in which the poet puts the dramatist aside, ing by "in sceptred pall," the range is and we feel that it is not the mere char- wide. There is, however, the same vividacter in the play that speaks, but Shake- ness of imaginative glance in the barnspeare himself who sings- there is noth- door strut and in the visioned sweep of ing in our language to vie with the blank Tragedy. verse of Comus. That of Paradise Lost These early masterpieces of Milton has a martial grandeur all its own, but strike one as combining a true poetic life the long resounding march becomes at with the highest possible degree of ornalength almost monotonous; in Comus the mentation consistent with vitality. The inventive subtlety of modulation is so presence of a genuine poetic inspiration exquisite that the charm of the music is felt, but the hand of conscious and is every moment new. There is perpet-careful elaboration is known to have been ual variation in perpetual unity, like the never far away. The result is beauty in marshalled moving of waves all one way, poise of fine perfection between possible while in each swell of liquid crystal there defects. It is beauty magical in its deis some subtle change of form and light, lightfulness, yet with no cloying sweetdue to pauses in the wind, reflections from ness, no mere prettiness or pettiness; it the green deeps below, or gleams in the is beauty grave and dignified, yet not sky above. The diction and imagery are rigid. Flowers are beautiful, but Miss throughout inventive; there is hardly a Mutrie's or Van Huysum's best flowers conventional epithet in the poem. Surely are not great art. Crude veracity, on the nothing was ever said in any tongue more other hand, goes for nothing. A grasp beautiful than this, spoken of the raptures of truth as firm as Holbein's, a sense of of song heard in the night: loveliness as refined as Correggio's in his noblest mood, combine in the beauty enduring power. of Milton's early pieces. Hence their The spring flowers would be tiresome if they remained with us all the year; the beauty of a fine mountain line never wearies. In moderation,

How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness, till it smiled!

gracious reserve, Milton was faithful to the Greek ideal; these works, therefore, while not stirring us, on a first perusal, so strongly as the hectic intensities of modernism, defy the tooth of time, and charm us the more the longer they are known.

Night and darkness always make Milton
sublime. He was probably fond of night-in
walks. He speaks of going abroad to
hear the nightingales, and there are lines
in Comus which prove that he did not
draw on his fancy in painting the scen-
ery of darkness. Take one illustration.
Black, usurping mists" have hidden
moon and stars, and the poet invokes a
lowlier light to direct him : —

But, after all, the prime interest of these poems is that which they possess as tones out of the life of Milton, pasSome gentle taper, sages, eloquently expressive, in the biThough a rush-candle from the wicker-hole ography which such a man, in the mere Of some clay habitation, visit us writing down of his thoughts and imaginWith thy long-levelled rule of streaming light! ings, puts on record. Biography not of No one who has seen, in a moonless the body, but of the soul." In this elenight, when mist shrouded the landscape, ment of melody and beauty dwelt the the glowing spark of village stithy or cot-spirit of John Milton; spreading pinions tage lamp shoot its white beam athwart of learning and imagination, and taking the fog, can doubt that this last line is a its way down the vistas of the past, to transcript from Milton's own observation. the shrines of wisdom and the treasureIt is interesting to find that the poet who fields of poetry, to return with glory on is noted among his brethren for imagina- its wings. One hears the morning stars tive breadth and sublimity should be so singing together in the calm heaven over sharp of glance. There is a quite mas- his head. The ecstacy of high poetic interly little etching in the same style inspiration becomes in these earlier poems L'Allegro :a trance-like repose.

When the cock with lively din,
Scatters the rear of darkness thin,
And to the stack or the barn door,
Stoutly struts his dames before.

