Life of John Milton Part 6

Thus does Milton appropriate the wealth of past literature, secure of being able to recoin it with his own image and superscription. The acc.u.mulated learning which might have choked the native fire of a feebler spirit was but nourishment to his. The polished stones and s.h.i.+ning jewels of his superb mosaic are often borrowed, but its plan and pattern are his own.

One of the greatest charms of "Paradise Lost" is the incomparable metre, which, after Coleridge and Tennyson have done their utmost, remains without equal in our language for the combination of majesty and music.

It is true that this majesty is to a certain extent inherent in the subject, and that the poet who could rival it would scarcely be well advised to exert his power to the full unless his theme also rivalled the magnificence of Milton's. Milton, on his part, would have been quite content to have written such blank verse as Wordsworth's "Yew Trees," or as the exordium of "Alastor," or as most of Coleridge's idylls, had his subject been less than epical. The organ-like solemnity of his verbal music is obtained partly by extreme attention to variety of pause, but chiefly, as Wordsworth told Klopstock, and as Mr. Addington Symonds points out more at length, by the period, not the individual line, being made the metrical unit, "so that each line in a period shall carry its proper burden of sound, but the burden shall be differently distributed in the successive verses." Hence lines which taken singly seem almost unmetrical, in combination with their a.s.sociates appear indispensable parts of the general harmony. Mr. Symonds gives some striking instances.

Milton's versification is that of a learned poet, profound in thought and burdened with the further care of ordering his thoughts: it is therefore only suited to sublimity of a solemn or meditative cast, and most unsuitable to render the unstudied sublimity of Homer. Perhaps no pa.s.sage is better adapted to display its dignity, complicated artifice, perpetual r.e.t.a.r.ding movement, concerted harmony, and grave but ravis.h.i.+ng sweetness than the description of the coming on of Night in the Fourth Book:--

"Now came still evening on, and twilight grey Had in her sober livery all things clad; Silence accompanied; for beast and bird, They to their gra.s.sy couch, these to their nests, Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale; She all night long her amorous descant sung; Silence was pleased: now glowed the firmament With living sapphires; Hesperus that led The stary host rose brightest, till the moon, Rising in clouded majesty, at length Apparent queen unveiled her peerless light, And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw."

How exquisite the indication of the pauseless continuity of the nightingale's song by the transition from short sentences, cut up by commas and semicolons, to the "linked sweetness long drawn out" of "She all night long her amorous descant sung"! The poem is full of similar felicities, none perhaps more noteworthy than the sequence of monosyllables that paints the enormous bulk of the prostrate Satan:--

"So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay."

It is a most interesting subject for inquiry from what sources, other than the Scriptures, Milton drew aid in the composition of "Paradise Lost." The most striking counterpart is Calderon, to whom he owed as little as Calderon can have owed to him. "El Magico Prodigioso," already cited as affording a remarkable parallel to "Comus," though performed in 1637, was not printed until 1663, when "Paradise Lost" was already completed.[8] The two great religious poets have naturally conceived the Evil One much in the same manner, and Calderon's Lucifer,

"Like the red outline of beginning Adam,"

might well have pa.s.sed as the original draft of Milton's Satan:--

"In myself I am A world of happiness and misery; This I have lost, and that I must lament For ever. In my attributes I stood So high and so heroically great, In lineage so supreme, and with a genius Which penetrated with a glance the world Beneath my feet, that, won by my high merit, A King--whom I may call the King of Kings, Because all others tremble in their pride Before the terrors of his countenance-- In his high palace, roofed with brightest gems Of living light--call them the stars of heaven-- Named me his counsellor. But the high praise Stung me with pride and envy, and I rose In mighty compet.i.tion, to ascend His seat, and place my foot triumphantly Upon his subject thrones. Chastised, I know The depth to which ambition falls. For mad Was the attempt; and yet more mad were now Repentance of the irrevocable deed.

Therefore I chose this ruin with the glory Of not to be subdued, before the shame Of reconciling me with him who reigns By coward cession. Nor was I alone, Nor am I now, nor shall I be, alone.

And there was hope, and there may still be hope; For many suffrages among his va.s.sals Hailed me their lord and king, and many still Are mine, and many more perchance shall be."

A striking proof that resemblance does not necessarily imply plagiarism.

