In the meantime, while Dryden and Milton both
had their schools, most of our seventeenth-century
poetry fell into an almost complete oblivion. Dryden's
satiric, and Milton's epic strains engrossed
attention, and shaped the verses of an age. But
the seventeenth century was extraordinarily wealthy
in poetic kinds quite distinct from these: in metaphysic,
and mysticism, in devotional ecstasy, and
love-lyric, and romance. The English genius
in poetry is essentially metaphysical and romantic.
Milton was neither. He could not have excelled
in any of these kinds; nor have come near to
Suckling, or Crashaw, or Vaughan, or Herrick, or
Marvell, in their proper realms. It is a permissible
indulgence, therefore, in taking leave of
Milton, to turn from the Paradise Lost for a
moment, and, escaping from the solid materialism
of the heroic and epic strain, to find passion once
more among the Court lyrists, and spiritual insight
among the retired mystics, to find Religion and
Love, and the humility that has access to both.
A profound humility, impossible to Milton, inspired
Vaughan when he wrote such a verse as
this:--
There is in God, some say,
A deep but dazzling darkness; as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear.
O for that night! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim!
There is a natural vision, and there is a spiritual
vision; the spiritual belongs to Vaughan, not to
Milton. If Milton persuades us to a willing
suspension of disbelief for the moment, Vaughan
thrills us with a sense of vivid reality. His Ascension
Day is a thing seen, as if it were a memory of
yesterday:--
The day-star smiles, and light, with thee deceast,
Now shines in all the chambers of the East.
What stirs, what posting intercourse and mirth
Of Saints and Angels glorifie the earth!
What sighs, what whispers, busie stops and stays;
Private and holy talk fill all the ways!
They pass as at the last great day, and run
In their white robes to seek the risen Sun;
I see them, hear them, mark their haste, and move
Amongst them, with them, wing'd with faith and love.
To the intensity of his aspiration and hushed
expectance the world seems only a turbulent
passing pageant, or a hard wayfaring, suffered in
a dream:--
Who stays
Here long must passe
O'er dark hills, swift streames, and steep ways
As smooth as glasse.
Or a brief sickness:--
So for this night I linger here,
And, full of tossings to and fro,
Expect still when thou wilt appear,
That I may get me up and go.
His eyes are fixed on the shining lights that beckon
him; the world is full of voices, but its sights and
sounds appeal to him in vain; the beauties that
surround him are things of naught--
Glorious deceptions, gilded mists,
False joyes, phantastick flights.
In the distance before him there shines
An air of glory
Whose light doth trample on my days;
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Meer glimmering and decays;
and he lifts up his voice in passionate desire for
the ultimate deliverance:--
Ah! what time will it come? When shall that crie
The Bridegroome's comming! fill the sky?
Shall it in the evening run,
When our words and works are done?
Or will thy all-surprising light
Break at midnight?
He broods over it till nothing else is present to
him in the night-watches:--
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of calm and endless light.
The history of the struggles and corruption of
mankind may close at any moment, in the twinkling
of an eye, at a signal given:--
All's in deep sleep and night; thick darkness lyes
And hatcheth o'er thy people--
But hark! what trumpet's that, what angel cries
Arise! Thrust in thy sickle!
Here is a religious poet indeed, a visionary, a
mystic, and a Christian; none of which names can
be truly applied to Milton. And if we wish to
find Love enjoying his just supremacy in poetry,
we cannot do better than seek him among the
lyrists of the Court of Charles II. Milton, self-sufficient
and censorious, denies the name of love
to these songs of the sons of Belial. Love, he
says, reigns and revels in Eden, not
in court amours,
Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenate, which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.
Yet for the quick and fresh spirit of love in
the poetry of that time we must go to the sons
of Belial. There is a pathetic passage in one of
Milton's divorce pamphlets, where, speaking of
the unhappy choices in marriage to which "soberest
and best governed men" are liable, he remarks:--"It
is not strange though many, who have spent
their youth chastely, are in some things not so
quick-sighted while they haste too eagerly to
light the nuptial torch; nor is it therefore that for
a modest error a man should forfeit so great a
happiness, and no charitable means to release him,
since they who have lived most loosely, by reason
of their bold accustoming, prove most successful
in their matches, because their wild affections,
unsettling at will, have been as so many divorces
to teach them experience."
