everything that was ridiculous. I do not speak of the gallantries of Whitehall, which figure so prominently in the histories of the reign. Far too much is made of these, when they are made the scapegoat of the moralist. The style of court manners was a mere incident on the surface of social life. The national life was more profoundly tainted by the discouragement of all good men, which penetrated every shire and every parish, than by the distant reports of the loose behaviour of Charles II. Servility, meanness, venality, time-serving, and a disbelief in virtue diffused themselves over the nation like a pestilential miasma, the depressing influence of which was heavy, even upon those souls which individually resisted the poison. The heroic age of England had passed away, not by gradual decay, by imperceptible degeneration, but in a year, in a single day, like the winter’s snow in Greece. It is for the historian to describe, and unfold the sources of this contagion. The biographer of Milton has to take note of the political change only as it affected the worldly circumstances of the man, the spiritual environment of the poet, and the springs of his inspiration.
The consequences of the Restoration to Milton’s worldly fortunes were disastrous. As a partisan he was necessarily involved in the ruin of his party. As a matter of course he lost his Latin secretaryship. There is a story that he was offered to be continued in it, and that when urged to accept the offer by his wife, he replied, “Thou art in the right; you, as other women, would ride in your coach; for me, my aim is to live and die an honest man.” This tradition, handed on by Pope, is of doubtful authenticity. It is not probable that the man who had printed of Charles I. what Milton had printed, could have been offered office under Charles II. Even were court favour to be purchased by concessions, Milton was not the man to make them, or to belie his own antecedents, as Marchmont, Needham, Dryden, and so many others did. Our wish for Milton is that he should have placed himself from the beginning above party. But he had chosen to be the champion of a party, and he loyally accepted the consequences. He escaped with life and liberty. The reaction, though barbarous in its treatment of its victims, was not bloodthirsty. Milton was already punished by the loss of his sight, and he was now mulcted in three-fourths of his small fortune. A sum of 2000 l. which he had placed in government securities was lost, the restored monarchy refusing to recognise the obligations of the protectorate. He lost another like sum by mismanagement, and for want of good advice, says Phillips, or according to his granddaughter’s statement, by the dishonesty of a money-scrivener. He had also to give up, without compensation, some property, valued at 60 l. a year, which he had purchased when the estates of the Chapter of Westminster were sold. In the great fire, 1666, his house in Bread-street was destroyed. Thus, from easy circumstances, he was reduced, if not to destitution, at least to narrow means. He left at his death 1500 l., which Phillips calls a considerable sum. And if he sold his books, one by one, during his lifetime, this was because, knowing their value, he thought he could dispose of them to greater advantage than his wife would be able to do.
But far outweighing such considerations as pecuniary ruin, and personal discomfort, was the shock which the moral nature felt from the irretrievable discomfiture of all the hopes, aims, and aspirations which had hitherto sustained and nourished his soul. In a few months the labour of twenty years was swept away without a trace of it being left. It was not merely a political defeat of his party, it was the total wreck of the principles, of the social and religious ideal, with which Milton’s life was bound up. Others, whose convictions only had been engaged in the cause, could hasten to accommodate themselves to the new era, or even to transfer their services to the conqueror. But such flighty allegiance was not possible for Milton, who had embarked in the Puritan cause not only intellectual convictions, but all the generosity and ardour of his passionate nature. “I conceive myself to be,” he had written in 1642, “not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was persuaded, and whereof I had declared myself openly to be the partaker.” It was now in the moment of overthrow that Milton became truly great. “Wandellos im ewigen Ruin,” he stood alone, and became the party himself. He took the only course open to him, turned away his thoughts from the political disaster, and directed the fierce enthusiasm which burned within, upon an absorbing poetic task. His outward hopes were blasted, and he returned with concentrated ardour to woo the muse, from whom he had so long truanted. The passion which seethes beneath the stately march of the verse in _Paradise Lost_, is not the hopeless moan of despair, but the intensified fanaticism which defies misfortune to make it “bate one jot of heart or hope.” The grand loneliness of Milton after 1668, “is reflected in his three great poems by a sublime independence of human sympathy, like that with which mountains fascinate and rebuff us” (_Lowell_).
Late then, but not too late, Milton, at the age of fifty-two, fell back upon the rich resources of his own mind, upon poetical composition, and the study of good books, which he always asserted to be necessary to nourish and sustain a poet’s imagination. Here he had to contend with the enormous difficulty of blindness. He engaged a kind of attendant to read to him. But this only sufficed for English books–imperfectly even for these–and the greater part of the choice, not extensive, library upon which Milton drew, was Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and the modern languages of Europe. In a letter to Heimbach, of date 1666, he complains pathetically of the misery of having to spell out, letter by letter, the Latin words of the epistle, to the attendant who was writing to his dictation. At last he fell upon the plan of engaging young friends, who occasionally visited him, to read to him and to write for him. In the precious volume of Milton MSS. preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, six different hands have been distinguished. Who they were is not always known. But Phillips tells us that, “he had daily about him one or other to read to him; some persons of man’s estate, who of their own accord greedily catch’d at the opportunity of being his reader, that they might as well reap the benefit of what they read to him, as oblige him by the benefit of their reading; others of younger years sent by their parents to the same end.” Edward Phillips himself, who visited his uncle to the last, may have been among the number, as much as his own engagements as tutor, first to the only son of John Evelyn, then in the family of the Earl of Pembroke, and finally to the Bennets, Lord Arlington’s children, would permit him. Others of these casual readers were Samuel Barrow, body physician to Charles II., and Cyriac Skinner, of whom mention has been already made (above, p. 132).
To a blind man, left with three little girls, of whom the youngest was only eight at the Restoration, marriage seemed equally necessary for their sake as for his own. Milton consulted his judicious friend and medical adviser, Dr. Paget, who recommended to him Elizabeth Minshull, of a family of respectable position near Nantwich, in Cheshire. She was some distant relation of Paget, who must have felt the terrible responsibility of undertaking to recommend. She justified his selection. The marriage took place in February 1663, and during the remaining eleven years of his life, the poet was surrounded by the thoughtful attentions of an active and capable woman. There is but scanty evidence as to what she was like, either in person or character. Aubrey, who knew her, says she was “a gent. (genteel?) person, (of) a peaceful and agreeable humour.” Newton, Bishop of Bristol, who wrote in 1749, had heard that she was “a woman of a most violent spirit, and a hard mother-in-law to his children.” It is certain that she regarded her husband with great veneration, and studied his comfort. Mary Fisher, a maidservant in the house, deposed that at the end of his life, when he was sick and infirm, his wife having provided something for dinner she thought he would like, he “spake to his said wife these or like words, as near as this deponent can remember: ‘God have mercy, Betty, I see thou wilt perform according to thy promise, in providing me such dishes as I think fit while I live, and when I die thou knowest I have left thee all.'” There is no evidence that his wife rendered him literary assistance. Perhaps, as she looked so thoroughly to his material comfort, her function was held, by tacit agreement, to end there.
As casual visitors, or volunteer readers, were not always in the way, and a hired servant who could not spell Latin was of very restricted use, it was not unnatural that Milton should look to his daughters, as they grew up, to take a share in supplying his voracious demand for intellectual food. Anne, the eldest, though she had handsome features, was deformed and had an impediment in her speech, which made her unavailable as a reader. The other two, Mary and Deborah, might now have been of inestimable service to their father, had their dispositions led them to adapt themselves to his needs, and the circumstances of the house. Unfortunate it was for Milton, that his biblical views on the inferiority of woman had been reduced to practice in the bringing up of his own daughters. It cannot indeed be said that the poet whose imagination created the Eve of _Paradise Lost_, regarded woman as the household drudge, existing only to minister to man’s wants. Of all that men have said of women nothing is more loftily conceived than the well-known passage at the end of Book viii.:–
When I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems, And in herself complete, so well to know Her own, that what she wills to do or say Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best; All higher knowledge in her presence falls Degraded; wisdom in discourse with her Loses discountenanc’d, 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 plac’d.
Bishop Newton thought that, in drawing Eve, Milton had in mind his third wife, because she had hair of the colour of Eve’s “golden tresses.” But Milton had never seen Elizabeth Minshull. If reality suggested any trait, physical or mental, of the Eve, it would certainly have been some woman seen in earlier years.
But wherever Milton may have met with an incarnation of female divinity such as he has drawn, it was not in his own family. We cannot but ask, how is it that one, whose type of woman is the loftiest known to English literature, should have brought up his own daughters on so different a model? Milton is not one of the false prophets, who turn round and laugh at their own enthusiasms, who say one thing in their verses, and another thing over their cups. What he writes in his poetry is what he thinks, what he means, and what he will do. But in directing the bringing up of his daughters, he put his own typical woman entirely on one side. His practice is framed on the principle that
Nothing lovelier can be found In woman, than to study household good.
_Paradise Lost_, ix. 233.
He did not allow his daughters to learn any language, saying with a gibe that one tongue was enough for a woman. They were not sent to any school, and had some sort of teaching at home from a mistress. But in order to make them useful in reading to him, their father was at the pains to train them to read aloud in five or six languages, of none of which they understood one word. When we think of the time and labour which must have been expended to teach them to do this, it must occur to us that a little more labour would have sufficed to teach them so much of one or two of the languages, as would have made their reading a source of interest and improvement to themselves. This Milton refused to do. The consequence was, as might have been expected, the occupation became so irksome to them, that they rebelled against it. In the case of one of them, Mary, who was like her mother in person, and took after her in other respects, this restiveness passed into open revolt. She first resisted, then neglected, and finally came to hate, her father. When some one spoke in her presence of her father’s approaching marriage, she said “that was no news to hear of his wedding; but if she could hear of his death, that was something.” She combined with Anne, the eldest daughter, “to counsel his maidservant to cheat him in his marketings.” They sold his books without his knowledge. “They made nothing of deserting him,” he was often heard to complain. They continued to live with him five or six years after his marriage. But at last the situation became intolerable to both parties, and they were sent out to learn embroidery in gold or silver, as a means of obtaining their livelihood. Deborah, the youngest, was included in the same arrangement, though she seems to have been more helpful to her father, and to have been at one time his principal reader. Aubrey says that he “taught her Latin, and that she was his amanuensis.” She even spoke of him when she was old–she lived to be seventy-four–with some tenderness. She was once, in 1725, shewn Faithorne’s crayon drawing of the poet, without being told for whom it was intended. She immediately exclaimed, “O Lord! that is the picture of my father!” and stroking down the hair of her forehead, added, “Just so my father wore his hair.”
One of Milton’s volunteer readers, and one to whom we owe the most authentic account of him in his last years, was a young Quaker, named Thomas Ellwood. Milton’s Puritanism had been all his life slowly gravitating in the direction of more and more liberty, and though he would not attach himself to any sect, he must have felt in no remote sympathy with men who repudiated state interference in religious matters, and disdained ordinances. Some such sympathy with the pure spirituality of the Quaker may have disposed Milton favourably towards Ellwood. The acquaintance once begun, was cemented by mutual advantage. Milton, besides securing an intelligent reader, had a pleasure in teaching; and Ellwood, though the reverse of humble, was teachable from desire to expand himself. Ellwood took a lodging near the poet, and went to him every day, except “first-day,” in the afternoon, to read Latin to him.
