CHAPTER II

MILTON

THE literary career of Milton falls naturally into three divisions. The first, from 1625 to 1640, is the period of his early poems-of the Hymn on the Nativity, of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, of Comus and Lycidas. The second, from 1640 to 1660, that is from the Long Parliament to the Restoration, is the period of his controversial pamphlets-of Areopagitica and Eikonoklastes and the great Defence of the People of England, which overthrew Salmasiusand contains virtually no poems except sonnets and a few paraphrases and translations. The third, from 1660 to 1671, is the culminating time of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, when he withdrew almost entirely from public life, and, left at liberty by the contemptuous tolerance of a government which he disowned, devoted his closing years to the service of his art.

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Thus, though it is saturated with political feeling, his poetry stands in singular detachment from the actual changes and fluctuations of current events. Part was written before he entered the arena; part was written after the struggle had ended in defeat: the former sounds a few premonitory notes of conflict, like the attack on church abuses in Lycidas, but is for the most part as remote and self-contained as a college garden; in the latter he resolutely

1 The idea of treating Paradise Lost (as a Drama) was first conceived about 1641, and there is evidence that the Address to the Sun (Bk. IV, 1. 32, &c.) was composed about then for its opening. Milton, however, deliberately laid it aside and did not return to it until after 1658, when he adopted the epic form. It was finished in 1663.

fastened his study door against the world and gave himself up to solitude and to contemplation. There is hardly any poet who so little reflects the age in which he lived.

It is not here proposed to attempt, in five pages of introduction, an estimate of Milton's genius. For that last reward of consummated scholarship' the student will consult the writings of Addison and Johnson, of Hazlitt and De Quincy and Landor, of Pattison and Masson and Raleigh. A few isolated points, however, may here be noted, not because they are new, but because in the immense range and variety of the subject they are in some danger of being overlooked. The first is the vividness and accuracy of his descriptions of nature. It is true that he has little gift of pictorial compositionEve's bower, for example, is a tangle of incongruous beauties-but in the presentation of detail he is unsurpassed. His epithets are as just as they are unexpected the wan' cowslip, the 'glowing violet, the 'russet lawns and fallows grey' of early morning. He loves the low-creeping mist in the valley; the country fragrance of grain or tedded grass or kine'; the song of birds at daybreak when the sun, clear-shining after rain, has

Dried the wet

On drooping plant or dropping tree.1

His blind eyes could behold the sky, thick with tempest, 'like a dark ceiling,' or the home-coming fleet that on the far horizon hangs in the clouds'. Of all false criticisms that have been urged against Milton, the most false is that he saw Nature through the spectacles of books.

The second, so far as his self-imposed limitations would allow, is his power of delineating character. Satan, as depicted in Paradise Lost, is finely and

1 Paradise Regained, IV. 433. See the whole passage.

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consistently drawn: his pride, his courage, his masterful resolution, the tremendous irony with which he edges his purpose at the moment nearest to relenting, his disdain of the loathsome form which he is to assume 3: there is a splendour in the whole conception which removes it as far from the incarnate evil of Puritan Theology as from the grotesque fiends of mediaeval legend. Again, the scene between Samson and Dalila is a wonderful study of a bad woman who, in place of penitence, feels only the sting of wounded vanity, who tries by every device of cajolery and insincere excuse to bring her betrayed lover back again to her feet, and who shows, by the voluble indignation of her failure, that she had no other purpose than to succeed. Finer still, because more subtle, is the change wrought by the Fall upon the characters of Adam and Eve. All the essential qualities which were there before are there still, but they are all for the moment warped and degraded. Eve's impulsiveness turns to unthinking falsehood, her quickness of intelligence to sophistry, her very love becomes tainted with selfish fears; Adam's rebuke, grave and dignified before he partakes of the transgression, grows afterwards harsh, stern, and acrimonious. Yet because knowledge is of good as well as evil, the better part in the end prevails; love and hope and strength return with a deeper note of experience, and Eve's closing words are full of the promise of a new life.