Milton's bodily appearance at this time was in brilliant correspondence with the ideal which imagination might form of a youthful poet. Perfect in all bodily proportions, an accomplished fencer, with From this to "gorgeous Tragedy," sweep- delicate flowing hair, and beautiful fea

tures through which genius, still half in slumber, shed its mystic glow, he was all that the imagination of Greece saw in the young Hyperion or Apollo. Greek, indeed, he was during this period in a very deep sense, a sense which may well have been overlooked in connection with the great Puritan poet. There was a composure in his nature, a self-sufficience and calm joyfulness, of the kind which Goethe imputes to the Greeks. The prevailing tone of his mind, intellectual rather than emotional, was Hellenic; his habit of viewing man in the type rather than in the individual, his high abstract conception of the race, without consuming ardour of affection for men in the concrete, was Hellenic. Now and always his view of woman was Hellenic rather than Christian. From this mainly is derived that unmelodious fibre, harsh and hard, which runs through his life and his poetry. He fixedly regarded woman as inferior to man; the tenderness of chivalry, the piercing, wailing tenderness of Dante, the glorious transporting tenderness of Shakespeare, were beyond him. His literary enthusiasm was for the ancients. Nor can we err in affirming that the source of his liberalism, of his devotion to freedom and strong Republican bent, was to a large extent Hellenic. Vane's democratic faith was drawn directly out of the New Testament; Cromwell, a sturdy Englishman, did not go much upon theories of any kind, but prepared to die rather than that his country should forfeit liberty and prove false to the Reformation; Milton was animated by a fervour akin to that of those ancient patriots who stood with Demosthenes against Philip, or with Brutus against Cæsar. There were other and mightier elements in his character, but we shall have no right idea of the personality of Milton unless we understand his strong affinity for the genius of Greece and of Rome.

was

controversial battle-field. "Lie thou there, my laurel-bough; here is other work."

This fact is significant in relation both to Puritanism and to Milton. It is one of the chief among a multitude of proofs that the general Puritan movement, as contrasted with the Catholic reaction inspired by Loyola, the Anglican compromise incarnated in Laud, and the Renaissance as distinct from both, was, in Milton's early period, the main current of England's and the world's progress. Milton perceived that the medieval Church Lad played its part, and that the human mind had outgrown its tutelage. Turning with peremptory decision from Rome, he was sensible of no fascination in that Anglican Church which could not give her whole heart either to Rome or to the Reformation. In halfness he could not dwell. Compromise in essential matters was to his nature as frost to fire. The melodious effeminacy, the quaint sweetness, of the Anglican bards, from Herbert to Keble, had no attraction for this strong man. But had not the Renaissance a legitimate claim on his homage? Ought he not to have cast in his lot with that purely intellectual and artistic movement, which went its own way, independently both of Catholicism and Protestantism?

I venture to hold that all that was greatest even in that part of his inspiration which Milton drew from Greece would have impelled him to choose as we know him to have chosen. The fittest company for the poet of a great period is that of the practical men of his time. Whatever the Renaissance might have told Milton, living Greece would have told him to be in the throng of living men. The truth is that, though we have been told a thousand times that Greece worshipped beauty and art, Greece did nothing of the kind. The Greeks, as compared with the Orientals, perhaps even as compared with the Romans, And yet he was from the first Puritan. were not a superstitious people; but, in When his brother Christopher declared the living period of their history, they for prerogative, he leaned towards the were religious, earnest, eminently practistruggling patriots. Rather than tie him- cal; and their supreme works of art, their self up with subscriptions, and accept best temples and statues, were not prothe rule of bishops, he declined to take duced merely to be looked at and admired, orders in the Church. When the Revo- but in reverent affection for the gods, lution broke out, he at once waived the and with a view to their propitiation. literary ambition which was to him what The highest Greek works are beautiful, the conquest of Asia had been to the because the Greeks were more richly giftyoung Alexander, hastened home from ed than any other race with the aesthetic Italy where he had been starring it in sense, but their æsthetic sense, instead Academies, put his garland and singing of superseding their religion, ministered robes aside, and took his place in the to it. The Renaissance attempted a re

