JOHN MILTON.

[JOHN MILTON (1608–1674) was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, 9 Dec. 1608. Educated at St. Paul's School, and Christ's College, Cambridge, he was destined by his family for the Church. From this, however, he was diverted, partly by his strong Puritan bias, partly by an ambition which possessed him from a very early period, to compose a great work which should bring honour to his country, and to the English language. Full of this lofty purpose, he retired to his father's country residence at Horton, in the county of Bucks. Here he gave himself up to study, and poetical meditation, in preparation for the work to which he had resolved to devote his life. He looked upon himself as a man dedicated to a high purpose, and framed his life accordingly. He thought that he who would not be frustrated of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem, not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy.'

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This residence at Horton constitutes Milton's first poetic period, 1632-1638. During these six years he wrote L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Arcades, Comus, and Lycidas. All these were thrown off by their author as occasional pieces, exercises for practice, preluding to the labour of his life, which he was all the while meditating.

A journey to Italy, 1638-9, was undertaken as a portion of the poet's education which he was giving himself. He was recalled from his tour by the lowering aspect of public affairs at home. For the next twenty years his thoughts were diverted from poetry by the absorbing interest of the civil struggle. His time was occupied, partly by official duties as Latin secretary to the Council of the Commonwealth, partly by the voluntary share he took in the controversies of the time.

The public cause to which he had devoted himself being lost, and the ruin of his party consummated in 1660, Milton reverted to his long-cherished poetical scheme. During the twenty years of political agitation this scheme had never been wholly banished from his thoughts. After much hesitation, 'long choosing and beginning late,' both subject and form had been decided on. The poem was to be an epic, and was to treat of the fall and recovery of He had begun to compose on this theme as early as 1658, and in 1665 Paradise Lost was completed. Owing to the Plague and the Fire, it

man.

was not published till August, 1667. It was originally in ten books, which were afterwards made into twelve, as the normal epical number, by subdividing books 7 and 10. The theme of the recovery of man had been dropped out of the plan at an early stage, and was afterwards made the subject of a second poem, Paradise Regained, on a hint given by Milton's young quaker friend, Ellwood. These years of disaster and distress, 1665-6, were specially prolific, if, as is probable, both Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes were written during them. The two poems came out in I vol. in 1671, and closed Milton's second poetic period. He lived three years longer, during which he occupied himself with carrying through the press a new edition of his Poems (the 1st ed. was 1645) as well as several compilations, which furnished mental occupation without requiring inventive power. He died 8 Nov. 1674.]

I.

Our earliest specimen of Milton is a little poem which was first printed among the commendatory verses prefixed, according to a custom then prevailing, to the Shakspeare folio of 1632, where it is headed, An epitaph on the admirable dramatick poet, W. Shakspere. It was written in 1630, æt. 22. Though not Milton's earliest effort, it is the first piece of which it can be said that its merit does not lie chiefly in its promise. What he had written before this date, was, besides college exercises, an ode On the morning of Christ's nativity, Upon the circumcision, The Passion, On the death of a fair infant, &c. In all these early pieces is discernible in germ that mental quality which became in his mature production his poetic characteristic. This quality, which the poverty of our language tries to express by the words solemnity, gravity, majesty, nobility, loftiness, and which, name it as we may, we all feel in reading Paradise Lost, is already conspicuous in the sixteen lines of the epitaph on Shakspeare. This sublimity does not reside in the thesis which is logically enunciated, nor in the image presented. These are, as often in Milton, commonplace enough. The elevation is communicated to us not by the dogma or deliverance, but by sympathy. We catch the contagion of the poet's mental attitude. He makes us bow with him before the image of Shakspeare, though there is not a single discriminating epithet to point out in what the greatness which we are made to feel consists. An eighteenth century poet would have offered some clever analysis, or judicious criticism. Avant donc que d'écrire, apprenez à penser,' was the precept of that age for prose and poetry alike. To be sensible of the sudden decadence

of poetry after 1660 we have only to compare, with this Miltonic tribute to Shakespeare, Dryden's lines on Milton himself prefixed to the first folio of 1688 :—

'Three poets, in three distant ages born,' &c.

In Milton's sixteen lines the lofty tone is so independent of the thought presented, that we overlook the inadequacy of the thought itself. Were we to suppress the feeling, and look only at the logical sentence, as Johnsonian criticism used to do, we should be obliged to say that the residuum is a frigid conceit in the style of Marini. Wẹ, the readers, are turned into marble monuments to the memory of Shakespeare-a farfetched fancy, which deadens, instead of excites, awe and admiration.

2.

The dates of the two pieces headed L'Allegro and Il Penseroso can only be approximately given. They are with great probability assigned to the early years of Milton's residence at Horton, 1632 and following. The Italian titles show that they were written at a time when Milton had already begun to learn Italian, while the incorrect form 'penseroso' shows that he was only beginning. L'Allegro='the cheerful man'; Il Penseroso is intended to mean 'the thoughtful man.' But from 'pensiero' the adjectival form is 'pensieroso.' There was an old form 'pensero,' but the Italian dictionaries do not acknowledge any adjective 'penseroso' as derived from it. Petrarch, with whom Milton must have been early acquainted, habitually uses 'pensoso,' but always with the connotation of 'sadness,' 'melancholy.'