Milton's affinity to Calderon has been overlooked by his commentators; but four luminaries have been named from which he is alleged to have drawn, however sparingly, in his golden urn--Caedmon, the Adamus Exul of Grotius, the Adamo of the Italian dramatist Andreini, and the Lucifer of the Dutch poet Vondel. Caedmon, first printed in 1655, it is but barely possible that he should have known, and ere he could have known him the conception of "Paradise Lost" was firmly implanted in his mind. External evidence proves his acquaintance with Grotius, internal evidence his knowledge of Andreini: and small as are his direct obligations to the Italian drama, we can easily believe with Hayley that "his fancy caught fire from that spirited, though irregular and fantastic composition."

Vondel's Lucifer--whose subject is not the fall of Adam, but the fall of Satan--was acted and published in 1654, when Milton is known to have been studying Dutch, but when the plan of "Paradise Lost" must have been substantially formed. There can, nevertheless, be no question of the frequent verbal correspondences, not merely between Vondel's Lucifer and "Paradise Lost," but between his Samson and "Samson Agonistes." Milton's indebtedness, so long ago as 1829, attracted the attention of an English poet of genius, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who pointed out that his lightning-speech, "Better to reign in h.e.l.l than serve in heaven," was a thunderbolt condensed from a brace of Vondel's clumsy Alexandrines, which Beddoes renders thus:--

"And rather the first prince at an inferior court Than in the blessed light the second or still less."

Mr. Gosse followed up the inquiry, which eventually became the subject of a monograph by Mr. George Edmundson ("Milton and Vondel," 1885). That Milton should have had, as he must have had, Vondel's works translated aloud to him, is a most interesting proof, alike of his ardour in the enrichment of his own mind, and of his esteem for the Dutch poet.

Although, however, his obligations to predecessors are not to be overlooked, they are in general only for the most obvious ideas and expressions, lying right in the path of any poet treating the subject.

_Je l'aurais bien pris sans toi._ When, as in the instance above quoted, he borrows anything more recondite, he so exalts and transforms it that it pa.s.ses from the original author to him like an angel the former has entertained unawares. This may not entirely apply to the Italian reformer, Bernardino Ochino, to whom, rather than to Ta.s.so, Milton seems indebted for the conception of his diabolical council. Ochino, in many respects a kindred spirit to Milton, must have been well known to him as the first who had dared to ventilate the perilous question of the lawfulness of polygamy. In Ochino's "Divine Tragedy," which he may have read either in the Latin original or in the nervous translation of Bishop Poynet, Milton would find a hint for his infernal senate. "The introduction to the first dialogue," says Ochino's biographer Benrath, "is highly dramatic, and reminds us of Job and Faust." Ochino's arch-fiend, like Milton's, announces a masterstroke of genius. "G.o.d sent His Son into the world, and I will send my son." Antichrist accordingly comes to light in the shape of the Pope, and works infinite havoc until Henry VIII. is divinely commissioned for his discomfiture. It is a token, not only of Milton's, but of Vondel's, indebtedness, that, with Ochino as with them, Beelzebub holds the second place in the council, and even admonishes his leader. "I fear me," he remarks, "lest when Antichrist shall die, and come down hither to h.e.l.l, that as he pa.s.seth us in wickedness, so he will be above us in dignity." Prescience worthy of him who

"In his rising seemed A pillar of state; deep on his front engraven Deliberation sat, and public care; And princely counsel in his face yet shone."

Milton's borrowings, nevertheless, nowise impair his greatness. The obligation is rather theirs, of whose stores he has condescended to avail himself. He may be compared to his native country, which, fertile originally in little but enterprise, has made the riches of the earth her own. He has given her a national epic, inferior to no other, and unlike most others, founded on no merely local circ.u.mstance, but such as must find access to every nation acquainted with the most widely-circulated Book in the world. He has further enriched his native literature with an imperishable monument of majestic diction, an example potent to counteract that wasting agency of familiar usage by which language is reduced to vulgarity, as sea-water wears cliffs to s.h.i.+ngle.

He has reconciled, as no other poet has ever done, the h.e.l.lenic spirit with the Hebraic, the Bible with the Renaissance. And, finally, as we began by saying, his poem is the mighty bridge--

"Bound with Gorgonian rigour not to move,"

across which the spirit of ancient poetry has travelled to modern times, and by which the continuity of great English literature has remained unbroken.

CHAPTER VIII.