The wild affections, unsettling at will, wrote
better love-songs than the steadfast principles of
the sober and well-governed. Roystering libertines
like Sir Charles Sedley were more edifying
lovers than the austere husbands of Mary Powell
and of Eve. Milton would have despised and detested
the pleasure-seeking philosophy of Sedley:--
Let us then ply those joys we have,
'Tis vain to think beyond the grave;
Out of our reach the Gods have laid
Of Time to come th' event,
And laugh to see the Fools afraid
Of what the Knaves invent.
But the self-abandonment and the passion of two
or three of Sedley's songs are out of Milton's
reach:--
Not Celia that I juster am,
Or better than the rest,
For I would change each hour like them,
Were not my heart at rest.
But I am ty'd to very thee
By every thought I have,
Thy face I only care to see,
Thy heart I only crave.
All that in woman is ador'd
In thy dear self I find,
For the whole sex can but afford
The handsome and the kind.
Why should I then seek further store,
And still make love anew;
When change itself can give no more,
'Tis easie to be true.
It is like a cup of cold water after the didactic endearments
of Adam, and his repeated apostrophe:
Daughter of God and Man, immortal Eve--
For such thou art, from sin and blame entire.
Then there was John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.
He was drunk for five years on end,--so his
biographer, who had it from his own lips, alleges--and
he died at the age of thirty-two. Like
Sedley, he professes no virtues, and holds no far-reaching
views. But what a delicate turn of
personal affection he gives to the expression of his
careless creed:--
The time that is to come is not,
How can it then be mine?
The present moment's all my lot,
And that, as fast as it is got,
Phyllis, is only thine.
Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows
If I by miracle can be
This live-long minute true to thee,
'Tis all that Heaven allows.
Rochester's best love-poetry reaches the topmost
pinnacle of achievement in that kind. None has
ever been written more movingly beautiful than
this:--
When, wearied with a world of woe,
To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love and peace and truth does flow,
May I contented there expire!
Lest, once more wandering from that heaven,
I fall on some base heart unblest--
Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven--
And lose my everlasting rest!
Or than that other piece (too beautiful and too
intense to be cited as a sudden illustration of a
thesis) beginning--
Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why
Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny
The sunshine of the Sun's enlivening eye?
The wind bloweth where it listeth; the
wandering fire of song touches the hearts and lips
of whom it will. Milton built an altar in the
name of the Lord, and he made a great trench
about the altar, and he put the wood in order, and
loaded the altar with rich exotic offerings, cassia
and nard, odorous gums and balm, and fruit
burnished with golden rind. But the fire from
Heaven descended on the hastily piled altars of
the sons of Belial, and left Milton's gorgeous altar
cold.
His fame is now old-established and settled, so
there is no place left for the eloquence of the
memorialist, or the studied praises of the pleader.
I have tried to understand Milton; and have
already praised him as well as I know how, with
no stinted admiration, I trust, and certainly with
no merely superstitious reverence. If I must
round my discourse by repeating something that I
have already said or suggested, it shall be this--that
as he stands far aloof from his contemporaries,
so in the succession of great figures that mark for
us the centuries of our literature he is seen once
more singular and a stranger. We bred Shakespeare
in our Midlands; he was nourished from
the soil that still grows our daily bread. But
Milton was an alien conqueror. The crowd of
native-born Puritans, who sometimes (not without
many searchings of heart and sharp misgivings)
attempt to claim him for their leader, have no
title in him. It is a proof of his dominating
power, and no credit to their intelligence, that
they accept him as their representative. His
influence on the destinies and history of our
literature might be compared to the achievement
of Napoleon while he was winning the victories
that changed the map of Europe. He could not
change the character of a people, nor perpetuate his
dynasty. But nothing is as it would have been
without him. Our literature is as hospitable as
the Hindoo pantheon; the great revolutionary has
won a place even in our creed. And the writer
has this advantage, at least, over the conqueror
and legislator, that he has bequeathed to us not
maps, nor laws, but poems, whose beauty, like the
World's unwithered countenance, is bright as at
the day of their creation.
[For the following Index I am indebted to the kindness of three of my pupils,
Miss F. Marston, Miss E. L. Morice, and Miss D. E. Yates.]
