and self-reliant for mere
+imitation.  He sometimes recalls the very words of Greek poets as he
+{234} does those of the Bible: but that is not because he is
+artificially imitating either, but because he has assimilated the
+spirit of both and made them a part of himself.
+
+The Chorus express their sympathy with Samson and he replies, bitterly
+reproaching his own folly and that of the rulers of Judah who gave him
+up to their enemies.  But human blindness will not ultimately defeat
+the ways of God: and the Chorus sing their song of faith, in which
+rhyme is called in to give its touch of impatient contempt at the folly
+of the atheist.
+
+  "Just are the ways of God,
+  And justifiable to men;
+  Unless there be who think not God at all.
+  If any be, they walk obscure;
+  For of such doctrine never was there school,
+  But the heart of the fool,
+  And no man therein doctor but himself."
+
+
+So ends the first act or episode of the drama.  The second is the visit
+of Samson's father Manoah, whose cry is--
+
+  "Who would be now a father in my stead?"
+
+He is trying to negotiate for his son's ransom: but Samson refuses, not
+desiring life, desiring rather to pay the full penalty of his sin.  He
+cannot share his father's hopes that God will give him back the sight
+he so misused--
+
+{235}
+
+  "All otherwise to me my thoughts portend,
+  That these dark orbs no more shall treat with light,
+  Nor the other light of life continue long,
+  But yield to double darkness nigh at hand:
+  So much I feel my genial spirits droop,
+  My hopes all flat; Nature within me seems
+  In all her functions weary of herself;
+  My race of glory run, and race of shame,
+  And I shall shortly be with them that rest."
+
+So Manoah leaves him, and in a noble lyric he laments over his greatest
+sufferings, which are not those of the body but those of the mind--
+
+        "which no cooling herb
+  Or med'cinal liquor can assuage,
+  Nor breath of vernal air from snowy Alp."
+
+
+A choral song on the mysterious dealings of God closes this episode
+which is followed by the most dramatically effective in the poem, that
+of the visit of Dalila.  The moment the blind man is told that it is
+"Dalila, thy wife," he cries--
+
+  "My wife! my traitress! let her not come near me:"
+
+and his reply to her offer of penitence, affection and help, begins
+with the daringly expressive line--
+
+  "Out, out, hyaena! these are thy wonted arts."
+
+A long and telling debate follows, in which {236} Dalila makes very
+good points, one of them recalling the scene in which Eve reproaches
+Adam for indulging her instead of exercising his right to command and
+control the weakness of her sex.  To this argument Dalila receives the
+stern, characteristically Miltonic reply--
+
+  "All wickedness is weakness: that plea, therefore
+  With God or man will gain thee no remission,"
+
+He refuses her intercession with the Philistine lords, forbids her even
+to touch his hand;
+
+  "Not for thy life, lest fierce remembrance wake
+  My sudden rage to tear thee joint by joint,"
+
+and drives her to remind him defiantly that, whatever he and his
+Hebrews may say of her, she appeals to another tribunal of fame--
+
+  "In Ecron, Gaza, Asdod, and in Gath,
+  I shall be named among the famousest
+  Of women, sung at solemn festivals,
+  Living and dead recorded."
+
+So she goes out, and the Chorus make Miltonic meditations on the
+unhappiness of marriage and the divinely appointed subjection of women.
+
+The next visitor is Harapha, the Philistine giant, who comes to taunt
+Samson, and is defied by him to mortal combat.  This {237} episode is
+perhaps the least interesting, but it advances the action by exhibiting
+Samson's returning sense that God is still with him and will yet do
+some great work through him.  It fitly leads to the chorus--
+
+  "O, how comely it is, and how reviving
+  To the spirits of just men long oppressed,
+  When God into the hands of their deliverer
+  Puts invincible might,
+  To quell the mighty of the earth, the oppressor,
+  The brute and boisterous force of violent men,
+  Hardy and industrious to support
+  Tyrannic power, but raging to pursue
+  The righteous and all such as honour truth!"
+
+In the next scene an officer comes to demand Samson's presence at the
+feast of Dagon that he may entertain the Philistine lords with feats of
+strength.  He at first dismisses the messenger with a contemptuous
+refusal: but, with a premonition of the end which recalls Oedipus at
+Colonus, he suddenly changes his mind--
+
+        "I begin to feel
+  Some rousing motions in me, which dispose
+  To something extraordinary my thoughts.
+  If there be aught of presage in the mind,
+  This day will be remarkable in my life
+  By some great act, or of my days the last."
+
+{238}
+
+  "Go, and the Holy One
+  Of Israel be thy guide,"
+
+sing the Chorus: and he leaves the scene, like Oedipus, to return no
+more, but to be more felt in his absence than in his presence.  Manoah
+re-enters to utter his further hopes of ransom, in which there is a
+note of Sophoclean irony recalling the ignorant optimism of Oedipus in
+the _Tyrannus_; and as he and the Chorus talk they hear at first a loud
+shouting, apparently of triumph, and then another louder and more
+terrible--
+
+_Manoah._
+
+  "O what noise!