In recording the publication of "Paradise Lost" in 1667, we have pa.s.sed over the interval of Milton's life immediately subsequent to the completion of the poem in 1663. The first incident of any importance is his migration to Chalfont St. Giles, near Beaconsfield, in Buckinghams.h.i.+re, about July, 1665, to escape the plague then devastating London. Ell wood, whose family lived in the neighbourhood of Chalfont, had at his request taken for him "a pretty box" in that village; and we are, says Professor Ma.s.son, "to imagine Milton's house in Artillery Walk shuttered up, and a coach and a large waggon brought to the door, and the blind man helped in, and the wife and the three daughters following, with a servant to look after the books and other things they have taken with them, and the whole party driven away towards Giles-Chalfont."

According to the same authority, Chalfont well deserves the name of Sleepy Hollow, lying at the bottom of a leafy dell. Milton's cottage, alone of his residences, still exists, though divided into two tenements. It is a two-storey dwelling, with a garden, is built of brick, with wooden beams, musters nine rooms--though a question arises whether some of them ought not rather to be described as closets; the porch in which Milton may have breathed the summer air is gone, but the parlour retains the latticed cas.e.m.e.nt at which he sat, though through it he could not see. His infirmity rendered the confined situation less of a drawback, and there are abundance of pleasant lanes, along which he could be conducted in his sightless strolls:--

"As one who long in populous city pent, Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air, Forth issuing on a summer's morn to breathe Among the pleasant villages and farms Adjoined, from each new thing conceives delight, The smell of grain, or tedded gra.s.s, or kine, Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound."

Milton was probably no stranger to the neighbourhood, having lived within thirteen miles of it when he dwelt at Horton. Ellwood could not welcome him on his arrival, being in prison on account of an affray at what should have been the paragon of decorous solemnities--a Quaker funeral. When released, about the end of August or the beginning of September, he waited upon Milton, who, "after some discourses, called for a ma.n.u.script of his; which he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me and read it at my leisure. When I set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he ent.i.tled 'Paradise Lost.'"

Professor Ma.s.son justly remarks that Milton would not have trusted the worthy Quaker adolescent with the only copy of his epic; we may be sure, therefore, that other copies existed, and that the poem was at this date virtually completed and ready for press. When the ma.n.u.script was returned, Ellwood, after "modestly, but freely, imparting his judgment,"

observed, "Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found? He made no answer, but sat some time in a muse; then brake off that discourse, and fell on another subject." The plague was then at its height, and did not abate sufficiently for Milton to return to town with safety until about February in the following year, leaving, it has been a.s.serted, a record of himself at Chalfont in the shape of a sonnet on the pestilence regarded as a judgment for the sins of the King, written with a diamond on a window-pane--as if the blind poet could write even with a pen! The verses, nevertheless, may not impossibly be genuine: they are almost too Miltonic for an imitator between 1665 and 1738, when they were first published.

The public calamity of 1666 affected Milton more nearly than that of 1665. The Great Fire came within a quarter of a mile of his house, and though he happily escaped the fate of s.h.i.+rley, and did not make one of the helpless crowd of the homeless and dest.i.tute, his means were seriously abridged by the destruction of the house in Bread Street where he had first seen the light, and which he had retained through all the vicissitudes of his fortunes. He could not, probably, have published "Paradise Lost" without the co-operation of Samuel Symmons. Symmons's endeavours to push the sale of the book make the bibliographical history of the first edition unusually interesting. There were at least nine different issues, as fresh batches were successively bound up, with frequent alterations of t.i.tle-page as reasonable cause became apparent to the strategic Symmons. First Milton's name is given in full, then he is reduced to initials, then restored; Symmons's own name, at first suppressed, by and by appears; his agents are frequently changed; and the t.i.tle is altered to suit the year of issue, that the book may seem a novelty. The most important of all these alterations is one in which the author must have actively partic.i.p.ated--the introduction of the Argument which, a hundred and forty years afterwards, was to cause Harriet Martineau to take up "Paradise Lost" at the age of seven, and of the Note on the metre conveying "a reason of that which stumbled many, why this poem rimes not." Partly, perhaps, by help of these devices, certainly without any aid from advertising or reviewing, the impression of thirteen hundred copies was disposed of within twenty months, as attested by Milton's receipt for his second five pounds, April 26, 1669--two years, less one day, since the signature of the original contract. The first printed notice appeared after the edition had been entirely sold. It was by Milton's nephew, Edward Phillips, and was contained in a little Latin essay appended to Buchlerus's "Treasury of Poetical Phrases."

"John Milton, in addition to other most elegant writings of his, both in English and Latin, has recently published 'Paradise Lost,'

a poem which, whether we regard the sublimity of the subject, or the combined pleasantness and majesty of the style, or the sublimity of the invention, or the beauty of its images and descriptions of nature, will, if I mistake not, receive the name of truly heroic, inasmuch as by the suffrages of many not unqualified to judge, it is reputed to have reached the perfection of this kind of poetry."