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Thirdly, for all his magnificent austerity, Milton has moments of very keen and genuine feeling. The sonnet on his late-espoused Saint' is an instance, so is that on the Massacres in Piedmont, which burns like one of the denunciatory Psalms;

1 Bk. II, passim.

3 Bk. IX, 162-78.

2 Bk. IV, 358-92.

• Samson Agonistes, 710-996.

5 See especially her speeches on pp. 60, 63, 65 of this volume.

Bk. XII, 614-24.

the three famous passages on his blindness rise tone by tone to a cry of almost intolerable agony. No doubt such moments are rare-Milton was not one who frequently unlocked his heart--but when they come they are overwhelming.

His two most obvious faults are so obvious that they need little more than the bare mention. He had no humour-the elephant of his Eden is the type and pattern of his own jesting, and we could well spare the frigid epigrams, the scene of Satan's artillery, and, except for one memorable line, the sonnet on Tetrachordon. Worse than this, he has, in the highest matters, no reticence. Dante, who describes every circle in Hell and every step of the Hill of Purgatory, turns back in awe from the White Rose of Paradise. St. John was admitted to the vision of the Son of Man, 'And when I saw Him I fell at his feet as dead.' Milton stands in the Presence with knee unbent and head unbowed: he relates the ineffable, he circumscribes the Infinite, he penetrates into the celestial counsels, and without misgiving 'justifies the ways of God'. His Heaven is a little lower than Olympus: a mundane kingdom which is stately, wise, dignified, but not divine.

To speak of his poetic form is to speak of the nearest approach to perfection that English verse has yet attained. It was influenced by Spenser and Marlowe Mr. Milton,' says Dryden, hath confessed to me that Spenser was his original'; but it far surpasses even the two great models which it followed. Strong, sonorous, flexible, rich with classic idiom and allusion, it holds in faultless design its counterchange of circling rhythms: like some vast polyphonic web of melodies that call and answer and intertwine at a solemn music. There is no blank verse like that of Paradise Lost; none other that moves with such fullness and majesty, that

carries such variety of stress and colour, that has so supreme a sense of the value of noble words. Tennyson spoke of Virgil's hexameter as the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man': if it be possible to compare two achievements so dissimilar, we may find here a rival by whom even that pre-eminence can be challenged.

JOHN MILTON (1608-1674) was born in London and educated at St. Paul's and at Christ's College, Cambridge. According to Aubrey he was a poet from the age of ten; and he certainly wrote poems both in Latin and English while at the University. For some time after he thought of taking Orders, but he was strongly opposed to the Church policy of Laud, and finally abandoned the idea and settled with his father at Horton. Here he wrote L'Allegro and Penseroso (probably in 1632). In 1634 he wrote the masque of Arcades, and this was shortly followed by Comus, which was acted at Ludlow Castle in September, 1634. Lycidas appeared in 1637. Milton now spent some time travelling in Italy, where he was well received. He repaid the civilities of his hosts with Latin and Italian poems. He was recalled to England by the condition of affairs, and in 1639 he settled in Aldersgate Street and devoted himself to the education of his two nephews. More pupils came later, and for a short time Milton kept a sort of small school. He was already planning a great poem on the lines of Paradise Lost, but political events caused him deliberately to lay aside poetry and take to pamphlet writing. In 1641 he published anonymously three pamphlets in defence of Smectymnuus against the English Bishops: Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England; Of Prelatical Episcopacy; and Animadversions upon the Remonstrance Defence. These were followed by The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy (1641-2). In 1643 he married Mary Powell, daughter of a cavalier squire near Oxford. His wife was only seventeen, and the marriage proved unhappy. In the same year were published Milton's first pamphlets upon freedom of divorce. These were unlicensed, and the House of Commons directed search to be made for the authors and printers, with a view to punishing them. The only result, however, was the publication of the