MASSON'S LIFE OF MILTON.*

Ma. MASSON'S stupendous work is complete at last. He has inseparably associated his name with that of Milton, and all students of the poet and of his age will be compelled to consult these volumes. It would be difficult to estimate the labour expended by the author. Not only has he mastered all the authorities which bear directly on his subject, but with infinite skill and perseverance he seems to have followed every track, however obscure, which could lead to any point of interest re- motely associated with his great hero. Thoroughness and impartiality are the qualities of highest value, perhaps, in this Life of Milton. Mr. Masson is eminently trustworthy. He takes nothing at second-hand ; every step of his ground has been won by hard fighting, and perhaps there is no living writer who has a larger acquaintance with the politics and literature of the seventeenth century.

The faults of this magnum opus are as obvious as its merits. The author is a chronicler rather than an historian. In his anxiety to tell all he knows, and he appears to know everything, he does not always see the difference between what is of primary importance and what is of secondary value. His minute parti- cularity of detail partakes of fussiness, and the reader who follows painfully every petty incident or verbal criticism in these volumes, and in Mr. Masson's edition of the Poetical Works, may be led to complain that the game is not always worth the candle. From Mr. Masson's honourable toil we gain innumerable facts, and much fresh light on a highly important period of English history. Our knowledge of Milton's biography is also largely increased by the author's unwearied researches, but he has, we think, failed to give us a more vivid portrait of the poet than we possessed before. We know much more about Milton, thanks to Mr. Masson, but we do not see him more clearly, and the central figure is, as it were, hidden under the heap of stones which the biographer's reverence has led him to cast upon his cairn.

The volume before us, which consists of upwards of 800 closely filled pages, opens with the year of the Restoration. This miserable and shameless period of English history is one of no slight interest and significance. Charles II. was, we think, the worst king that ever sat upon the throne of England, the most vicious, the most unscrupulous, the most debased, the most in- different to the welfare of his kingdom. But Charles had easy manners and a pleasant wit, he could laugh heartily, and he fed his ducks in the Park ; so his perfidy was forgotten, and his unblushing licentiousness forgiven. England went mad with delight at the return of this scapegrace, and found among other amusements a merry pastime in witnessing the hanging and disembowelling of the regicides. There was another pleasant sight, too, which Lady Batten, Mrs. Pepys, and doubtless many • The Life of John Milton, narrated in connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary Ilictory of his Time. By David Masson, MA., LL.D. Vol, VI., 1660-1074. London: Macmillan and Co. 1880.

other ladies of quality went to see, namely, the disinterred bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton drawn upon sledges to Tyburn and hanged upon a tree, after which their heads were cut off and fixed on poles on the top of Westminster Hall, where "they were to remain for years and years." It was a brutal age, alike in its pleasures and in its punishments ; a cruel age, in which the outrageous revellings of the Court and of the merry Monarch made the contrast of his severities all the more striking. Many a harsh act was committed under Cromwell; but "Noll.," though stern, was not vindictive, and if he was often severe, he could also endure hardness. Under Charles, ex- treme laxity in one direction was accompanied by the strongest repression in another. What sort of King the second Charles would prove could be of course but dimly conjectured in 1660, but there was every reason why Milton should be alarmed at his advent. He had defended the deposition and execution of Charles I., he had abused the late King in the strongest terms which such a master of language could command, he had urged' the permanent establishment of a Republic, he had served with dauntless fidelity the late King's greatest enemy, and his last act, just before the arrival of Charles, had been to publish a second edition of his Ready and Easy Way, and as Mr. Masson puts it, " to double up his first, register once more his opinion of the worthlessness of the whole pack that were coming in, and hit approaching Majesty in the face." Milton must have thought his chance of escape a sorry one.

" The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus ;'

but Charles was not an Alexander, and, moreover, Pindar had not injured the conqueror of Thebes as Milton had striven to injure Charles. For nearly four months the poet, who must have felt the sword suspended over him, lay in concealment at a friend's house in Bartholomew Close ; and when one thinks of the excitement of the period, and of Milton's position, it is a marvel that he was left in peace. " There is no greater puzzle," says Professor Masson, " than this complete escape of Milton after the Restoration," and he considers that the poet had friends in the House, who managed his cause with admirable skill. The whole subject is investigated by the biographer with the utmost elaboration. Whatever was the cause of Milton's escape from the punishment meted out to the regicides and their accom- plices, we cannot agree with Mr. Mark Pattison in thinking it probable that he owed his immunity to his insignificance and his harmlessness.

