658

Spirit he invoked to lift up his voice ex-
cept when its tongue of fire sat upon him.
The transport of poetic inspiration has
not, since his death, visited any man in
Great Britain,-it would be safe to add
in the world, in ardency so intense and
sustained as his. In him there dwelt also
a tone of what, though allied to the poetic
namely,
inspiration, is distinct from it
the religious inspiration. He would have
been a great poet in any age; but had
he not lived in the age of the Puritans,
he might have been more like a Greek
dramatist, less like a Hebrew prophet.
The religious inspiration of Puritanism
was probably stronger in Cromwell.

The triumph of the Puritan poet was
as signal as the triumph of the Puritan
king. No Anglican minstrel is nearly
equal to Milton: neither the Temple nor
the Christian Year will compare with
Paradise Lost. We naturally place it side
by side with the poem in which Dante
Dante excels
enshrined Catholicism.
Milton in tenderness; in intimate knowl-
edge of the human heart; in the delinea-
tion of all passions, except revenge and
Dante has
ambition, pride and hatred.
the infallible Shakespearian touch when-
ever his theme is love; Milton in the like
case paints with great literary dexterity
and with a frank audacity of sensuous
colour which would fain be passionate and
tender; but he never gets really beyond
painted tenderness.

For contemplation he, and valour formed;
For softness she, and sweet attractive grace;
He, for God only, she, for God in him:
His fair large front, and eye sublime, declared
Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks,
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders

broad.

She, as a veil, down to the slender waist,
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved
As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied
Subjection, but required with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best received,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.

waist, and ringlets "wanton," which sure-
ly they had no call to be in Eden ; — this
is what we find in Milton's first women,
whom Charlotte Brontë says he never
saw. Against Dante, on the other hand,
and in favour of Milton, we have to put
the traces of middle-age childishness,
the nursery goblinism, grotesquerie, and
allegoric wire-drawing, which are present
The sustained
in the Divine Comedy.
Miltonic" a
grandeur which has made
convertible term with "sublime" is far
above all that.

Who is Milton's hero? It is rather an
awkward question. He cannot be Adam,
who is passive both in his fall and in his
rise. Milton cannot have intended it to
be Christ, for he makes Him the unques-
tioned hero of Paradise Regained. It
any other con-
will be difficult to come to
clusion than that the hero, unintentionally
of course, is Satan. The two first books
are most Miltonic, and their interest cen-
tres in the fiend. Throughout the poem
Satan is the speaker of lines which it is
impossible not to recognize as character-
istically Miltonic:

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same?

The conception of Satan is wonderful
He refuses to
in breadth and simplicity.
submit to God, but there is in him other-
wise no subtle or malignant badness. He
never stoops to the whine of the mean,
discontented rebel. He does not accuse
"heaven's potentate." He admits that he
has been ungrateful. No glimpse of hope
encourages him to give in. “Evil," he
says, "be thou my good;" but the sense
that evil must be his good agonizes him,
and it is by an effort that he is wicked.
He admires Adam and Eve. He could
love" them; and that for a reason which
contradicts all one's conceptions of dia-
bolic logic, to wit:

..

so lively shines In them Divine resemblance, and such grace The hand that shaped them on their shape hath poured.

These celebrated and very noble lines embody Milton's inexorable sentence up- He has to argue himself up to the bitter on woman as man's inferior and play- cruelty of injuring such helpless, harmless He is out of sight the most thing. He is perhaps on one occasion, or creatures. even on two, more happy in his treatment moral of known devils. Job's tempter is of love; but this is, to say the least, a insolent to Jehovah, and viciously and critical instance; and does he not egre-slanderously spiteful towards the man of Compared with lago, or with giously fail? For Eve's face he has not a word; not one syllable for the crimson Goethe's "spirit that always denies," who of the lip, for the ravishment of the smile. devises refined tormentings for the innoConventional golden tresses, slender Icent Gretchen, the one drop of comfort on

Uz.

whose burning tongue is the torture-throb | human reason, awaking from its sleep, of human hearts, Milton's devil is honest clearing its eyes, daring to scan the dusky and virtuous. It is with a sense of actual heavens with its own optical instruments. amazement that we remark the length to Homer had no surmise, the most distant, which, in Paradise Regained, Milton per- of the claims of the aggressive intellect mits Satan to appeal to our pity, as a in its moods of aspiration and of doubt. being whose fate it is to be bad, but who Nor did Dante think of justifying the clings desperately to the memory and tra- ways of God to men. But of Protestantdition of goodness, and gropes in his ism in its later phases, this has been a fallen nature for relics of virtue as a miser leading problem. And it is a legitimate might grope in the embers of his burnt as well as a sublime problem, however house for some dearest treasure: - difficult; for when reason has once detected flaws in the conception of God, worship is to that extent consciously rendered to an idol.

