us From The Contemporary Review. They left me then when the gray-hooded Even, had been smitten, even in completing the THE Puritan poet was bound to show sense, into tuneless artificiality, by the more of Puritanism than any other introduction of "Phoebus' wain." But his own England, its "hedge-row elms and hillocks green," its cottage windows caressed by the sweet-briar or the vine, Or the twisted eglantine, had woed him with a finer magic than While the ploughman, near at hand, man; for the poet is in deepest union with the spirit of his time. In so far, indeed, as he is a world-poet he will be more than his age; he will stand up from the crowd to receive light from past generations, and to "take the morning" of the future: but not the less will he be the child, the most characteristic child, of his time. No Puritan, not Cromwell himself, was more Puritan than Milton. Imagination singles out these two and places them apart, the Puritan poet and the Puritan king. In power of brain and fiery strength of will, in velocity and intrepidity of intellectual vision, they were about equal. Cromwell was superior in massive sense and infallible certitude of In 1623, when Milton was a boy of fifteen, practical glance; Milton had the incom- John Heminge and Henry Condell, "only municable gift of poetic genius, enabling to keep the memory of so worthy a friend him to extract the finest essence of Puritan nobleness, and preserve it for posterity, "married to immortal verse and equally immortal prose." Watch well the steps of these two, and you will not fail to catch some notes of the music to which the historical procession of Puritanism marched. John Milton, as we see him before the outbreak of the civil war, was the most comprehensively cultured young man in England, probably in Europe. The languages of Greece and Rome were to him as mother tongues. He read the Italian poets and the great poetical masters of his own country. He was able to estimate all the Renaissance could tell or teach him. Here and there the dead hand of antiquity had struck with its stiffening touch into the poetry which he had already written. The glorious roll of music and imagery in the opening stanzas of his Hymn of the Nativity, leading us along a world veiled in maiden snow beneath amazed stars to the shepherds waiting the angels' song, had been broken by the alien and ignoble apparition of "the mighty Pan." The gracious quietude and vivid simplicity of the lines in Comus, Under the hawthorn in the dale. and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare," had given to the world the folio edition of Shakespeare's works, very anxious that the said folio might commend itself to "the most noble and incomparable pair of brethren," William, Earl of this, and Philip, Earl of that, and exceedingly unconscious that, next to the production of the works themselves, they were doing the most important thing done, or likely to be done, in the literary history of the world. Milton read Shakespeare, and in the lines which he wrote upon him in 1630, there seems to be the due throb of transcendent admiration. A superb enthusiasm, an imaginative audacity bordering on the gigantesque, are er bodied in the idea of Shakespeare's readers being, "with wonder and astonishment," cast into a state of trance-like death, made into "marble with too much conceiving," and thus forming a grave worthy of the poet. Thou, our fancy of itself bereaving, Sweetest Shakespeare, nature's child, Whea though right in laying emphasis upon land of the Puritan period have been so Shakespeare's sweetness, convey a sug- rich a field for the Shakespearian drama gestion of something like depreciation. as the England of Elizabeth. Not thus would you speak if you in- Englishmen were arrayed in hostile tended to describe greatness colossal and camps, when every family circle was rent unapproached. To apply the term "na- with unutterable heartburnings, how, to ture's child" to one who exhausted the mention nothing else, could the most possibilities of art is like praising a con- marvellous faculty of humour that ever summate general for understanding regi- dwelt in man have found in England, to mental drill, and a reference to the love and to laugh at, and to preserve for "wood-notes wild" of him who wrote the love and laughter of all times, the DogHamlet and the Tempest, Othello, Mac- berries, the Botttoms, the Petruchios, the beth, Lear, and Julius Cæsar, is like say- Malvolios, the Sir Tobys, the Launces. ing that the Himalayan range carries the Lancelot Gobbos, the Falstaffs, the grass-tufts and daisies. Beneath the grave-diggers, the clowns, the Pucks, the radiant expanse of the Shakespearian Ariels, the Calibans, which are but minor mind, the entire phenomenon of Puritan- figures in works so far beyond the comism may be contemplated as an angry mon reach of literary art that language spot of storm, moving along the face of has no epithet by which to characterize the sea, beneath soft unfathomable bril- them? It was in a still, great time, of liance of summer sky. All that was wrong in the social philosophy of Puritanism is checked and rectified by Sir Toby's answer to