MILTON AND THE BRUTE CREATION.

WHETHER Milton was a lover of any creature of God's universe may be doubted. That he was not a lover of animals seems clear. Abstractions he could love with a passion almost savage,--liberty above all : liberty for husbands, liberty for the Press, liberty for the nation. As

Disraeli wrote of Sidonia, "he was susceptible of great emotions, but not for individuals." Of personal affection there is barely a trace in his works. The lamentations in " Lycidas" are too exquisitely phrased to convey the passion of grief. Such feeling as he shows for Cromwell is far removed from affection. The one sonnet (" On his Deceased Wife ") in which his habitual dignity seems touched with love ends on a conceit frigid enough for Orashaw. Therefore it is not surprising to find the brute creation conceived throughout his works as incapable of companionship. Such a conception as Ulysses's dog in the Odyssey or Silvia's bind in the Aeneid was impossible for Milton.

"Among unequals what society

Can sort, what harmony or true delight P"

asks Adam, pleading with his Creator for a mate. The Divine Voice congratulates Adam on his dislike of animal companionship, and, as if to justify this view, no animal is exempt from temporary possession by Satan during his reconnaissances of Eden. No creature of any kind ventured into Adam and Eve's bower. When Eve laments the various delights of Paradise she has no word to say for the animals.

They had done their best to please their lord and lady, especially the elephant, to whom we shall have occasion to return; and as the degeneration in their character at the Fall had been duly noted, some reference to their original amenity would not have been out of place.

Many men in all ages have acknowledged the companionship

of the brutes. Cato, indeed, used to boast that be had left his old charger in Spain lest the State should be at the cost

of his transport to Italy, but his callousness rouses Plutarch to rebuke. "For my own part," says he, "I would not sell even an old ox that had laboured for me Whether such things as these [Cato's actions] are instances of great- ness or littleness of soul let the reader judge for himself." Livingstone gravely doubted whether animals had not guardian spirits. Montaigne asserted "a kind of inter- changeable commerce and mutual bond between them and us." But the mere fact of animals' servitude to man Milton considered a bar to such communion. In that delight of one's childhood, " Masterman Ready," three beasts are singled out to provide material for one of those dolorous "Sunday" chapters,—elephant, horse, and dog. We shall see presently how Milton treats the elephant. Ho is hardly kinder to the other two of these elect among animals. "Hounds and horse" appear in " L'Allegro," and the only other dogs in his poems are the somewhat unsympathetic bell-hounds associated with Sin. The only horse occurs as an illustration of Satan,—" like a proud steed reined." Other references

there are, but only in quite general terms,—viz., "fiery steeds," "horse and chariots," "their rich retinue long of horses led," "caparisons and steeds," "foaming steeds," "in mail their

horses clad." A lover of horses would at least have culled them more often by their proper name. Milton simply introduces them as adjuncts to a procession.

But there is another side to the attractiveness of animals which one might have expected to count for more with Milton.

Beauty and grace, the effective exhibition of strength and agility, all the pageantry of crowds, appeal vividlY to him and find plentiful expression in his poems. For developing this side of animal life several fine opportunities occur in "Paradise Lost," and all are deliberately sacrificed. If Milton's sym- pathies had led his learning iu that direction, what a gorgeous pageant he could have painted of the beasts filing up to the ark ! And this is all we get :—

" When lo ! a wonder strange! Of every beast, and bird, and insect small, Came sevens and pairs, and entered in, as taught Their order."