Milton’s frequent change of abode has been thought indicative of a restless temperament, seeking escape from petty miseries by change of scene. On emerging from hiding, or escaping from the serjeant-at-arms in 1660, he lived or a short time in Holborn, near Red Lion Square. From this he removed to Jewin Street, and moved again, on his marriage, in 1662, to the house of Millington, the bookseller, who was now beginning business, but who, before his death in 1704, had accumulated the largest stock of second-hand books to be found in London. His last remove was to a house in a newly-created row facing the Artillery-ground, on the site of the west side of what is now called Bunhill Row. This was his abode from his marriage till his death, nearly twelve years, a longer stay than he had made in any other residence. This is the house which, must be associated with the poet of _Paradise Lost_, as it was here that the poem was in part written, and wholly revised and finished. Bat the Bunhill Row house is only producible “by the imagination; every trace of it has long been swept away, though the name Milton Street, bestowed upon a neighbouring street, preserves the remembrance of the poet’s connexion with the locality. Here “an ancient clergyman of Dorsetshire, Dr. Wright, found John Milton in a small chamber, “hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow-chair, and dressed neatly in black; pale, but not cadaverous, his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones.” At the door of this house, sitting in the sun, looking out upon the Artillery-ground, “in a, grey coarse cloth coat,” he would receive his visitors. On colder days he would walk for hours–three or four hours at a time. In his garden. A garden was a _sine qua non_, and he took care to have one to every house he lived in.
His habit in early life had been to study late into the night. After he lost his sight, he changed his hours, and retired to rest at nine. In summer he rose at four, in winter at five, and began the day with having the Hebrew Scriptures read to him. “Then he contemplated. At seven his man came to him again, and then read to him and wrote till dinner. The writing was as much as the reading” (Aubrey). Then he took exercise, either walking in the garden, or swinging in a machine. His only recreation, besides conversation, was music. He played the organ and the bass viol, the organ most. Sometimes he would sing himself or get his wife to sing to him, though she had, he said, no ear, yet a good voice. Then he went up to his study to be read to till six. After six his friends were admitted to visit him, and would sit with him till eight. At eight he went down to supper, usually olives or some light thing. He was very abstemious in his diet, having to contend with a gouty diathesis. He was not fastidious in his choice of meats, but content with anything that was in season, or easy to be procured. After supping thus sparingly, he smoked a pipe of tobacco, drank a glass of water, and then retired to bed. He was sparing in his use of wine. His Samson, who in this as in other things, is Milton himself, allays his thirst “from the clear milky juice.”
Bed with its warmth and recumbent posture he found favourable to composition. At other times he would compose or prune his verses, as he walked in the garden, and then, coming in, dictate. His verse was not at the command of his will. Sometimes he would lie awake the whole night, trying but unable to make a single line. At other times lines flowed without premeditation “with a certain impetus and oestro.” What was his season of inspiration is somewhat uncertain. In the elegy “To Spring,” Milton says it was the spring which restored his poetic faculty. Phillips, however, says, “that his vein never flowed happily but from the autumnal equinox to the vernal,” and that the poet told him this. Phillips’ reminiscence is perhaps true at the date of _Paradise Lost_, when Milton’s habits had changed from what they had been at twenty. Or we may agree with Toland, that Phillips has transposed the seasons, though preserving the fact of intermittent inspiration. What he composed at night, he dictated in the day, sitting obliquely in an elbow-chair, with his leg thrown over the arm. He would dictate forty lines, as it were in a breath, and then reduce them to half the number.
Milton’s piety is admitted, even by his enemies; and it is a piety which oppresses his writings as well as his life, The fact that a man, with a deep sense of religion, should not have attended any place of public worship, has given great trouble to Milton’s biographers. And the principal biographers of this thorough-going nonconformist have been Anglican clergymen; Bishop Newton, Todd, Mitford; Dr. Johnson, more clerical than any cleric, being no exception, Mitford would give Milton a dispensation on the score of his age and infirmities. But the cause lay deeper. A profound apprehension of the spiritual world leads to a disregard of rites. To a mind so disposed externals become, first indifferent, then impedient. Ministration is officious intrusion. I do not find that Milton, though he wrote against paid ministers as hirelings, ever expressly formulated an opinion against ministers as such. But as has already been hinted, there grew up in him, in the last period of his life, a secret sympathy with the mode of thinking which came to characterise the Quaker sect. Not that Milton adopted any of their peculiar fancies. He affirms categorically the permissibility of oaths, of military service, and requires that women should keep silence in the congregation. But in negativing all means of arriving at truth except the letter of scripture interpreted by the inner light, he stood upon the same platform as the followers of George Fox.
Milton’s latest utterance on theological topics is found in a tract published by him the year before his death, 1673. The piece is entitled _Of true religion, heresy, schism, toleration_; but its meagre contents do not bear out the comprehensiveness of the title. The only matter really discussed in the pages of the tract is the limit of toleration. The stamp of age is upon the style, which is more careless and incoherent even, than usual. He has here dictated his extempore thoughts, without premeditation or revision, so that we have here a record of Milton’s habitual mind. Having watched him gradually emancipating himself from the contracted Calvinistic mould of the Bread-street home, it is disappointing to see that, at sixty-five, his development has proceeded no further than we here find. He is now willing to extend toleration to all sects who make the Scriptures their sole rule of faith. Sects may misunderstand Scripture, but to err is the condition of humanity, and will be pardoned by God, if diligence, prayer, and sincerity have been used. The sects named as to be tolerated are, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Arians, Socinians, Arminians. They are to be tolerated to the extent of being allowed, on all occasions, to give account of their faith, by arguing, preaching in their several assemblies, writing and printing.
In this pamphlet the principle of toleration is flatly enunciated in opposition to the practice of the Restoration. But the principle is rested not on the statesman’s ground of the irrelevancy of religious dispute to good government, but on the theological ground of the venial nature of religious error. And to permissible error there are very narrow limits; limits which exclude Catholics. For Milton will exclude Romanists from toleration, not on the statesman’s ground of incivism, but on the theologian’s ground of idolatry. All his antagonism in this tract is reserved for the Catholics. There is not a hint of discontent with the prelatry, once intolerable to him. Yet that prelatry was now scourging the nonconformists with scorpions instead of with whips, with its Act of Uniformity, its Conventicle Act, its Five-mile Act, filling the gaols with Milton’s own friends and fellow-religionists. Several times, in these thirteen pages, he appeals to the practice or belief of the Church of England, once even calling it “our church.”
This tract alone is sufficient refutation of an idle story that Milton died a Roman Catholic, The story is not well vouched, being hearsay three times removed. Milton’s younger brother. Sir Christopher, is said to have said so at a dinner entertainment. If he ever did say as much, it must be set down to that peculiar form of credulity which makes perverts think that every one is about to follow their example. In Christopher Milton, “a man of no parts or ability, and a superstitions nature” (Toland), such credulity found a congenial soil.
The tract _Of true religion_ was Milton’s latest published work. But he was preparing for the press, at the time of his death, a more elaborate theological treatise. Daniel Skinner, a nephew of his old friend Cyriac, was serving as Milton’s amanuensis in writing out a fair copy. Death came before a third of the work of correction, 196 pages out of 735, had been completed, of which the whole rough draft consists. The whole remained in Daniel Skinner’s hands in 1674. Milton, though in his preface he if aware that his pages contain not a little which will be unpalatable to the reigning opinion in religion, would have dared publication, if he could have passed the censor. But Daniel Skinner, who was a Fellow of Trinity, and had a career before him, was not equally free. What could not appear in London, however, might be printed at Amsterdam. Skinner accordingly put both the theological treatise, and the epistles written by the Latin Secretary, into the hands of Daniel Elzevir. The English government getting intelligence of the proposed publication of the foreign correspondence of the Parliament and the Protector, interfered, and pressure was put upon Skinner, through the Master of Trinity, Isaac Barrow. Skinner hastened to save himself from the fate which in 1681 befel Locke, and gave up to the Secretary of State, not only the Latin letters, but the MS. of the theological treatise. Nothing further was known as to the fate of the MS. till 1823, when it was disinterred from one of the presses of the old State Paper Office. The Secretary of State, Sir Joseph Williamson, when he retired from office in 1678, instead of carrying away his correspondence as had been the custom, left it behind him. Thus it was that the _Treatise of Christian doctrine_ first saw light, one hundred and fifty years after the author’s death.
In a work which had been written as a text-book for the use of learners, there can be little scope for originality. And Milton follows the division of the matter into heads usual in the manuals then current. But it was impossible for Milton to handle the dry bones of a divinity compendium without stirring them into life. And divinity which is made to live, necessarily becomes unorthodox.
The usual method of the school text-books of the seventeenth century was to exhibit dogma in the artificial terminology of the controversies of the sixteenth century. For this procedure Milton substitutes the words of Scripture simply. The traditional terms of the text-books are retained, but they are employed only as heads under which to arrange the words of Scripture. This process, which in other hands would be little better than index making, becomes here pregnant with meaning. The originality which Milton voluntarily resigns, in employing only the words of the Bible, he recovers by his freedom of exposition. He shakes himself loose from the trammels of traditional exposition, and looks at the texts for himself. The truth was
Left only in those written records pure, Though not but by the spirit understood.
_Paradise Lost_, xii. 510.
Upon the points which interested him most closely, Milton knew that his understanding of the text differed from the standard of Protestant orthodoxy. That God created matter, not out of nothing, but out of Himself, and that death is, in the course of nature, total extinction of being, though not opinions received, were not singular. More startling, to European modes of thinking, is his assertion that polygamy is not, in itself, contrary to morality, though it may be inexpedient. The religious sentiment of his day was offended by his vigorous vindication of the freewill of man against the reigning Calvinism, and his assertion of the inferiority of the Son in opposition to the received Athanasianism. He labours this point of the nature of God with especial care, showing how greatly it occupied his thoughts. He arranges his texts so as to exhibit in Scriptural language the semi-Arian scheme, i.e. a scheme which, admitting the co-essentiality, denies the eternal generation. Through all this manipulation of texts we seem to see, that Milton is not the school logician erecting a consistent fabric of words, but that he is dominated by an imagination peopled with concrete personalities, and labouring to assign their places to the Father and the Son as separate agents in the mundane drama. The _De doctrina Christiana_ is the prose counterpart of _Paradise Lost_ and _Regained_, a caput mortuum of the poems, with every ethereal particle evaporated.
In the royal injunctions of 1614, James I. had ordered students in the universities not to insist too long upon compendiums, but to study the Scriptures, and to bestow their time upon the fathers and councils. In his attempt to express dogmatic theology in the words of Scripture, Milton was unwittingly obeying this injunction. The other part of the royal direction as to fathers and councils it was not in Milton’s plan to carry out. Neither indeed was it in his power, for he had not the necessary learning. M. Scherer says that Milton “laid all antiquity, sacred and profane, under contribution.” So far is this from being the case, that while he exhibits, in this treatise, an intimate knowledge of the text of the canonical books, Hebrew and Greek, there is an absence of that average acquaintance with Christian antiquity which formed at that day the professional outfit of the episcopal divine. Milton’s references to the fathers are perfunctory and second-hand. The only citation of Chrysostom, for instance, which I have noticed is in these words: “the same is said to be the opinion of Chrysostom, Luther, and other moderns.” He did not esteem the judgment of the fathers sufficiently, to deem them worth studying. In the interpretation of texts, as in other matters of opinion, Milton withdrew within the fortress of his absolute personality.