vival of Greece; but it got no further than | his case a moral act. Goethe would not restoring the grave of Greece, than deck- have admitted that the æsthetic sense is ing with a few cold brilliants the corpse capable, under any circumstances, of honof Greece. Great art has always hitherto ourably and beneficently taking the place been connected with the life of a great of the moral imperative. If Milton had nation, with the grand utilities of its do- sequestered himself in the culture of the mestic and social life, and the mightier beautiful when duty called him to the serinterests of its spiritual life; and the vice of his country, he would never have Renaissance, in so far as it was an at- been one of the poets of the world. We tempt to resuscitate the art of Greece, might have had from him a miracle of was destined to be a fleeting phase in learning and elaboration, "pencilled historical evolution, just as Loyalism or over," to use his own language, "with all Anglicanism, attempts to resuscitate the curious touches of art, even to the Medieval religion, are sure to be fleeting perfection of a faultless picture;" but phases in historical evolution. "Er the inspiration of a great time would not gräcisirt nirgends," says Goethe of Raphael, with one of those pen-strokes by which it is his way to strike out a great truth, "fühlt, denkt, handelt aber durchaus wie ein Grieche." Had Raphael been a man to set about reviving the antique Greecizing, as Goethe says better in German than we can in English-he would by the very fact have shown that he could not feel, think, act as a Greek. Serene, whole-hearted activity, in unison with the great tones of the life of the times, is the true Hellenism.

have thrilled through it with the modulation of the long-rolling thunder peal, nor would it have taught many generations how lofty was the enthusiasm, how mighty the fervour, that dwelt in the Puritans of England.

Opening the earliest of his prose works, we feel that we have entered the second of those periods into which Milton's his[tory naturally divides itself. We are aware of a gigantic strength, an emotional force and agitation, a clash and clang of militant energy, which suggest that the delicate preludings of his earlier poetry were but the flute-music before the Spartan charge. Who would have thought that, in the fine spirit-spun reins of that harmony, feelings so impetuous and impatient, seer-like intuitions so keen, intense, and vivid, had been disciplined to a movement soft and measured as that of Cytherea's doves?

It was the highest art instinct, therefore, which impelled Milton, after expatiating on the delights and ambitions of "calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts," to add these memorable words: but were it the meanest under-service, if God by His secretary conscience enjoins it, it were sad for me if I should draw back." It was a lower art instinct which prompted But Milton continues a poet although Winckelmann to make an insincere pro- he now writes in prose. Almost the fession of the Roman Catholic religion in whole of his two Books on Reformation order that he might study the antique in in England, published in 1641, when Rome. Shakespeare, in the same cir- Strafford had fallen, when king and nation cumstances, would have done as Milton seemed to be reconciled, when it still apdid. With somewhat more doubtfulness, peared an easy thing to reform the I venture to believe that Goethe would Church on the Puritan model, might be have done as Milton did. Goethe de-arranged in line and stanza as a magnififends Winckelmann, but on the ground cent dithyrambic poem. In the first senthat Winckelmann was essentially a born tence there is a fervent intrepidity of imheathen (einen gründlich geborenen aginative glance which comes upon us as Heiden), out of whom baptism could not something new. He strikes the key-note make a Christian. Goethe was a univer- of the treatise by expressing unbounded salist, worshipping in the temple of all enthusiasm for the Reformation. After time, discerning and prizing the excellen- the story of the death and resurrection of cies of all schools of art, and of all reli- Christ, nothing, he says, is "more worthy gions; Winckelmann, as Goethe depicts to take up the whole passion of pity on him, was a particularist, with a special the one side and joy on the other" than organ for Greek art, and as such Goethe the corruption of the early Church, and, comprehended his whole nature and could after many a tedious age, the "wonderful make allowance for it. His apology for and happy Reformation." Launching out Winckelmann is at bottom that a Chris- then into one of those wide circuits of intian conscience did not exist in the man, tellectual survey, which, both in poetry and that pretended conversion was not in 'and in prose, were habitual with Milton,