- Abdiel, 72, 138-39, 156, 211
- Abstract terms, Milton's use of, 227-31
- Adam, 32, 35, 54, 64, 82-4, 87, 92, 95-6, 105, 112, 115, 122, 141-45, 148-50, 154-57, 160, 207, 222, 237, 248-50, 261
- Adamo, 95
- Addison, Joseph, 157-58, 206, 218, 242
- Æneid, Virgil's, 158
- Akenside, Mark, 243
- Allegorical figures, Milton's, 237-38
- Amyntor and Theodora, Mallet's, 243
- Andreini, 95-7, 104, 106
- Angelo, Michael, 88
- Animadversions on the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuus, 217
- Apology for Smectymnuus, 16, 69, 71, 74
- Arbuthnot, John, 218
- Areopagitica, 43, 46, 48, 49, 52, 56-7, 65, 76, 180
- Arianism, 86
- Ariosto, 171
- Armstrong, John, 242
- Art of English Poetry, Bysshe's, 241
- Art of Preserving Health, The, Armstrong's, 242
- Arthurian Legend, 23, 60, 89-90
- Ascension Day, Vaughan's, 257
- Athanasian Creed, 86
- Athenian Mercury, 240
- Augustine, Saint, 112
- Bacon, Francis, 1, 198
- Barclay, John, 57
- Baxter, Richard, 20-21
- Beaumont, Francis, 218
- Beaumont, Joseph, 176
- Beelzebub, 140
- Belial, 140, 211-12, 239, 259
- Bembo, Pietro, 46
- Bentley, Richard, 157-58
- Biron, Tragedy of, Chapman's, 204
- Blair, Robert, 243
- Blenheim, Lyttelton's, 243
- Blenheim, Philips's, 242
- Blount, Sir Thomas Pope, 241
- Bodley, Sir Thomas, 17
- Boileau, Nicolas, 178
- Book of Sports, 25
- Bossu, Charles, 158
- Boyd, Zachary, 175
- Brice, Thomas, 173
- Broome, William, 242
- Bunyan, John, 147, 155
- Burke, Edmund, 40, 47, 77, 134
- Burnet, Dr. Thomas, 84
- Butler, Samuel, 44, 72, 246
- Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 233
- Bysshe, 241
- Cædmon, 106
- Cambridge, Milton at, 13
- Camden, William, 61
- Carew, Thomas, 197
- Catalogues, Milton's Epic, 236
- Catullus, 206
- Chapman, George, 204, 218
- Charlemagne, 60
- Charles I., 23
- Charles II., Court of, 26, 259
- Chase, The, Somerville's, 242
- Chaucer, Geoffrey, 145, 236, 255
- Chesterfield, Lord, 133
- Christian Doctrine, Treatise of, 43, 113, 140
- Church of England, 17, 19-21, 24, 34
- City Match, The, Mayne's, 189
- Classic School, 220, 226
- Cleveland, John, 72
- Clovis, Saint-Sorlin's, 178-79, 205
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 127, 151, 173, 214, 238, 251
- Comus, 28, 93, 162-63, 182, 184, 191, 199, 235, 245
- Congreve, William, 147, 225
- Cooper, John Gilbert, 243
- Coriolanus, Shakespeare's, 122
- Court lyrists, 259-63
- Cowley, Abraham, 72, 177, 206, 219, 231, 242
- Crabbe, George, 223
- Crashaw, Richard, 106, 256
- Cromwell, Oliver, 62-3, 65, 135
- Cyder, Philips's, 242
- Cynthia, Hymn to, Jonson's, 185
- Dalila, 51, 149, 209-10
- Daniel, Samuel, 218
- Davenant, William, 177, 180, 206, 219
- Davideis, Cowley's, 177-78, 231
- De Re Poetica, Blount's, 241
- Death of a Fair Infant, On the, 181-82
- Defence of the People of England, 47, 74, 131
- Defence of the People of England, Second, 34, 47, 63
- Dekker, John, 218
- Denham, John, 206, 219
- De Quincey, Thomas, 82, 103, 120, 192
- Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure, Marvell's, 162
- Discourse of Satire, Dryden's, 202, 205
- Divine Institutes of Lactantius, 101
- Divine Weekes and Workes, Du Bartas's, 18
- Divorce Pamphlets, 16, 19, 48, 52, 54, 69, 75, 248, 259
- Donne, John, 181, 183
- Dramatists, influence of, on Milton, 15-16, 185-87
- Drayton, Michael, 27, 174, 218
- Dryden, John, 10, 17, 133, 180, 202, 203, 206-208, 219, 240-41, 246-47, 256
- Du Bartas, Guillaume, 18, 237
- Dunciad, Pope's, 251
- Dyer, John, 242, 245
- Ecclesiastical Pamphlets, 49
- Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker's, 103
- Economy, Shenstone's, 243
- Economy of Love, The, Armstrong's, 242
- Education, Of, 48-9
- Eighteenth-century poetry, 233;
- influence of Milton on, 241 seq.
