THE "QUARTERLY REVIEW" ON MILTON.

AREMARKABLE paper in the new number of the Quarterly Review introduces to its readers a French criticism of Milton, which will go a great way towards teaching Englishmen to discriminate between their blind idolatry and their just admiration for the second amongst the great poets of their country. M. Scherer and the Quarterly Reviewer are neither of them disparagers of Milton. They do the fullest justice to the solemn magnificence, the rare elevation, the strange rich music, the unerring magic, of his verse ; but they do not disguise the injurious influences which affected him as a poet, the thorny and ill-digested polemical learning which absorbed so much of his mind, and sowed with briars the path of his imagination, nor do they entirely ignore the almost pedantic display of classical learning which overlays his grandest passages with an almost too ostentatious brocade of allusive illus- tration. The latter blemish in Milton as a poet is not indeed, we think, quite adequately brought out in M. Scherer's criticisms,— at least, so far as they are embodied in the Quarterly Review,— though it is sufficiently indicated in the passage in which Milton is spoken of as "a great poet, with a Salmasius or a Grotius bound up along with him ;" but on the former blemish, that polemical cast of his mind which has so vitally affected the whole drift of his great poem, M. Scherer and his reviewer dwell with what we may even regard as an excess of disfavour. Not, indeed, that it is possible to differ from the estimate formed of the subject of "Paradise Lost" as a theme for poetry. It is not disputable for a moment that a theodicy cannot be really assimilated into the structure of a poem, and that as a matter of fact, in Milton's epic the attempt at amalgamation is a failure. As M. Scherer says, "they clash with one another, and from their juxtaposition there results a suppressed contradiction, which extends to the whole work, impairs its solidity, and compromises its value." At the same time, it may be fairly doubted, we think, whether, Milton being what he was, he could have chosen any theme on which his genius would have poured itself out with anything like equal wealth and grandeur. Satan, as it has been well said, is the true hero of "Paradise Lost," and it is difficult to conceive how Milton could have drawn that magnificent picture of spiri- tual defiance and unsubdued revolt, in connection with a more manageable theme. Sometimes we have fancied that the story of Job might have given him a subject which would have produced a companion poem to the "Samson Agonistes," one, moreover, of greater depth and dignity, and even more suited to the "high argument" in which Milton so delighted. But Satan is a very sub- ordinate, by no means an heroic figure, in the story of Job ; and the subject would not have given occasion to that unequalled delineation of unbending pride and naked will, which is the finest element in "Paradise Lost." On the whole, though we quite agree with M. Scherer and his interpreter in the Quarterly, that Milton's great poem, to be valued as it ought, should be read only in passages, and that the long, dull tracts ought to be skipped by any one who has the true eye for what is skipable, we are disposed to doubt very much indeed whether it is not fortunate for English literature that Milton fell under the delusion that the theme of "man's redemption" was a proper theme for an epic poem. Milton gave no specimen of his true power till he got into what Mr. Clough calls the great "massy strengths of abstraction." He is splendid, he is musical, he is rich, he is full at once of genius and daring fancies, in such poems as "Allegro," and " Penseroso," and " Comus ;" but in all these beautiful poems you feel that he is ornate, that the exquisite beauty of the images, and the overlaid enamel, almost smother at times the form and substance of the subject itself. But wherever you come across the picture given us in "Paradise Lost" of spiritual defiance and rebellious scorn, the substantive massiveness of the theme altogether casts into the shade the external orna- ment, and Milton's strength and grandeur crop out like granite

from a fertile alluvial soil. We remember nothing but the majesty of the main conception in such passages as these :—

" He above the rest

In shape and gesture proudly eminent, Stood like a tower ; his form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appear'd Less than Arch-Angel ridn'd and the excess Of glory obscur'd ; as when the sun new-risen, Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon, In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs. Darken'd so, yet shone Above them all the Arch-Angel: but his face

Deep scars of thunder had intrench'd, and care Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows Of dauntless courage, and considerate pride Waiting revenge ; cruel his eye, bat cast Signs of remorse and passion, to behold The fellows of his crime, the followers rather (Far other once beheld in bliss) condemn'd For ever now to have their lot in pain."

Bad, in a poetic sense, as the subject of "Paradise Lost" is, we sincerely doubt whether any other subject in any way accessible to Milton could have given him the requisite occa- sion to bring out the full sum of his imaginative strength. And looking to his other poems, we question gravely whether, had Milton chosen any more concrete theme, any theme which would have given full play to the lavishly luxuriant fancy by which even his finest passages are overlaid, we should have had any adequate conception of the majestic character of his imagination. Certainly there is no other of his poems (except it be the "Samson Agonistes ") from which we should gain the least conception of that rugged and massive grandeur which is the secret of his spell for the English people.

