Milton

Dowden, Edwerd
Milton

3588

DKCKMHKR, 190*.

r 1

MILTON. -

PROFESSOR EDWARD
DOWDEN, LL.D.

TWTILTON'S soaring spirit, which
AVA We: Jaworth likened to a. star,
must not make us forget his senses,
framed for rich and delicate pleasures.
The eye, while sight was his, the ear,
the sense of smell, the sense of taste,
were with him inlets of delight. The
Puritan poet expressly rejected the
common doctrine that soul and body
are distinct and different in kind ; the
whole man is for him indivisibly one.
He honours the joys of wedlock as
sacred. He is the least morose, the
least ascetic of poets. The fact that
his life, viewed as a whole, was dedi-
cated to great ends and had a continu-
ity of purpose that is rare has obscured
the fact that he was in a high degree
sensitive aud impulsive. The last page
of Garnett's little biography of Milton —
a far juster appreciation of the man
and his work than the life by Mark
Pattison — dwells on this point. In
1734 Jonathan Richardson wrote of
Milton — " He was always in haste,"
and he goes on to quote the poet's own
words, from the " Letter to Diodatus"
" Such is the impetuosity of my
temper, that no delay, no quiet, no
different care and thought of almost
anything else, can stop me till I come
to mv journey's end, and finish the
present study tothe.utmost I am able."
In his wooing Milton was as precipitate

as Shelley ; in the rupture with his
wife he was far more precipitate. His
vehemence in politics was more un-
qualified than the vehemence of Shel-
ley. He steadied himself by devotion
to great ends and worthy causes. He
regarded himself — too much, perhaps —
as a dedicated person ; but without the
help of this lofty self- consciousness,
his temperament might have wrecked
Milton in mid-career. Yet it is not to
be supposed that his steadfastness of
aim made him rigid or unsocial. " He
was delightful company," said his
daughter, " the life of the conversation,
and that on account of a flow of sub-
ject, and an unaffected cheerfulness
and civility."

In his writings on matters of national
interest he is not to be regarded as a
practical politician, who is satisfied
with the second best because the best
is unattainable, but rather as a poet or
a seer setting forth the highest ideals,
ideals of domestic life, of education, of
civil and ecclesiastical liberty. And it
was he, the Puritan poet, who dreamed
of an organisation of the pleasures of
England under the superintendence of
an enlightened government. If his
soul, as Wordsworth declares, " dwelt
apart," it was only because he took a
more comprehensive view of the na-
tional well-being than any of his con-

Vol. Il.-Xo. 10.-K

167

S8D879

THE BIBLIOPHILE

temporaries. He embodies in his art
the spirit of the Renaissance united
with the spirit of the Reformation ; he
is Hellenic and at the same time Heb-
raic. It is an art studiously concrete —
visualised for the eye, full of majestic

and Satan, the Lady and Comus, Sam-
son and Harapha, the spirit of gaiety
and the temper of genius, which is, in
the old sense of the word, melancholic,
the infant of Bethlehem and the fallen
divinities of the Pagan world. Hence,

MILTOX AS A VOl'TH

KHOM AX KXlillAVIXCi )IV MOCIIItAKKX 1741

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harmonies for the ear — yet founded as compared with Shakespeare, his

upon somewhat abstract conceptions, conceptions of life and character are

And these abstractions lend themselves simple and lack the complexity of

to impressive effects of contrast — dark- actual character and real life; hence

ness and light, heaven and hell, the they are less instructive ; but they are

righteous and the fallen angels, Christ hardly less inspiring.

168

MILTON

Milton's temperament was naturally
joyous, and until he had fallen on evil
days he was sanguine in an extra-
ordinary degree idealist as he was —
in his hopes for the speedy realization
by the English people of his vision of
a nation, righteous, free, strong, dis-
ciplined, and enlightened. Even when
compassed round in darkness with
dangers, he was sustained by that faith
in human effort, under the guidance
of divine Providence, which is express-
ed by the Chorus of "Samson Agon-
istes." A foiled or disappointed ideal-
ist runs a risk of becoming embittered
or even cynical. In all Milton's writ-
ings, while it is true that indignation
often breaks the bounds, there is no
touch of the cynic. His youth was one
of aspiring and joyous self-culture
self-culture not for its own sake merely,
but with a view to some great achieve-
ment. His mid-manhood was filled
with the joys of the combatant cham-
pion of liberty, champion of England,
and he could even exult in the loss of
sight sustained "in Liberty's defence,
my noble task." His elder years were
happy in the accomplishment of the
dreams and designs and prophecies of
his youth. His joys from first to last
were arduous, and might almost be
called severe. That to some extent
removes him from our common, facile
sympathies ; but he aspired towards
those highest delights, in whose coun-
tenances there is something of awe.

The alteration, of course, is" great
from the writer of "L'Allegro " to the
writer of " Samson Agonistes." If
viewed aright, the change calls forth
no feeling of pity but rather that of a
noble pride : —

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail.
Or knock the breast.

In the young poet's contrasted pieces
the higher joys are those described in
" II Penseroso," and the hope for old
age there expressed is that it " may

attain to something of prophetic strain."
The aspiration of early manhood found
its fulfilment in the more advanced
years of Milton's blindness. For such
an one as Milton a life of uninterrupted
continuity is in itself a source of pecu-
liar satisfaction : and although he felt
called on during many years to labour
with his left hand -the hand that wrote
prose — his life had the virtue of a rare
continuity. It seemed to him that the
very sources of high poetry in a nation's
life — liberty and virtue — were threat-
ened, and he laid down the lyre and
took up the sword — such sword as he
could most effectively wield ; he cast
off his singing robes and put on his
buff-coat of prose, because greater
than poetry itself is that from which
all lofty poetry springs. He would not
have been Milton had he done other-
wise, and once engaged in strife, he
would have been other than himself if
all his passions had not been aroused.
His prose writings are the writings of
a poet not because they include occa-
sional passages of almost unmatchable
eloquence ; they- are a poet's work be-
cause the central conceptions of those
which have permanent value are the
conceptions, not of a politician but of a
prophet ; and even the fierce, insulting
rages by which some of them are dis-
figured do not so much resemble the
violences of the classical scholar, in
an age when the mammoths of Renais-
sance learning tore each other in their
slime, as they resemble the objurga-
tions and mockery of a troubled seven-
teenth-century Elijah against the
seventeenth-century priests of Baal.
There is not a more terrible wild fowl,
to borrow Bottom's phrase, than your
lion of an idealist in a passion ; and
while he may be touched in the tend-
erest spots of personal self-esteem, he
will roar as if he were nothing less
than the sacred representative of a
sacred cause or idea.

169

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Dowden, Edward
Milton