Halleck's New English Literature Part 33

"So frowned the mighty combatants, that h.e.l.l Grew darker at their frown."[4]

George Saintsbury's verdict is approved by the majority of the greatest modern critics of Milton: "In loftiness--sublimity of thought, and majesty of expression, both sustained at almost superhuman pitch, he has no superior, and no rival except Dante."

Mastery of Verse.--Milton's verse, especially in _Paradise Lost_, is such a symphony of combined rhythm, poetic expression, and thought; it is so harmonious, so varied, and yet so apparently simple in its complexity, that it has never been surpa.s.sed in kind.

His mastery of rhythm is not so evident in a single line as in a group of lines. The first sentence in _Paradise Lost_ contains sixteen lines, and yet the rhythm, the pauses, and the thought are so combined as to make oral reading easy and the meaning apparent. The conception of the music of the spheres in their complex orbits finds some a.n.a.logy in the harmony of the combined rhythmical units of his verse.

Denied the use of his eyes as a guide to the form of his later verse, he must have repeated aloud these groups of lines and changed them until their cadence satisfied his remarkably musical ear. Lines like these show the melody of which this verse is capable:--

"Heaven opened wide Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound On golden hinges moving."[5]

To begin with, he had, like Shakespeare and Keats an instinctive feeling for the poetic value of words and phrases. Milton's early poems abound in such poetic expressions as "the frolic wind," "the slumbring morn," "linked sweetness," "looks commercing with the skies," "dewy-feathered sleep," "the studious cloister's pale," "a dim religious light," the "silver lining" of the cloud, "west winds with musky wing," "the laureate hea.r.s.e where Lycid lies." His poetic instinct enabled him to take common prosaic words and, by merely changing the position of the adjective, trans.m.u.te them into imperishable verse. His "darkness visible" and "human face divine" are instances of this power.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MILTON DICTATING PARADISE LOST TO HIS DAUGHTERS.

_From the painting by Munkacsy_.]

Twentieth century criticism is more fully recognizing the debt of subsequent poetic literature to Milton. Saintsbury writes:--

"Milton's influence is omnipresent in almost all later English poetry, and in not a little of later prose English literature. At first, at second, at third, hand, he has permeated almost all his successors."[6]

How the Paradise Lost has affected Thought.--Few people realize how profoundly this poem has influenced men's ideas of the hereafter. The conception of h.e.l.l for a long time current was influenced by those pictures which Milton painted with darkness for his canvas and the lightning for his brush. Our pictures of Eden and of heaven have also felt his touch. Theology has often looked through Milton's imagination at the fall of the rebel angels and of man. Huxley says that the cosmogony which stubbornly resists the conclusions of science, is due rather to the account in _Paradise Lost_ than to _Genesis_.

Many of Milton's expressions have become crystallized in modern thought. Among such we may mention:--

"The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of h.e.l.l, a h.e.l.l of Heaven, What matter where, if I be still the same?"[7]

"To reign is worth ambition, though in h.e.l.l Better to reign in h.e.l.l, than serve in Heaven."[8]

"...Who overcomes By force hath overcome but half his foe."[9]

The effect of _Paradise Lost_ on English thought is more a resultant of the entire poem than of detached quotations. _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ have furnished as many current quotations as the whole of _Paradise Lost_.

The Embodiment of High Ideals.---No poet has embodied in his verse higher ideals than Milton. When twenty-three, he wrote that he intended to use his talents--

"As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."[10]

Milton's poetry is not universally popular. He deliberately selected his audience. These lines from _Comus_ show to whom he wished to speak:--

"Yet some there be that by due steps aspire To lay their just hands on that golden key That opes the palace of eternity.

To such my errand is."

He kept his promise of writing something which speaks for liberty and for n.o.bility of soul and which the world would not willingly let die.

His ideals react on us and raise us higher than we were. To him we may say with Wordsworth:--

"Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart; Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free." [11]

SUMMARY

The Puritan age was one of conflict in religious and political ideals.

James I. and Charles I. trampled on the laws and persecuted the Puritans so rigorously that many of them fled to New England. Civil war, in which the Puritans triumphed, was the result.

The Puritans, realizing that neither lands beyond the sea nor the New Learning could satisfy the aspirations of the soul, turned their attention to the life beyond. Bunyan's Pilgrim felt that the sole duty of life was to fight the forces of evil that would hold him captive in the City of Destruction and to travel in the straight and narrow path to the New Jerusalem. Life became a ceaseless battle of the right against the wrong. Hence, much of the literature in both poetry and prose is polemical. Milton's _Paradise Lost_ is an epic of war between good and evil. The book that had the most influence in molding the thought of the time was the King James (1611) version of the _Bible_.

The minor prose deals with a variety of subjects. There are argumentative, philosophical, historical, biographical, and theological prose works; but only the fine presentation of nature and life in _The Complete Angler_ interests the general reader of to-day, although the grandeur of Milton's _Areopagitica_, the humor of Thomas Fuller, the stately rhythmical prose of Sir Thomas Browne, and the imagery and variety of Jeremy Taylor deserve more readers.

Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ is the masterpiece of Puritan prose, written in the simple, direct language of the 1611 version of the _Bible_. The book is a prose epic of the journey of the Puritan Christian from the City of Destruction to the New Jerusalem.

The Cavalier poets wrote much lyrical verse, mostly in lighter vein, but the religious poets strike a deeper note. The work of these minor poets is often a reflection of the Elizabethan lyrics of Donne and Jonson.

John Milton, who has the creative power of the Elizabethans, is the only great poet of the period. His greatest poems are _L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus,_ and _Paradise Lost_. In sublimity of subject matter and cast of mind, in n.o.bility of ideals, in expression of the conflict between good and evil, he is the fittest representative of the Puritan spirit in literature.

REFERENCES FOR FUTURE STUDY

HISTORICAL

Read the chapters on this period in Gardiner,[12] Walker, Cheney, Lingard, or Green. For the social life, see Traill, IV. The monumental history of this time has been written in eighteen volumes by Samuel Rawson Gardiner. His _Oliver Cromwell_, I vol., is excellent, as is also Frederick Harrison's _Oliver Cromwell_.

LITERARY

The _Cambridge History of English Literature_, Vol. VII.

Courthope's _History of English Poetry_, Vol. III.

Masterman's _The Age of Milton_.

Saintsbury's _A History of Elizabethan Literature_ (comes down to 1660).

Dowden's _Puritan and Anglican Studies in Literature.

Dictionary of National Biography_ (for lives of minor writers).

Froude's _John Bunyan._

Brown's _John Bunyan, his Life, Times, and Works._

Macaulay's Life of Bunyan in _Encylopaedia Britannica_ or in his _Essays._

Macaulay's _Essay on Southey's Edition of the Pilgrim's Progress._

Ma.s.son's _The Life of John Milton, Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary history of his Time_ (6 vols.).

Ma.s.son's _Poetical Works of John Milton_, 3 vols., contains excellent introductions and notes, and is the standard edition.

Raleigh's _Milton_.

Pattison's _Milton_. (E.M.L.)

Woodhull's _The Epic of Paradise Lost_.