I have now to relate the external history of the composition of _Paradise Lost_. When Milton had to skulk for a time in 1660, he was already in steady work upon the poem. Though a few lines of it were composed as early as 1642, it was not till 1658 that he took up the task of composition continuously. If we may trust our only authority (Aubrey-Phillips), he had finished it in 1663, about the time of his marriage. In polishing, re-writing, and writing out fair, much might remain to be done, after the poem was, in a way, finished. It is in 1665, that we first make acquaintance with _Paradise Lost_ in a complete state. This was the year of the plague, known in our annals as the Great Plague, to distinguish its desolating ravages from former slighter visitations of the epidemic. Every one who could fled from the city of destruction. Milton applied to his young friend Ellwood to find him a shelter, Ellwood, who was then living as tutor in the house of the Penningtons, took a cottage for Milton, in their neighbourhood, at Chalfont St. Giles, in the county of Bucks, Not only the Penningtons, but General Fleetwood had also his residence near this village, and a report is mentioned by Howitt that it was Fleetwood who provided the ex-secretary with a refuge. The society of neither of these friends was available for Milton. For Fleetwood was a sentenced regicide, and in July, Pennington and Ellwood were hurried off to Aylesbury gaol by an indefatigable justice of the peace, who was desirous of giving evidence of his zeal for the king’s government. That the Chalfont cottage “was not pleasantly situated,” must have been indifferent to the blind old man, as much so as that the immediate neighbourhood, with its heaths and wooded uplands, reproduced the scenery he had loved when he wrote _Il Allegro_.
As soon as Ellwood was relieved from imprisonment, he returned to Chalfont. Then it was that Milton put into his hands the completed _Paradise Lost_, “bidding me take it home with me, and read it at my leisure, and when I had so done, return it to him with my judgment thereupon.” On returning it, besides giving the author the benefit of his judgment, a judgment not preserved, and not indispensable–the Quaker made his famous speech, “Thou hast said much here of _Paradise Lost_, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?” Milton afterwards told Ellwood that to this casual question was due his writing _Paradise Regained_, We are not, however, to take this complaisant speech quite literally, for it is highly probable that the later poem was included in the original conception, if not in the scheme of the first epic. But we do get from Ellwood’s reminiscence a date for the beginning of _Paradise Regained_, which must have been at Chalfont in the autumn of 1665.
When the plague was abated, and the city had become safely habitable, Milton returned to Artillery Row. He had not been long back when London was devastated by a fresh calamity, only less terrible than the plague, because it destroyed the home, and not the life. The Great Fire succeeded the Great Plague. 13,000 houses, two-thirds of the city, were reduced to ashes, and the whole current of life and business entirely suspended. Through these two overwhelming disasters, Milton must have been supporting his solitary spirit by writing _Paradise Regained_, _Samson Agonistes_, and giving the final touches to _Paradise Lost_. He was now so wholly unmoved by his environment, that we look in vain in the poems for any traces of this season of suffering and disaster. The past and his own meditations were now all in all to him; the horrors of the present were as nothing to a man who had outlived his hopes. Plague and fire, what were they, after the ruin of the noblest of causes? The stoical compression of _Paradise Regained_ is in perfect keeping with the fact that it was in the middle of the ruins of London that Milton placed his finished poem in the hands of the licenser.
For licenser there was now, the Archbishop of Canterbury to wit, for religious literature. Of course the Primate read by deputy, usually one of his chaplains. The reader into whose hands _Paradise Lost_ came, though an Oxford man, and a cleric on his preferment, who had written his pamphlet against the dissenters, happened to be one whose antecedents, as Fellow of All Souls, and Proctor (in 1663), ensured his taking a less pedantic and bigoted view of his duties. Still, though Dryden’s dirty plays would have encountered no objection before such a tribunal, the same facilities were not likely to be accorded to anything which bore the name of John Milton, ex-secretary to Oliver, and himself an austere republican. Tomkyns–that was the young chaplain’s name–did stumble at a phrase in Book i, 598,
With fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.
There had been in England, and were to be again, times when men had hanged for less than this. Tomkyns, who was sailing on the smooth sea of preferment with a fair wind, did not wish to get into trouble, but at last he let the book pass, Perhaps he thought it was only religious verse written for the sectaries, which would never be heard of at court, or among the wits, and that therefore it was of little consequence what it contained.
A publisher was found, notwithstanding that Paul’s, or as it now was again, St, Paul’s-Churchyard had ceased to exist, in Aldersgate, which lay outside the circuit of the conflagration. The agreement, still preserved in the national museum, between the author, “John Milton, gent, of the one parte, and Samuel Symons, printer, of the other parte,” is among the curiosities of our literary history. The curiosity consists not so much in the illustrious name appended (not in autograph) to the deed, as in the contrast between the present fame of the book, and the waste-paper price at which the copyright is being valued. The author received 5 l. down, was to receive a second 5 l. when the first edition should be sold, a third 5 l. when the second, and a fourth 5 l., when the third edition should be gone. Milton lived to receive the second 5 l., and no more, 10 l. in all, for _Paradise Lost_. I cannot bring myself to join in the lamentations of the biographers over this bargain. Surely it is better so; better to know that the noblest monument of English letters had no money value, than to think of it as having been paid for at a pound the line.
The agreement with Symons is dated 27 April, 1667, the entry in the register of Stationers’ Hall is 20th August. It was therefore in the autumn of 1667 that _Paradise Lost_ was in the hands of the public. We have no data for the time occupied in the composition of _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_. We have seen that the former poem was begun at Chalfont in 1665, and it may be conjecturally stated that _Samson_ was finished before September, 1667. At any rate, both the poems were published together in the autumn of 1670.
Milton had four years more of life granted him after this publication. But he wrote no more poetry. It was as if he had exhausted his strength in a last effort, in the Promethean agony of Samson, and knew that his hour of inspiration was passed away. But, like all men who have once tasted the joys and pangs of composition, he could not now do without its excitement. The occupation, and the indispensable solace of the last ten sad years, had been his poems. He would not write more verse, when the oestrus was not on him, but he must write. He took up all the dropped threads of past years, ambitious plans formed in the fulness of vigour, and laid aside, but not abandoned. He was the very opposite of Shelley, who could never look at a piece of his own composition a second time, but when he had thrown it off at a heat, rushed into something else. Milton’s adhesiveness was such that he could never give up a design once entered upon. In these four years, as if conscious that his time was now nearly out, he laboured to complete five such early undertakings.
(1.) Of his _Compendium of Theology_ I have already spoken. He was overtaken by death while preparing this for the press.
(2.) His _History of Britain_ must hare cost him much labour, bestowed upon comparison of the conflicting authorities. It is the record of the studies he had made for his abandoned epic poem, and is evidence how much the subject occupied his mind.
The _History of Britain_, 1670, had been preceded by (3) a Latin grammar, in 1669, and was followed by (4) a Logic on, the method of Ramus, 1672.
(5.) In 1673 he brought out a new edition of his early volume of _Poems_. In this volume he printed for the first time the sonnets, and other pieces, which had been written in the interval of twenty-seven years, since the date of his first edition. Not, indeed, all the sonnets which we now have. Four, in which Fairfax, Vane, Cromwell, and the Commonwealth are spoken of as Milton would speak of them, were necessarily kept back, and not put into print till 1694, by Phillips, at the end of his life of his uncle.
In proportion to the trouble which Milton’s words cost him, was his care in preserving them. His few Latin letters to his foreign friends are remarkably barren either of fact or sentiment. But Milton liked them well enough to have kept copies of them, and now allowed a publisher, Brabazon Aylmer, to issue them in print, adding to them, with a view to make out a volume, his college exercises, which he had also preserved.
Among the papers which he left at his death, were the beginnings of two undertakings, either of them of overwhelming magnitude, which he did not live to complete. We have seen that he taught his pupils geography out of _Davity, Description de l’Univers_. He was not satisfied with this, or with any existing compendium. They were all dry; exact enough with their latitudes and longitudes, but omitted such uninteresting stuff as manners, government, religion, &c. Milton would essay a better system. All he had ever executed was Russia, taking the pains to turn over and extract for his purpose all the best travels in that country. This is the fragment which figures in his Works as a _Brief History of Moscovia_.
The hackneyed metaphor of Pegasus harnessed to a luggage trolley, will recur to us when we think of the author of _L’Allegro_, setting himself to compile a Latin lexicon. If there is any literary drudgery more mechanical than another, it is generally supposed to be that of making a dictionary. Nor had he taken to this industry as a resource in age, when the genial flow of invention had dried up, and original composition had ceased to be in his power. The three folio volumes of MS. which Milton left were the work of his youth; it was a work which the loss of eyesight of necessity put an end to. It is not Milton only, but all students who read with an alert mind, reading to grow, and not to remember, who have felt the want of an occupation which shall fill those hours when mental vigilance is impossible, and vacuity unendurable. Index-making or cataloguing has been the resource of many in such hours. But it was not, I think, as a mere shifting of mental posture that Milton undertook to rewrite Robert Stephens; it was as part of his language training. Only by diligent practice and incessant exercise of attention and care, could Milton have educated his susceptibility to the specific power of words, to the nicety which he attained beyond any other of our poets. Part of this education is recorded in the seemingly withered leaves of his Latin Thesaurus, though the larger part must have been achieved, not by a reflective and critical collection of examples, but by a vital and impassioned reading.
Milton’s complaint was what the profession of that day called gout. “He would be very cheerful even in his gout fits, and sing,” says Aubrey. This gout returned again and again, and by these repeated attacks wore out his resisting power. He died of the “gout struck in” on Sunday, 8th November, 1674, and was buried, near his father, in the chancel of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate. The funeral was attended, Toland says, “by all his learned and great friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the vulgar.” The disgusting profanation of the leaden coffin, and dispersion of the poet’s bones by the parochial authorities, during the repair of the church in August, 1790, has been denied, but it is to be feared the fact is too true.
CHAPTER XIII.
PARADISE LOST–PARADISE REGAINED–SAMSON AGONISTES
“Many men of forty,” it has been said, “are dead poets;” and it might seem that Milton, Latin secretary, and party pamphleteer, had died to poetry about the fatal age. In 1645, when he made a gathering of his early pieces for the volume published by Humphry Moseley, he wanted three years of forty. That volume contained, besides other things, _Comus_, _Lycidas_, _L’Allegro_, and _Il Penseroso_; then, when produced, as they remain to this day, the finest flower of English poesy. But, though thus like a wary husbandman, garnering his sheaves in presence of the threatening storm, Milton had no intention of bidding farewell to poetry. On the contrary, he regarded this volume only as first-fruits, an earnest of greater things to come.
The ruling idea of Milton’s life, and the key to his mental history, is his resolve to produce a great poem. Not that the aspiration in itself is singular, for it is probably shared by every young poet in his turn. As every clever schoolboy is destined by himself or his friends to become Lord Chancellor, and every private in the French army carries in his haversack the baton of a marshal, so it is a necessary ingredient of the dream on Parnassus, that it should embody itself in a form of surpassing brilliance. What distinguishes Milton, from the crowd of young ambition, “audax juventa,” is the constancy of resolve. He not only nourished through manhood the dream of youth, keeping under the importunate instincts which carry off most ambitions in middle life into the pursuit of place, profit, honour–the thorns which spring up and smother the wheat–but carried out his dream in its integrity in old age. He formed himself for this achievement, and for no other. Study at home, travel abroad, the arena of political controversy, the public service, the practice of the domestic virtues, were so many parts of the schooling which was to make a poet.
The reader who has traced with me thus far the course of Milton’s mental development will perhaps be ready to believe, that this idea had taken entire possession of his mind from a very early age. The earliest written record of it is of date 1632, In Sonnet II. This was written as early as the poet’s twenty-third year; and in these lines the resolve is uttered, not as then just conceived, but as one long brooded upon, and its non-fulfilment matter of self-reproach.