Happily for England, the evil days on which Milton had fallen proved the happiest days possible for brooding over his divine fancies. He had, of course, no poetical greeting to be- stow upon the Heaven-sent monarch, and the abject servility and time-serving of contemporary poets must have disgusted his lofty nature :-

" Passing," writes Mr. Masson, " from the books and pamphlets of the Protectorate, or even from those of 1659, to the new mass from 1660 onwards, one is amazed at the discovery that the Muses in a nation can 'be such arrant turncoats. While Oliver lived, and for some time after his death, they had applauded him and panegyrised him ; even the honest Royalist wits who remained within his do- minions subdued at length into respect for him, and expressing that respect in language which was the more remarkable because it was cautions and reluctant. Now it was all otherwise. In prose and in verse nothing but panegyrics to Charles, laudations of Charles and his kindred day after day, renunciations of Oliver in every form of posthumous insult, reports of his meditations in Hell, and of his blasphemous messages upwards from his pro-eminence among the damned."

The greatest poet of the day, with the exception of Milton, had prophesied of Cromwell :-

" His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest ; His name a great example stands, to show How strangely high endeavours may be blessed Where piety and valour jointly go."

Three years later, Dryden sang to another tune, and told how, in the absence of Charles, madness had seized the pulpit and faction the throne, and how the King, whose " goodness only is above the laws," would reclaim some from sins by his edicts, and win others by his life and blest example. Charles was also told that music brings in vain

"Her choicest notes to praise the best of Kings,"

—whose pleasures even " are designed to noble ends." Waller, too, who had written some years before his Panegyric to my Lord Protector, had a poem ready to welcome "his Majesty's happy return" the day after the King's entry into Whitehall, in which we read of the much-suffering monarch's tried virtue and sacred word, and how,—the lines read like satire, but were written quite otherwise by Waller :-

" Faith, Law, and Piety, that. banished train, Justice and Truth, with you return again."

Imagine the contempt with which Milton, sitting lonely in his blindness, must have listened to these effusions, and others of a like kind; but it may be well to remember that greater poets of a nobler period had sinned in the same way, and that the grossest flattery was lavished upon Elizabeth by Edmund Spenser.

The history of Charles II.'s miserable reign up to 1674, the year of Milton's death, with the injustices and cruelties, the contempt for what is honourable in politics and social life by which it is distinguished, is related with some minuteness by Mr. Masson. We need not follow him on this track, which has been well worn before, and shall content ourselves with a few remarks suggested by his survey of the so-called. Restoration literature, and by the chapters devoted to Milton's life and poetry.

The author, with his usual love of dates and careful marking of periods, gives an account, in the order of their ages, of all the men of letters living at the Restoration. Milton was then in his fifty-second year, and the greatest work of his life was yet to be accomplished. Among the poets, Herrick and Shirley, and good Isaak Walton, a poet in prose, were his seniors. Waller was slightly older than Milton ; Butler, Denham, and Cowley were some years younger. Andrew Marvell, Milton's friend and colleague in the Latin Secretaryship, was forty, and the sacred poet, Henry Vaughan, was the same age. Samuel Butler was the wit of the period. At the age of forty-eight he was unknown, but by the publi- cation of Hadibras he leaped into fame at one bound. It was the book for the time, and became at once the favourite volume at Court. Yet Pepys is honest enough to confess that he could make nothing of it. He relates how he bought the new book of drollery at the Temple for half-a-crown, and finding it so silly that he was ashamed of it, sold it again for eighteen-pence. But all the world were praising Hadibras, and Pepys tried once more to discover the fun of it, but tried in vain. "I cannot, I confess," he writes, " see enough where the wit lies." The King praised Butler, sent for him to Court, made him promises of preferment, and broke them, according to his wont. Cowley, although he tried to be a Court poet, held a unique position. His genius was not likely to win favour among the courtiers of King Charles ; he could sing best in retirement, and it is pro- bable that if his life had not been cut off prematurely, the Porch-house at Chertsey would have proved a genial home for his verse. We do not know whether Milton and Cowley ever met; they would surely have had many themes in common. Dryden, the most prominent and characteristic poet of the Restoration, did, as all the world knows, call on Milton after the publication of Paradise Lost, and obtain permission from the venerable poet to " tag his verses," or, in other words, to put them into rhyme. After proving his own skill in rhyme in the early poems, Milton had denounced. it on the publication of Paradise Lost. On this, as on most subjects, his views would have been opposed to Dryden's. In some respects, Dryden was a masterly critic, but his argument, based on French precedent, in favour of rhyme for tragedies, is utterly futile, as Mr. Masson points out with much elaboration ; and he also shows, what may be less obvious to the general reader, that so far from the Muses, according to Dryden's assertion, having deserted England during the Civil Wars and returned with Charles, only one form of literature, the dramatic, did in reality come back with the Restoration. In prose and verse, according to the author, the best work of writers known in the Restoration period had been achieved before 1660.