His mind was so thickly carpeted with the exquisite flora of a teeming fancy, and his purely intellectual power,—his power of thought and invention,—was so much inferior to his power of delineating moods of feeling, and his delight in illustrative learn- ing, that it took a somewhat abstract subject, with a moral con- ception at the centre of it which had a strange fascination for his Republican and proud and sombre mind, to give us a chance of seeing the shapes of the bare rock beneath all that tropical vege- tation and all those stores of acquired knowledge.

Milton "seems," says M. Scherer, in the finest of the passages ex- tracted by the Quarterly Reviewer, "to wrap us in a fold of his robe, and to carry us with him into the eternal region where is his home." But that image, true and noble as it is, describes Milton only as he appears in the greatest passages of his great poem. In the exquisite poems of his younger years, though the melody is even more perfect and the felicity of imagery more marvellous, he rather laps us in a wilderness of flowers, than carries us away into "the eternal region which is his home." Language more exquisite and in its metaphor more bold than that of Milton's " Comus " or the " Penseroso " cannot be imagined, but then no one would say of it that it carries us into the bracing atmosphere of the "eternal region where is his home." Comus, describing the song of the lady whom he hopes to make his victim, says :— "Sure something holy lodges in that breast,

And with these raptures moves the vocal air To testify his bidden residence : How sweetly did they float upon the wings Of silence, through the empty vaulted night, At every fall, smoothing the raven down Of darkness till it smiled !"

And critic after critic has acknowledged at once the daring of the conflicting images, and yet the exquisite beauty of the resulting impression. But passages of this kind,—and Milton's earlier poems are made up of passages of this kind,—hide us rather in the folds of a luxuriant fancy, certainly do not bear us away in folds of his higher imagination "into the eternal region where is his home." Indeed, Milton's illustrative fancy, as distinguished from his few grand conceptions of spiritual states and moods, was an exquisitely sensuous fancy, but not certainly in any sense a spiritual fancy.

There is more spiritual life in many of Henry Vaughan's poems, —say, such a one as "They are all gone into a world of light,"—

more spiritual life in most of Wordsworth's shortest poems, —say, either of the poems called "The Daisy," or "The Prim- rose and the Rock,"—than in all Milton's exquisite imagery put together. Look at all the beautiful imagery of his " Allegro " and " Penseroso," and you will hardly find an image anywhere that does not leave you where it found you,—that is, breathing the soft though exquisite atmosphere of sensuous delights.

And Milton's fancy, perfect as it is, is not only sensuous, but it is always sedate, and in its grandiose way, ornate. It is, of

course, spontaneous, because such perfection of workmanship and magic of felicity must imply spontaneousness of a kind. But there is nothing that is not under control, that is not measured and polished and considerate in its movement. When in his

" Allegro " he sends his readers to the theatre to see Ben Jonson, or to hear,-

-" sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild,"

he must have been betrayed into that exquisitely fine but most inadequate picture of Shakespeare as a dramatist, by his profound sense of the contrast between his own highly disciplined and marvellously cultured genius, and the more untutored poetry of his great contemporary. There is nothing 'wild' about Milton from the first line to the last of his poems. No man loved liberty more, but it was the stately and measured liberty of the Puritan, who, while he defied tyranny to intervene in his religious life, yet regulated all his life by a severe rule of his own, not the liberty of happy children, or swift and buoyant youth. Milton's conception even of Mirth—and that, too, a conception formed in his youth—is curiously sedate, and though full of beauty, is much nearer to the conception of a trim and stately Cheerfulness, than of the Mirth he did not understand.

Again, we differ somewhat from the Quarterly Reviewer in speak- ing of the elevation of Milton as due in him to the moral quality of "pureness." "Pureness" has a great many meanings, and no doubt in some of the most important it was very characteristic of Milton. His character was set in a noble key. His mind was fixed on a noble standard of life. Though his prose writings are often morose, and oftener still passionate, you can see that not merely high principles, but grand principles, are of the very grain of his political and moral nature. But when the Reviewer talks of his elevation of style being due mainly to his pureness, we should demur. We should say it was rather due to his earnest, his intense, his imperious love of justice. That he hated those sensual lusts "which war against the soul," we all know. But the richness and sensuousness of his fancy tempt him to linger often in a heated region, though his sympathies are always for the right. We could not say that we think that Milton's genius had the perfect coolness and refreshing quality of the highest natural purity. His fancy runs often in a carnal vein, and it was rather his worship of righteousness, than his temperament, or the channels in which his thoughts naturally flowed, which kept his poetry so pure. There is nothing of the limpid and bracing springs of Wordsworth's rapture in the imperial sublimity and voluptuous magnificence of Milton's rich and in- dustrious imagination. His poetry is like a mountain in the tropics ; the summit is high in the pure ether, but at the spreading base, and high up the sides, you find a garden of the richest and most heavy-scented blossoms, and a very jungle of leafy shades. The Quarterly Reviewer will call that sentence uninstructive rhetoric. But it has a meaning, too. It is only at his highest points that the word " pureness " seems to express with anything like exact or felicitous propriety the leading characteristic of Milton's imagination.