If this sonnet stood alone, its relevance to a poetical, or even a literary performance, might he doubtful. But at the time of its composition it is enclosed in a letter to an unnamed friend, who seems to have been expressing his surprise that the Cambridge B.A. was not settling himself, now that his education was complete, to a profession. Milton’s apologetic letter is extant, and was printed by Birch in 1738. It intimates that Milton did not consider his education, for the purposes he had in view, as anything like complete. It is not “the endless delight of speculation,” but “a religious advisement how best to undergo; not taking thought of being late, so it give advantage to be more fit.” He repudiates the love of learning for its own sake; knowledge is not an end, it is only equipment for performance. There is here no specific engagement as to the nature of the performance. But what it is to be, is suggested by the enclosure of the “Petrarchian stanza” (i.e. the sonnet). This notion that his life was like Samuel’s, a dedicated life, dedicated to a service which required a long probation, recurs again more than once in his writings. It is emphatically repeated, in 1641, in a passage of the pamphlet No. 4:–
None hath by mote studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit none shall,–that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and full license will extend. Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work 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 amorist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, not 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 life of whom he pleases. To this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs. Till which in some measure be compassed, at mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to sustain this expectation, from as many as are not loth to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges that I can give them.
In 1638, at the age of nine and twenty, Milton has already determined that this lifework shall be a poem, an epic poem, and that its subject shall probably be the Arthurian legend.
Si quando indigenas revocabo in carmina regea, Arturumque etiam sub terris bella moventem, Aut dicam invictae sociali foedere mensae Magnanimos heroas, et, o modo spiritus adsit! Frangam Saxonicas Britonum sub marte phalangas.
May I find such a friend … when, if ever, I shall revive in song our native princes, and among them Arthur moving to the fray even in the nether world, and when I shall, if only inspiration be mine, break the Saxon bands before our Britons’ prowess.
The same announcement is reproduced in the _Epitaphium Damonis_, 1639, and, in Pamphlet No. 4, in the often-quoted words:–
Perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, composed at under twenty, or thereabout, met with acceptance…. I began to assent to them (the Italians) and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting which now grows dally 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 perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die.
Between the publication of the collected _Poems_ in 1645, and the appearance of _Paradise Lost_ in 1687, a period of twenty-two years, Milton gave no public sign of redeeming this pledge. He seemed to his cotemporaries to have renounced the follies of his youth, the gewgaws of verse; and to have sobered down into the useful citizen, “Le bon poete,” thought Malherbe, “n’est pas plus utile a l’etat qu’un bon joueur de quilles.” Milton had postponed his poem, in 1641, till “the land had once enfranchished herself from this impertinent yoke of prelatry, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish.” Prelatry was swept away, and he asked for further remand on account of the war. Peace was concluded, the country was settled under the strong government of a Protector, and Milton’s great work did not appear. It was not even preparing. He was writing not poetry but prose, and that most ephemeral and valueless kind of prose, pamphlets, extempore articles on the topics of the day. He poured out reams of them, in simple unconsciousness that they had no influence whatever on the current of events.
Nor was it that, during all these years, Milton was meditating in secret what he could not bring forward in public; that he was only holding back from publishing, because there was no public ready to listen to his song. In these years Milton was neither writing nor thinking poetry. Of the twenty-four sonnets indeed–twenty-four, reckoning the twenty-lined piece, “The forcers of conscience,” as a sonnet–eleven belong to this period. But they do not form a continuous series, such as do Wordsworth’s _Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, nor do they evince a sustained mood of poetical meditation. On the contrary, their very force and beauty consist in their being the momentary and spontaneous explosion of an emotion welling up from the depths of the soul, and forcing itself into metrical expression, as it were, in spite of the writer. While the first eight sonnets, written before 1645, are sonnets of reminiscence and intention, like those of the Italians, or the ordinary English sonnet, the eleven sonnets of Milton’s silent period, from 1645 to 1658, are records of present feeling kindled by actual facts. In their naked, unadorned simplicity of language, they may easily seem, to a reader fresh from Petrarch, to be homely and prosaic. Place them in relation to the circumstance on which each piece turns, and we begin to feel the superiority for poetic effect of real emotion over emotion meditated and revived. History has in it that which can touch us more abidingly than any fiction. It is this actuality which distinguishes the sonnets of Milton from any other sonnets. Of this difference Wordsworth was conscious when he struck out the phrase, “In his hand the _thing became_ a trumpet.” Macaulay compared the sonnets in their majestic severity to the collects, They remind us of a Hebrew psalm, with its undisguised outrush of rage, revenge, exultation, or despair, where nothing is due to art or artifice, and whose poetry is the expression of the heart, and not a branch of literature. It is in the sonnets we most realise the force of Wordsworth’s image–
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea.
We are not then to look in the sonnets for latent traces of the suspended poetic creation They come from the other side of Milton’s nature, the political, not the artistic. They are akin to the prose pamphlets, not to _Paradise Lost_. Just when the sonnets end, the composition of the epic was taken in hand. The last of the sonnets (23 in the ordinary numeration) was written in 1658, and it is to the same year that our authority, Aubrey-Phillips, refers his beginning to occupy himself with _Paradise Lost_. He had by this time settled the two points about which he had been long in doubt, the subject, and the form. Long before bringing himself to the point of composition, he had decided upon the Fall of man as subject, and upon the narrative, or epic, form, in preference to the dramatic. It is even possible that a few isolated passages of the poem, as it now stands, may have been written before. Of one such passage we know that it was written fifteen or sixteen years before 1658, and while he was still contemplating a drama. The lines are Satan’s speech, _P. L._ iv. 32, beginning,–
O, thou that with surpassing glory crowned.
These lines, Phillips says, his uncle recited to him, as forming the opening of his tragedy. They are modelled, as the classical reader will perceive, upon Euripides. Possibly they were not intended for the very first lines, since if Milton intended to follow the practice of his model, the lofty lyrical tone of this address should have been introduced by a prosaic matter-of-fact setting forth of the situation, as in the Euripidean prologue. There are other passages in the poem which have the air of being insititious in the place where they stand. The lines in Book iv, now in question, may reasonably be referred to 1640-42, the date of those leaves in the Trinity College MS., in which Milton has written down, with his own hand, various sketches of tragedies, which might possibly be adopted as his final choice.
A passage in _The Reason of Church Government_, written at the same period, 1641, gives us the the fullest account of his hesitation. It was a hesitation caused, partly by the wealth of matter which his reading suggested to him, partly by the consciousness that he ought not to begin in haste while each year was ripening his powers. Every one who has undertaken a work of any length has made the experience, that the faculty of composition will not work with ease, until the reason is satisfied that the subject chosen is a congenial one. Gibbon has told us himself of the many periods of history upon which he tried his pen, even after the memorable 16 October, 1764, when he “sate musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter.” We know how many sketches of possible tragedies Recine would make before he could adopt one as the appropriate theme, on which he could work with that thorough enjoyment of the labour, which is necessary to give life and verve to any creation, whether of the poet or the orator.
The leaves of the Trinity College MS., which are contemporary with his confidence to the readers of his tract _Of Church Government_, exhibit a list of nearly one hundred subjects, which, had occurred to him from time to time as practicable subjects. From the mode of entry we see that, already in 1641, a scriptural was likely to have tie preference over a profane subject, and that among scriptural subjects _Paradise Lost_ (the familiar title appears in this early note), stands out prominently above the rest. The historical subjects are all taken from native history, none are foreign, and all are from the time before the Roman conquest. The scriptural subjects are partly from the Old, partly from the New, Testament. Some of these subjects are named and nothing more, while others are slightly sketched out. Among these latter–are _Baptistes_, on the death of John the Baptist, and _Christus Patiens_, apparently to be confined to the agony in the garden. Of _Paradise Lost_ there are four drafts in greater detail than any of the others. These drafts of the plot or action, though none of them that which was finally adopted, are sufficiently near to the action of the poem as it stands, to reveal to as the fact that the author’s imaginative conception of what he intended to produce was generated, cast, and moulded, at a comparatively early age. The commonly received notion, therefore, with which authors, as they age, are wont to comfort themselves, that one of the greatest feats of original invention achieved by man, was begun after fifty, must be thus far modified. _Paradise Lost_ was _composed_ after fifty, but was _conceived_ at thirty-two. Hence the high degree of perfection realised in the total result. For there were combined to produce it the opposite virtues of two distinct periods of mental development; the daring imagination and fresh emotional play of early manhood, with the exercised judgment and chastened taste of ripened years. We have regarded the twenty-five years of Milton’s life between 1641 and the commencement of _Paradise Lost_, as time ill laid out upon inferior work which any one could do, and which was not worth doing by any one. Yet it may be made a question if in any other mode than by adjournment of his early design, Milton could have attained to that union of original strength with severe restraint, which distinguishes from all other poetry, except that of Virgil, the three great poems of his old age. If the fatigue of age is sometimes felt in _Paradise Regained_, we feel in _Paradise Lost_ only (in the words of Chateaubriand), “la maturite de l’age a travers les passions des legeres annees; une charme extraordinaire de vieillesse et de jeunesse.”
A still further inference is warranted by the Trinity College jottings of 1641. Not the critics merely, but readers ready to sympathise, have been sometimes inclined to wish that Milton had devoted his power to a more human subject, in which the poet’s invention could have had freer play, and for which his reader’s interest could have been more ready. And it has been thought that the choice of a Biblical subject indicates the narrowing effect of age, adversity, and blindness combined. We now know that the Fall was the theme, if not determined on, at least predominant in Milton’s thoughts, at the age of thirty-two. His ripened judgment only approved a selection made in earlier years, and in days full of hope. That in selecting a scriptural subject he was not In fact exercising any choice, but was determined by his circumstances, is only what must be said of all choosing. With all his originality, Milton was still a man of his age. A Puritan poet, in a Puritan environment, could not have done otherwise. But even had choice been in his power, it is doubtful if he would have had the same success with a subject taken from history.
First, looking at his public. He was to write in English. This, which had at one time been matter of doubt, had at an early stage come to be his decision. Sot had the choice of English been made for the sake of popularity, which he despised. He did not desire to write for the many, but for the few. But he was enthusiastically patriotic. He had entire contempt for the shouts of the mob, but the English nation, as embodied in the persons of the wise and good, he honoured and reverenced with all the depth of his nature. It was for the sake of his nation that he was to devote his life to a work, which was to ennoble her tongue among the languages of Europe.
He was then to write in English, for the English, not popularly, but nationally. This resolution at once limited his subject. He who aspires to be the poet of a nation is bound to adopt a hero who is already dear to that people, to choose a subject and characters which are already familiar to them. This is no rule of literary art arbitrarily enacted by the critics, it is a dictate of reason, and has been the practice of all the great national poets. The more obvious examples will occur to every reader, But it may be observed that even the Greek tragedians, who addressed a more limited audience than the epic poets, took their plots from the best known legends touching the fortunes of the royal houses of the Hellenic race. Now to the English reader of the seventeenth century–and the same holds good to this day–there were only two cycles of persons and events sufficiently known beforehand to admit of being assumed by a poet. He must go either to the Bible, or to the annals of England. Thus far Milton’s choice of subject was limited by the consideration of the public for whom he wrote.