Again, when Adam describes the animals brought to lins for naming, the sole point emphasised is their subjection to men,

—" cowering low with blandishment." In the picture of this Creation we are so obsessed by the grotesque apparition

of full-grown animals rising from the earth—" the grassy clods now calved "—that their personal appearance goes for very little. The lion is indeed tawny, and shakes his brinded mane; the stag is swift and kare a branching bead; • Behemoth is biggest born of earth ; the flocks are fleeced and bleating; the ounce, libbard, and tiger are not characterised at all. With the insects and worms a more sympathetic note is sounded, as we shall see later. Perhaps the most significant passage of all is the single picturesque allusion to an animal, and that one of the noblest, which occurs in the splendid description of Adam and Eve's environment. The beasts gambolled in a general way,— " bears, tigers, ounces, pards "; the lion dandled the kid in his paw, the sly serpent tied itself into knots—Gordian knots, of course—and the cattle, "filled with pasture, gazing sat, or bedward ruminating." So far nothing but common- place detail ; but when the poet's fancy allows itself a little rein, see where it leads him :—

" The unwieldy elephant,

To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed Ms lithe proboscis."

There was once an elephant who did a laughable thing in a music-hall. With a drum-stick tied to his tail he so cunningly belaboured, by a vigorous oscillation of his hinder parts, a large drum standing by that the music of the orchestra was

rather aided than disturbed. The performance certainly contained that element of incongruity which makes for humour, but in the retrospect the thing was an unmixed offence. The man who could so belittle a noble animal as to gibbet him for ever in this circus attitude one would almost call inhuman. He would surely have jeered at Don Quixote. But then Don Quixote thought we might learn "modesty from elephants and loyalty from horses," and was no doubt a truly comic character. Milton's elephant is rather on a par with the eel in the Australian legend, which danced so comically on its tip-tail that it compelled the giant frog to split his sides with laughter and thus release the world's water-supply,—temporarily stored in his belly. But what is pardonable in an uncivilised eel is very offensive in an elephant,—especially before the Fall.

It will be well to take in detail the remaining references to animals in Milton's poems. The leviathan "seems a moving land, and at his gills draws in, and at his trunk [his trunk spouts out, a sea." There is also an allusion to the "great whales," and the ancient travellers' tale about sailors anchoring at night to the scaly rind. The hippopotamus and the crocodile are just mentioned in the Creation passage. A lion and lioness offer a type of matrimonial bliss, and there are a lion and tiger chasing fawns. Wolves never appear without the stock accompaniment of frightened sheep. Flocks and herds please the poet as part of those exquisite landscapes which he never wearied of painting. Goats occur in a simile, and Satan in his conversation with Evementions "the teats of ewe or goat dropping with milk at even." Sine are once commended for their pleasing smell, and appear again as booty in Adam's vision. The only other reference is—

"What time the laboured ox In his loose traces from the furrow came"— a mere expansion of a stock phrase in Homer. The hart and hind pursued by beasts of prey make a pathetic picture two lines long. The calf worshipped in Oreb and the grazed ox in Bethel may rank with the sacrificed "bullock, lamb, or kid," and the description of the plagues of Egypt contains nothing more intimate. Circe's pigs are in the same category as Diana's brinded lioness and spotted mountain-pard,--mere stage properties. In "Paradise Regained" the attitude of impotent hostility taken up by the wild beasts is not very sympathetic, yet it is more tolerable than the servility one might have expected. Horses, mules, camels, dromedaries, and elephants indorsed with towers are the only other certain quadrupeds in the poem, for as to how many legs a hippogrif bad opinions may differ. Ewes and their bleating flocks are just mentioned among the booty in Adam's vision, and there is a strayed ewe in "Comas," brushed aside by the Attendant Spirit as a "trivial toy." The hungry sheep of " Lycidas" are of course not sheep at all, any more than is the "grim wolf with privy paw" a wolf. Thus even in his pastoral poems Milton dwells little on the dumb occupants of the pasture.