+  Mercy of Heaven! what hideous noise was that?
+  Horribly loud, unlike the former shout."
+
+_Chorus._
+
+  "Noise call you it, or universal groan,
+  As if the whole inhabitation perished?"
+
+They dare not enter the city: and, as they speculate on what this great
+event can be, a Hebrew spectator of the catastrophe comes up and, after
+some brief exchange of question and answer exactly in the manner of the
+Greek tragedians, tells the whole story at length.  The end has come.
+Samson is dead, but death is swallowed up in victory: what has happened
+is the last and most tremendous {239} triumph of the divinely chosen
+hero whose death is more fatal to his country's enemies than even his
+life had been.  There is nothing left to do but to close the drama, as
+most Greek tragedies close, with a brief choral song of submission to
+the divine governance of the world:
+
+  "All is best, though we oft doubt
+  What the unsearchable dispose
+  Of Highest Wisdom brings about,
+  And ever best found in the close.
+  Oft He seems to hide his face,
+  But unexpectedly returns,
+  And to his faithful champion hath in place
+  Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns,
+  And all that band them to resist
+  His uncontrollable intent.
+  His servants He, with new acquist
+  Of true experience from this great event,
+  With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
+  And calm of mind, all passion spent."
+
+
+Such is Milton's drama: a thing worth dwelling on as entirely unique in
+any modern language.  Some good judges have thought it the finest of
+his works.  That will not be admitted if poetry is to be judged either
+by universality of appeal or by extent and variety of range.
+_L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ will always have far more readers: and
+_Paradise Lost_ embraces an immeasurably {240} greater span of human
+life.  But, if not the greatest, _Samson_ is probably for its own
+audience the most moving of Milton's works.  It is not everybody who
+has in him the grave emotions to which it appeals: but whoever has will
+find them stirred by Samson as few other books in all the literature of
+the world can stir them.
+
+It is curious to think of Milton composing such a drama in the midst of
+the theatrical revival of the Restoration.  Did ever poet set himself
+in such opposition to the literary current of his day?  Dryden's
+unbounded admiration for him is well known: but he understood the
+genius of _Paradise Lost_ so little as to make an opera out of it, and
+he must have understood even less of Samson.  The drama was then so
+much the most fashionable form of literature that he may have felt that
+in writing _The State of Innocence_ and its preface he was taking the
+best means of directing public attention to _Paradise Lost_.  But he
+would scarcely have tried to do the same for _Samson_.  He had wished,
+perhaps, as Mr. Verrall has suggested, to write an epic and had failed
+to do so: hence his profound reverence for the man who had not failed.
+But he had written many dramas and here he had succeeded: he had
+pleased both his {241} contemporaries and himself.  He would feel no
+need there to take lessons from Milton.  Nor is he to be blamed.  He
+and his fellow dramatists are justly criticized for many things, but
+there is nothing to complain of in their unlikeness to Milton.  They
+wrote for the stage.  He avowedly did not.  They wrote in the spirit of
+the theatre of their day, with the object of providing themselves with
+a little money and "the town" with a few hours of more or less
+intellectual amusement.  He wrote out of his own mind and soul, not for
+the entertainment of the idle folk of his own or any other day, but for
+men who in all times and countries should prove capable of knowing a
+great work when they saw it.  Besides, his contemporary dramatists
+followed, quite legitimately, the theatrical traditions of England or
+France: he the very different dramatic system of the Greeks.  His drama
+is what Greek tragedies were, an act of religion.  It could take its
+place quite naturally, as they did, as part of a great national
+religious festival performed on a holy day.  It is like them in the
+solemn music of its utterance: in its deep sense of the gravity of the
+issues on which human life hangs.  It is like them also in technical
+points such as the use of a Chorus to give expression to the {242}
+spectator's emotions, the paucity of actors present on the stage at any
+moment, the curious imitation, to be seen also in _Comus_, of the Greek
+_stichomuthia_, in which a verbal passage of arms is conducted on the
+principle of giving each speaker one line for his attack or retort.
+
+There are, indeed, some fundamental differences.  They are important
+enough to have led so great a critic as Professor Jebb to argue that
+Milton's drama is too Hebrew to be Hellenic at all.  His point is that
+Greek tragedy aims at producing an imaginative pleasure by arousing a
+"sense, on the one hand, of the heroic in man; on the other hand, of a
+superhuman controlling power"; and he asserts that this is not the
+method adopted by Milton in _Samson_.  Samson is throughout a free man;
+his misfortunes are the fruit of his own folly.  God is still on his
+side and his death is a patriotic triumph, not, like the death of
+Heracles, who resembles him in so many ways, merely the final proof of
+the all-powerful malignity of fate.