Secondly, he was still farther restricted by a condition which the nature of his own intelligence imposed upon himself. It was necessary for Milton that the events and personages, which were to arouse and detain his interests, should be real events and personages. The mere play of fancy with the pretty aspects of things could not satisfy him; he wanted to feel beneath him a substantial world of reality. He had not the dramatist’s imagination which can body forth fictitious characters with such life-like reality that it can, and does itself, believe in their existence. Macaulay has truly said that Milton’s genius is lyrical, not dramatic. His lyre will only echo real emotion, and his imagination is only stirred by real circumstances. In his youth he had been within the fascination of the romances of chivalry, as well in their original form, as in the reproductions of Ariosto and Spenser. While under this influence he had thought of seeking his subject among the heroes of these lays of old minstrelsy. And as one of his principles was that his hero must be a national hero, it was of course upon the Arthurian cycle that his aspiration fixed. When he did so, he no doubt believed at least the historical existence of Arthur. As soon, however, as he came to understand the fabulous basis of the Arthurian legend, it became unfitted for his use. In the Trinity College MS. of 1641, Arthur has already disappeared from the list of possible subjects, a list which contains thirty-eight suggestions of names from British or Saxon history, such as Vortigern, Edward the Confessor, Harold, Macbeth, &c. While he demanded the basis of reality for his personages, he at the same time, with a true instinct, rejected all that fell within the period of well-ascertained history. He made the Conquest the lower limit of his choice. In this negative decision against historical romance we recognise Milton’s judgment, and his correct estimate of his own powers. Those who have been thought to succeed best in engrafting fiction upon history, Shakspeare or Walter Scott, have been eminently human poets, and have achieved their measure of success by investing some well-known name with the attributes of ordinary humanity such as we all know it. This was precisely what Milton could not have done. He had none of that sympathy with which Shakspeare embraced all natural and common affections of his brother men. Milton, burning as he did with a consuming fire of passion, and yearning for rapt communion with select souls, had withal an aloofness from ordinary men sad women, and a proud disdain of commonplace joy and sorrow, which has led hasty biographers and critics to represent him as hard, austere, an iron man of iron mould. This want of interest in common life disqualified him for the task of revivifying historic scenes.
Milton’s mental constitution, then, demanded in the material upon which it was to work, a combination of qualities such as very few subjects could offer. The events and personages must be real and substantial, for he could not occupy himself seriously with airy nothings and creatures of pure fancy. Yet they must not be such events and personages as history had pourtrayed to us with well-known characters, and all their virtues, faults, foibles, and peculiarities. And, lastly, it was requisite that they should be the common property and the familiar interest of a wide circle of English readers.
These being the conditions required in the subject, it is obvious that no choice was left to the poet in the England of the seventeenth century but a biblical subject. And among the many picturesque episodes which the Hebrew Scriptures present, the narrative of the Fall stands out with a character of all-embracing comprehensiveness which belongs to no other single event in the Jewish annals. The first section of the book of Genesis clothes in a dramatic form the dogmatic idea from which was developed in the course of ages the whole scheme of Judaico-Christian anthropology. In this world-drama, Heaven above and Hell beneath, the powers of light and those of darkness, are both brought upon the scene in conflict with each other, over the fate of the inhabitants of our globe, a minute ball of matter suspended between two infinities. This gigantic and unmanageable material is so completely mastered by the poet’s imagination, that we are made to feel at one and the same time the petty dimensions of our earth in comparison with primordial space and almighty power, and the profound import to us of the issue depending on the conflict. Other poets, of inferior powers, have from time to time attempted, with different degrees of success, some of the minor Scriptural histories; Bodmer, the Noachian Deluge; Solomon Gessner, the Death of Abel, &c. And Milton himself, after he had spent his full strength upon his greater theme, recurred in _Samson Agonistes_ to one such episode, which he had deliberately set aside before, as not giving verge enough for the sweep of his soaring conception.
These considerations duly weighed, it will be found, that the subject of the Fall of Man was not so much Milton’s choice as his necessity. Among all the traditions of the peoples of the earth, there is not extant another story which, could have been adequate to his demands. Biographers may have been, somewhat misled by his speaking of himself as “long choosing and beginning late.” He did not begin till 1658, when he was already fifty, and it has been somewhat hastily inferred that he did not choose till the date at which he began, But, as we have seen, he had already chosen at least as early as 1642, when, the plan of a drama on the subject, and under the title, of _Paradise Lost_ was fully developed. In the interval between 1642 and 1658, he changed the form from a drama to an epic, but his choice remained unaltered. And as the address to the sun (_Paradise Lost_, iv, 32) was composed at the earlier of these dates, it appears that he had already formulated even the rhythm and cadence of the poem that was to be. Like Wordsworth’s “Warrior”–
He wrought
Upon the plan that pleas’d his boyish thought.
I have said that this subject of the Fall was Milton’s necessity, being the only subject which his mind, “in the spacious circuits of her musing,” found large enough. But as it was no abrupt or arbitrary choice, so it was not forced upon him from without, by suggestion of friends, or command of a patron, We must again remind ourselves that Milton had a Calvinistic bringing up. And Calvinism in pious Puritan souls of that fervent age was not the attenuated creed of the eighteenth century, the Calvinism which went not beyond personal gratification of safety for oneself, and for the rest damnation. When Milton was being reared, Calvinism was not old and effete, a mere doctrine. It was a living system of thought, and one which carried the mind upwards towards the Eternal will, rather than downwards towards my personal security. Keble has said of the old Catholic views, founded on sacramental symbolism, that they are more poetical than any other religious conception. But it must be acknowledged that a predestinarian scheme, leading the cogitation upward to dwell upon “the heavenly things before the foundation of the world,” opens a vista of contemplation and poetical framework, with which none other in the whole cycle of human thought can compare. Not election and reprobation as set out in the petty chicanery of Calvin’s _Institutes_, but the prescience of absolute wisdom revolving all the possibilities of time, space, and matter. Poetry has been defined as “the suggestion by the image of noble grounds for noble emotions,” and, in this respect, none of the world-epics–there are at most five or six such in existence–can compete with _Paradise Lost_. The melancholy pathos of Lucretius indeed pierces the heart with a two-edged sword more keen than Milton’s, but the compass of Lucretius’ horizon is much less, being limited to this earth and its inhabitants. The horizon of _Paradise Lost_ is not narrower than all space, its chronology not shorter than eternity; the globe of our earth becomes a mere spot in the physical universe, and that universe itself a drop suspended in the infinite empyrean. His aspiration had thus reached “one of the highest arcs that human contemplation circling upwards can make from the glassy sea whereon she stands” (_Doctr. and Disc_.), Like his contemporary Pascal, his mind had beaten her wings against the prison walls of human thought.
The vastness of the scheme of _Paradise Lost_ may become more apparent to us if we remark that, within its embrace, there to be equal place for both the systems of physical astronomy which were current in the seventeenth century. In England, about the time _Paradise Lost_ was being written, the Copernican theory, which placed the sun in the centre of our system, was already the established belief of the few well-informed. The old Ptolemaic or Alphonsine system, which explained the phenomena on the hypothesis of nine (or ten) transparent hollow spheres wheeling round the stationary earth, was still the received astronomy of ordinary people. These two beliefs, the one based on science, though still wanting the calculation which Newton was to supply to make it demonstrative, the other supported by the tradition of ages, were, at the time we speak of, in presence of each other in the public mind. They are in presence of each other also in Milton’s epic. And the systems confront each other in the poem, in much the same relative position which they occupied in the mind of the public. The ordinary, habitual mode of speaking of celestial phenomena is Ptolemaic (see _Paradise Lost_, vii. 339; iii. 481). The conscious, or doctrinal, exposition of the same phenomena is Copernican (see _Paradise Lost_, viii. 122). Sharp as is the contrast between the two systems, the one being the direct contradictory of the other, they are lodged together, not harmonised, within the vast circuit of the poet’s imagination. The precise mechanism of an object so little as is our world in comparison with the immense totality may be justly disregarded. “De minimis non curat poeta.” In the universe of being the difference between a heliocentric and a geocentric theory of our solar system is of as small moment, as the reconcilement of fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute is in the realm of absolute intelligence. The one Is the frivolous pastime of devils; the other the Great Architect
Hath left to there disputes, perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide.
As one, and the principal, inconsistency in Milton’s presentment of his matter has now been, mentioned, a general remark may be made upon the conceptual incongruities in _Paradise Lost_. The poem abounds in such, and the critics, from Addison downwards, have busied themselves in finding out more and more of them. Milton’s geography of the world is as obscure and untenable as that of Herodotus. The notes of time cannot stand together. To give an example: Eve says (_Paradise Lost_, iv. 449)–
That day I oft remember, when from sleep I first awak’d.
But in the chronology of the poem, Adam himself, whose creation preceded that of Eve, was but three days old at the time this reminiscence is repeated to him. The mode in which the Son of God is spoken of is not either consistent Athanasianism or consistent Arianism. Above all there is an incessant confusion of material and immaterial in the acts ascribed to the angels. Dr. Johnson, who wished for consistency, would have had it preserved “by keeping immateriality out of sight.” And a general arraignment has been laid against Milton of a vagueness and looseness of imagery, which contrasts unfavourably with the vivid and precise detail of other poets, of Homer or of Dante, for example.
Now first, it must be said that Milton is not one of the poets of inaccurate imagination. He could never, like Scott, have let the precise picture of the swan on “still Saint Mary’s lake” slip into the namby-pamby “sweet Saint Mary’s lake.” When he intends a picture, he is unmistakably distinct; his outline is firm and hard. But he is not often intending pictures. He is not, like Dante, always seeing–he is mostly thinking in a dream, or as Coleridge best expressed it, he is not a picturesque, but a musical poet. The pictures in _Paradise Lost_ are like the paintings on the walls of some noble hall–only part of the total magnificence. He did not aim at that finish of minute parts in which, each bit fits into every other. For it was only by such disregard of minutiae that the theme could be handled at all. The impression of vastness, the sense that everything, as Bishop Butler says, “runs up into infinity,” would have been impaired if he had drawn attention to the details of his figures. Had he had upon his canvas only a single human incident, with ordinary human agents, he would have known, as well as other far inferior artists, how to secure perfection of illusion by exactness of detail. But he had undertaken to present, not the world of human experience, but a supernatural world, peopled by supernatural beings, God and his Son, angels and archangels, devils; a world in which Sin and Death, may be personified without palpable absurdity. Even his one human pair are exceptional beings, from whom we are prepared not to demand conformity to the laws of life which now prevail in our world. Had he presented all these spiritual personages in definite form to the eyes the result would have been degradation. We should have had the ridiculous instead of the sublime, as in the scene of the _Iliad_, where Diomede wounds Aphrodite in the hand, and sends her crying home to her father. Once or twice Milton has ventured too near the limit of material adaptation, trying to explain _how_ angelic natures subsist, as in the passage (_Paradise Lost_, v. 405) where Raphael tells Adam that angels eat and digest food like man. Taste here receives a shock, because the incongruity, which before was latent, is forced upon our attention. We are threatened with being transported out of the conventional world of Heaven, Hell, Chaos, and Paradise, to which we had well adapted ourselves, into the real world in which we know that such beings could not breathe and move.
