JOHN MILTON.
THE three hundredth anniversary of Milton's birth (December 9th, 1608), and the accompanying cele- brations in his honour, naturally turn the mind towards some consideration of the man himself, apart from his creations,—the man who lived and moved and had his being in the common highway of the world, and was subject to all those laws of time, chance, and mortality which can have no power over "Paradise Lost." The figure is a familiar one; who does not know the grave, majestic countenance with the Roman features and the great eyes ? Who does not remember some traits at least of that dominating character, east so firmly and so boldly in such an heroic mould ? Milton has impressed himself upon us not only by the intrinsic force of his nature, but by his own deliberate efforts. No great man has ever spoken to the world so much or so minutely about himself. Sometimes, indeed, one cannot help wishing that he had done so a little less. Great geniuses seem to fall, from the human point of view, into two very distinct classes,—those whom it would have been an exquisite pleasure to live with, and those whom it would have been a high honour to know. Shakespeare, of course, belongs to. the first class; and Milton no less unmistakably to the second. Though Shakespeare was infinitely the greater man, it is possible, without vanity or impertinence, to imagine oneself his friend ; while the idea of friendship with Milton strikes one immediately as something impracticable, something, by the very nature of the case, out of the question. It would have been easy to be his disciple and his admirer, to watch with reverence and amazement the high, clear workings of his will and his intellect, to accept gratefully whatever small attentions he might bestow. But to have hoped for anything more, for the true offices of friendship—the free communication of thoughts, the equal interchange of sympathies—that would have been to court disaster. The soul of Milton was unapproachable. He was a profound egoist, but his egoism was not that of vanity, but of pride. Over and over again in his prose writings he lays stress upon his own nobility, upon his virtues and his capacities, upon the glory of his mission and its importance to the world. He knew that be was a poet, that, as a poet, he was marked out by God for great things, and he said so. "These abilities, wheresoever they be found, are the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed, but yet to some (though most abuse) in every nation; and are of power, beside the office of a pulpit, to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right tune; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God's almightiness." Such words are absolutely sincere, they are informed with a spirit of loftiness which is completely alien to anything resembling petty conceit ; Milton is singing, not only his own praises, but the praises of poetry. Yet the fact remains that his praises of poetry and of himself are never very clearly distinguished from one another ; self-centred and self-secure, he found most readily in his own being the high example of what a poet was. Closely connected with Milton's egoism was his lack of sympathy, which lay at the root of his most obvious faults. His domestic severity, his want of humour, his harsh and uncompromising habit of mind,—these things were inevitable in a personality which could neither under- stand nor imagine the thoughts and feelings of other people. The same quality may be noticed in his poetry. Milton is the least dramatic of great poets, and the least tender. It is only at the height of his sublimity—in his treatment of Satan and Samson—that he is truly pathetic; it is only then that his sympathy seems to be really aroused. He is gay in his earliest poems, but nowhere else. In his middle and later life he had lost the sense of joyousness, of that convivial light-heartedness which springs from the happiness of others ; he gave himself up altogether to the difficult, the sublime, and the severe. Thus he represents in the highest degree the strength and the weakness of Puritanism,—its grandeur and its narrowness, its noble sincerity and its coldness of heart.
But there could be no greater mistake than to suppose that Milton was a Puritan and nothing more. If be was a child of the Reformation, he was a child of the Renaissance too. He told Dryden "that Spenser was his original,"—Spenser, the sweetest, softest, and most enervating of all English poets. His early works show clearly enough, not only that Milton loved beauty, but that he was obsessed by it. He was an artist to his fiuger-tips,—exquisitely refined, marvellously imaginative, infinitely sensitive to all the varied loveliness of material things. The interest of his character lies in this,— that be mingled the sensuousness of a virtuoso with the austerity of a seer. He was a Puritan with the artistic temperament ; and—what is more extraordinary still—the combination of such contraries was a source, not of weakness, but of strength. Each side of this dual personality helped the other. The rigidity of his moral nature prevented his artistic faculties from losing themselves in their own sweetness, while they on their side endowed the most exalted of his conceptions with colour, warmth, and form. These two forces in Milton's mind show themselves nowhere more clearly than in his attitude towards women. Superficial readers, judging from the abuse of Dalila in "Samson," from the relations between Adam and Eve in "Paradise Lost," and from some passages in the pamphlets on divorce, fall into the error of thinking that Milton's feelings with regard to women fluctuated between patronising approval and frank dislike. This is a crude view of the case, and one, moreover, which does not account for all the facts. How, for instance, can such a theory be reconciled with these beautiful lines on Eve ?—
" When I approach Her loveliness, so absolute she seems And in herself complete, so well to know Her own, that what she wills to do or say Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best. All higher Knowledge in her presence falls Degraded; Wisdom in discourse with her Loses, discountenanced, and like Folly shows; Authority and Reason on her wait, As one intended first, not after made Occasionally ; and, to consummate all, Greatness of mind and nobleness their seat Build in her loveliest, and create an awe About her, as a guard angelic placed."