+
+No one will venture to differ from Jebb on such a question without a
+sense of great temerity.  But perhaps the truth is that one who had
+lived all his life, as Jebb had, in the closest intimacy with the Greek
+drama, would be apt to feel small differences from {243} it too much
+and broad resemblances too little.  To the shepherd all his sheep
+differ from each other: the danger for him is to forget, what the
+ignorant stranger sees, that they are also all very much alike.  So
+Jebb is no doubt perfectly right in the distinction he makes: but he is
+surely blinded by his own knowledge when he argues from it that _Samson
+Agonistes_ "is a great poem and a noble drama; but neither as poem nor
+as drama is it Hellenic."  Of that question comparative ignorance is
+perhaps a better judge.  For it can still see that the broad division
+which separates the world's drama into two kinds is a real thing, and
+that Milton's drama belongs in spite of differences unquestionably to
+the Greek kind and not to the other, both by its method and by its
+spirit.  There can be no real doubt that it is far more like the
+_Prometheus_ or the _Oedipus_ than it is like _Hamlet_ or _All for
+Love_.  Probably no great tragedy of any sort can be made without that
+sense of the contrast between man's will and the "superhuman
+controlling power" of which Jebb speaks as peculiarly Greek.  Certainly
+it is present in the greatest of Shakspeare's tragedies, and not seldom
+finds open expression.  "There's a divinity that shapes our ends."
+
+{244}
+
+But the point is that in _Samson_, the note of which is always the
+classical, never the mystical or romantic, this sense is present, not
+in Shakspeare's way, but substantially in the Greek way.  The fact that
+Samson is free and that his God is his friend does not prevent his
+feeling just in the Greek way that God's ways are dark and inscrutable,
+past man's finding out, and far above out of the reach of his control.
+It does not prevent his being helpless as well as heroic, fully
+conscious that all his strength leaves him still a weak child at the
+absolute disposal of incomprehensible Omnipotence.  So the whole
+atmosphere of the play, as well as its formal mould, will always recall
+the Greek tragedies.  And rightly: the likenesses of every kind are far
+greater than the differences.  The distinctions which led Jebb to
+declare it was not Hellenic at all are far less important than the
+kinship which made a still greater critic, the poet Goethe, declare
+that it had "more of the antique spirit than any production of any
+other modern poet."
+
+A more obvious and perhaps more important difference than that on which
+Jebb lays such stress is, of course, the fundamental one that the Greek
+plays were written for performance and that many of them have {245}
+elaborately contrived "plots."  No one supposes that _Samson_ would be
+effective on the stage; but the modern dramatist who could make his
+play as exciting to the spectator as the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ or
+_Electra_ of Sophocles, or the _Hippolytus_ or _Medea_ of Euripides,
+would assuredly be no ordinary playwright.  This Milton did not
+attempt.  His drama resembles rather the earlier Greek tragedies where
+the lyrical element is still the principal thing while the "plot" and
+the persons who act its story play a comparatively subordinate part.
+It is, at any rate in form, more like Aeschylus than Sophocles, and
+more like the _Persae_ and the _Prometheus_ than the Oresteian Trilogy.
+To the _Prometheus_, indeed, it bears particularly close and obvious
+resemblances; for instance, both have a heroic and defiant prisoner as
+their principal figure, and as their minor figures a succession of
+friends and enemies who visit him.
+
+However, literary parallels and precedents of this kind are perhaps
+rather interesting than important.  Milton's greatness is his own.
+Only the fact remains that, as it was of an order that need not fear to
+measure itself with the Greeks and as he happened to put its dramatic
+expression into a Greek form, he has given us something which comes far
+{246} nearer to producing on us the particular impression of sublimity
+made by the greatest Greek dramas than anything else in English or
+perhaps in any modern language.  In English nothing worth mentioning of
+the kind has been attempted, till in our own day the present Poet
+Laureate wrote his _Prometheus the Fire-Giver_ and _Achilles in
+Scyros_.  But, interesting and beautiful as these are, they make no
+pretence to rival _Samson Agonistes_.  They are altogether on a smaller
+scale of art, of thought, of emotion.
+
+_Samson Agonistes_ is Milton's last word and on the whole his saddest.
+Yet the final effect of great art is never sad.  The sense of greatness
+transcends all pain.  In the preface of _Samson_ Milton alludes to
+Aristotle's remark that it is the function of tragedy to effect through
+pity and fear a proper purgation of these emotions.  Whatever be the
+precise meaning of that famous and disputed sentence, there is no doubt
+that Milton gives part of its general import truly enough when he
+paraphrases it "to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind
+of delight stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well
+imitated."  And its application extends far beyond the mere field of
+tragedy.  So far as other kinds of poetry, or indeed any of the arts,
+deal with {247} subjects that arouse any of the deeper human emotions,
+the law of purification by a kind of delight is one by which they stand
+or fall.  A crucifixion which is merely painful, as many primitive
+crucifixions are, or merely disgusting, as many later ones are, is so
+far a failure.  It has not done the work art has to do.  Shakspeare
+knew this well enough, though he very likely never thought about it.