The two Odes, taken together, present contrasted views of the scholar's life. It is what the rhetoricians call an antiperistasis, or development of an idea by its opposite. Or we may rather regard them as alternating moods, buoyant spirits and solemn recollectedness succeeding and displacing each other, as in life. They are Milton's own moods, and might be employed as autobiography, depicting his studious days in those years when he was forming his mind and hiving wisdom. But they are ideally and not literally true, just as the landscape of the odes is ideally, but not literally, that of the neighbourhood of Horton. The joyous mood is the mood of daytime, beginning with the first flight of the lark before dawn, and closing with music inducing sleep. The thoughtful mood is that of the same scholar studying through the night, or meditating in his solitary moonlight walk. For the

country life of these idylls is not the life of the native of the country, peasant or proprietor, but of the scholar to whose emotions all the country objects are subordinated. Milton does not set himself to tell us what rural objects are like, but indicates them by their bearing on the life lived among them by his studious youth. Whereas in Browne's Britannia's Pastorals (1613–16), with which Milton was well acquainted, there is generally the faintest possible breath of human interest, in Milton, town and country are but scenery to the moods of the human agent. Milton, like all poets of the first order, knew or rather felt, that human action or passion is the only subject of poetry. This is no mere conventional rule established by the critics, or by custom; it rests upon the truth that poetry must be a vehicle of emotion. Poetry is an address to the feelings and imagination, not to the judgment and the understanding. The world and its cosmical processes, or nature and natural scenery, are in themselves only objects of science. They become matter for the poet only after they have been impregnated with the joys and distresses, the hopes and fears, of man. 'We receive but what we give.' This truth, the foundation of any sufficient 'poetic,' is itself contained in the still wider law, under which colour and form, light itself, are but affections of our human organs of perception.

The doctrine that human action and passion are the only material of poetic fiction was the first theorem of Greek æsthetic. But it had been lost sight of, and was not introduced into modern criticism till its revival by Lessing in 1766. The practice both of our poets, and of our English critics, in the eighteenth century, had forgotten this capital distinction between the art of language, and the art of design. The English versifiers of that century had not the poetic impulse in sufficient intensity to feel the distinction. And the Addison-Johnson criticism, which regarded a poem as made up of images and propositions in verse, could not teach the truth. So the poets went to work to describe scenery. And our collections are filled with verse, didactic and descriptive, which, with many merits of style and thought, has no title to rank as poetry.

Descriptive poetry is in fact a contradiction in terms. A landscape can be represented to the eye by imitative colours laid on a flat surface. But it cannot be presented in words which, being necessarily successive, cannot render juxtaposition in space. To exhibit in space is the privilege of the arts of design. Poetry,

whose instrument is language, involves succession in time, and can only present that which comes to pass-das geschehene— under one or other of its two forms, action or passion.

Milton was in possession of this secret, not as a trick taught him by the critics, but in virtue of the intensity of human passion which glowed in his bosom. He has exemplified the principle in these two lyrics. In them, as in Wordsworth's best passages, the imagery is not there for its own sake, it is the vehicle of the personal feelings of the Man. The composition derives its unity and its denomination from his mental attitude as spectator.

It is misleading, then, when these odes are spoken of as 'masterpieces of description.' A naturalist discerns at once, in more than one minute touch, that the poet is not an accurate observer of nature, or thoroughly familiar with country life. As a town-bred youth, 'in populous city pent,' Milton missed that intimacy with rural sights and sounds, which belongs, like the mother tongue, to those who have been born and bred among them. But the same want of familiarity which makes his notice of the object inaccurate, intensifies the emotion excited in him by the objects, when he is first brought in contact with them. Nature has for Milton the stimulus of novelty. Like other town poets, he knows nature less, but feels it more. What he does exactly render for us is not objective nature, but its effect upon the emotional life of the lettered student.

If Milton is not ideally descriptive, still less is he the copyist of a given scene. That the locality of Horton suggested the scenery of these odes is one thing; that they describe that locality, that the 'mountains' are the Chilterns, and the 'towers and battlements' are Windsor, is quite another. It might seem hardly necessary to dwell upon this, but that this confusion of poetical truth with historical truth is so widely spread, even among the educated. While pilgrims are still found endeavouring to identify the Troy sung by Homer with some one Asiatic site, Hissarlik or other, the critic must continue to repeat the trite lesson that poetry feigns, and does not describe. Fact and fiction are contradictories, and exclude each other. Truth of poetry may be called philosophical truth; truth of fact, historical. So beauty in nature is one thing, beauty of a work of art quite another thing. And this is how it is that L'Allegro and Il Penseroso have the highest beauty as works of art, while they may abound with naturalistic solecism.