BOOKS.
A NEW STUDY OF MILTON.* IT is easy enough, as we see every day, to write a big book on a little subject. To write a little book on a big subject • Milton. By John Bailey. "Home Uniyersity Library." London: William. saii1Norgate. Ra sat.]
is another matter altogether, and by some minds impossible of achievement. This feet is borne in on us with especial
force by the case of Milton, who, oe Mr. Bailey observes, has been made the subject of perhaps the moat minute and elaborate biography in the language. " Mr. Magoon's labours enable ue to know, if we choose, every fact, however insig-. nificant, which the most laborious investigation can discover, not only about Milton himself, but, one may almost say, about everybody who was ever for five minutes in his com- pany." Why, then, a new book on Milton at all P
Bailey has his answer ready, and it is a good answer:—_
"Each succeeding, generation sees the peaks of humanity from a new point of view which cannot be exactly the same as that of its predecessor. Each age reshapes for itself its conception of art, of poetry, of religion, and of human life which includes them • all. Of some of the masters in each of these worlds it feels that they belong not to their own generation only but to all time and so to itself. It cannot be satisfied, therefore, with what its pre- decessors have said about them. It needs to see them again freshly for itself, and put into words so far as it can its own. attitude towards them. That is the excuse for the new books which will always be written every few years about Hebrew. Religion, or Greek Art, or the French Revolution, or about such men as Plato, St. Paul, Shakespeare, Napoleon. It is the excuse even for a much humbler thing, for the addition of a volume on Milton to the Home University Library. The object of this Library is not, indeed, to say anything startlingly now about- the great men with whom it deals. Rather the contrary, in fact: for to say anything startlingly new about Shakespeare or Plato would probably be merely to say what is absurd or false. The main outlines of these great figures have long been settled, and the man who writes a book to prove that Shakespeare was not a great dramatist, or was an exact and lucid writer, is wasting his own time and that of his readers. The mountain may change its aspect from hour to hour, but when once we have ascertained that it is composed of granite, that matter is settled, and there is no use in arguing that it is sandstone or basalt. The object of such volumes as those of this Library is no vain assault on the secure judgment-seat of the world, no hopeless appeal against the recorded and accepted decrees of time. It is rather to re-state those decrees in modern language and from the point of view of our own day: to show, for instance, how Plato, though no longer for us what he was for the Nes, Platonists, is still for us the most moving mind of the race that. more than all others has moved the mind of the world; how Milton, though no longer for us a convincing justifier of the ways of God to mon, is still a figure of transcendent interest, the most lion-hearted, the loftiest-soul:id, of Englishmen, the one con- summate artist our race has produced, the only English man of letters who in all that is known about him, his life, his character, his poetry, shows something for which the only fit word is sublime."
Mr. Bailey has already on many occasions proved hie quality as a literary critic of admirable taste and wide sympathies, but never more conclusively than id this monograph. He brings enthusiasm to his task, but it is tempered with judgment. He is fully alive to the ugly as well as the noble traits- in Milton's character, and is not in the least inclined to ignore these limitations. But, as he happily observes, "the im- portant thing about the sun is not its spots but its light and heat. No great poet in all history, with the possible exception of Dante, has Bo much heat as Milton. In prose and verse alike be burns and glows with fire. At its worst it is a fire of anger and pride, at its best a Bre of faith in liberty, justice, righteousness, God." He had little of "the highest of all fires, the white flame of love," or the beatific vision of Dante. He was "a lifelong Crusader who scare* set foot in the Holy Land." He was "a prophet rather than a Psalmist. The will of God meant for him not so mueli peace as war." He was by his own admission a "man of strife and contention " a- " Never for a moment did his soul bow to the triumph of the idolaters : but neither could it forget them, nor make any per- manent escape into purer air. Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson, especially the last, are all plainly the works of a man conscious of having been defeated by a world which he could defy but could not forget. Sublimely certain of the righteousness of his cause, he has no abiding certainty of its victory. He hears too plainly the insulting voices of the eons of Belief, and broods in proud and angry gloom over the ruin of all his hopes, personal, , political, and ecclesiastical. And as his religion was a thing of intellect and conscience, not a thing of spiritual vision, he cannot make for himself that mystical trans-valuation of all earthli doings in the light of which the struggles of political and ecclesiastical parties are seen as things temporary, trivial, and,
of little account." •
Mr. Bailey does not weary us with comparisons, but he notes justly that Milton "had in him nothing whatever of the universal and universally sympathetic insight of Shakespeare." But "to deprive ourselves of Milton because we are neither.