- Eikonoklastes, 16, 67
- Elizabethan Poetry, 116, 173-75, 186-87;
- Milton's relation to, 15, 16, 218-20
- Ellwood, Thomas, 161, 163
- English Dramatick Poets, Account of the, Langbaine's, 241
- Epic catalogues, Milton's, 236
- Etherege, George, 190
- Eve, 27, 54, 83, 87, 92, 96, 112, 121-22, 142-50, 154-59, 160, 204, 206-207, 222, 249-50, 260
- Excursion, The, Mallet's, 243
- Faerie Queene, Spenser's, 199-200
- Fenton, Elijah, 242
- Fleece, The, Dyer's, 242
- Fletcher, Giles, 106
- Fletcher, Phineas, 106
- Ford, John, 117
- Gabriel, 72, 129, 135, 154, 239
- Galileo, 100
- Gay, John, 242
- Gibbon, Edward, 138
- Glover, Richard, 243
- Godwin, William, 185
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 133
- Gondibert, Davenant's, 177
- Gorboduc, Sackville's, 196
- Grainger, James, 242, 244
- Grave, The, Blair's, 243
- Gray, Thomas, 238, 253-55
- Grongar Hill, Dyer's, 245
- Hall, John, 71
- Hamlet, Shakespeare's, 142
- Hampton Court Conference, 17
- Handel, 239
- Harmonie of the Church, Drayton's, 174
- Hazlitt, William, 198
- Herbert, George, 174
- Herodotus, 100
- Herrick, Robert, 21, 256
- Hervey, Lord, 203
- History of Britain, 60, 143
- Hobbes, Thomas, 58, 219
- Homer, 171, 206, 220, 234
- Homer, Pope's, 251
- Hop Garden, The, Smart's, 242
- Horace, 202
- Horton, 22
- Howard, Sir Robert, 180
- Hume, Patrick, 240
- Hyperion, Keats's, 227
- Idylls of the King, Tennyson's, 193
- Iliad, The, 242
- Il Penseroso, 22, 62, 184-85, 195, 245
- Johnson, Samuel, 22, 31, 35, 57-8, 127, 149, 175, 216, 224-25, 229-30, 239, 246-47, 251
- Jonson, Ben, 18, 27, 185-86, 198, 218-19
- Juvenal, 202
- Keats, John, 227
- King, Edward, 34
- Knox, John, 142
- Lactantius, 101-102
- L'Allegro, 22, 24-5, 27, 195, 245
- Lamb, Charles, 198
- Landor, Walter Savage, 137, 212-13, 239
- Langbaine, Gerard, 241
- Latinisms, Milton's, 208-10
- Laud, Archbishop, 21, 23
- Laudian movement, 91
- Lawrence, Henry, 8
- Lear, King, Shakespeare's, 223-24
- Leonidas, Glover's, 243
- Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 224
- Lestrange, Sir Roger, 246
- Licensing Act, 6
- Lives of the Most Famous English Poets, Winstanley's, 241
- Lives of the Poets, Johnson's, 247
- Love and Honour, Shenstone's, 243
- Lucretius, 238
- Lycidas, 23-4, 33, 57, 63, 213, 235, 246
- Lydgate, John, 255
- Lyttelton, Lord, 243
- Macbeth, Shakespeare's, 16, 118, 122, 229
- Mackenzie, Sir George, 206
- Malherbe, Chrétien Guillaume de, 205
- Mallet, David, 243
- Mammon, 140, 172
- Manoa, 51
- Manso, 88
- Marlowe, Christopher, 190
- Marot, Clement, 173
- Marvell, Andrew, 67, 73, 162, 256
- Masson, Professor David, 133
- Meredith, George, 118
- Metaphors, Milton's use of, 13-14, 213, 234
- Michael, 97, 129, 135, 156-57, 167, 253
- "Miltonics," the, 245
- Miracle plays, 101
- Moloch, 140, 254
- Monstrous Regiment of Women, Knox's, 142
- Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 57
- Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de, 62
- More, Henry, 227
- More, Sir Thomas, 57, 69
- Morus, Alexander, 70
- Moryson, Fynes, 15