+The final word of his great tragedies is one of sorrow overpassed and
+transformed.  "The rest is silence;" "Dost thou not see my baby at my
+breast That sucks the nurse asleep?" "I have almost forgot the taste of
+fears;" "My heart doth joy that yet in all my life I found no man but
+he was true to me!"  This is the note always struck before the very end
+comes.  And Milton, so unlike Shakspeare both as man and as artist, is
+no less conspicuous than he in the strict observance of this practice.
+All his poems, without exception, end in quietness and confidence.  The
+beauty of the last lines of _Paradise Lost_, to which early critics
+were so strangely blind, is now universally celebrated--
+
+  "Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
+  The world was all before them, where to choose
+{248}
+  Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
+  They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
+  Through Eden took their solitary way."
+
+The storm and stress of day are over and are followed by the
+passionless quiet of evening.  So in _Paradise Regained_.  A modern
+poet would have been tempted to end at line 635, with a kind of
+dramatic fall of the curtain--
+
+        "on thy glorious work
+  Now enter, and begin to save Mankind."
+
+Not so Milton.  As after the most aweinspiring death known to
+literature the _Oedipus Coloneus_ closes on the note of acquiescent
+peace--
+
+  "Come, cease lamentation, lift it up no more;
+    for verily these things stand fast;"
+
+so Milton ends the long debate of his poem, not with victory, but with
+silence--
+
+        "He, unobserved,
+  Home to his mother's house private returned."
+
+It is indeed just the opposite in one way of the conclusion of
+_Paradise Lost_.  The man and woman who had fallen before the Tempter
+had no home to return to: they must seek a new "place of rest"
+elsewhere in the new world that was before them.  The Man who {249} had
+vanquished him could go back quietly to the home of his childhood.  But
+the contrast is external, the likeness essential.  For the first man as
+well as the second there is an appointed place of rest and a Providence
+to guide: the two poems can both end on the same note of that peace
+which follows upon the right understanding of all great experiences.
+
+This, which is only implied in his earlier poems, is almost expressly
+set forth in the last of all Milton's words, the already quoted
+conclusion of Samson--
+
+  "His servants He, with new acquist
+  Of true experience from this great event,
+  With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
+  And calm of mind, all passion spent."
+
+
+Milton was a passionate man who lived in passionate times.  Neither his
+passions nor those of the men of his day are of very much matter to us
+now.  But the art in which he "spent" them, in which, that is to say,
+he embodied, transcended and glorified them, till through it he and we
+alike attain to consolation and calm, is an eternal possession not only
+of the English race but of the whole world.
+
+
+
+
+{250}
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+The literature that in one way or another deals with Milton is, of
+course, immense.  His name fills more than half of one of the volumes
+of the great British Museum Catalogue, more than sixteen pages being
+devoted to the single item of _Paradise Lost_.  They afford perhaps the
+most striking of all proofs of the universality of his genius; for they
+include translations into no fewer than eighteen languages, many of
+which possess a large choice of versions.  Into more than a very small
+fraction of such a vast field it is obviously impossible to enter here.
+Only a few notes can be given, under the four headings of Poetry,
+Prose, Biography and Criticism.
+
+
+POETRY
+
+Of the poetry, it may be worth saying, though MSS. hardly come within
+the scope of a brief bibliography of this sort, that a manuscript,
+mainly in the handwriting of Milton himself and containing many of his
+early poems, is preserved in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
+The printed copies, of course, begin with those published in his own
+lifetime.  They contain practically the whole of his poetry.  The most
+important are the volume containing his early poems issued in 1645,
+_Paradise Lost_ which first appeared in 1667, _Paradise Regained_ and
+_Samson Agonistes_ which followed in 1671, and a re-issue in 1673, with
+additions, of the volume of his minor poems already printed in 1646.
+The first complete edition was _The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton_,
+issued by Jacob Tonson in 1695.
+
+So much for the bare text.  Annotation naturally soon followed.  The
+earliest commentator was Patrick Hume who published an edition of the
+poems with notes on _Paradise Lost_ in 1695.  But the most famous,
+though also least important, of Milton's early critics was the greatest
+of English scholars, Richard Bentley, who in 1732 issued an edition of
+_Paradise Lost_ in which whole passages were relegated to the margin as
+the spurious interpolations of an imaginary editor.  Such a book is, of
+course, merely a curiosity connecting two {251} great names.  The real
+beginning in the work of editing Milton as a classic should be edited
+was made by Thomas Newton, afterwards Bishop of Bristol, who in 1749
+brought out an edition of _Paradise Lost_, "with Notes of Various
+Authors," and followed it in 1752 with a similar volume including
+_Paradise Regained_ and the minor poems.  Newton's work was often
+reprinted, and remained the standard edition till it was superseded by
+that of the Rev. H. J. Todd which first appeared in 1801.  The final
+issue of Todd is that of 1826 in six volumes which, in spite of many
+notes which are defective, many which are antiquated and some which are
+superfluous, may still claim to be the best library edition of Milton.
