Lycidas. From Prose. spells is Spenserian, and Spenserian, too, is the sensuous beauty of its speeches and songs. It contains a perfect lyric in 'Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv'st unseen '. Lycidas, Milton's elegy on his fellow student, Edward King, was published in 1638, together with elegies on King from other hands. There is no reason to think that Milton had known King much more intimately than Shelley knew Keats; but in Lycidas, as in Adonais, grief is universalized, and achieves a grandeur which transcends any merely personal poignancy. Both elegies, vastly as they differ in spirit and general handling, are constructed closely on the model of the Greek pastoral elegy; and in both, this convention, so far from inhibiting inspiration, directs and moulds it into exquisiteness. Technically, in skill of rhyming and rhythm, Lycidas was never surpassed by Milton; nor in the wider aspect of beauty did he often surpass the passage beginning Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies', nor the great lines, Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, Where the great Vision of the guarded Mount The details of Milton's Italian tour (1638–9), and of his Poetry to subsequent essays in matrimony and politics, lie outside the scope of the present volume. After visiting Florence, Rome, Naples, and Geneva, and making the acquaintance of Grotius and Galileo, he returned to England. I considered it dishonourable', he wrote, 'to be enjoying myself in foreign lands while my countrymen were striking a blow for freedom.' This sentence embodies one master-impulse of Milton's life—that which led him for the next twenty years to forgo poetry save for a handful of sonnets-and to put his whole might into prose written on behalf of liberty. That the earlier impulse was not dead may be seen from his reference in 1641' to the inward prompting which grows daily upon me that by labour and intent study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after times as they would not willingly let it die'. Yet this instinct was for the time-being directed to political rather than poetic ends. His Prose Works. His next work, his Tractate on Education, written in 1642 at the request of Samuel Hartlib, reflects much of the experience he himself had gained from schoolmastering. A more distressing experience the unhappiness of his first marriage— resulted in a more fervid piece of prose-The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), in which, as in the later Tetrachordon and Colasterion, he pleads for the granting of liberty when the marriage bond has become intolerable. His publication of the Doctrine and Discipline, in defiance of the recent licensing ordinance, led immediately to the writing of his most famous prose work, Areopagitica, for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. Milton does not claim an immunity for all books, however outrageous, after publication; his protest is directed against such a censorship before publication as would entirely prevent the appearance of unorthodox works. He pleads his cause with a mighty energy, and the best periods of the Areopagitica have a fervour and a music unsurpassed in the prose of our race. To this earlier period of Milton's prose writings belong also the series of pamphlets in which he attacked 'prelatical episcopacy'. The earliest and best known of these is The Reformation, and the causes that hitherto have hindered it. From the political, though not from the literary, point of view, the most important class of his prose work was that beginning with The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), published fourteen days after the execution of Charles I, which it vindicated. His Eiconoclastes, written in refutation of the royalist Eicon Basilike, followed close upon his appointment as Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth. From now onwards till the Restoration his writings were mainly political and controversial. His Defence of the English People (Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio), written in reply to the Defensio Regia of the great classical scholar, Salmasius, consists largely of personal abuse. Despite its contemporary fame, its chief claim to sublimity lies in the fact that the toil he spent upon it cost Milton his sight. Equally abusive, less famous, but more interesting through its biographical passages, is the Second Defence, in which Milton fiercely assails Morus, the reputed author of a further attack upon the regicides. The Pro Se Defensio followed in 1655, and, by a piece of unconscious irony, Milton published in 1660, on the very eve of the Restoration, his Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth. Some writers, appalled by the personal virulence recurring throughout Milton's writings, have held that these represent a kind of spiritual interregnum in his life, and that the instinct which produced Lycidas and Comus slumbered for some twenty years, only to awake with Paradise Lost. Nothing could be more unsound than this view. Milton, as we have seen, had from the beginning regarded his life as a dedicated one. When the call came, he gave up to liberty what had been originally meant for poetry, and accepted all the conditions of the change. Personal virulence was universal, if not necessary, in the quarrels of the day. That Milton used it merely meant that he was writing controversial prose, as he was afterwards to write imaginative verse, with his whole might and spirit. If, in the circumstances of the time, he had not been the man to write the Defensio Secunda, he could not have been the man to write Paradise Lost. The highest flights of his prose have, moreover, marked affinity, both in form and spirit, with his highest poetry, and have often the long roll and swell of his greatest blank verse. If his style frequently becomes unwieldy, and all too seldom reaches, the highest moments of Areopagitica, at its best it is supremely great. His Son nets. Paradise Practically the only poetry which Milton wrote during the twenty years preceding the Restoration was a sprinkling of sonnets. He had tried his hand in this form during his youth, and the most notable result had been the lines on his three and twentieth year'. His later sonnets, though scanty in number, have a range of theme which is unparalleled in the previous English practice of the form, and includes vituperation, homage, friendship, playful invitation, solemn indignation, and still more solemn resignation. In quality they range from I did but prompt the age', with its commonplace violence, to the transcendent grandeur of When I consider how my light is spent'. Milton's sonnet reverts from the Shakespearean form, with its final couplet and free scheme of rhyme, to the stricter Petrarchan model, which had not previously obtained a secure place in English, and had been used with a difference even by its sponsor Wyatt. Not until the day of Wordsworth do we meet again the combined fervour and grandeur which distinguish the best sonnets of Milton. 