For the world of _Paradise Lost_ is an ideal, conventional world, quite as much as the world of the _Arabian Nights_, or the world of the chivalrous romance, or that of the pastoral novel. Not only dramatic, but all, poetry is founded on illusion. We must, though it be but for the moment, suppose it true. We must be transported out of the actual world into that world in which the given scene is laid. It is chiefly the business of the poet to effect this transportation, but the reader (or hearer) must aid. “Willst du Dichter ganz verstehen, musst in Dichter’s Lande gehen.” If the reader’s imagination is not active enough to assist the poet, he must at least not resist him. When we are once inside the poet’s heaven, our critical faculty may justly require that what takes place there shall be consistent with itself, with the laws of that fantastic world. But we may not begin by objecting that it is impossible that such a world should exist. If, in any age, the power of imagination is enfeebled, the reader becomes more unable to make this effort; he ceases to co-operate with the poet. Much of the criticism on _Paradise Lost_ which we meet with resolves itself into a refusal on the part of the critic, to make that initial abondonment to the conditions which the poet demands; a determination to insist that his heaven, peopled with deities, dominations, principalities, and powers, shall have the same material laws which govern our planetary system. It is not, as we often hear it said, that the critical faculty is unduly developed in the nineteenth century. It is that the imaginative faculty fails us; and when that is the case, criticism is powerless–it has no fundamental assumption upon which its judgments can proceed,
It is the triumph of Milton’s skill to have made his ideal world actual, if not to every English mind’s eye, yet to a larger number of minds than have ever been reached by any other poetry in our language. Popular (in the common use of the word) Milton has not been, and cannot be. But the world he created has taken possession of the public mind. Huxley complains that the false cosmogony, which will not yield, to the conclusions of scientific research, is derived from the seventh, book of _Paradise Lost_, rather than, from Genesis. This success Milton owes partly to his selection of his subject, partly to his skill in handling it. In his handling, he presents his spiritual existences with just so much relief as to endow them with life and personality, and not with, that visual distinctness which would at once reveal their spectral immateriality, and so give a shock to the illusion. We might almost say of his personages that they are shapes, “if shape it might be called, that shape had none.” By his art of suggestion by association, he does all he can to aid us to realise his agents, and at the moment when distinctness would disturb, he withdraws the object into a mist, and so disguises the incongruities which he could not avoid. The tact that avoids difficulties inherent in the nature of things, is an art which gets the least appreciation either in life or in literature.
But if we would have some measure of the skill which in _Paradise Lost_ has made impossible beings possible to the imagination, we may find it in contrasting them with the incarnated abstraction and spirit voices, which we encounter at every turn in Shelley, creatures who leave behind them no more distinct impression than that we have been in a dream peopled with ghosts. Shelley, too,
Voyag’d th’ unreal, vast, unbounded deep Of horrible confusion.
_Paradise Lost_, x. 470.
and left it the chaos which he found it. Milton has elicited from similar elements a conception so life-like that his poetical version has inseparably grafted itself upon, if it has not taken the place of, the historical narrative of the original creation.
So much Milton has effected by his skilful treatment. But the illusion was greatly facilitated by his choice of subject. He had not to create his supernatural personages, they were already there. The Father, and the Son, the Angels, Satan, Baal and Moloch, Adam and Eve, were in full possession of the popular imagination, and more familiar to it than any other set of known names. Nor was the belief accorded to them a half belief, a bare admission of their possible existence, such as prevails at other times or in some countries. In the England of Milton, the angels and devils of the Jewish Scriptures were more real beings, and better vouched, than any historical personages could be. The old chronicles were full of lies, but this was Bible truth. There might very likely have been a Henry VIII, and he might have been such as he is described, but at any rate he was dead and gone, while Satan still lived and walked the earth, the identical Satan who had deceived Eve.
Nor was it only to the poetic public that his personages were real, true, and living beings. The poet himself believed as entirely in their existence as did his readers. I insist upon this point, because one of the first of living critics has declared of _Paradise Lost_ that it is a poem in which every artifice of invention, is consciously employed, not a single fact being, for an instant, conceived as tenable by any living faith. (Ruskin, _Sesame and Lilies_, p. 138). On the contrary, we shall not rightly apprehend either the poetry or the character of the poet until we feel that throughout _Paradise Lost_, as in _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson_, Milton felt himself to he standing on the sure ground of fact and reality. It was not in Milton’s nature to be a showman, parading before an audience a phantasmagoria of spirits, which he himself knew to be puppets tricked up for the entertainment of an idle hour. We are told by Lockhart, that the old man who told the story of Gilpin Horner to Lady Dalkeith _bona fide_ believed the existence of the elf. Lady Dalkeith repeated the tale to Walter Scott, who worked it up with consummate skill into the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_. This is a case of a really believed legend of diablerie becoming the source of a literary fiction. Scott neither believed in the reality of the goblin page himself, nor expected his readers to believe it. He could not rise beyond the poetry of amusement, and no poetry with only this motive can ever be more than literary art.
Other than this was Milton’s conception of his own function. Of the fashionable verse, such as was written in the Caroline age, or in any age, he disapproved, not only because it was imperfect art, but because it was untrue utterance. Poems that were 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,” were in his eyes treachery to the poet’s high vocation.
* * * * *
Poetical powers “are the inspired gift of God rarely bestowed … in every nation, and are of power, beside the office of a pulpit, to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbation of the mind, and set the affections in right tune; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God’s almightiness, and what he works, and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in his church; to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious nations, doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore the general relapses of kingdoms and states from justice and God’s true worship.”
* * * * *
So he had written in 1642, and this lofty faith in his calling supported him twenty years later, in the arduous labour of his attempt to realise his own ideal. In setting himself down to compose _Paradise Lost_ and _Regained_, he regarded himself not as an author, but as a medium, the mouthpiece of “that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and all knowledge: Urania, heavenly muse,” visits him nightly,
And dictates to me Blumb’ring, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated verse.
_Paradise Lost_, ix. 24.
Urania bestows the flowing words and musical sweetness; to God’s Spirit he looks to
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.
_Paradise Lost,/i>, iii, 50.
The singers with whom he would fain equal himself are not Dante, or Tasso, or, as Dryden would have it, Spenser, but
Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
As he in equalled with these in misfortune–loss of sight–he would emulate them in function. Orpheus and Musaeus are the poets he would fain have as the companions of his midnight meditation (_Penseroso_). And the function of the poet is like that of the prophet in the old dispensation, not to invent, but to utter. It is God’s truth which passes His lips–lips hallowed by the touch of sacred fire. He is the passive instrument through whom flows the emanation from on high; His words are not his own, but a suggestion. Even for style Milton is indebted to his “celestial patroness who deigns her nightly visitation unimplor’d.”
Milton was not dependent upon a dubious tradition in the subject he had selected. Man’s fall and recovery were recorded in the Scriptures. And the two media of truth, the internal and the external, as deriving from the same source, must needs be in harmony. That the Spirit enlightens the mind within, in this belief the Puritan saint, the poet, and the prophet, who all met in Milton, were at one. That the Old Testament Scriptures were also a revelation, from God, was an article of faith which he had never questioned. Nor did he only receive these books as conveying in substance a divine view of the world’s history, he regarded them as in the letter a transcript of fact. If the poet-prophet would tell the story of creation or redemption, he was thus restrained not only by the general outline and imagery of the Bible, but by its very words. And here we must note the skill of the poet in surmounting an added or artificial difficulty, in the subject he had chosen as combined with his notion of inspiration. He must not deviate in a single syllable from the words of the Hebrew books. He must take up into his poem the whole of the sacred narrative. This he must do, not merely because his readers would expect such literal accuracy from him, but because to himself that narrative was the very truth which he was, undertaking to deliver. The additions which his fancy or inspiration might supply must be restrained by this severe law, that they should be such as to aid the reader’s imagination to conceive how the event took place. They must by no means be suffered to alter, disfigure, traduce the substance or the letter of the revelation. This is what Milton has done. He has told the story of creation in the very words of Scripture. The whole of the seventh book, is little more than a paraphrase of a few verses of Genesis. What he has added is so little incongruous with his original, that most English men and women would probably have some difficulty in discriminating in recollection the part they derive from Moses, from that which they have added from the paraphrast. In Genesis it is the serpent who tempts Eve, in virtue of his natural wiliness. In Milton it is Satan who has entered into the body of a serpent, and supplied the intelligence. Here indeed Milton was only adopting a gloss, as ancient at least as the Book of Wisdom (ii. 24). But it is the gloss, and not the text of Moses, which is in possession of our minds, and who has done most to lodge it there, Milton or the commentators?
Again, it is Milton and not Moses who makes the serpent pluck and eat the first apple from the tree. But Bp. Wilson comments upon the words of Genesis (iii, 6) as though they contained this purely Miltonic circumstance,
It could hardly but he that one or two of the incidents which Milton has supplied, the popular imagination has been unable to homologate. Such an incident is the placing of artillery in the wars in heaven, We reject this suggestion, and find it mars probability. But It would not seam so Improbable to Milton’s contemporaries; not only because it was an article of the received poetic tradition (see _Ronsard_ 6, p. 40), but also because fire-arms had not quite ceased to be regarded as a devilish enginery of a new warfare, unfair in the knightly code of honour, a base substitute of mechanism for individual valour. It was gunpowder and not _Don Quixote_ which had destroyed, the age of chivalry,
Another of Milton’s fictions which has been found too grotesque is the change (_P, L._, x. 508) of the demons into serpents, who hiss their Prince on his return from his embassy. Here it is not, I think, so much the unnatural character of the incident itself, as its gratuitousness which offends. It does not help us to conceive the situation. A suggestion of Chateaubriand may therefore go some way towards reconciling the reader even to this caprice of imagination. It indicates, he says, the degradation of Satan, who, from the superb Intelligence of the early scenes of the poem, is become at its close a hideous reptile. He has not triumphed, but has failed, and is degraded into the old dragon, who haunts among the damned. The braising of his head has already commenced.
The bridge, again, which Sin and Death construct (_Paradise Lost_, x. 300), leading from the mouth of hell to the wall of the world, has a chilling effect upon the imagination of a modern reader. It does not assist the conception of the cosmical system which we accept in the earlier books. This clumsy fiction seems more at home in the grotesque and lawless mythology of the Turks, or in the Persian poet Sadi, who is said by Marmontel to have adopted it from the Turk. If Milton’s intention were to reproduce Jacob’s ladder, he should, like Dante (_Parad_, xxi. 25), have made it the means of communication between heaven and earth.
It is possible that Milton himself, after the experiment of _Paradise Lost_ was fully before him, suspected that he had supplemented too much for his purpose; that his imagery, which was designed to illustrate history, might stand in its light. For in the composition of _Paradise Regained_ (published 1671) he has adopted a much severer style. In this poem he has not only curbed his imagination, but has almost suppressed it. He has amplified, but has hardly introduced any circumstance which is not in the original. _Paradise Regained_ is little more than a paraphrase of the Temptation as found in the synoptical gospels. It is a marvel of ingenuity that more than two thousand lines of blank verse can have been constructed out of some twenty lines of prose, without the addition of any invented incident, or the insertion of any irrelevant digression. In the first three books of _Paradise Regained_ there is not a single simile. Nor yet can it be said that the version of the gospel narrative has the fault of most paraphrases, viz., that of weakening the effect, and obliterating the chiselled features of the original. Let a reader take _Paradise Regained_ not as a theme used as a canvas for poetical embroidery, an opportunity for an author to show off his powers of writing, but as a _bona fide_ attempt to impress upon the mind the story of the Temptation, and he will acknowledge the concealed art of the genuine epic poet, bent before all things upon telling his tale. It will still be capable of being alleged that the story told does not interest; that the composition is dry, hard, barren; the style as of set purpose divested of the attributes of poetry. It is not necessary indeed that an epic should be in twelve books; but we do demand in an epic poem multiplicity of character and variety of incident. In _Paradise Regained_ there are only two personages, both of whom are supernatural. Indeed, they can scarcely be called personages; the poet, in his fidelity to the letter, not having thought fit to open up the fertile vein of delineation which was afforded by the human character of Christ. The speakers are no more than the abstract principles of good and evil, two voices who hold a rhetorical disputation through four books and two thousand lines.
The usual explanation of the frigidity of _Paradise Regained_ is the suggestion, which is nearest at hand, viz., that it is the effect of age. Like Ben Jonson’s _New Inn_, it betrays the feebleness of senility, and has one of the most certain marks of that stage of authorship, the attempt to imitate himself in those points in which he was once strong. When “glad no more, He wears a face of joy, because He has been glad of yore.” Or it is an “oeuvre de lassitude,” a continuation, with the inevitable defect of continuations, that of preserving the forms and wanting the soul of the original, like the second parts of _Faust_, of _Don Quixote_, and of so many other books.