+Among the best of those which have appeared since are Thomas
+Keightley's, published in 1859, which contains excellent notes, and
+Prof. David Masson's, which is the work of the most learned and devoted
+of all Milton's editors.  Both of these have the advantage of Todd in
+some respects; Keightley in acuteness and penetration, Masson in
+completeness of knowledge.  But no single editor's work can be a
+perfect substitute for a _variorum_ edition like that of Todd, giving
+the comments and suggestions of many different minds.  The most
+complete edition of Masson's work is the final library one in three
+volumes, 1890; there is also a convenient smaller issue, based on this,
+but omitting some of its editorial matter.  It was last printed in
+three volumes 1893.  It contains a Memoir, rather elaborate
+Introductions to all the poems, an Essay on Milton's English and
+Versification, and reduced Notes.
+
+A text with Critical Notes by W. Aldis Wright was issued by the
+Cambridge University Press in one volume, 1903.  The text of the
+earliest printed editions of the several poems was reprinted in 1900 in
+an edition prepared for the Clarendon Press by the Rev. H. C. Beeching.
+
+It may be worth while adding that Milton's Latin and Italian poems were
+translated by the poet Cowper and printed in 1808 by his biographer,
+Hayley, in a beautiful quarto volume with designs by Flaxman.  These
+translations are reprinted in the "Aldine" edition of Milton, 1826.
+Masson has also given translations of most of them in his _Life of
+Milton_ and in his 1890 library edition of the Poems.
+
+
+PROSE
+
+The Prose works were, of course, mostly issued as books or pamphlets in
+Milton's lifetime.  They were collected by Toland in three volumes
+_folio_, 1698.  There are several more modern editions; as that
+published in 1806 in seven volumes {252} with a _Life_ by Charles
+Symmons; that of Pickering, who included them in his fine eight-volume
+edition.  _The Works of John Milton in Verse and Prose, Edited by John
+Mitford, 1851_; and that in Bohn's Standard Library, in six volumes,
+edited, with some notes of a somewhat controversial character, by J. A.
+St. John, 1848.  The first volume of a new edition edited by Sir Sidney
+Lee appeared in 1905.  One of the most curious of the prose works, the
+_De Doctrina Christiana_ or _Treatise of Christian Doctrine_, was not
+known till 1823, when it was discovered in the State Paper Office.  It
+was edited, with an English translation, by the Rev. C. R. Sumner in
+1825 and is included in Bohn's edition.
+
+
+BIOGRAPHY
+
+The earliest sources for the biography of Milton, outside his own
+works, are the account given in the _Fasti Oxonienses_ of Anthony à
+Wood, 1691, the _Brief Lives of John Aubrey_, and the Life prefixed by
+the poet's nephew, Edward Phillips, to an edition of the _Letters of
+State_, printed in 1694.  A very large number of _Lives of Milton_ have
+been written since, based on these materials and those collected from a
+few other sources.  The most famous and in some ways the best, in spite
+of its unfairness, is that of Johnson, to be found in his _Lives of the
+Poets_.  The best short modern Life is Mark Pattison's masterly, though
+occasionally wilful, little book in the English Men of letters Series.
+For the library and for students all other biographies have been
+superseded by the great work of David Masson, who spared no labours to
+investigate every smallest detail of the life of Milton and to place
+the whole in the setting of an elaborate history of England in Milton's
+day.  The value of the book is somewhat impaired by the very strong
+Puritan and anti-Cavalier partisanship of the writer; and its style
+suffers from an imitation of Carlyle.  But nothing can seriously
+detract from the immense debt every student of Milton owes to the
+author of this monumental biography which appeared in seven volumes,
+1859-1894.
+
+An interesting critical discussion of the various portraits
+representing or alleged to represent Milton is prefixed to the
+Catalogue of the Exhibition held at Christ's College Cambridge during
+the Milton Tercentenary in 1908.  It is by Dr. G. C. Williamson.
+
+
+CRITICISM
+
+A poet at once so learned and so great as Milton inevitably invited
+criticism.  The first and most generous of his critics {253} was his
+great rival Dryden, who, in a few words of the preface to _The State of
+Innocence_, published the year after Milton's death, led the note of
+praise, which has been echoed ever since by speaking of _Paradise Lost_
+as "one of the greatest, most noble and most sublime poems which either
+this age or nation has produced."  The next great name in the list is
+that of Addison, who contributed a series of papers on Milton to the
+_Spectator_ in 1712.  Like all criticism except the work of the supreme
+masters, they are written too exclusively from the point of view of
+their own day to retain more than a small fraction of their value after
+two hundred years have passed.  But they are of considerable historical
+interest and may still be read with pleasure, like everything written
+by Addison.  A less sympathetic but finer piece of work is the critical
+part of Johnson's famous _Life_.  It is full of crudities of every
+sort, such as the notorious remark that "no man could have fancied that
+he read _Lycidas_ with pleasure had he not known the author"; and
+perhaps nothing Johnson over wrote displayed more nakedly the narrow
+limits of his appreciation of poetry.  But, in spite of all its
+defects, it exhibits its writer's great gifts; and its absolute and
+unshrinking sincerity, its half-reluctant utterance of some of the
+truest praise ever spoken of Milton, its profound knowledge of the way
+in which the human mind approaches both literature and life, will
+always preserve it as one of the most interesting criticisms which
+Milton has provoked.  Johnson's friend, Thomas Warton, in his edition
+of the minor poems issued in 1785, led the way to an understanding of
+much in Milton to which Johnson and his school were entirely blind.