he returns at its close to the point from | religion conform to his politic interests; which he set out, and repeats, with more and this was the sin that watched over than lyric exultation, the opening stave. the Israelites till their final captivity." "When I recall to mind at last, after so Vividly illuminative in relation to Pumany dark ages, wherein the huge over- ritanism as a living thing is Milton's atshadowing train of error had almost swept titude towards the Laudian ceremonies. all the stars out of the firmament of the In respect of logic, his position is that Church; how the bright and blissful the Church should not curtail the liberty Reformation (by Divine power) struck of Christians, that there should be no through the black and settled night of imposition of anything not enjoined in ignorance and anti-Christian tyranny, the Word of God. In respect of feelmethinks a sovereign and reviving joy ing, he is the impassioned devotee, who must needs rush into the bosom of him requires no sensuous imagery to express that reads or hears; and the sweet the fervour of his soul. He will not odour of the returning Gospel imbathe suffer imagination, in her well-meaning his soul with the fragrancy of heaven. play, to insult with ornament the ausThen was the sacred Bible sought out of tere loveliness of truth. When the rethe dusty corners where profane false-ligious ardour is in its first fiery glow, it hood and neglect had thrown it, the disdains the aid of the allegorizing facschools opened, Divine and human ulty and the æsthetic sense. The Purilearning raked out of the embers of for- tans had returned to the fervour of the gotten tongues, the princes and cities early Christians, and were under the introoping apace to the new-erected ban-spiration which had thrilled St. Paul ner of salvation; the martyrs, with the when he wrote to the Galatians, "How unresistible might of weakness, shaking turn ye again to the weak and beggarly the powers of darkness, and scorning elements, whereunto ye desire again to the fiery rage of the old red dragon." be in bondage? Ye observe days, and The Reformed Church, with primitive months, and times, and years. I am bishops, chosen by the testimony of afraid of you, lest I have bestowedtheir colleagues and the suffrage of the upon you labour in vain.” There is a people, was to be worthy of her "eternal mood of imagination in which it throws and shortly-expected King." "Shortly-out imagery, as there is a stage in the expected," - this is a characteristic note of Puritanism. Vane and Cromwell both thought it likely that Christ was about to appear and to be visible King of His saints. Apart from Christ's personal reign, Milton believed in the power of the Church to maintain herself. "I am not of opinion to think the Church a vine in this respect, because, as they take it, she cannot subsist without clasping about the elm of worldly strength and felicity, as if the heavenly city could not support itself without the props and buttresses of secular authority." His conception of the nation as a whole is pointedly Miltonic. "A commonwealth ought to be but as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest man." Woe betide the commonwealth if the Church is denied freedom and self-government. "Must Church-government, that is appointed in the Gospel, and has chief respect to the soul, be conformable and pliant to civil, that is, arbitrary, and chiefly conversant about the visible and external part of man? This is the very maxim that moulded the calves of Bethel and of Dan; this was the quintessence of Jeroboam's policy, he made

heating of iron when it throws out sparks; but there is an imaginative fervour which corresponds to the blinding glow of iron molten into liquid fire, and this requires no metaphoric sparkling. The religious ecstasy which manifests itself, as the religious ecstacy of Cromwell's soldiers manifested itself, in tears and agonized prayer, turns from music and picture. But it is equally true that religious rapture so high-wrought is naturally fleeting, and that music and painting and solemn architecture may be so applied as to promote that reverent interest in religious truth, that mildly emotional participation in acts of public worship, which are better than apathy, and which average people prefer to impassioned feeling. This consideration is to be taken into account in estimating the force of Laud's pleading on behalf of what he called the beauty of holiness. Feeling may be sincere although not intense, and if all men, except dishonest and affected men, have a claim to freedom in respect of emotional moods, the majestic trimming of a Hooker, the melodious moderation of a Keble, must not be denied an appreciative sympathy. Say that their songs are songs of the sick

