ENGLAND'S DEBT TO MILTON.
WE considered a abort time ago England's debt to Wordsworth. The appearance of Professor Corson's "Introduction to the Poetical and Prose Works of John Milton" (Macmillan and Co., 5s.) suggests the even greater debt that England owes to Milton. We say "greater," though we must make it clear that in a certain realm of poetic inspira- tion we think Wordsworth supreme. We should not dream of comparing him as an artist with Milton, we should not dream of suggesting that either his learning or his sheer intellectual power was comparable with that of Milton. It was as regards the subtly blended relations of Nature and humanity that Wordsworth struck a note unique in poetry, conveying to us far-off hints as to our nature and destiny which have revolutionised English thought. But Wordsworth himself, as one of his noblest sonnets testifies, owed not a little to the inspiring example and lofty idealism of Milton; and we think that England has been a different nation from the fact that Milton was born a citizen of this land. It is not only that a line of poetic creation, in which Keats and Tennyson have been the greatest names, has proceeded from Milton. It is not only that to Milton, as Arnold has it, we owe the one conspicuous example of the "grand style," the one illustrious example of structural grandeur that we can show to the world as exhibiting the capacities of English poetry. It is the total personality and general achievements of Milton that we regard as constituting the immortal heritage, not only of this country of ours, but of all English-speaking people for all time.
If we want to know what Milton did for us, we must say that, excluding Spenser, who, as the "poet's poet," has never been and will never be read except by a few, Milton was the first and supreme poet who introduced a high, serious, and noble strain into our literature and life, clothing it in the most perfect artistic forms ever conceived among us, and per- meated it with an idealism sane and (in the best sense of the word) thoroughly English on the one hand, while yet religions and divine on the other. He initiated us into the love of divine things, he redeemed us from the dominion of earthliness. We have still much of the sot and the clown in our national life, but few of us realise the nature and extent of the mere carnal life of the mass of Englishmen until the Puritan movement had begun seriously to take bold of their minds. The Anglo-Saxon (we will not go into the question of the diffusion of a Celtic element ; it is enough that the sub- stratum of our population was Anglo-Saxon) was descended from sensual marauders, whose conversion to Christianity was largely nominal, given to gorging and drinking, filled, to use the Apostolic words, with "desires of the flesh and of the mind." It was necessary that a powerful antidote to this animalism should be found, and it was found in Puritanism. First came the great Lollard movement, the ground for which had been prepared by the Franciscans, and to this movement we may trace the beginnings of serious popular thought, religious earnestness, social reform, intellectual freedom, and that belief in a doctrine of " right " to which no race of man- kind has ever been wholly indifferent. Persecution could not kill Lollardry, and the seed it sowed came up again in the reign of Elizabeth, when it assumed the form of serious life and democratic proclivities in Church and State. The debauches and buffoonery of James L's Court only deepened the new Puritan conviction, and when the hollow graces and deep-rooted immorality of the Court and aristocracy revealed themselves full-grown under Charles I., Puritanism stood forth as the political palladium and moral salvation of England.
Of this great movement towards high seriousness of life, towards a worthy conception of the ends of man's existence, Milton was the supreme exponent, and he imparted to it a breath of idealism, a spirit finely touched to fine issues, a largeness of view, a sense both of exaltation and of emancipa- tion which, in the absence of his magnificent genius, that movement might have lacked. Superficial chatter can only look at the sour, sad side of this movement which has really created the England we care for. But all movements must be judged by their highest products, and in Milton we see the crown and flower of Puritanism, the genius who has justified it for all time. We know that he was not in all respects at one with either Puritan doctrine or discipline. His theological views diverged in important particulars from the Westminster Confession. His "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce" could not have found favour in many Puritan households. His entire absence from religions service would have subjected him to severe censure in a New England Puritan township. But he stood supremely for the high temper, the strong, firm outlines of Puritan character; he stood supremely for political and intellectual liberty; and he was able to present to England these lofty ideals in the terms of a gorgeous and consummate literary expression, unsurpassed in its way, and never likely to be surpassed in the English tongue. To call Milton a politician or a moralist, or even a reformer, would be to apply to him words stunted, desiccated; in a sense be was all these, but he was more. No Englishman who ever lived has so fully realised the idea of what Israel meant by a prophet. Yet he was a prophet who was also a poet, versed in the finest details of his art. In him the sons of Zion and the sons of Greece were reconciled; in him was seen all the learning of his age, the most ardent yet most delicate service of the Muses, but all his vast and varied accomplish- ments were fused in the supreme devotion to truth and liberty, and the desire to make of England a worthy temple to these divinities. There has been no such combination of gifts, no such diverse powers incarnated in one person in England's history.
For England herself Milton mainly desired the embodiment of these ideals : intellectual freedom, the position of the leader of the cause of liberty in Europe, and that worthy and noble inner life in the absence of which the outer forms of liberty are worthless. The " Areopagitica " is the greatest plea for the freedom of the mind ever written, let alone its splendour as a piece of prose; and though we have had our reactions since its production, in effect it killed the despotism over the mind. During the whole of the seventeenth century a Machiavellian despotism was desolating Western Europe, and preparing the way for unutterable tragedy in France. Milton, who had lived in the land of Machiavelli, and who saw with prophetic insight what this meant, roused England and Europe (he proudly asserts, with a noble egoism akin to that of Dante, of his work that "Europe talks from side to side" of this great task) to a sense of the danger. In "Paradise Regained" we find a great part of the poem devoted to the idea of that inner freedom, that liberty of the soul to be gained solely by obedience to divine law, which should come in priority to mere political liberty as the real guardian and guarantee of free institutions. Milton was no democrat, he was an aristo- cratic Republican, like Plato : he despised the mob as truly as he detested tyrants : he was for an ordered liberty, a commonwealth of men whom, as Cowper said, the truth bad made free, living under the reign of law. If our life and influence as a nation are to stand for a living influence in the world, if we are to be saved from the very real perils of materialism, we shall go to Milton for our ideal.
Matthew Arnold in his essay on Milton, looking forward to the spread of Anglo-Saxondom, and quoting Heine as to the contagion of Anglo-Saxon vulgarity, says that the superb austerity of Milton will save us. So long as Milton is a power, the progress of the English speech cannot mean the spread of vulgar contagion. There was recently a discussion as to whether Milton was still read, the majority of contributors, if we recollect rightly, being of opinion that he was not. It will be an evil thing for England if that is true. But it is a notable fact that the work of Professor Corson, to which we have referred, comes from America, where serious study of our great poets is far more general (to our shame be it said) than in the old country. It is new countries, with their mushroom towns, their rush of life, their crude methods, which all need the chastening influence of a great idealist. We gladly welcome, therefore, the sign that Milton is loved and studied in the great Republic whose infant origins proceeded from the same great movement which gave him birth. Yes, America, as well as England, owes a mighty debt to John Milton.
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