But

It

ceased to be, Christianity is a thing of the past. unlike other poets he draws his picture on the background of the universal and eternal, not darkly hinted in inevitable law, but boldly shown, with the clearness of a Canadian landscape where there is no middle distance,— in God the Father, God the Son, Heaven and Hell. is this explicitness that makes the poem hard reading for the modern temperament. In law we believe, perhaps only too much. It is the basis of our cheap popular sciences and philosophies of Evolution and Environment. But we are not so clear about Moral Law as about physical, and we have little to say of Grace. Milton offends us partly because, like every other generation, we have a strong sense of the value and finality of our own terminology; partly because he is a great deal surer about the spiritual than we are. The physics and astronomy, the non-geological and creationist cosmogony, and so forth, of his poem give us our chance, and we boldly say Paradise Lost is impossible. We forget that Milton too had a progressive mind that ranged, at any rate in human experience, a good deal further and more freely than many of us can manage even yet. We forget how he moved over to the Copernican astronomy, and how likely it is that, if we could have made them good to him, he might have adopted our geology and evolution. We forget that we too might be uncomfortable-more so than he--if he boldly threw over the physics and creationism, as he very well might, and challenged us on the spiritual experience. He had had to justify the ways of God to John Milton, and they took a good deal of justification. Samson Agonistes is as likely to reach truth as any pleasant person in an easy chair with a smattering of science.

Our critics tell us to-day that we must dismiss Milton's "fable," that his symbols represent nothing-nothing at all. But if we are to get anything from a poet, we have not only to criticize him by ourselves-an easy and not always very profitable task-but to criticize ourselves by

him. Here is a man who thinks in the terms of the eternal, the universal, the infinite, and we say his physics are wrong. How do we think? The influence of Natural Science is strong upon us, with its tendencies to detailed inquiry and to partial and provisional affirmation and its hesitation in general statement. Milton might say that we have no philosophy and no theology, and if he asked us what lay behind all the phænomena we so laboriously study in detail, we should have to tell him that we do not think about it. Which is the greater error, his or ours? Which is the larger, the sounder, the wiser mind? In Paradise Lost an attempt is made to get behind the world of phænomena and to think of all existence as a unity, and as a unity in the mind and love of God. The symbol is only symbol, Milton might say, but to suggest that there is nothing behind it is surely to confess that for us the universe has very little meaning. If Milton can induce us to add to our scientific outlook some deep-going spiritual insight, he will not be found quite so obsolete as we are sometimes told.

But after all it is not as a philosopher or a theologian that Milton has to be judged. He is a poet; and whatever in our merely philosophic or theological moods we may make of his work, it is something more. No statement in prose of the philosophy of a poet-even when he makes it himself is quite the same thing as his poetry. It is like a legal document describing an inheritance. What is there in common between the unpunctuated wilderness of technical terms and the heritage itself with the song of birds about its woods and waters? There is something in common, but who could guess the one from the other-who could enjoy the green and glory of the wood and its voices in "all the whatever-it-is herein before described?" If Milton gave us only a scheme of the universe, we might discuss it and dismiss it. But it is no such document-it is a heritage enjoyed and interpreted by a poet, who has travelled over all its vast

regions, with ever-widening intelligence making all his own. This he gives us, but only on the terms of our enjoying it for in no other way can we enter upon it. The Kingdom of Heaven is only to be had by acceptance, and Nature and Poetry have no other law. When we accept them in earnest, we cease to theorize very much, for we can never be quite certain that we know all that we should know and shall know-the unsuspected depths of wonder and glory and happiness that any chance look may reveal in the most familiar spot. The measure of our enjoyment and expectation of enjoyment gives our right to criticize Paradise Lost. The philosophy is there -the cumulative wisdom gathered from life by a great soul-and we can indeed think of it in some degree apart from its expression, but not perfectly; for style is thought, and we have no right to neglect it in judging of a poet's mind. Indeed, what makes a poet so unlike ordinary men is this quality of wholeness, integrity, in his utterance. All counts, and often that most which we at first, and perhaps he to the last, might reckon least.

In the Areopagitica1 Milton had complained that under a system of licensing an author might have to submit his book" to the hasty view of an unleisur'd Licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps far his inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of Book-writing." There was no help for it now, and to the licenser Paradise Lost was sent. It was to a Rev. Mr Thomas Tompkyns, chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and author, as it happened, of a pamphlet on "The Inconveniencies of Toleration," that the duty fell of certifying England that Milton was “no Idiot or Seducer." What leisure he had we cannot guess, nor how far he read, but in the first book his eye caught doubtful words and he hesitated. The comet, he there read,

With fear of change

Perplexes monarchs.

1 Prose i. 151.

However this was explained, and the MS. of the first book is still extant with the Imprimatur of Mr Tompkyns.

The publication of his poem at once drew attention to Milton, and thoughtful persons, many of them foreigners, came to see him-Dryden among them. They found him sitting “in a grey coarse Cloth Coat at the Door of his House, in warm sunny Weather, to enjoy the fresh Air," or it might be, "up one pair of Stairs, . . . sitting in an Elbow Chair; black Clothes, and neat enough; pale but not cadaverous; his Hands and Fingers gouty, and with Chalk-stones. Among other Discourse he express'd himself to this purpose, that was he free from the Pain this gave him, his Blindness would be tolerable." When he dictated his verse, we are told, it was often with his leg thrown over the arm of the chair.

Milton had shewn his poem in MS. to Thomas Ellwood, the young Quaker with a conscience about hat-worship. In returning it Ellwood" pleasantly said to him, Thou hast said much of Paradise Lost; but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?" From this, Ellwood believed, came Paradise Regained. It shows a flagging of powers -but it is a flagging of no ordinary powers. This Milton did not like to hear suggested, and he had an ally in Wordsworth, who "spoke of the Paradise Regained as surpassing even the Paradise Lost in perfection of execution," pointing out the storm in it, "as the finest of all poetry."1

Last came the Samson Agonistes, but drama is neither here nor in Comus Milton's proper sphere. His Epic has unity and is an integer. His dramas are episodic. Aristotle had said that a poem must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Wordsworth, following Johnson, held that Samson Agonistes has no middle, though "the beginning and the end are equally sublime."

1 P. R., iv. 409. And either tropic now. . . . Ill wast thou shrouded then, O patient Son of God. Knight, Life of Wordsworth, vol. iii. p. 258.

Thus the great task was done and the bold promise fulfilled, and after disappointment, blindness, danger, and solitude, the old man could wait in the enjoyment of "the smell of peace toward Mankind" for the end, which came on 8 November 1674, so peacefully that its moment was not recognized. The event made no stir. His work had not been done to win the approval of the men of the Restoration, and he had to wait for his fame. But he could afford to wait.