Milton’s
literary life divides into three almost mechanically distinct
periods: (I) the time of his youth and minor poems, (2) his
middle twenty years of prose polemics, and (3) the time of his
later Muse and greater poems. Had Milton died in 1640,
when he was in his thirty-second year, and had his literary
remains been then collected, h
e would have been remembered as
one of the best Latinists of his generation and one of the
most exquisite of English poets. In the latter character, more
particularly, he would have taken his place as one of that
interesting group or series of English poets, coming in the
next forty years after Spenser, who, because they all
acknowledged a filial relationship to Spenser, may be called
collectively the Spenserians. In this group or series,
counting in it such other true poets of the reigns of James I.
and Charles I. as Phineas and Giles Fletcher, William Browne
and Drummond of Hawthornden, Milton would have been entitled,
by the small collection of pieces he had left, and which would
have included his Ode on the Nativity, his L’Allegro and
Ii Penseroso, his Comus and his Lycidas, to
recognition as indubitably the very highest and finest. There
was in him that peculiar Spenserian something which might be
regarded as the poetic faculty in its essence, with a
closeness and perfection of verbal finish not to be found in
the other Spenserians, or even in the master himself.
Few as the
pieces were, and owning discipleship to Spenser as the author
did, he was a Spenserian with a difference belonging to his
own constitution, which prophesied, and indeed already
exhibited, the passage of English poetry out of the Spenserian
into a kind that might be called the Miltonic. This Miltonic
something, distinguishing the new poet from other Spenserians,
was more than mere perfection of literary finish. It consisted
in an avowed consciousness already of the os magna
soniturum, the mouth formed for great utterances, that
consciousness resting on a peculiar substratum of personal
character that had occasioned a new theory of literature.
"He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well
hereafter on laudable things ought himself to be a true poem
was Milton’s own memorable expression afterwards of the
principle that had taken possession of him from his earliest
days; and this principle of moral manliness as the true
foundation of high literary effort, of the inextricable
identity of all literary productions in kind, and their
coequality in worth, with the personality in which they have
their origin, might have been detected, in more or less
definite shape, in all or most of the minor poems. It is a
specific form of that general Platonic doctrine of the
invincibility of virtue which runs through his Comus.
That a youth
and early manhood of such poetical promise should have been
succeeded by twenty years of all but incessant prose polemics
has been a matter of regret with many. But this is to ignore
his political and social side. If Burke, whose whole public
career consisted in a succession of speeches and pamphlets, is
looked back upon as one of the greatest men of his century on
their account, why should there be regret over the fact that
Milton, after having been the author of Comus and Lycidas,
became for a time the prose orator of his earlier and more
tumultuous generation? Milton was not only the greatest
pamphleteer of his generation, head and shoulders above the
rest, but there is no life of that time, not even
Cromwell’s, in which the history of the great Revolution in
its successive phases, so far as the deep underlying ideas and
speculations were concerned, may be more intimately and
instructively studied than in Milton’s.
Then, on
merely literary grounds, what an interest in those prose
remains! Not only of his Areopagitica, admired now so
unreservedly because its main doctrine has become axiomatic,
but of most of his other pamphlets, even those the doctrine of
which is least popular, it may be said confidently that they
answer to his own definition of "a good book," by
containing somehow "the precious life-blood of a master spirit."
From the entire series there might be a collection of
specimens, unequalled anywhere else, of the capabilities of
that older, grander and more elaborate English prose of which
the Elizabethans and their immediate successors were not
ashamed. Nor will readers of Milton’s pamphlets continue to
accept the hackneyed observation that his genius was destitute
of humor. Though his prevailing mood was the severely earnest,
there are pages in his prose writings, both English and Latin,
of the most laughable irony, reaching sometimes to outrageous
farce, and some of them as worthy of the name of humor as
anything in Swift. Here, however, we touch on what is the
worst feature in some of the prose pamphlets—their
measureless ferocity, their boundless license in personal
scurrility.
While it is
wrong to regard Milton’s middle twenty years of prose
polemics as a degradation of his genius, and while the fairer
contention might be that the youthful poet of Comus and
Lycidas actually promoted himself, and became a more
powerful agency in the world and a more interesting object in
it for ever, by consenting to lay aside his "singing
robes" and spend a portion of his life in great prose
oratory, who does not exult in the fact that such a life was
rounded off so miraculously at the close by a final stage of
compulsory calm, when the "singing robes" could be
resumed, and Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson
Agonistes could issue in succession from the blind man’s
chamber? Of these three poems, and what they reveal of Milton,
no need here to speak at length. Paradise Lost is one of the
few monumental works of the world, with nothing in modern epic
literature comparable to it except the great poem of Dante.
This is best perceived by those who penetrate beneath the
beauties of the merely terrestrial portion of the story, and
who recognize the coherence and the splendor of that vast
symbolic phantasmagory by which, through the wars in heaven
and the subsequent revenge of the expelled archangel, it
paints forth the connection of the whole visible universe of
human cognizance and history with the grander, pre-existing
and still environing world of the eternal and inconceivable.
To this
great epic Paradise Regained is a sequel, and it ought
to be read as such. The legend that Milton preferred the
shorter epic to the larger is quite incorrect. All that is
authentic on the subject is the statement by Edward Phillips
that, when it was reported to his uncle that the shorter epic
was “ generally censured to be much inferior to the
other,” he “could not hear with patience any such
thing.” The best critical judgment now confirms Milton’s
own, and pronounces Paradise Regained to be not only, within
the possibilities of its briefer theme, a worthy sequel to
Paradise Lost, but also one of the most artistically perfect
poems in any language. Finally, the poem in which Milton bade
farewell to the Muse, and in which he reverted to the dramatic
form, proves that to the very end his right hand had lost none
of its power or cunning. Samson Agonistes is the most powerful
drama in the English language after the severe Greek model,
and it has the additional interest of being so contrived that,
without any deviation from the strictly objective incidents of
the Biblical story which it enshrines, it is yet the poet’s
own epitaph and his condensed autobiography.
Much light
is thrown upon Milton’s mind in his later life, and even
upon the poems of that period, by his posthumous Latin
Treatise of Christian Doctrine. It differs from all his other
prose writings of any importance in being cool, abstract and
didactic. Professing to be a system of divinity derived
directly from the Bible, it is really an exposition of
Milton’s metaphysics and of~ his reasoned opinions on all
questions of philosophy, ethics and politics. The general
effect is to show that, though he is rightly regarded as the
very genius of English Puritanism, its representative poet and
idealist, yet he was not a Puritan of what may be called the
first wave, or that wave of Calvinistic orthodoxy which broke
in upon the absolutism of Charles and Laud, and set the
English Revolution going. He belonged distinctly to that
larger and more persistent wave of Puritanism which, passing
on through Independency, and an endless variety of sects, many
of them rationalistic and freethinking in the extreme,
developed into what has ever since been known as English
Liberalism. The treatise makes clear that, while Milton was a
most fervid theist and a genuine Christian, believing in the
Bible, and valuing the Bible over all the other books in the
world, he was at the same time one of the most intrepid of
English thinkers and theologians.
John
Milton |
The Story of
Milton | Interesting
Facts About Milton | Milton's
Literary Life |
Milton and
His Family | Particular
Works By Milton
poems: On
Time | The
Fifth Ode of Horace