+This movement has continued ever since, and is seen in the immense
+influence Milton had upon the poets of the nineteenth century,
+especially upon Wordsworth and Keats; an influence of exactly the
+opposite sort to that which he exercised with such disastrous effect
+upon many poets of the century immediately succeeding his own.  It is
+also seen in the finer intelligence of the critical studies of his
+work.  These are far too many to mention here.  Among the best are
+Hazlitt's Lecture on Shakspeare and Milton in his _Lectures on the
+English Poets_; Matthew Arnold's speech at the unveiling of a Milton
+memorial, printed in the second series of his _Essays in Criticism_;
+Sir Walter Raleigh's volume, _Milton_, published in 1900, and _The
+Epic_, by Lascelles Abercrombie, 1914, which is full of fine and
+suggestive criticism of Milton.  _Milton's Prosody by Robert Bridges,
+1901_, is the best study of the metre and scansion of Milton's later
+poems, especially of _Paradise Lost_.
+
+
+
+
+{254}
+
+INDEX TO PRINCIPAL PERSONS, PLACES, AND WORKS MENTIONED
+
+  Abercrombie, L., 136-7, 253
+  _Absalom and Achitophel_, 105
+  _Achilles in Scyros_, 246
+  Addison, Joseph, 77, 253
+  _Adonais_, 125
+  _Ad Patrem_, 39-40.
+  _Aeneid, The_, 150, 175, 196
+  Aeschylus, 245
+  À Kempis, Thomas, 147
+  Aldersgate Street, 46
+  _All for Love_, 243
+  _Allegro, L'_, 41, 70, 93, 99, 106 _et sqq._, 123, 239
+  Anglesey, Earl of, 72, 82
+  Annesley, Arthur, 72
+  Aquinas, Thomas, 157
+  _Arbuthnot, Epistle to_, 105
+  _Arcades_, 41, 42
+  _Arcadia_, 58
+  _Areopagitica_, 44, 49, 64
+  Arianism, 204
+  Ariosto, 153
+  Aristotle, 86, 200
+  Arnold Matthew, 164, 253
+  Arthurian Epic (planned), 45, 148-9
+  _At a Solemn Music_, 13, 42, 97, 100, 103, 147
+  Athens, 205-6, 209
+  Aubrey, John, 29, 252
+
+  Barbican, the, 54
+  Baroni, Leonora, 44-5
+  Barrow, Samuel, 82
+  Beeching, Rev. H. C., 251
+  Bentley, Richard, 250
+  Bibliography, 250-3
+  Blake, Admiral, 57
+  Bohn's Standard Library, 252
+  Bow Church, 25
+  Bread Street, 24, 75
+  Bridges, Robert, 26, 108, 222, 223, 246, 253
+  _Brief Lives_, 252
+  Buckingham, Duke of, 58
+  Byron, Lord, 90
+
+  Cambridge, 28, 29, 30, 31-7, 39, 42, 85, 120, 121, 124, 250, 252
+  Carlyle, Thomas, 262
+  Caroline, Queen, 77
+  Charles I, 11, 28, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72, 86
+  Charles II, 47, 60, 65, 71, 73, 82, 86
+  Chaucer, Geoffrey, 90, 111
+  Christina, Queen of Sweden, 60
+  Christ's College, Cambridge, 28, 29, 120, 121, 124, 252
+  Clarendon, Earl of, 73
+  Clarges, Sir Thomas, 72
+  Coleridge, S. T., 206
+  _Comus_, 13, 41, 42, 95, 100, 110, 112-13 _et sqq._, 128, 242
+  Constable, 135
+  Coriolanus, 85
+  Cowper, William, 69, 251
+  Criticisms, 252-3
+  Cromwell, Oliver, 55, 57, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 133, 139, 176
+
+  Dante, 10, 11-12, 33, 120, 153-7
+  _Daphnaïda_, 125
+  Davenant, William, 72