Both these explanations of the inferiority of _Paradise Regained_ have probability. Either of them may be true, or both may have concurred to the common effect. In favour of the hypothesis of senility is the fact, recorded by Phillips, that Milton “could not hear with patience any such thing when related to him.” The reader will please to note that this is the original statement, which the critics have improved into the statement that he preferred _Paradise Regained_ to _Paradise Lost_. But his approval of his work, even if it did not amount to preference, looks like the old man’s fondness for his youngest and weakest offspring.
Another view of the matter, however, is at least possible. Milton’s theory as to the true mode of handling a biblical subject was, as I have said, to add no more dressing, or adventitious circumstance, than should assist the conception of the sacred verity. After he had executed _Paradise Lost_, the suspicion arose that he had been too indulgent to his imagination; that he had created too much. He would make a second experiment, in which he would enforce his theory with more vigour. In the composition of _Paradise Lost_ he must have experienced that the constraint he imposed upon himself had generated, as was said of Racine, “a plenitude of soul.” He might infer that were the compression carried still further, the reaction of the spirit might be still increased. Poetry he had said long before should be “simple, sensuous, impassioned” (_Tractate of Education_). Nothing enhances passion like simplicity. So in _Paradise Regained_ Milton has carried simplicity of dress to the verge of nakedness. It is probably the most unadorned poem extant in any language. He has pushed severe abstinence to the extreme point, possibly beyond the point, where a reader’s power is stimulated by the poet’s parsimony.
It may elucidate the intention of the author of _Paradise Regained_, if we contrast it for a moment with a poem constructed upon the opposite principle, that, viz., of the maximum of adornment, Claudian’s _Rape of Proserpine_ (A.D. 400) is one of the most rich and elaborate poems ever written. It has in common with Milton the circumstance that its whole action is contained in a solitary event, viz., the carrying off of Proserpine from the vale of Henna by Pluto, All the personages, too, are superhuman; and the incident itself supernatural. Claudian’s ambition was to overlay his story with the gold and jewellery of expression and invention. Nothing is named without being carved, decked, and coloured from the inexhaustible resources of the poet’s treasury. This is not done with ostentatious pomp, as the hyperbolical heroes of vulgar novelists are painted, but always with taste, which though lavish is discriminating.
Milton, like Wordsworth, urged his theory of parsimony farther in practice than he would have done, had he not been possessed by a spirit of protest against prevailing error. Milton’s own ideal was the chiselled austerity of Greek tragedy. Bat he was impelled to overdo the system of holding back, by his desire to challenge the evil spirit which was abroad. He would separate himself not only from the Clevelands, the Denhams, and the Drydens, whom he did not account as poets at all, but even from the Spenserians. Thus, instead of severe, he became rigid, and his plainness is not unfrequently jejune.
“Pomp and ostentation of reading,” he had once written, “is admired among the vulgar; but, in matters of religion, he is learnedest who is plainest.” As Wordsworth had attempted to regenerate poetry by recurring to nature and to common objects, Milton would revert to the pure Word of God. He would present no human adumbration of goodness, but Christ Himself. He saw that here absolute plainness was best. In the presence of this unique Being silence alone became the poet. This “higher argument” was “sufficient of itself” (_Paradise Lost_, ix., 42).
There are some painters whose work appeals only to painters, and not to the public. So the judgment of poets and critics has been more favourable to _Paradise Regained_ than the opinion of the average reader. Johnson thinks that “if it had been written, not by Milton, but by some imitators, it would receive universal praise.” Wordsworth thought it “the most perfect in execution of anything written by Milton.” And Coleridge says of it, “in its kind it is the most perfect poem extant.”
There is a school of critics which maintains that a poem is, like a statue or a picture, a work of pure art, of which beauty is the only characteristic of which the reader should be cognisant. And beauty is wholly ideal, an absolute quality, out of relation to person, time, or circumstance. To such readers _Samson Agonistes_ will seem tame, flat, meaningless, and artificial. From the point of view of the critic of the eighteenth century, it is “a tragedy which only ignorance would admire and bigotry applaud” (Dr. Johnson). If, on the other hand, it be read as a page of contemporary history, it becomes human, pregnant with real woe, the record of an heroic soul, not baffled by temporary adversity, but totally defeated by an irreversible fate, and unflinchingly accepting the situation, in the firm conviction of the righteousness of the cause. If fiction is truer than fact, fact is more tragic than fiction. In the course of the long struggle of human liberty against the church, there had been terrible catastrophes. But the St. Bartholomew, the Revocation of the Edict, the Spanish Inquisition, the rule of Alva in the Low Countries,–these and other days of suffering and rebuke have been left to the dull pen of the annalist, who has variously diluted their story in his literary circumlocution office. The triumphant royalist reaction of 1680, when the old serpent bruised the heel of freedom by totally crushing Puritanism, is singular in this, that the agonised cry of the beaten party has been preserved in a cotemporary monument, the intensest utterance of the most intense of English poets–the _Samson Agonistes_.
In the covert representation, which we have in this drama, of the actual wreck of Milton, his party, and his cause, is supplied that real basis of truth which was necessary to inspire him to write. It is of little moment that the incidents of Samson’s life do not form a strict parallel to those of Milton’s life, or to the career of the Puritan cause. The resemblance lies in the sentiment and situation, not in the bare event. The glorious youth of the consecrated deliverer, his signal overthrow of the Philistine foe with means so inadequate that the hand of God was manifest in the victory; his final humiliation, which he owed to his own weakness and disobedience, and the present revelry and feasting of the uncircumsised Philistines in the temple of their idol,–all these things together constitute a parable of which no reader of Milton’s day could possibly mistake the interpretation. More obscurely adumbrated is the day of vengeance, when virtue should return to the repentant backslider, and the idolatrous crew should be smitten with a swift destruction in the midst of their insolent revelry. Add to these the two great personal misfortunes of the poet’s life, his first marriage with a Philistine woman, out of sympathy with him or his cause, and his blindness; and the basis of reality becomes so complete, that the nominal personages of the drama almost disappear behind the history which we read through them.
But while for the biographer of Milton _Samson Agonistes_ is charged with a pathos, which as the expression of real suffering no fictive tragedy can equal, it must be felt that as a composition the drama is languid, nerveless, occasionally halting, never brilliant. If the date of the composition of the _Samson_ be 1663, this may have been the result of weariness after the effort of _Paradise Lost_. If this drama were composed in 1667, it would be the author’s last poetical effort, and the natural explanation would then be that his power over language was failing. The power of metaphor, i.e. of indirect expression, is, according to Aristotle, the characteristic of genius. It springs from vividness of conception of the thing spoken of. It is evident that this intense action of the presentative faculty is no longer at the disposal of the writer of _Samson_. In _Paradise Regained_ we are conscious of a purposed restraint of strength. The simplicity of its style is an experiment, an essay of a new theory of poetic words. The simplicity of _Samson Agonistes_ is a flagging of the forces, a drying up of the rich sources from which had once flowed the golden stream of suggestive phrase which makes _Paradise Lost_ a unique monument of the English language. I could almost fancy that the consciousness of decay utters itself in the lines (594)–
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.
The point of view I have insisted on is that Milton conceives a poet to be one who employs his imagination to make a revelation of truth, truth which the poet himself entirely believes. One objection to this point of view will at once occur to the reader, the habitual employment in both poems of the fictions of pagan mythology. This is an objection as old as Miltonic criticism. The objection came from those readers who had no difficulty in realising the biblical scenes, or in accepting demoniac agency, but who found their imagination repelled by the introduction of the gods of Greece or Rome. It is not that the biblical heaven and the Greek Olympus are incongruous, but it is that the unreal is blended with the real, in a way to destroy credibility.
To this objection the answer has been supplied by De Quincey. To Milton the personages of the heathen Pantheon were not merely familiar fictions or established poetical properties; they were evil spirits. That they were so was the creed of the early interpreters. In their demonology, the Hebrew and the Greek poets had a common ground. Up to the advent of Christ, the fallen angels had been permitted to delude mankind. To Milton, as to Jerome, Moloch was Mars, and Chemosh Priapus. Plato knew of hell as Tartarus, and the battle of the giants in Hesiod is no fiction, but an obscured tradition of the war once waged in heaven. What has been adverse to Milton’s art of illusion is, that the belief that the gods of the heathen world were the rebellious angels has ceased to be part of the common creed of Christendom. Milton was nearly the last of our great writers who was fully possessed of the doctrine. His readers now no longer share it with the poet. In Addison’s time (1712) some of the imaginary persons in _Paradise Lost_ were beginning to make greater demands upon the faith of readers, than those cool rationalistic times could meet.
There is an element of decay and death in poems which we vainly style immortal. Some of the sources of Milton’s power are already in process of drying up. I do not speak of the ordinary caducity of language, in virtue of which every effusion of the human spirit is lodged in a body of death. Milton suffers little as yet from this cause. There are few lines in his poems which are less intelligible now, than they were at the time they were written. This is partly to be ascribed to his limited vocabulary, Milton, in his verse, using not more than eight thousand words, or about half the number used by Shakespeare. Nay, the position of our earlier writers has been improved by the mere spread of the English language over a wider area. Addison apologised for _Paradise Lost_ falling short of the _Aeneid_, because of the inferiority of the language in which it was written. “So divine a poem in English is like a stately palace built of brick.” The defects of English for purposes of rhythm and harmony are as great now as they ever were, but the space that our speech fills in the world is vastly increased, and this increase of consideration is reflected back upon our older writers.
But if, as a treasury of poetic speech, _Paradise Lost_ has gained by time, it has lost far more as a storehouse of divine truth. We at this day are better able than ever to appreciate its force of expression, its grace of phrase, its harmony of rhythmical movement, but it is losing its hold over our imagination. Strange to say, this failure of vital power in the constitution of the poem is due to the very selection of subject by which Milton sought to secure perpetuity. Not content with being the poet of men, and with describing human passions and ordinary events, he aspired to present the destiny of the whole race of mankind, to tell the story of creation, and to reveal the councils of heaven and hell. And he would raise this structure upon no unstable base, but upon the sure foundation of the written word. It would have been a thing incredible to Milton that the hold of the Jewish Scriptures over the imagination of English men and women could ever be weakened. This process, however, has already commenced. The demonology of the poem has already, with educated readers, passed from the region of fact into that of fiction. Not so universally, but with a large number of readers, the angelology can be no more than what the critics call machinery. And it requires a violent effort from any of our day to accommodate their conceptions to the anthropomorphic theology of _Paradise Lost_. Were the sapping process to continue at the same rate for two more centuries, the possibility of epic illusion would be lost to the whole scheme and economy of the poem. Milton has taken a scheme of life for life itself. Had he, in the choice of subject, remembered the principle of the Aristotelean Poetic (which he otherwise highly prized), that men in action are the poet’s proper theme, he would have raised his imaginative fabric on a more permanent foundation; upon the appetites, passions, and emotions of men, their vices and virtues, their aims and ambitions, which are a far more constant quantity than any theological system. This perhaps was what Goethe meant, when he pronounced the subject of _Paradise Lost_, to be “abominable, with a fair outside, but rotten inwardly.”