Though I have lost

Much lustre of my native brightness, lost
To be belov'd of God, I have not lost
To love, at least contemplate and admire,
What I see excellent in good or fair,

Or virtuous; I should so have lost all sense.

The question then arises whether Milton has succeeded or failed in solving the problem he states. Paradise Lost is essentially an idealization of that theolThese words are addressed by Satan to ogy which Augustine and Calvin foundChrist, and in the reply made by the Sav-ed, mainly, though not exclusively, on iour, there is no assertion that they are hypocritical.

In all this, however, Milton is true to Puritanism. His Satan incarnates with errorless accuracy the Puritan conception of superlative sin. Satan has rebelled against the Divine sovereignty. This is enough. For this his brow must be knit up in corrugations of eternal pain.

those parts of the writings of Paul in which the inspiration, perfectly divine, which the greatest of the Apostles derived from Christ, is modified if not chilled by a sense of the necessity of reconciling Christ and Gamaliel, and of tacking on the new Christian ethics of universal love and brotherhood to the old scheme of Judaism. "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin":- this is Paul's starting-point when his inspiration stoops from its heavenliest transports, and becomes con

It is not so easy at the first glance to see that the task which Milton imposes on himself at the outset of the poem, "to justify the ways of God to man," is dis-sciously logical and argumentative. We tinctly Puritan. The Puritan idea, in its should be launched into controversies most conspicuous manifestations, was which have no definable limit, were we to much rather that the ways of God to man inquire what, in strict critical estimate, require no justification. God's part is to Paul meant by these words, and by the declare His will, man's to do it; submis- contrast with which he follows them up sion, not criticism, becomes the finite be- between Adam and Christ. But it aping. And yet Milton struck no false pears on the very face of the passage, note in the first lines of the Puritan that he writes in an expansive and exultpoem. The explicit and unquestioning ant mood, finding in Adam a represensubmission to the Divine will of such tative, on the widest conceivable scale, of men as Milton, Vane, and Cromwell, was man under sinful and deathful condiassociated with perfect conviction that tions, as contrasted with Christ, repreGod is Infinite Justice and Infinite Love. senting man under righteous and deathLogical proof of the fact they might less conditions. "Where sin abounded, never ask; they certainly did not make grace did much more abound: that as their faith dependent on their power to sin hath reigned unto death, even so comprehend the scope and bearings of might grace reign through righteousness the Divine Government; but of the fact unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our itself, they had absolutely no doubt. And Lord." Saint Paul, who even in his diaif we view Milton's statement of his pur- lectical mood was an inspired apostle of pose in connection with the general move- Jesus, probably intended nothing more, ment of the Reformation, we shall find it by his allusion to the sin of Adam, than to be impressively right. Deep among to put in the strongest form accessible the impelling forces of the Reformation, to him, his main contention against the unacknowledged at the time, and by exclusive tendency of his Judaizing opmany still rejected and denied, but per-ponents, to wit, that every human being haps most potent of all, was the energy of is invited to receive eternal life in Christ.

Out of this and a few other misapplied | Adam's sin. His death on the cross passages of Scripture, rose the terrific redeems man from death,— doctrine of the Fall, the background of all Augustinian theology. Through the sin of Adam, all generations of men come into the world under the wrath and curse

of their Creator, blackened and blasted
in soul and body, hating good and loving
evil. Their very virtues, to use the
words of Article XIII. of the Church of
England, "have the nature of sin." The
proper subject of the great Puritan poem
was the Fall, and Milton shows by his
choice of a name, that this was
tially his idea. In answering, therefore,
the question whether he succeeds or
fails in "justifying," in reconciling
with intelligible and tenable principles of
justice, - the ways of God to man," we
turn to his account of the Fall.

essen

Adam takes the apple rather than relinquish the wife whom God had given

him:

With thee

Certain my resolution is to die :
How can I live without thee? How forego
Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
Eve had been beguiled by Satan in form
of the serpent. Of course a serpent
could talk only by miracle, and, strange
to say, Milton represents Eve as sharp
enough to discern this fact:

66

For

as many as offered life Neglect not, and the benefit embrace By faith not void of works. these death becomes,

then raise

From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined,
Founded in righteousness, and peace, and love;
New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date,
To bring forth fruits, joy and eternal bliss.
This is formally sufficient in relation to
the plan of Milton's poem. Satan is
vanquished. The world regains its primal
splendour among the stars of God, or
glows with a fairer brightness than at
first. Supposing, as Milton does not in
terms forbid us to suppose, that every
man who fell in Adam has the offer of
redemption in Christ and is excluded
from the redeemed company only by his
own conscious refusal to be saved, we
cannot deny that the vindication of Provi-
dence has been successful.
yond question this general impression of
Christ's work was the inspiring impulse
of the whole religious movement which
originated with Luther and Calvin and
sent its last great tidal wave into Puritan
England. It was exultant trust in Christ
their king, in whose strength they could
conquer death and hell, that made the
soldiers of Cromwell invincible.