The "many not unqualified" undoubtedly included the first critic of the age, Dryden. Lord Buckhurst is also named as an admirer--pleasing anecdotes respecting the practical expression of his admiration, and of Sir John Denham's, seem apocryphal.

While "Paradise Lost" was thus slowly upbearing its author to the highest heaven of fame, Milton was achieving other t.i.tles to renown, one of which he deemed nothing inferior. We shall remember Ellwood's hint that he might find something to say about Paradise Found, and the "muse"

into which it cast him. When, says the Quaker, he waited upon Milton after the latter's return to London, Milton "showed me his second poem, called 'Paradise Regained,' and in a pleasant tone said to me, 'This is owing to you; for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont; which before I had not thought of.'" Ellwood does not tell us the date of this visit, and Phillips may be right in believing that "Paradise Regained" was entirely composed after the publication of "Paradise Lost"; but it seems unlikely that the conception should have slumbered so long in Milton's mind, and the most probable date is between Michaelmas, 1665, and Lady-day, 1666. Phillips records that Milton could never hear with patience "Paradise Regained" "censured to be much inferior" to "Paradise Lost." "The most judicious," he adds, agreed with him, while allowing that "the subject might not afford such variety of invention," which was probably all that the injudicious meant. There is no external evidence of the date of his next and last poem, "Samson Agonistes," but its development of Miltonic mannerisms would incline us to a.s.sign it to the latest period possible. The poems were licensed by Milton's old friend, Thomas Tomkyns, July 2, 1670, but did not appear until 1671. They were published in the same volume, but with distinct t.i.tle-pages and paginations; the publisher was John Starkey; the printer an anonymous "J.M.," who was far from equalling Symmons in elegance and correctness.

"Paradise Regained" is in one point of view the confutation of a celebrated but eccentric definition of poetry as a "criticism of life."

If this were true it would be a greater work than "Paradise Lost," which must be violently strained to admit a definition not wholly inapplicable to the minor poem. If, again, Wordsworth and Coleridge are right in p.r.o.nouncing "Paradise Regained" the most perfect of Milton's works in point of execution, the proof is afforded that perfect execution is not the chief test of poetic excellence. Whatever these great men may have propounded in theory, it cannot be believed that they would not have rather written the first two books of "Paradise Lost" than ten such poems as "Paradise Regained," and yet they affirm that Milton's power is even more advantageously exhibited in the latter work than in the other.

There can be no solution except that greatness in poetry depends mainly upon the subject, and that the subject of "Paradise Lost" is infinitely the finer. Perhaps this should not be. Perhaps to "the visual nerve purged with euphrasy and rue" the spectacle of the human soul successfully resisting supernatural temptation would be more impressive than the material sublimities of "Paradise Lost," but ordinary vision sees otherwise. Satan "floating many a rood" on the sulphurous lake, or "up to the fiery concave towering high," or confronting Death at the gate of h.e.l.l, kindles the imagination with quite other fire than the sage circ.u.mspection and the meek fort.i.tude of the Son of G.o.d. "The reason," says Blake, "why Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and G.o.d, and at liberty when of Devils and h.e.l.l, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it." The pa.s.sages in "Paradise Regained" which most nearly approach the magnificence of "Paradise Lost," are those least closely connected with the proper action of the poem, the episodes with which Milton's consummate art and opulent fancy have veiled the bareness of his subject. The description of the Parthian military expedition; the picture, equally gorgeous and accurate, of the Roman Empire at the zenith of its greatness; the condensation into a single speech of all that has made Greece dear to humanity--these are the s.h.i.+ning peaks of the regained "Paradise," marvels of art and eloquence, yet, unlike "Paradise Lost," beautiful rather than awful. The faults inherent in the theme cannot be imputed to the poet. No human skill could make the second Adam as great an object of sympathy as the first: it is enough, and it is wonderful, that spotless virtue should be so entirely exempt from formality and dulness. The baffled Satan, beaten at his own weapons, is necessarily a much less interesting personage than the heroic adventurer of "Paradise Lost." Milton has done what can be done by softening Satan's reprobate mood with exquisite strokes of pathos:--

"Though I have lost Much l.u.s.tre of my native brightness, lost To be beloved of G.o.d, I have not lost To love, at least contemplate and admire What I see excellent in good or fair, Or virtuous; I should so have lost all sense."