" The best of old Hobbes, the best of Sanderson, nearly all Wither, all Herrick, nearly all Bramhull, the best of zaak Walton, all Brian Walton, the best of Howell, the best of Shirley, the whole of Fuller, a great deal of Waller, all of Browne of Norwich, nearly all of Jeremy Taylor, the best of Dr. Henry More, a full half of Baxter and Owen, much of Wilkins and Wallis, nearly the whole of Denham, the best of Cowley, and at least the fully announced beginnings of a number more, lie chronologically on the other side of the Restoration. Jeremy Taylor, the Bishop, belongs to the Restoration ; but the Jeremy Taylor of English literature belongs to the twenty years of the Civil Wars, the Republican Govern. ment of the Rump, and the sovereignty of Cromwell."

It is scarcely necessary to add that a general statement of ttlis kind is far from satisfying Mr. Masson, who, by way of proving his assertions, ransacks the registered book transactions of the period. With regard to one literary matter in which John Milton was concerned, the biographer writes, perhaps, too confidently. The evidence recently discovered, although far from proving decisively that the Eikon Basilike was written, as it professed to be, by Charles I., and not by the Bishop of Worcester, has assuredly some weight. Mr. Masson rejects the arguments marshalled many years ago by Dr. Wordsworth in favour of the royal authorship, and says that if Gauden was not the author of the Eilzo; " he was the maddest and most impudent liar and impostor in English history." An impostor Gauden assuredly was, by his own showing, whether he wrote the Eikon or not ; and the confidence with which the author accepts the claim of this disreputable Bishop will perhaps be somewhat shaken, in consideration of the recent discoveries of Mr. Scott at the British Museum, and of Mr. Marsh at the Record Office.

A large portion of this volume, and the most interesting por- tion, is devoted to an account of Milton's latest years, and of the works which have placed him beyond controversy among the greatest poets of the world. He had fallen, as he said, on evil days. His pecuniary losses had been severe, but he was still in comfortable circumstances, and had not to contend with poverty, as well as blindness. Daughters are generally the

dearest delight of fathers, but Milton, "a harsh sire," treated his three girls without consideration, and won their enmity by

his exacting conduct. Uneducated and undisciplined, the daughters were expected to read to their father in foreign languages, without understanding a word of what they read —one tongue, he said, was enough for a woman—and we need not wonder if they grew to hate him. Anne and Mary are said to have sold his books without his knowledge, and to have cheated him "in his nearketings ;" but Deborah, the youngest, acted a better part, and appears to have been better treated, for Aubrey states that Milton taught her Latin. When the eldest was twenty-four and the youngest eighteen they parted from their father, leaving him to the care of his third wife, a young woman less than half his age, whose gentle conduct and housewifely assiduities gave to Milton a tranquil home for the remainder of his life. Apparently the leisure needed for building up his immortal epics was un- broken. There is nothing more remarkable in our literary history than the production of such works at such a time, unless it be the popularity they attained. Paradise Lost was written, contrary to the poetical instinct of the age, in blank- verse, the poet's argument was eminently serious, no arts were used to catch the car of the public, and yet thirteen hundred copies of the poem were sold in about eighteen months. If such

a work could be written in our day, it may be questioned whether it would command such a sale. Yet persons who read poetry now, or profess to read it, must be twenty times more numerous than in the age of Milton. " This man," said Dryden,

" cuts us all out, and the ancients too ;" but Waller, on the other hand, declared that the poem was remarkable for nothing but its extreme length ; and this, no doubt, was (and perhaps still is) the private, if unexpressed, opinion of a good many readers. There are, it is to he feared, hundreds of English men and women who pride themselves on their culture, who have never read the Paradise Lost or the Paradise Regained through, there are many who have read the poems without any just appreciation of their transcendent splendour of language and divine harmony of rhythm.

Readers capable of enjoying such a heavenly song in an age so unheavenly must, as Mr. Masson observes, have been startled by it. The following passage is characteristic of the writer, and with it, not from lack of matter, but of space, we must close an imperfect notice of a work which will reward careful study, and deserves to be examined from many standing-points :—

" The other day, tired with excess of readings in the English litera- ture of the Restoration, I took up again, by a kind of instinct, Dante's Divina Cammedia, in Cary's translation. I read no further than to where Dante, astray in the gloomy wood, is met by Virgil, who offers to be his guide through two of the regions of the eternal world, ex- plaining that ho has been sent for that purpose by Beatrice, and pro- mising that Beatrice herself will be his guide into the realms of the highest. At that point, remembering what a succession of things and visions was to follow, first in the Inferno, then in the Purgatorio, and then in the Paradiso, I had suddenly to stop, overcome by the thrill already, as I held the book in my hand, and exclaiming once And again, Mercy of Heaven ! this is a book, here is literature.' Hardly otherwise can a reader have been impressed who took up Paradise Lost on its first appearance, and compared it with the printed productions into the midst of which it had come."