And be

But it is a circumstance of fateful im

Thee, Serpent, subtlest beast of all the field I knew, but not with human voice endued; Redouble then this miracle, and say How cam'st thou speakable of mute, and how To me so friendly grown above the rest Of brutal kind, that daily are in sight? The serpent explains that the charming gift of speech has been obtained by eat-port that the triumph of Christ, as deing of the tree of knowledge; and with picted by Milton, is mainly in a new miraculous eloquence as his "creden- heaven and earth, the present heaven tials," convinces her that she also will and earth having been burnt up. And be benefitted by partaking of the fruit. as salvation is mainly future, so there is Then follows the "mortal taste" which a state of damnation of which, in the 'brought death into the world and all concluding portions of his poem, Milton our woe." Eve's mistake in interpreting says little, but which, as realized for us the first recorded miracle laid her de- in the hell of the earlier books, is of suscendants to the latest ages under "God's preme importance. Take the delineawrath and curse," and made them lia- tions of hell out of Paradise Lost, and the ble to all the miseries of this life, to whole work will collapse. Into the greatdeath itself, and to the pains of hell for est poem of Protestantism, as into the ever." These are the words of the greatest poem of Catholicism, enters the Shorter Catechism, the most affection- unutterable horror which, for nearly two ately revered of all the productions of thousand years, has sat as a nightmare the Puritan Synod of Westminster. The on the breast of Christendom. Neither fall is followed in the scheme of Puritan in Homer nor in Shakespeare have we theology, and in the conception of Mil- anything corresponding to the Dantesque ton's poem, by redemption. Christ obeys or Miltonic hell. Afar, on the dawning the law, and suffers the penalty due to rim of European civilization,

written

661

Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire.
Thither, by happy-footed Furies haled,
The parching air
At certain revolutions all the damned
Are brought; and feel by turns the bitter
change

Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more
fierce,

From beds of raging fire, to starve in ice Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine Immovable, infixed and frozen round, Periods of time, thence hurried back to fire. And so there is no prospect that "our torments may become our elements." From whom Dante got this truly devilish notion I know not; but there is, I think, proof in his poem that there was a taint of cruelty in his own nature; and indeed, if we can trust the evidence of Roman relentlessness to Carthage, of the gladiatorial shows, and of the savage treatment of animals in modern Italy, the taint must be pronounced general in the Italian race. ever noble in execution, which is insepaIt seems likely that poetry, howrably associated with a stupendous horand left behind by the race, and that ror and incredibility, will be outgrown both the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost will sooner or later be peremptorily refused a place among the constellations beside the poems of Homer and the dramas of Shakespeare.

as on the golden bars of morning,- are | The hell of Dante and Milton is the rethe Homeric poems. In modern times, sult of two processes; the intense and representing all that western civilization gloating selection of the imagery of fire; has felt, thought, and hoped for, we have and the addition of a device, purely grathe works of Shakespeare. It is man as tuitous, not countenanced in the remotest he is, man on his green world, with its hint of Scripture, by which fire is made summer showers and its wintry blasts, to yield a maximum of pain. This device its trees that flush ruddy and white with Milton borrowed from Dante; we may blossom to be smitten into fruitlessness by read Milton's description of it. the east wind, its gleamings of beauty at morning and evening with long grey hours of toil between, that forms the subject of both. In both there is the shadow. Homer knows of Hades and its pallid, melancholy ghosts. Shakespeare is for ever wondering and pondering over the secrets of sorrow and of evil, of the night and of the grave; and between and amid the ripplings of his infinite laughter, there are snatches of tenderest wail. But neither in Homer nor in Shakespeare is there anything corresponding to the Dantesque or Miltonic hell. The sad look of the Greeks towards the future is essentially the cloud on the face of the happy child at the thought of being sent to bed, attesting and measuring his present joy. A prison-house of the universe, in which ingenious, exquisite, elaborate torture is inflicted to all eternity, whether as described in revolting and grotesque detail by Dante or in more sublime but not less appalling imagery by Milton, is so monstrous a conception, that we may doubt whether works of which it forms an integral part will be permanently enshrined among the household treasures of mankind. These limnings, especially Dante's, perpetuate the most ghastly horrors of those infernal old times (which fools call good), before judicial and penal torture was abolished; particulars of agony such as the gnawing of the tongue in torment, the very thought of which almost drives us, who are beginning to be Christ-like enough to cease to be inhuman, mad, but which were doubtless familiar to those accustomed to the incidents of ancient executions. One of the main themes of Jesus Christ's teaching was the majesty, the severity, the unchangeableness of God's moral government, as contrasted with the levity of the world's judgments. In enforcing this great idea He used a variety of illustrations. Some of these quite dispense with the instrumentality of fire; as the leading one of the exclusion of guests from a marriagesupper. Some of them almost pointedly negative permanence of fire; for the use of fire in burning the weeds that have injured a crop is to make an end of them. |