room; is the sick-room to have no mu- | looseness and riot, then do they as much sic? Of the highest inspiration, how- as if they laid down their necks for some ever, in all forms, whether of the poeti- wild tyrant to get up and ride." The cal inspiration or the more potent reli- principles of discrimination between State gious inspiration, whether of the inspira- rule and Church rule, laid down in this tion of Lear and Othello or the inspira- treatise, are perfectly and permanently tion of the prophecies of Isaiah and the sound. The authority of the Church letters of Paul, intensity is a character-"which Christ, and St. Paul in his name, istic; and in times of revolution the in- confers," has absolutely no material spiration which goes deepest down towards the fire-fountains will prevail.

strength to support it. The pains and penalties by which it is enforced are In the treatise before us we see Mil- purely spiritual. The utmost the Church ton's puritan fervour combined with the can do is to excommunicate; and if the exultant hope and faith of a spirit still in excommunicated man "can be at peace its youth. He knows no moderation. in his own soul," if he firmly believes "We must not run, they say "-thus he that the ecclesiastical sentence has not scornfully exclaims-into sudden ex-been ratified by God, he "may have fair tremes." Away with such a rule except as applied to things indifferent! "If it be found that those two extremes be vice and virtue, falsehood and truth, the greater extremity of virtue and superlative truth we run into, the more virtuous and the more wise we become; and he that, flying from degenerate and traditional corruption, fears to shoot himself too far into the meeting embraces of a divinely warranted reformation, had better not have run at all." A courage so high is fitly associated with the faith of youth. "Lordship and victory," says Milton, "are but the pages of justice and virtue." It is a faith which nature gives a man when she has still to get his life's work out of him. Goethe, in a mood rare with him but terrible when it came, wrote this:

Jeglichen Schwärmer schlagt mir ans Kreuz
im dreissigsten Jahre;
Kennt er nun einmal die Welt, wird der
Betrogne der Schelm.

All the disenchantment of the Restora-
tion, which turned so many an enthusiast
into a scoundrel, did not infect Milton
with the bitter badness that despairs of
man; but at sixty he would have put
something more of qualification and re-
serve than at thirty into his view of the
connection between lordship and victory
on the one hand and justice and virtue
on the other.

His conception of Church discipline is characteristically Puritan. The liberty he loves shrinks contemptuously from license. "Well knows every wise nation, that their liberty consists in manly and honest labours, in sobriety and rigorous honour to the marriage-bed, which in both sexes should be bred up from chaste hopes to loyal enjoyments; and when the people slacken, and fall to

leave to tell all his bags over undiminished of the least farthing, may eat his dainties, drink his wine, use his delights, enjoy his land and liberties, not the least skin raised, not the least hair misplaced, for all that excommunication has done." It is only for him who believes that the Church carries the keys of the kingdom of heaven that excommunication becomes the "dreadful and inviolable prerogative of Christ's diadem.” Even then the severity is to be accompanied with infinite tenderness. "As a tender mother takes her child and holds it over the pit with scaring words, that it may learn to fear where danger is; so doth excommunication as dearly and as freely, without money, use her wholesome and saving terrors: she is instant, she beseeches, by all the dear and sweet promises of salvation she entices and woos; by all the threatenings and thunders of the law and rejected gospel, she charges and adjures; this is all her armoury, her munition, her artillery.” Of course Milton rejects absolutely the notion that the clergy constitute the Church. The clergy are but the ministers of the Church, and it is by "full and free election " that they are chosen to hold, in their several charges, the " pastorly rod and sheep-hook of Christ."

Such is Milton's, such, in its purest form, is the Puritan, theory of Church discipline. Christians are viewed as a company of brothers and fellow-soldiers loyal to Christ their king. As in all brotherhoods animated and bound together by the sympathy of a great purpose, by the enthusiasm of a mighty affection, offence against the fundamental principles of the Christian society, that is of the Church, entails discipline upon the offender, and, in the last resort, exclusion. This is all. In such Church