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Milton : Man and Thinker. By Denis Seurat. (Cape. 15s.

. pet.) Milton's-, Poems, - 1645. Type-faesimile.: (Clarehdon Preas.

10s. 6a. het.) The Poenisinf John Milton. Edited by H. T. C. Grierson. (Florence preset* Ghtat.to and Windus. 2 vols. 12s. ad. net each.) " Do -you ask what I am meditating ? By the help of heaven, an immortality Ay fazne."=John Milton to Charles Beodati.

TES parents- of John Milton. found their -justification -in this son of -theirs. He 'came—of a • stock notable for its obstinacy. And what individualism John Milton inherited in his frame was magnified by his education. From the beginning his parents brought him .up to the consciousness of genius and impressed upon him the full seriousness of his duties—to himself, to England and to the world. At the age of ten he composed verses which his family considered marvellous, and from that time he had no doubt of his power to become a great man. Indeed, he considered himself the very, type of man--not openly and explicitly, perhaps, but ,with-a hidden conviction that the touchstone of truths was their consistency with the genius of John Milton. We find him, then, even at Cambridge; conscious of his destiny, alienating the people he met by the rigour of his i life and the profundity of his self-esteem, and winning them back again by his sensitive and almost feminine grace of body and mind. His—early exercises in verse were truly exercises ; he WILS practising his wings. These poems he wrote not for self-expression, not with his heart in what be was doing. His heart was set Upon those great poems which were to come ; and how can we expect lyrical genius from a man who binds his moods and uses them to try himself out ? Even the Ode on the Nativity and L'Allegro express no impulse. " They are not• Perfections, for Milton withheld perfection. He worked with his right hand, as ably as he could, to train his right hand. But is it possible, we may well ask, to defer the realization of genius like this ? Isn't the only training that is finally chicacious the expression of self in each moment, as though that moment were the fullness of time and everything must b poured into it ? But here we may degenerate into a discussion of impractical ideals. Let us say now that the pure hunger of ambition has never been so thoroughly displayed in our literature as in John

Milton.

Indeed, there is something to be appalled at in this huge

and active individualism. In so far as we bow our heads to the man, John Milton, we bow them because his aim was not vague but concrete ; it was technique and dexterity and learning he felt himself bound to acquire: the inspiration was there already, as much as he wanted, and only his present handlessness prevented him from ex-traverting it. But, unlike other individualists, he did not waste his time in admiring himself. He set himself to learn the use of his capacities. He learned, not in order to be taught, not to gain anything from the intuitions of other men, but in order to confirm himself and to discover the ways of triumph. Where the Fathers of the Church, for example, agree with him, he praises them all and adduces them as authorities. Where they disagree with him, he ridicules and denounces them, calling them "that indigested heap and fry of authors."

"Whatsoever t1rtie;--61- the heedless handotif biiniieefiath drawn down from of old to this present, in her huge drag-net, whether fish or seaweed, shells 'or- shim' bs, unpicked, unchosen, those are the fathers."

So he remained, unsubmissive tO other men, but utterly submissive tn the necessity of work. He was erudite , in order to prove his genius. He was chaste in order to gain mastery of himself ; every man must be chaste "who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things." And even in his youth he was casting about to find the largest subjeet for his verse. Epic it must be. Shall it be the -myth of the foundation of Britain ? For some time that was his decision ; he would place himself at the root of the English race, so that all of us should derive from him. But by degrees he discovered a deeper ground for his ambition—the myth of the foundation of the universe,

the rebellion of angels, the fall of man. He would place himself at the root of humankind. --

What is more surprising and honourable in him than that after his purpose was fixed he should suddenly abandon_ everything for which he had trained himself and throw himself into a political struggle ; give up those talents he had cultivated for his own glory and take to pamphleteering in an impersonal cause ? It is the same Milton. He still ; reacts from his individualism. If he uses his magnificent and hard-won wealth of phrase to vindicate the freedom of the Press, it is because he himself has been inconvenienced and outraged. He attacks the laws of marriage because he himself has suffered from domestic infelicities. Yet for twenty years, during the troubles of the State, he can drop. his projects of ambition, he can work in the service of other men, and for what he conceives as the advantage of his fellows he can come near to beggaring himself of his capacities. In a word, he loses his sight—he who had preserved every

faculty to extract from it a tribute to his greatness. As Dr. Seurat says :-

"Behind Milton's literary ambition was a higher one : to be great. When greatness seemed to lie elsewhere than in literature, he sought for it elsewhere. There is therefore no contradiction, no inconsistency, between the two parts of Milton's fife. They are not two ; they come together from his character ; they are one the search for the glory of God, which is the same as the search fox the glory of Milton. But Milton, in his pride, preferred the glory of his own approbation to the applause of the literary public. It is fine and noble to sing the ways of God ; it is finer and nobler tc fulfil them. Therefore, in that earnest soul of Milton's, there was little hesitation. And he knew perfectly well—land this is all- important—that he was sacrificing them himself. . . Thus, in the fullest conciousness of what he was doing, Milton gave up the aims of his life. He trusted in God, and, so to speak, ran up a debit account against God's name, hoping that one day God would pay up."

It must seem to us now that it was this very sacrifice of ambition that gave Milton in the end the power to write Paradise Lost. It was in the ruin of his hopes, in his beggary and despair, that he triumphed. But we must not forget. that even in his sacrifice he remained individualist ; and even Paradise Lost bears upon its face and hides in its structure the fact that it was grounded, conceived, and carded through by the "last infirmity," which we might better call the "original sin." Hence it happens that the very metre of the poem has worked in English poetry to kill freedom and exalt artifice. There is a tell-tale fact to be discovered when we examine the great accretion of ideas which served Milton for a philosophical system. There is no place in any of his works-- pamphlets or poems—for the Spirit. Never in his life did the thought come to him that the universe centres as mud) in every other man as in John Milton.

Dr. Saurat's life of Milton and his exposition of the ideas implicit in his writings are both admirable. Indeed, it is hard to think that a better introduction to Milton could have been written. It is rather chastening to think that the work of taking Milton seriously should be left to a French critic ; our own critics have been occupied mainly with the technical virtues of his verse. It is especially in tracking down the contributions to the system of Milton, in exploring its sources and expanding its expression that the merit of the book consists. Perhaps Dr. Seurat errs in giving Milton himself credit for the profundity of the ideas he took from the Kab- balah, or from the great English "barbarous philosopher," Robert Fludd. It is a fault that can well be forgival, however, for the exposition itself is very valuable, and more people ad likely to read Milton than the Kabbalists.

Mr. Grierson's edition of the poems is most sensibly con. ceived. He has fixed as far as possible the chronology ot the poems, and prints them in their order Of composition. The spelling of the original editions he has standardized ; he has kept Milton's own peculiarities of spelling where they are significant, but has left no eccentricities or mere archaisms to interrupt the reader. The Clarendon Press edition of the early poems will serve the scholar who wishes no errors cor- rected except the most obvious, and no modernization attempted: "The purpose of this reprint," the Press an- nounces, "is to put into the reader's hands, a book resembling as closely as may be, the book which Milton saw." "I have striven," says Mr. Grierson, "to make my text represent, more closely than any which I know, the way in which Milton