Whatever fortune may be in store for _Paradise Lost_ in the time to come, Milton’s choice of subject was, at the time he wrote, the only one which offered him the guarantees of reality, authenticity, and divine truth, which he required. We need not therefore search the annals of literature to find the poem which may have given the first suggestion of the fall of man as a subject. This, however, has been done by curious antiquaries, and a list of more than two dozen authors has been made, from one or other of whom Milton may have taken either the general idea or particular hints for single incidents. Milton, without being a very wide reader, was likely to have seen the _Adamus Exul_ of Grotius (1601), and he certainly had read Giles Fletcher’s _Christ’s Victory and Triumph_ (1610). There are traces of verbal reminiscence of Sylvester’s translation of _Du Bartas_. But out of the long catalogue of his predecessors there appear only three, who can claim to have conceived the same theme with anything like the same breadth, or on the same scale as Milton has done. These are the so-called Caedmon, Andreini, and Vondel.
1. The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem which passes under the name of Caedmon has this one point of resemblance to the plot of _Paradise Lost_, that in it the seduction of Eve is Satan’s revenge for his expulsion from heaven. As Francis Junius was much occupied upon this poem of which he published the text in 1655, it is likely enough that he should have talked of it with his friend Milton.
2. Voltaire related that Milton during his tour in Italy (1638) had seen performed _L’Adamo_, a sacred drama by the Florentine Giovanni Battista Andreini, and that he “took from that ridiculous trifle” the hint of the “noblest product of human imagination.” Though Voltaire relates this as a matter of fact, it is doubtful if it be more than an _on dit_ which he had picked up in London society. Voltaire could not have seen Andreini’s drama, for it is not at all a ridiculous trifle. Though much of the dialogue is as insipid as dialogue in operettas usually is, there is great invention in the plot, and animation in the action. Andreini is incessantly offending against taste, and is infected with the vice of the Marinists, the pursuit of _concetti_, or far-fetched analogies between things unlike. His infernal personages are grotesque and disgusting, rather than terrible; his scenes in heaven childish–at once familiar and fantastic, in the style of the Mysteries of the age before the drama. With all these faults the _Adamo_ is a lively and spirited representation of the Hebrew legend, and not unworthy to have been the antecedent of _Paradise Lost_. There is no question of plagiarism, for the resemblance is not even that of imitation or parentage, or adoption. The utmost that can be conceded is to concur in Hayley’s opinion that, either in representation or in perusal, the _Adamo_ of Andreini had made an impression on the mind of Milton; had, as Voltaire says, revealed to him the hidden majesty of the subject. There had been at least three editions of the _Adamo_ by 1641, and Milton may have brought one of these with him, among the books which he had shipped from Venice, even, if he had not seen the drama on the Italian stage, or had not, as Todd suggests, met Andreini in person.
So much appears to me to be certain from the internal evidence of the two compositions as they stand. But there are further some slight corroborative circumstances, (i.) The Trinity College sketch, so often referred to, of Milton’s scheme when it was intended to be dramatic, keeps much more closely, both in its personages and in its ordering, to Andreini. (ii.) In Phillips’s _Theatrum Poetarum_, a compilation in which he had his uncle’s help, Andreini is mentioned as author “of a fantastic poem entitled Olivastro, which was printed at Bologna, 1642.” If Andreini was known to Edward Phillips, the inference is that he was known to Milton.
3. Lastly, though external evidence is here wanting, it cannot be doubted that Milton was acquainted with the _Lucifer_ of the Dutch poet, Joost van den Vondel, which appeared in 1654. This poem is a regular five-act drama in the Dutch language, a language which Milton was able to read. In spite of commercial rivalry and naval war there was much intercourse between the two republics, and Amsterdam books came in regular course to London. The Dutch drama turns entirely on the revolt of the angels, and their expulsion from heaven, the fall of man being but a subordinate incident. In _Paradise Lost_ the relation of the two events is inverted, the fall of the angels being there an episode, not transacted, but told by one of the personages of the epic. It is therefore only in one book of _Paradise Lost_, the sixth, that the influence of Vondel can be looked for. There may possibly occur in other parts of our epic single lines of which an original may be found in Vondel’s drama. Notably such a one is the often-quoted–
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. _Paradise Lost_, i. 263.
which is Vondel’s–
En liever d’eerste Vorst in eenigh lager hof Dan in’t gezalight licht de tweede, of noch een minder!
But it is in the sixth book only in which anything more than a verbal similarity is traceable. According to Mr. Gosse, who has given an analysis, with some translated extracts, of Vondel’s _Lucifer_, the resemblances are too close and too numerous to be mere coincidences. Vondel is more human than Milton, just where human attributes are unnatural, so that heaven is made to seem like earth, while in _Paradise Lost_ we always feel that we are in a region aloft. Miltonic presentation has a dignity and elevation, which is not only wanting but is sadly missed in the Dutch drama, even the language of which seems common and familiar.
The poems now mentioned form, taken together, the antecedents of _Paradise Lost_. In no one instance, taken singly, is the relation of Milton to a predecessor that of imitation, not even to the extent in which the Aeneid, for instance, is an imitation of the Iliad and Odyssey. The originality of Milton lies not in his subject, but in his manner; not in his thoughts, but in his mode of thinking. His story and his personages, their acts and words, had been the common property of all poets since the fall of the Roman Empire. Not only the three I have specially named had boldly attempted to set forth a mythical representation of the origin of evil, but many others had fluttered round the same central object of poetic attraction. Many of these productions Milton had read, and they had made their due impression on his mind according to their degree of force. When he began to compose _Paradise Lost_ he had the reading of a life-time behind him. His imagination worked upon an accumulated store, to which books, observation, and reflection had contributed in equal proportions. He drew upon this store without conscious distinction of its sources. Not that this was a recollected material, to which the poet had recourse whenever invention failed him; it was identified with himself. His verse flowed from his own soul, but his was a soul which had grown up nourished with the spoil of all the ages. He created his epic, as metaphysicians have said that God created the world, by drawing it out of himself, not by building it up out of elements supplied _ab extra_.
The resemblances to earlier poets, Greek, Latin, Italian, which could be pointed out in _Paradise Lost_, were so numerous that in 1695, only twenty-one years after Milton’s death, an editor, one Patrick Hume, a schoolmaster in the neighbourhood of London, was employed by Tonson to point out the imitations in an annotated edition. From that time downwards, the diligence of our literary antiquaries has been busily employed in the same track of research, and it has been extended to the English poets, a field which was overlooked, or not known to the first collector. The result is a valuable accumulation of parallel passages, which have been swept up into our _variorum_ Miltons, and make _Paradise Lost_, for English phraseology, what Virgil was for Latin in the middle ages, the centre round which the study moves. The learner, who desires to cultivate his feeling for the fine shades and variations of expression, has here a rich opportunity, and will acknowledge with gratitude the laborious services of Newton, Pearce, the Wartons, Todd, Mitford, and other compilers. But these heaped-up citations of parallel passages somewhat tend to hide from us the secret of Miltonic language. We are apt to think that the magical effect of Milton’s words has been produced by painfully inlaying tesserae of borrowed metaphor–a mosaic of bits culled from extensive reading, carried along by a retentive memory, and pieced together so as to produce a new whole, with the exquisite art of a Japanese cabinet-maker. It is sometimes admitted that Milton was a plagiary, but it is urged in extenuation that his plagiarisms were always reproduced in finer forms.
It is not in the spirit of vindicating Milton, but as touching the mystery of metrical language, that I dwell a few moments upon this misconception. It is true that Milton has a way of making his own even what he borrows. While Horace’s thefts from Alcaeus or Pindar are palpable, even from the care which he takes to Latinise them, Milton cannot help transfusing his own nature into the words he adopts. But this is far from all. When Milton’s widow was asked “if he did not often read Homer and Virgil, she understood it as an imputation upon him for stealing from those authors, and answered with eagerness, that he stole from nobody but the muse who inspired him.” This is more true than she knew. It is true there are many phrases or images in _Paradise Lost_ taken from earlier writers–taken, not stolen, for the borrowing is done openly. When Adam, for instance, begs Raphael to prolong his discourse deep into night,–
Sleep, listening to thee, will watch; Or we can bid his absence, till thy song End, and dismiss thee ere the morning shine;
we cannot be mistaken, in saying that we have here a conscious reminiscence of the words of Alcinous to Ulysses in the eleventh book of the Odyssey. Such imitation is on the surface, and does not touch the core of that mysterious combination of traditive with original elements in diction, which Milton and Virgil, alone of poets known to us, have effected. Here and there, many times, in detached places, Milton has consciously imitated. But, beyond this obvious indebtedness, there runs through the whole texture of his verse a suggestion of secondary meaning, a meaning which has been accreted to the words, by their passage down the consecrated stream of classical poetry. Milton quotes very little for a man of much reading. He says of himself (_Judgment of Bucer_) that he “never could delight in long citations, much less in whole traductions, whether it be natural disposition or education in me, or that my mother bore me a speaker of what God made mine own, and not a translator.” And the observation is as old as Bishop Newton, that “there is scarce any author who has written so much, and upon such various subjects, and yet quotes so little from his contemporary authors.” It is said that “he could repeat Homer almost all without book.” But we know that common minds are apt to explain to themselves the working of mental superiority, by exaggerating the power of memory. Milton’s own writings remain a sufficient evidence that his was not a verbal memory. And, psychologically, the power of imagination and the power of verbal memory, are almost always found in inverse proportion.
Milton’s diction is the elaborated outcome of all the best words of all antecedent poetry, not by a process of recollected reading and storage, but by the same mental habit by which we learn to speak our mother tongue. Only, in the case of the poet, the vocabulary acquired has a new meaning superadded to the words, from the occasion on which they have been previously employed by others. Words, over and above their dictionary signification, connote all the feeling which has gathered round them by reason of their employment through a hundred generations of song. In the words of Mr. Myers, “without ceasing to be a logical step in the argument, a phrase becomes a centre of emotional force. The complex associations which it evokes, modify the associations evoked by other words in the same passage, in a way distinct from logical or grammatical connection.” The poet suggests much more than he says, or as Milton himself has phrased it, “more is meant than meets the ear.”
For the purposes of poetry a thought is the representative of many feelings, and a word is the representative of many thoughts. A single word may thus set in motion in us the vibration of a feeling first consigned to letters 3000 years ago. For oratory words should be winged, that they may do their work of persuasion. For poetry words should be freighted, with associations of feeling, that they may awaken sympathy. It is the suggestive power of words that the poet cares for, rather than their current denotation. How laughable are the attempts of the commentators to interpret a line in Virgil as they would a sentence in Aristotle’s _Physics!_ Milton’s secret lies in his mastery over the rich treasure of this inherited vocabulary. He wielded it as his own, as a second mother-tongue, the native and habitual idiom of his thought and feeling, backed by a massive frame of character, and “a power which is got within me to a passion.” (_Areopagitica_)
When Wordsworth came forward at the end of the eighteenth century with his famous reform of the language of English poetry, the Miltonic diction was the current coin paid out by every versifier. Wordsworth revolted against this dialect as unmeaning, hollow, gaudy, and inane. His reform consisted in dropping the consecrated phraseology altogether, and reverting to the common language of ordinary life. It was necessary to do this in order to reconnect poetry with the sympathies of men, and make it again a true utterance instead of the ingenious exercise in putting together words, which it had become. In projecting this abandonment of the received tradition, it may be thought that Wordsworth was condemning the Miltonic system of expression in itself. But this was not so. Milton’s language had become in the hands of the imitators of the eighteenth century sound without sense, a husk without the kernel, a body of words without the soul of poetry. Milton had created and wielded an instrument which was beyond the control of any less than himself. He used it as a living language; the poetasters of the eighteenth century wrote it as a dead language, as boys make Latin verses. Their poetry is to _Paradise Lost_, as a modern Gothic restoration is to a genuine middle-age church. It was against the feeble race of imitators, and not against the master himself, that the protest of the lake poet was raised. He proposed to do away with the Miltonic vocabulary altogether, not because it was in itself vicious, but because it could now only be