Malvolio, himself "a kind of Puritan." "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Puritanism, in its best mood of reverent submission, could say no more in vindication of the ways of God to men, than is said by Isabel: All the souls that were, were forfeit once; And He who might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy. And never did Puritanism more inly realize, more delicately and intensely express, the soul of Christian morality, than had been done by Portia : The quality of mercy is not strained; L It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the plac beneath : it is twice blessed; It blesseth him at gives, and him that takes. Shakespeare may with some propriety be called the poet of the Reformation; for he is pre-eminently the poet of freedom, the poet of man; and the Reformation denotes and dates for us a magnificent awakening, energizing, expanding of the human mind. But he was not, and could not be, the poet of Puritanism. He was too great for that. He was incapable of being a partisan, or of giving up to the noblest of special developments what was meant for mankind. Nor would the Eng energy healthful and therefore calm, of enjoyment, of proud strength and exuberant life, tortured by no raging antago nisms, no rabid fanaticisms, that Shakespeare, with a genius capable of sympathetically embracing and bodying forth every type of man, every phase of permanent human emotion, loving all, tolerating all, interested in evil as well as in good, clear that even the fool and the rogue have uses in a world so dull as ours, and where there is so much smoke to be consumed by the summer lightning of laughter, could do his unique and inestimable work. We have arrived, therefore, at the first of those distinctions by which, as with critical surveying line, it must be our aim to edge round and mark off the individuality of Milton. He was not of that class of poets whose inspiration lies essentially in their boundless, all-penetrating, all-tolerating sympathy; for whom concrete men and women in their whole range of character, from sage to simpleton, from saint to sot, from ape to archangel, are endlessly interesting; who are not uncontrollably fired with reforming ardour; who do not expect the world to become much better than it is; who, if the truth must out, have an inextinguishable tenderness for evil, and will keep a lurking place at the world's chimney-corner for the devil himself. Nothing is more curi ously characteristic of Shakespeare than | well skilled in music, soon perceived that the manifest enjoyment with which, by one of the race of immortals had been subtlest sympathy, he reads every secret in the diabolical breast of lago. Goethe throws all his cleverness and all his heart into a version of Reineke Fuchs, and carefully explains to Eckermann that he does not intend Mephistopheles to be finally cast out. Burns, no more doubting the existence of Satan than of his own grandfather, feels to him exactly as Goethe felt to Mephisto : But fare ye weel, auld Nickie Ben, O wad ye tak' a thocht an' men', Ye aiblins micht- I dinna kenYet hae a stake; I'm wae to think upo' yon den, Ev'n for your sake. As Shakespeare is the supreme name in this order of poets, the men of sympathy and of humour, Milton stands first in that other great order which is too didactic for humour, and of which Schiller is the best recent representative. He was called the lady of his College, not only for his beautiful face, but because of the vestal purity and austerity of his virtue. The men of the former class are intuitive, passionate, impulsive; not steadily conscious of their powers; fitful, unsystematic. Their love is ecstasy; their errors are the intoxication of joy; their sorrows are as the pangs of death. Himmelhoch jauchzend, - zum Tode betrübt; panting with rapture, to death brought low: happy only in that their whole soul is thrown into every mood, and counting life past when the intellect ceases wander and the heart to love. When head and heart are whirling wild, The man who neither loves nor errs Were better underground.* to born in his house. He began, apparently with the conscious and delighted assent of his son, to give the young Apollo such an education as Plato might have prescribed. An eminently good education it proved to be; only not so good, with a view to the production of a world-poet, as that which nature, jealous of the Platos and pedagogues, and apt to tumble them and their grammatical appurtenances out of window when she has one of her miraculous children in hand, had provided for that Stratford lad who came to London, broken in character and probably almost broken in heart, some forty years earlier, to be a hanger-on of the theatres and to mount the intellectual throne of the world. No deer-stealing expeditions late o' nights when the moon silvered the elms of Charlecote chase; no passionate love-affairs and wild boy-marriage. Milton, carefully grounded in the tongues, went in due course to Cambridge University, and during those years when the youthful mind is in its stage of richest recipiency, lived among the kind of men who haunt seats of learning. On the whole, the most uninteresting