Puritan moralists nor Old Testament politicians is an act of intellectual suicide." And here we hare an admirable precedent in the attitude of his contemporaries. Though an unrepentant champion of the regicides, he owed his life at the Restoration quite as much to the magnanimity of Royalists as to the exertions of his friends, and later on, as Mr. Bailey reminds us in a striking passage, it was from the very high priests of the fashionable society of the Restoration which Milton so bitterly attacked in Paradise Lost that the most unstinted praise came. It was Dryden and Lord Dorset who more than any others made the town—the London of Charles
II.—
recognize the greatness of Milton. "There is nowhere a finer proof of the compelling power of great art upon those who know it when they see it than the unbounded praise with which Dryden at once saluted Milton." One cannot escape from the greatness of Milton, whether as poet or man. "It is impossible not to catch from him some sense of the high issues, immediate and eternal, on which human existence ought to be conscious that it hangs." And apart from the permanent claim upon our attention of his mind and character the study of Milton is of immense and special value to Englishmen :—
"Except in poatry our English contribution to the life of the arts in Europe has been comparatively small. That very Puritanism which had so much to do with the greatness of Milton has also had much to do with the general failure of Englishmen to produce fine art, or even to care about it, or so much as recognise it when they see it. Now Milton, Puritan as he was, was always, and not least in his final Puritan phase, a supreme artist. Poetry has been by far our greatest artistic achievement and he is by far our greatest poetic artist. No artist in any other field, no Inige Jones or Wren, no Purcell, no Reynolds or Turner, holds such unquestioned eminence in any other art as be in his. If the world asks us where to look for the genius of England, so far as it has over been expressed on paper, we point, of course, un- hesitatingly to Shakespeare. But Shakespeare is as inferior to Milton in art as he is superior in genius. His genius will often, indeed, supply the place of art ; but the possession of powers that are above art is not the same thing as being continuously and consciously a great artist. We can all think of many places in his avorks where for hundreds of lines the most censorious criticism can scarcely wish a word changed ; but we can also think of many in which the least watchful cannot fail to wish much changed and much omitted. ' Would he had blotted a thousand' is still a true saying, and its truth knownand felt by all but the blindest of the idolaters of Shakespeare. No one has ever uttered such a wish about the poetry of Milton. This is not the place to anticipate a discussion of it which must come hater. But, in an introductory chapter which aims at insisting upon the present and permanent import- snth of Milton, it is in place to point out the immense value to the English race of acquaintance with work so conscientiously perfect as Milton's. English writers on the whole have had a tendency to be rather slipshod in expression and rather indifferent to the finer harmonies of human speech, whether as a thing of pure sound or as a thing of sounds which have more than mere meaning, which bare associations. Milton as both a lover of music and a scholar is never for a moment unconscious of either. It would scarcely be going too far to say that there is not a word in his verse which owes its place solely to the fact that it expresses his meaning. All the words accepted by his instinctive or deliberate choice were accepted because they provided him with the most he could obtain of three qualities which he desired : tne exact expression of the meaning needed for the immediate purpose in hand, the associa- tions fittest to enhance or enrich that meaning, the rhythmical or musical effect required for the verse. The study of his verse is one that never exhausts itself, so that the appre- ciation of it has been called the last reward of consummate scholarship."
There are some disputable statements here, but in the main it is a just and illuminative passage. Mr. Bailey also lays stress on the fact that, as with all the greatest authors, each new reading of Milton brings more wonder and delight. Though he was intensely English, be belongs to all time and all peoples. (Does not Mr. Maurice Baring mention the curious fact that he is largely read by the Bit:mien peasants P) " To read his great poem, or indeed any of his poems, is to live for a while in the presence of one of those royal souls, those natural kings of men, whom Plato felt to be born to rule and inspire their fellows: and the heroic temper of the man is in England less rare than the consummate perfection of art which has eternalized his utterance."
We have quoted so freely from the " introdectory " chapter as to leave little space for comment on those in which Mr. Bailey deals successively with Milton's life and character, the earlier poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson d gonisten We may note, however, Mr. Bailey's very proper insistence on the debt which Milton owed to the liberality and patience OS his father; the interesting passage on the comparative sensitiveness of town-bred and country-bred people to the beauties of rural nature; the sane treatment of Milton as a domestic despot; the admirable explanation of the curious fact that,though he was much more intimate with Dio3ati than King, Milton celebrated the former in a Latin elegy and the latter inlajeidas ; the masterly analysis of the form of the Miltonio sonnet; the unerring instinct shown in the quotations from Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained; and the convincing illustrations of Milton's claim to be regarded as not only a consummate artist, but a great and fruitful metrical inno- vator. We had marked many other points and passages, but must content ourselves with a strong expression of per- sonal gratitude to the author for his brilliant essay, and a cordial recommendation of its contents to all who find in Milton that sublimity which Longinus defined as "the reverberation of a noble mind."
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