the divine power of kindness and selfThe spiritual depths of Christianity, sacrifice, were fully fathomed neither in Paradise Lost nor in Paradise Regained. In these dwells the inspiration of Puritan battle, but there were gentler tones in the angel's song above the fields of Bethlehem. Deeper Christian tones than any in Milton are to be found scattered through the hymnology of the Christian Churches, through the works of Goethe, and in Mrs. Browning's Drama of Exile and Tennyson's In Memoriam. These, however, are single tones: no such body of Christian music, no poems so great, so monumental, as Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, have been produced since the time of Milton.

To the man himself we turn, for one brief glance before laying down the pen.

In the evil times of the Restoration, in the land of the Philistines, Agonistes but unconquerable, the Puritan Samson ended his days. Serene and strong; conscious

From The Graphic

INNOCENT:

A TALE OF MODERN LIFE

66 THE MINISTER'S WIFE,' ""

"SALEM CHA FEL,"

SQUIRE ARDEN,

CHAPTER XLI.

AN UNPOPULAR MARRIAGE.

that the ambition of his youth had been BY MRS. OLIPHANT, AUTHOR OF
achieved. He begins the day with the
Hebrew Bible, listens reverently to words
in which Moses or David or Isaiah spake
of God. But he attends no church, be-
longs to no communion, and has no form
of worship in his family; notable circum-
stances, which we may refer, in part at
least, to his blindness, but significant of
more than that. His religion was of the
spirit, and did not take kindly to any
form. Though the most Puritan of the
Puritans, he had never stopped long in
the ranks of any Puritan party, or given

satisfaction to Puritan ecclesiastics and

ETC.

THE marriage of Innocent took place on one of the first days of February, a day of the "seasonable" kind, with black skies, a dark grey atmosphere, and ocraw cold penetrated to one's bones and casional downpours of steady rain. The flowers which had been procured for the one's heart, and even the show of costly occasion, failed to make the rooms look

cheerful. Innocent herself, in her white

He had

Mrs. East

theologians. In his youth he had loved bridal dress and veil, was like the snowthe night; in his old age he loves the pure sunlight of early morning as it glim-cheeks were not much less pale than her drops. Her head drooped a little, her mers on his sightless eyes. The music dress. She was which had been his delight since childnot a blushing, or a hood has still its charm, and he either smiling, or a weeping bride. Her eves sings or plays on the organ or bass-violin were full of a certain awe, sometimes every day. In his grey coat, at the door varied by alarm, when the prospect of of his house in Bunhill Fields, he sits on leaving home came uppermost; but she clear afternoons; a proud, ruggedly gewas passive in all things, gentle and nial old man, with sharp satiric touches in grateful, as calm in her new position as his talk, the untunable fibre in him to she had been in the former. The only the last. Eminent foreigners come to one thing she had been anxious about, see him; friends approach reverently, the one trouble and mystery in her life, drawn by the spiendour of his discourse. had been set right (as she thought) by It would range, one can well imagine, in her bridegroom's exertions. glittering freedom, like "arabesques of taken upon him to arrange all that: to lightning," over all ages and all literatures. explain it, to make everything clear; and He was the prince of scholars; a memory Innocent, trustful and ignorant, had not of superlative power waiting, as submis-doubted his power to do so. sive handmaid, on the queenliest imagi- wood's anxious assurances that she was nation. The whole spectacle of ancient mistaken, that her belief about Amanda civilization, its cities, its camps, its land- was a delusion, had never made any imscapes was before him. There he sat in pression on the girl. But when Sir Alexis accepted her story as true, and his grey coat, like a statue cut in granite. He recanted nothing, repented of noth- pledged himself to set everything right, ing. England had made a sordid failure, the practical part of her mind, which was but he had not failed. His soul's fellow in reality the only intellectual part of her ship was with the great Republicans of which had any power, accepted his as Greece and Rome, and with the Psalmist surances, and trusted in them. and Isaiah and Oliver Cromwell. should any one bid her believe that it was a delusion? Innocent knew that it was no delusion; but at the same time she was quite simple and foolish enough to believe that Sir Alexis could set it all to rights, without inquiring how. He would give her a caressing answer when she asked him about it, and tell her that all was being settled; and in her ignorance she believed him, and was lightened of her burden. The wedding was to be a very quiet one, partly (as it was announced) because of Innocent's health

PETER BAYNE.

FAITH AND REASON. - Faith says many things concerning which reason is silent, but nothing which reason denies; it is often above reason, but never contrary to reason.

Why