These words, though spoken with a deceitful intention, express a truth.

Milton's Satan is a long way from Goethe's Mephistopheles. Profound, too, is the pathos of--

"I would be at the worst, worst is my best, My harbour, and my ultimate repose."

The general sobriety of the style of "Paradise Regained" is a fertile theme for the critics. It is, indeed, carried to the verge of baldness; frigidity, used by Pattison, is too strong a word. This does not seem to be any token of a decay of poetical power. As writers advance in life their characteristics usually grow upon them, and develop into mannerisms. In "Paradise Regained," and yet more markedly in "Samson Agonistes," Milton seems to have prided himself on showing how independent he could be of the ordinary poetical stock-in-trade. Except in his splendid episodical descriptions he seeks to impress by the ma.s.sy substance of his verse. It is a great proof of the essentially poetical quality of his mind that though he thus often becomes jejune, he is never prosaic. He is ever unmistakably the poet, even when his beauties are rather those of the orator or the moralist. The following sound remark, for instance, would not have been poetry in Pope; it is poetry in Milton:--

"Who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior (And what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?) Uncertain and unsettled still remains?

Deep versed in books and shallow in himself."

Perhaps, too, the spa.r.s.e flowers of pure poetry are more exquisite from their contrast with the general austerity:--

"The field, all iron, cast a gleaming brown."

"Morning fair Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice gray."

Poetic magic these, and Milton is still Milton.

"I have lately read his Samson, which has more of the antique spirit than any production of any other modern poet. He is very great." Thus Goethe to Eckermann, in his old age. The period of life is noticeable, for "Samson Agonistes" is an old man's poem as respects author and reader alike. There is much to repel, little to attract a young reader; no wonder that Macaulay, fresh from college, put it so far below "Comus," to which the more mature taste is disposed to equal it. It is related to the earlier work as sculpture is to painting, but sculpture of the severest school, all sinewy strength; studious, above all, of impressive truth. "Beyond these an ancient fisherman and a rock are fas.h.i.+oned, a rugged rock, whereon with might and main the old man drags a great net from his cast, as one that labours stoutly. Thou wouldest say that he is fis.h.i.+ng with all the might of his limbs, so big the sinews swell all about his neck, grey-haired though he is, but his strength is as the strength of youth."[9] Behold here the Milton of "Samson Agonistes," a work whose beauty is of metal rather than of marble, hard, bright, and receptive of an ineffaceable die. The great fault is the frequent harshness of the style, princ.i.p.ally in the choruses, where some strophes are almost uncouth. In the blank verse speeches perfect grace is often united to perfect dignity: as in the farewell of Dalila:--

"Fame if not double-faced is double-mouthed, And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds; On both his wings, one black, the other white, Bears greatest names in his wild aery flights.

My name perhaps among the circ.u.mcised, In Dan, in Judah, and the bordering tribes, To all posterity may stand defamed, With malediction mentioned, and the blot Of falsehood most unconjugal traduced.

But in my country where I most desire, In Ecron, Gaza, Asdod, and in Gath, I shall be named among the famousest Of women, sung at solemn festivals, Living and dead recorded, who to save Her country from a fierce destroyer, chose Above the faith of wedlock-bands; my tomb With odours visited and annual flowers."

The scheme of "Samson Agonistes" is that of the Greek drama, the only one appropriate to an action of such extreme simplicity, admitting so few personages, and these only as foils to the hero. It is, but for its Miltonisms of style and autobiographic and political allusion, just such a drama as Sophocles or Euripides would have written on the subject, and has all that depth of patriotic and religious sentiment which made the Greek drama so inexpressibly significant to Greeks. Consummate art is shown in the invention of the Philistine giant, Harapha, who not only enriches the meagre action, and brings out strong features in the character of Samson, but also prepares the reader for the catastrophe.

We must say reader, for though the drama might conceivably be acted with effect on a Court or University stage, the real living theatre has been no place for it since the days of Greece. Milton confesses as much when in his preface he a.s.sails "the poet's error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people." In his view tragedy should be eclectic; in Shakespeare's it should be all embracing.

Sh.e.l.ley, perhaps, judged more rightly than either when he said: "The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in 'King Lear,' universal, ideal, and sublime." On the whole, "Samson Agonistes"

is a n.o.ble example of a style which we may hope will in no generation be entirely lacking to our literature, but which must always be exotic, from its want of harmony with the more essential characteristics of our tumultous, undisciplined, irrepressible national life.