+  _Defensio Regia_, 60, 61
+  _Defensio Secunda_, 61
+  De Quincey, Thomas, 96
+  Diodati, Charles, 42, 124, 125
+  _Divina Commedia, La_, 120, 157
+  Divorce pamphlets, 50 _et sqq._
+  _Doctrina Christiana, De_, 252
+  Dorset, Earl of, 81
+  Dowland, Robert, 28
+  Drayton, Michael, 124
+  Drummond, William, 124, 135
+  Dryden, John, 80-2, 90, 103, 104-5, 117, 241, 253
+
+  _Eikon Basilike_, the, 57-8
+  _Eikonoklastes_, 58, 61
+  _Electra, The_, 245
+  Elizabeth, Queen, 85
+  _English Men of Letters Series_, 252
+  _Epic, The_, 253
+  Epigrams, Latin, on La Baroni, 45
+  _Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester_, 36, 37, 97, 103
+  _Epitaphium Damonis_, 124
+  _Essays in Criticism_, 253
+  Euripides, 77, 82, 245
+  _Excursion, The_, 136, 228-9
+
+  _Faerie Queen, The_, 115
+  Fairfax, General, 139, 171
+  _Faithful Shepherdess, The_, 115
+  _Fasti Oxonienses_, 252
+  _Faust_, 196
+  Fire of London, 75
+  Flaxman, John, 251
+  Fletcher, John, 107, 115
+  Florence, 43, 44, 46
+  France, 43, 46, 59
+
+  Galileo, 44, 45
+  _Gerusalemme Conquistata_ (Tasso), 45
+  Gibbons, Orlando, 28
+  Goethe, J. W. von, 230, 244
+  Gorges, Mrs., 125
+  Grotius, Hugo, 43
+
+  _Hamlet_, 24, 243
+  Hampden, John, 171
+  Hayley, William, 251
+  Hazlitt, William, 253
+  _Hippolytus_, 245
+  _History of Britain_, 78
+  Homer, 77, 82, 84, 89, 152, 153, 155, 171, 230
+  Horace, 69
+  Horton, 37, 40, 41, 42, 111
+  Hume, Patrick, 250
+
+  _Iliad, The_, 154, 155, 157, 162
+  _Imitation, The, of Christ_, 147-8
+  Indemnity, Act of, 72, 73, 74
+  Independent Army, The, 55, 56
+  Italian travels, 43-6
+
+  James I, 58
+  Jebb, Prof., 242-3, 244
+  _Job, Book of_, 21, 82
+  Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 125, 126, 160, 162, 175, 194, 196, 206,
+    207, 227, 252, 253
+  Jones, Inigo, 16, 114
+  Jonson, Ben, 114, 115
+
+  Keats, John, 79, 90, 102, 110, 125, 253
+  Keightley, Thomas, 251
+  King, Edward, 42, 91, 124, 125, 127, 128-31
+
+  Landor, Walter Savage, 132
+  Lawes, Henry, 41, 82, 91, 116, 119
+  Lawrence, Henry, 69-70, 133
+  _Lectures on the English Poets_, 253
+  Lee, Sir Sidney, 252
+  _Letters of State_, 252
+  Lives of Milton, 251, 252, 253
+  _Lives of the Poets_, 252
+  London, 25, 49; fire of, 75
+  Long Parliament, 47, 63, 64, 171
+  _Lycidas_, 13, 41, 42, 90, 91, 100, 106, 123 _et sqq._
+
+  Mackail, J. W., 94-5, 206, 211
+  Manso, Giovanni, 45
+  Marini, 45
+  Marlowe, Christopher, 107
+  Marvell, Andrew, 69, 73
+  Massacres in Piedmont, sonnets on, 68, 133, 139, 140-1
+  Masson, D., 24, 52, 68, 73, 75, 251
+  _Medea, The_, 245
+  Meredith, George, 134
+  _Milton_, 253
+  _Milton's Prosody_, 224, 253
+  Milton's relations:--
+    Daughters, 11, 54, 69, 75-77, 218
+      Deborah, 77-8
+    Father, 27, 29, 37, 38-40, 42, 43, 49, 54, 75
+    Infant son, 76
+    Mother, 40
+    Nephews, 46, 54, 61, 70, 252
+    Wives--
+      First, _see_ Powell, Mary.