In reality, Milton was, as Professor Raleigh says, " extra- ordinarily susceptible to the attractions of feminine beauty and grace," and it was this very susceptibility which urged him so often into the opposite extreme of anger or disdain. If he had been more sympathetic, he would have been more dispassionate. As it was, he felt that a woman was a force outside himself which he could not understand, and which yet, in some mysterious way, exercised a most potent influence upon him. The result was that he was torn between two passions,—his egoism and his sensibility. Even in the midst of his eulogy of Eve he recollects himself, and suggests that, after all, she was only "made occasionally " ; while in his diatribe upon Dallia be betrays an undercurrent of strangely personal agitation, he protests too much, and almost gives the impression of trying to conceal the fact that he is, for once, afraid.
If the extreme masculinity of Milton's character explains the inconsistencies in his attitude towards women, its influence is equally apparent in his public life. He was a patriot of a singularly robust and thoroughgoing kind, taking politics in deadly earnest, and believing with a curious naivete that the destinies of England were under the peculiar care of Providence. "God is decreeing," he says in the " Areopagitica," "to begin some new and great period in His church what does He then but reveal Himself to His
hervants, and as His manner is, first to His Englishmen ?" His view of life had nothing in common with the kind of easy- going cynicism which, before and since, has been no uncommon
characteristic of the second-rate man of letters. He was a dreamer ; but he carried his dreams into the market-place, and did his best to put them into action. "I considered it dishonourable," he says, referring to his travels in Italy, "to be enjoying myself at ease in foreign lands, while my country- men were striking a blow for freedom." Dr. Johnson laughs at this, looking "with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance, on the man who hastens home, because his countrymen are contending for their liberty, and, when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding-school." But in spite of Johnson's sneers, the fact remains that Milton in returning to England was simply doing what he believed, rightly or wrongly, to be his duty. And in the end—as he was careful to point out in a characteristic and splendid Bonnet—he lost his sight in the service of the Commonwealth. His ideal of national service was the highest, and the prepara- tion which he demanded for it covered every branch of activity. In his tractate on education be is careful to lay stress on the importance of military exercises in the training of the young. "The exercise which I commend first is the exact use of their weapon, to guard, and to strike safely with edge or point They must also be practised in all the locks and gripes of wrestling, wherein Englishmen were wont to excel, as needs may often be in fight to tug, to grapple, and to close." He recommends that the youths should,
"by a sudden alartun or watchword, be called out to their military motions, under sky or covert, according to the season, as was the Roman wont ; first on foot, then, as their age permits, on horse- back, to all the art of cavalry ; that having in sport, but with much exactness and daily muster, served out the rudiments of their soldiership, in all the skill of embattling, marching, encamp- ing, fortifying, besieging, and battering, with all the helps of ancient and modern stratagems, tactics, and warlike maxims, they may as it were out of long war come forth renowned and perfect commanders in the service of their country."
But such martial activities were, in Milton's plan, to be inter- spersed with recreations of a very different kind
"The interim,” he says, "of unsweating themselves regularly, and convenient rest before meat, may, both with profit and delight, be taken up in recreating and composing their travailed spirits with the solemn and divine harmonies of music, heard or learnt; either while the skilful organist plies his grave and fancied descant in lofty fugues, or the whole symphony with artful and unimaginable touches adorn and grace the well-studied chords of some choice composer."
What a noble and charming scheme of education ! And hew beautifully set forth ! Milton can never touch upon mush, but an added intensity comes into his words,—his writing seems to vibrate with the echoes of the art which he loved so well, an art which, in its aloofness, its elaboration, and its splendour resembles so closely his own. One likes to imagine him, in his old age, in the "small chamber, hung with rusty green," at the little house in Artillery Row, "sitting in an elbow chair, and dressed neatly in black," as a contemporary described him, listening to the "well-studied chords of some choice composer." Did his mind go back then to the fancies of his youth ? Did he catch once more the sound of a diviner music,—of "the celestial Sirens' harmony,
That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres, And sing to those that hold the vital shears, And turn the adamantine spindle round, On which the fate of gods and men is wound ? —Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie, To lull the daughters of Necessity, And keep unsteady Nature to her law, And the low world in measured motion draw After the heavenly tune, which none can hear Of human mould with gross ttnpurged ear !"
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