6 The Restoration, which brought Milton poverty and neglect, brought him also rest from political strife, and the means of achieving his greatest glory, Paradise Lost. In his Latin verses to his Italian friend and host, Manso, he had indicated his desire to write a heroic poem, with Arthur for its hero. In 1641, as is shown by the list of some hundred possible subjects contained in his commonplace-book, the theme of Arthur has been dropped, and later still the epic form is substituted for the dramatic. This latter change was probably due, partly to Milton's sense of the epic's superior fitness for his sublime purpose, partly also to the strong disfavour with which he came to regard romantic drama. The main theme of Paradise Lost had already been treated, both dramatically and epically, on the Continent and in England. In taking the Fall for his subject, Milton was doubtless attracted by the grandeur of the first great Tragedy of all. He has imparted a good deal of that grandeur to his drawing of Adam and Eve; yet intimate humanity is as necessary a condition of tragedy as grandeur; and in this quality the first inhabitants of Eden, from the very conditions of their being, were necessarily in some sense lacking. It seems as if Milton, fully conscious of this drawback, had endeavoured to make up by sheer force of poetry for what he forfeited in psychology; for there are no more lovely-though there may be more sublime passages in Paradise Lost than those in which we overhear for the first time the speech of our first parents. And if the humans, Adam and Eve, in some sense lack humanity, the same cannot be said of the superhuman, Satan. Milton seems to have lavished all the force of his imagination, and even of his sympathy, upon the archrebel, whose indomitable will beneath adversity was in so many respects akin to his own. Beauty and grandeur, defiance, compassion, eternal misery and eternal endurance, all combine to make Satan a supreme figure of romance. To heighten the terrific effect of his fall and journey, Milton has, moreover, retained the old Ptolemaic cosmology, though in the Eighth Book he expresses, through the mouth of Raphael, his knowledge of the newer and truer Copernican theory. Through this choice Milton has achieved some of the most tremendous descriptions in Paradise Lost-the scene, for instance, of the fallen angels in hell, and of Satan's journey upward through Chaos to the primum mobile, and thence downward through the spheres to Earth and Eden. For the metre of the poem Milton has chosen blank verse in preference to what he calls the troublesome and modern bondage of riming'. His line is austere and exquisite; it seldom admits hypermetrical syllables, whether medial or terminal, but passes freely into the long music of the paragraph. All of his vast reading in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and modern literature, is used to give volume and variety to his verse and the great story which it tells. Milton's two last poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Paradise Agonistes, were published together in 1671; the dates of their Regained. composition remain uncertain. Paradise Regained expands the story of the Temptation to an extent of more than two thousand lines. It has not the splendour and dramatic intensity of the highest passages of Paradise Lost; yet Coleridge described it as in its kind the most perfect poem extant and many of its passages rank among the greatest in Milton. Mark Pattison's statement that it 'betrays the senility of age', and that in it 'Milton has not only curbed his imagination, but has almost suppressed it ', must rank among the strangest statements ever made by a fine critic. It is difficult to say where in literature imagination is to be found, if not in the great speech of Satan at the end of the First Book, or in the scene of the Fourth which describes his final defeat. For the most part the blank verse has Milton's old majesty and strength, though there are curious lapses into looseness and harshness.1 In Samson Agonistes, Milton realized his long-cherished Samson ambition to write a classical drama. The play is Hebrew in Agonistes. subject, Greek rather than Senecan in structure, and intensely personal in spirit and emotion. Like Samson, Milton himself was blind, and at the mercy of his enemies, yet scornful and untameable. Like him he had suffered deeply from 'the ungrateful multitude', and, according to his own view of the case, from woman; and, like him too, he was conscious of 1 Cf. Perhaps thou lingerest in deep thoughts detained Thy life hath yet been private, most part spent At home, scarce viewed the Galilean towns a valiant and upright life foiled and broken by permission of God. The tragedy, therefore, owes its poignancy not only to Milton's art, but to the innermost experience of his soul. Regarded thus, as the product of agony no less than of genius, it is seen to be the intensest utterance of the most intense of English poets'. But even apart from its personal relation, this tragedy of a Jew is probably the greatest Greek play ever written in English. The different episodes or acts in which Samson is visited in turn by his father, Dalila, and the Philistine giant Harapha, are so ordered as to elicit every emotion of his soul, and to lead inevitably to the final catastrophe. The tragedy is given depth, fullness, and added beauty by the chorus, especially in those intermediate and final passages in which Milton has availed himself of rhyme. It was thoroughly fitting that the last work of this great rebel should have been Samson Agonistes; and it is fitting, too, that here at the very end there should have been no failure of the sublimity whereby Milton ranks second only to Shakespeare among the poets of our tongue. CHAPTER XVII CAROLINE PROSE Development of Prose. New Developments in Prose - Religious writers Andrewes, Donne, - IT has already been shown that at a time when English prose was wavering between two extremes, and tending on the whole towards extravagance, Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity represents a form making for clearness, balance, and harmony. The same qualities distinguish one main kind of ecclesiastical prose throughout the next century, though the ornate style is also found striving for mastery. Throughout the reign of Elizabeth the sermon had been growing both in Vogue and merit, and during the Jacobean and Caroline periods it had won a place among the highest forms of English prose. The interest now felt in it was the product of various causes- -the eager zest of patriotic and Protestant Englishmen for anti-Romish polemics, the puritan preference for the sermon over other literary forms, and the fashionable taste created for it by the preoccupation of James I with theology. This fashionable revival was a source both of weakness and of strength. It helped to bring the sermon into prominence and to attract to it some of the best intellects in England; but it also promoted extravagance of expression, and an undue use of the fashionable conceits' of the day. The good and the bad tendencies are both evident in the sermons and devotional Andrewes. writings of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Dean of Westminster, and subsequently Bishop of Winchester under James I. |