men in existence; whose very knowledge is a learned ignorance; not bees of industry, who have hoarded information by experience, but book-worms. Mr. Trollope, by a rare felicity of genius, has managed to get these people into novels, but no one has yet got them into poetry. It is important, also, that Milton was never to any distracting extent in love. If Shakespeare had been a distinguished university man, would he have told us of a catch that could "draw three souls out of one weaver?" And if the boy of eighteen had not been in a fine frenzy about Anne Hathaway, could he have known how Juliet and Romeo, Othello and Desdemona, loved? The inspiration of Milton's genius was not that of personal experience and emotion. He sang by no means as the bird sings, to give voice to the feelings with which the strings of the heart are vibrating to agony. He was a student of music and of beauty, training himself to excel in Milton's time, for the railway, at Uxbridge, is five miles distant, and all who must live near the steel highway have left the little place. Here, on his visits to the Countess of Derby, Milton would see a less uniform landscape; hills of pleasant undulation, and the Colne, still undivided, lighting with pale gleam its wooded valley. In such country, John Milton, animated by high intellectual passion, gathering himself up in what, compared with the habitudes of the sympathetic poets, may be characterized as a certain proud isolation, trained himself for conquest in the world of mind. To some, even the august art of song, aware of its difficul- lage probably quite as silent to-day as in ty, but aware also of his powers. Conscious education of this kind is perilous; genius, tamed and regulated, is apt to lose its wings and become capable only of the sober paces of prose. It is, therefore, a proof of the fiery and inextinguishable nature of Milton's genius that it triumphed over the artificiality of his training; that there is the pulse of a true poetical life in his most highly wrought poems, and that the whole mountain of his learning glows with the strong internal flame. His inspiration was from within, the inspiration of a profound enthusiasm for beauty and an impassioned devotion to virtue. The district in which he lived during the period of his most though intelligent and friendly, he seemelaborate self-education is not marked ed to be wasting his years, and in a wellenough to have disturbed, by strong im-known sonnet he makes a poetical confespressions from without, the development sion that the same thought had struck of his genius from within. Horton lies warningly upon his own heart. But where the dead flat of South-eastern above the hasty rebukes of friends, and Buckingham meets the dead flat of South-deeper than the hints of conscience in western Middlesex. Egham Hill, not quite so high as Hampstead, and the chalk knoll on which Windsor Castle fails to be sublime, are the loftiest ground in the immediate neighbourhood. Staines, the Pontes of the Romans, and Runnymead with its associations, are near. The parish church of Horton, in which Milton worshipped for five or six years, and in which his mother is buried, has one of the Norman porches common in the district, but is drearily heavy in its general structure, and forms a notable contrast to that fine example of the old English church in which, by the willows of Avon, lie Shakespeare's bones. The river Colne breaks itself, a few miles to the north, into a leash of streams, the most consid-ed men of recent times, and as perhaps erable of which flows by Horton. The the best cultured; but a suspicion has abounding water-courses are veiled with got into the mind of the world that his willows, but the tree does not seem to culture was self-centred and self-sufficing, have attracted Milton's attention. It was a suspicion, I believe, unjust, but invinreserved for the poet-painter of the Liber cible hitherto by the testimony of Mr. Studiorum to show what depths of home- Carlyle and two or three others who have ly pathos, and what exquisite picturesque studied him most deeply; and therefore ness of gnarled and knotted line, could the heart-homage of mankind is inexorabe found in a pollard willow, and for Ten-bly denied him. It would not be paranyson to reveal the poetic expressiveness doxical to allege that Milton erred on the of the tree as denoting a solemn and pen- opposite side, that he was too consive landscape, such as that amid whose sciously alive to the duty of annexing "willowy hills and fields" rose the carol high service, with God for feudal superior, to his self-culture, as the condition of its being noble. But the moral instincts of the race pronounce that he was in the main right, for they recog nise a radiancy transfiguring the culture of the Lady of Shalott. About ten miles inspired by devotion to mankind and to the north of Horton is Harefield, a vil-governed by a sense of duty, more warm mournful, holy, Chaunted loudly, chaunted lowly, moments of self-reproach, was the predominant conviction that he who, in his youth, addresses himself, with the whole energy of his soul, to culture, is in the path of duty, and need not