In "Samson Agonistes," besides the inevitable ass whose jaw-bone confounded the Philistines, there are just four allusions to quadrupeds, and their significance is unmis- takable. Samson—like Antonio before him—compares himself to a wether. Carcasses of the Philistines are left "to doge and fowls a prey "; Dalila is greeted as " hyaena " ; and the lords of Philistia. are "drunk with wine and fat regorged of bulls and goats." • The serpent is on a special footing in "Paradise Lost," and it must be admitted that Milton describes reptiles with some sympathy. The serpent is, of course, sly, subtle, and wily. But he is also vividly pictured "with brazen eyes and hairy mane terrific"; "his braided train" is a fine description of the long embroidered back as it lies "in labyrinth of many a round self-rolled, his bead the midst." There is high poetic energy in the account of his advances to Eve :— "Not with indented wave,

Prone on the ground, as since, but on his rear,

Circular base of rising folds, that towered Fold above fold, a surging maze ; his head Crested aloft, and carbuncle his eyes ; With burnished neck of verdant gold, erect Amidst his circling spires, that on the grass Floated redundant."

Then come classical parallels, similes, and all weapons of the poetic armoury. "His turret crest and sleek enamelled neck" is at least a phrase which indicates interest in the object described. The gruesome scene where Satan turns from angel to serpent in full conclave of his lords is written with an intensity which almost obscures its grotesqueness. The hall "thick-swarming now with complicated monsters" becomes as real as Dr. Jekyll's study. The truth is, of course, that the untameable snake with its wild rebellious force had a nobility in Milton's eyes to which the tame elephant, slaving for his

human lord, could never reach. •

Winged creatures interest the poet far more than quadru- peds. Even reptiles become more interesting when they have "added wings," and the "female bee, that feeds her husband drone deliciously," was a creature after his own heart. The parsimonious eunuch is commended as "pattern of just equality." The cricket is mentioned in "II Penseroso." "Perish as a summer fly" is not a phrase packed with feeling, and restless thoughts have often been compared to hornets; but the well-known allusion to the grey-fly in " Lycidas" as he "winds his sultry horn" is of better stuff; and those lines are pretty in "Comes" which tell how Nature has "Set to work millions of spinning worms, That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk, To deck her sons."

The grey-fly's horn is matched with the humming of flies about the wine-press and the "bees' industrious murmur" of "Paradise Regained." The honey-gathering bee sings at her work in "II Penseroso." It is true that the simile at the end of the first book of "Paradise Lost" has nothing correspond- ing to Virgil's "strepit omnis mnrmure campus," but when to the free charm of wings is added the musical note that Milton loved, there is no hesitation in his descriptions. Of the fifteen passages in which he mentions birds generally, thirteen refer to their song, and one only to their colours,— " painted wings." The particular birds mentioned in his poems are the vulture, in a fine simile; the cormorant, whose form Satan assumed in Paradise ; the eagle, stork, swan, crane, cock, and peacock, in the Creation narrative; cranes and pygmies ; carrion birds, in a simile; the bird of Jove, who broke the peace of Paradise, and one other eagle, in a simile of "Samson Agonistes" ; Noah's raven and dove; the cock,*— once in "Paradise Lost," once in "Comas," once in "L'Allegro" ; the herald lark in "Paradise Regained," low- roosted lark in "Comas," and the well-known lark of " L'Alle,gro." The nightingale occurs ten times in Milton's poems, hardly ever without raising the emotional value of the passage, sometimes making the poetry almost poignant.

The spectacular value of fishes has secured them twelve highly descriptive lines in the Creation narrative. Possibly the greater freedom given by fins, he by wings,"secuied them some measure of sympathy from the poet, and fish have seldom been tamed.

At the risk of weariness, I have now gone through all the passages in Milton's poetry which deal with the brute creation. It will be admitted that, with the single exception of the nightingale, no creature was capable of calling out his poetic emotion. He was, in the words of his latest biographer, "a man of very austere and somewhat frigid character." His

* Milton seems to have been sensible of the cook's companionship during tbe nigh-watches; but in "Samson Agonistes" he sneers at the breed as ••taine villatic fowl."

first wife's lawyer described him as harsh and choleric. All the more may we prize those glowing bursts of poesy, whether inspired by music, the song of birds, a noble landscape, or the magnificent pageantry of heaven and hell. For the sake of his high.poetio imagination and the splendour of his harmonies we may forgive—though we cannot fail to notice—that harsh- ness of character which is not an inseparable accompaniment