+      Second, 54, 69, 71
+      Third, 54
+  Mitford, John, 252
+  Monk, General, 72
+  Morley, Thomas, 28
+  Morrice, --, 72
+  Morus, 69
+
+  Napoleon, 9, 139
+  Newbolt, Henry, 120
+  Newton, Thomas, 251
+
+  _Ode on the Nativity_, 35-6, 37, 91, 93-4, 97, 98-103
+  _Odyssey, The_, 162, 196
+  _Oedipus Coloneus_, 237, 248
+  _Oedipus Tyrannus_, 233, 238, 243
+  _On Attaining the Age of Twenty-three_, sonnet, 91, 133
+  _On His Blindness_, sonnet, 62-3, 133
+  _On the Death of a Fair Infant_, 35, 97-9
+  _Orations_, 34-5
+  _Othello_, 150
+  Ovid, 33, 77, 124
+
+  Pamphlets, 49, 56, 69, 71
+  _Paradise Lost_, 13, 24, 25, 28, 44, 47, 55, 71, 78, 79,
+    80, 82, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 101, 104, 106, 112, 113,
+    118, 120, 123, 125, 137, 142 _et sqq._, 196, 197 _et sqq._,
+    239, 240, 247, 248, 250, 251, 253
+  _Paradise Regained_, 13, 24, 44, 78, 167, 196 _et sqq._,
+    227, 248, 250, 251
+  _Passion, The_, 103
+  Pattison, Mark, 131, 132, 197, 252
+  _Penseroso, Il_, 41, 70, 93, 100, 106 _et sqq._, 239
+  _Persae, The_, 245
+  Petrarch, 33, 134, 135
+  Phillips, Edward, 252
+  Pickering, William, 252
+  Pindar, 117
+  Plato, 8, 9-10, 21, 111, 156
+  _Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue_, 115
+  _Poems, editions of_, 250-1, 252
+  _Poetical Works, The, of Mr. John Milton_, 250
+  Pope, A., 85, 90, 91, 105, 222, 223
+  Portraits, 252
+  Powell family, 50, 53
+  Powell, Mary, 50-4, 69, 71
+  _Prelude, The_, 136, 228-9
+  _Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio_, 60, 61
+  _Prometheus the Fire-Giver_, 246
+  _Prometheus Unbound_, 102
+  _Prometheus Vinctus_, 21, 243, 245
+  Prose Works, 47 _et sqq._, 251-2
+  Psalms, the, 139-40; paraphrases of, 95
+  Purcell, Henry, 16
+  Pym, John, 171
+
+  Raleigh, Sir Walter, 198, 253
+  Ranelagh, Lady, 69
+  _Ready and Easy Way A, to
+    Establish a Free Commonwealth_, 65
+  _Reason, The, of Church Government_, 13, 37
+  Regicides, the, 55, 63, 71, 74
+  Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 16
+  Rome, 44, 209
+  Rossetti, Dante G., 133, 135
+
+  St. Brides', Fleet Street, 46
+  St. Giles' Church, Cripplegate, 79
+  St. John, J. A., 252
+  St. Paul, 9, 144, 218
+  St. Paul's Cathedral, 89, 193
+  Salmasius, 59-62, 69, 218
+  _Samson Agonistes_, 13, 20, 24, 78, 83, 99, 199, 219 _et sqq._, 250
+  Sansovino's Library, Venice, 193
+  Saumaise, _see_ Salmasius.
+  Scudamore, Lord, 43
+  Shakspeare, W., 9, 14, 17, 32, 35, 36, 80, 85, 90, 103, 114, 118,
+    145, 166, 247; sonnets, 133-5, 253
+  Shelley, P. B., 20, 29, 50, 79, 90, 99, 102, 111, 125, 228
+  Shelley, Mrs. P. B., 50
+  Sidney, Sir Philip, 58, 98, 124, 135
+  Skinner, Cyriack, 62, 133
+  Smithfield, 72
+  _Song on May Morning_, 36, 107
+  _Sonnets_, 47, 54, 62-3, 68, 69, 91, 106, 131 _et sqq._
+  Sophocles, 82, 233, 245
+  _Spectator, The_, 253
+  Spenser, Edmund, 93, 97, 98, 111, 115, 116, 124, 125, 153
+  _State, The, of Innocence_, 240, 253
+  Statius, 157
+  Strafford, Earl of, 171
+  Sumner, Rev. C. R., 252
+  Symmons, Charles, 252
+
+  Tasso, Torquato, 45, 82, 153, 164
+  Tennyson, Alfred, 69, 90, 197
+  _Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_, 56, 58, 75
+  Theocritus, 124
+  Todd, Rev. H. J., 251
+  Toland, John, 251
+  Tonson, Jacob, 250
+  _Treatise of Christian Doctrine_, 252
+  Trinity College Library, 89, 250
+  Turner, J. W. M., 16
+  Tyburn, 71, 90
+
+  Verrall, A. W., 240
+  Virgil, 82, 84, 89, 91, 124, 139, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 163, 175
+  _Vita Nuova, La_, 120
+
+  Waller, Edmund, 104
+  Warton, Joseph, 118, 126, 214
+  Warton, Thomas, 253
+  Whitehall, 58, 70, 74, 219
+  Williamson, Dr. G. C., 252
+  Winchester, Marchioness of, 36
+  Windsor, 37
+  Windsor Castle, 40
+  Wood, Anthony à, 31, 35, 252
+  Wordsworth, W., 26, 34, 79, 90, 131, 133, 135, 137, 140, 141,
+    206, 227-30; sonnets, 137-41, 253
+  _Works, The, of John Milton, in Prose and Verse_, 252
+  Wren, Sir Christopher, 16, 89
+  Wright, W. Aldis, 251
+
+  Young, Thomas, 27
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Milton, by John Bailey
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