shrink from "the great Task-master's eye." Culture, indeed, is judged by mankind, and whatever the Sophist and Epicurean schools may hold, ought to be judged by mankind, with reference to its end. The study of the beautiful, without view to anything but the pleasure it affords or the distinction it procures, is named dilettantism, a term not strictly of contempt but sharply excluding all idea of heroic desert. Goethe, for example, is acknowledged as one of the superbly gift ly touched with the bloom of life than | force of its own radiance, over rude the ice-like brilliance of mere æsthetic strength and malign enchantment. sensibility, scientific curiosity, or intellectual ambition. Few things in the whole range of literary art are so fine as the works composed by Milton during those years of calm yet ardent self-education which intervened between his leaving Cambridge and his visiting Italy. Allusion has already been made to L'Allegro and I Penseroso. In addition to the bright, crisp touch of their landscape sketching, and their comprehensive felicity of thought, sentiment, imagery, and diction, there is in them a subtle melodiousness, attained by skilful interweaving of the trochee and the iambus with one or two anapæstic touches, of which the language had previously possessed no example, and which has proved to this day inimitable. But the pre-eminent work of the time is Comus. After Goethe and Keats have been in the lists, this continues far and away the best poem of its class, the best attempt of a modern to strike the lyre of Greece. It has the defect which seems inevitable in such poetry, the defect of incongruity. This appears in the opening lines. A spirit whose duty it is to wait upon virtuous ladies on earth, may well enough have a mansion in the skies; but spirits and mansions were certainly not to be found "before the starry threshold of Jove's court." And when this spirit talks of "the crown that virtue gives," of "eternity," and above all of the "sin-worn mould" of "this dim spot which men call Earth," all sense of illusion vanishes, and Jove and his court are felt to be as much out of place as they would be in the Epistle to the Romans. The introduction of the epithets “sin-worn” and “dim,” as characterizing the world of living men, in a speech by a familiar of Jove's court, may well surprise us when we recall Milton's love of Homer. The poet of the Iliad and the heroes of whom he sang, did not regard the world of Greece and its islands, of Asia Minor and the garden-lined coast of Syria down to Sidon and Tyre, as dim or sad, but as filled with light and with jocund life. The very idea of sin had hardly glimmered on their minds. Probably, however, Milton made no serious attempt to keep the work true to the antique in tone and colour. Comus is a descriptive poem, with something of dramatic form, but no aim at dramatic verisimilitude, the subject being the triumph of Vestal Purity, by So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity, The tale is told beautifully, simply, without plot or any artifice; and with no regard to superficial probabilities. Frankly discarding everything of the drama, except its form, the poet does not stoop, as, within certain limits, the dramatist must, to be a literary mocking-bird. Aloft on his perch, like a nightingale, he fills the grove with his music, varying hi; note as the subject varies, but always with the same volume of sound and the same rich and mellow tone. None of the masters of English poetry, Milton's predecessors, not Chaucer, not Spenser, not Shakespeare even, had done much to detract from the originality, or to herald the perfection of Comus. Chaucer's blank verse is not to be mentioned with that of Milton. Chaucer indeed had little sense of beauty, little sense of melody; Milton's nature was instinct with both. Chaucer was a strong, observant, activeminded, coarse man, who could see the point of a story, and tell it in a straightforward way. His works are historically invaluable, as enabling us to strip the middle age of that veneer and that tinsel with which modern affectation and literary cant have overlaid it. Reading Chaucer, we learn how different from the society of a refined age was the society of a time when a company of Canterbury pilgrims, including knight, clergyman, and nun, could listen, well pleased, to descriptions which would now be hooted from the stage of the lowest music-hall in London. Chaucer has a true gift of narrative, a sympathy with brave and strenuous life, a good heart, and a vein of humour characteristically English and very gross; but we look almost in vain for either beauty or music in his page. In much of Shakespeare's blank verse there is an idiomatic purity, united with an inexpressible sweetness, which Milton does not reach. Shakespeare spoke and read only English, as Sophocles spoke and read only Greek; and acquaintance with but one language seems a condition of perfect purity of diction, perfect idiomatic faithfulness in its use. Milton's speech is composite, and in its jewelled wealth there is stateliness almost too much for grace. But except Shakespeare's passages of poetry — those priceless passages |