A history of English literature

by Edward Albert

JOHN MILTON (1608–74)

1. His Life. Milton was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, London. His father was a money-scrivener, an occupation that combined the duties of the modern banker and lawyer. Milton was educated at St. Paul’s School, London, and at Cambridge. At the university his stubborn and irascible nature declared itself, and owing to insubordination he was “sent down” for a term. On taking his final degree (1632) he abandoned his intention of entering the Church and retired to Horton, a small village in Buckinghamshire, some seventeen miles from London, whither his father had withdrawn from business.

Milton’s next few years were those of a sequestered man of letters. Poetry, mathematics, and music were his main studies. In 1638 he left for a tour on the Continent, staying some months in Italy, where he met many scholars and literary men. He was recalled to England by the news that civil war was imminent. He settled down in London and set up a small private school, and when hostilities broke out a year or two later he took no part in the fighting. His pen, however, was active in support of the Parliamentary cause, to which he was passionately attached.

In 1643 he married a woman much younger than himself, and almost immediately his wife left him, and did not return for two years. This unfortunate circumstance led Milton to write two strong pamphlets on divorce, which caused a great scandal at the time. Then in 1649, after the execution of the King, he was appointed by the Commonwealth Government Secretary for Foreign Tongues. In this capacity he became secretary to the Council of State, and drafted Latin documents for transmission to foreign Powers. In addition, he wrote numerous pamphlets in support of the republican cause. By this time his eyesight was failing; and when the Restoration came in 1660 to ruin his hopes, it found him blind, poor, and alone. He escaped, however, from the severe punishments that were inflicted upon many prominent Roundheads. He was slightly punished by a nominal imprisonment; retired to an obscure village in Buckinghamshire to write poetry; and died in London, where he was buried.

2. His Prose. Most of Milton’s prose was written during the middle period of his life (1640–60), when he was busy with public affairs. The prose works have an unusual interest, because as a rule they have a direct bearing on either his personal business or public interests. In all they amount to twenty-five pamphlets, of which twenty-one are in English and the remaining four in Latin.

He began pamphleteering quite early (1641), when he engaged in a lively controversy with Bishop Hall over episcopacy. Then, while teaching, he wrote a rather poor tract, Of Education (1644). When his wife deserted him he composed two pamphlets on divorce (1643–4), which scandalized the public by the freedom of their opinions and the slashing nature of their style. The critics of the pamphlets sought to confound Milton on a technical matter by pointing out that he had not licensed the books, as required by law. To this Milton retorted with the greatest of all his tracts, Areopagitica (1644), a noble and impassioned plea for the liberty of the Press. Later works include a defense (in Latin) of the execution of Charles I and of other actions of the Commonwealth Government. During the last years of his life Milton partly completed a History of Britain and other scholastic works.

When we consider the style of Milton’s prose we must keep in mind how it was occasioned. His pamphlets were cast off at white heat and precipitated into print while some topic was in urgent debate either in Milton’s or the public mind. Hence in method they are tempestuous and disordered; voluble, violent, and lax in style. They reveal intense zeal and pugnacity, a mind at once spacious in ideals and intolerant in application, a rich fancy, and a capacious scholarship. They lack humor, proportion, and restraint; but in spite of these defects they are among the greatest controversial compositions in the language. A short extract will illustrate some of the Miltonic features:

I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons’ teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

Areopagitica

3. His Poetry. The great bulk of Milton’s poetry was written during two periods separated from each other by twenty years: (a) the period of his university career and his stay at Horton, from 1629 to 1640; and (b) the last years of his life, from about 1660 to 1674. The years between were filled by a few sonnets.

(a) While still an undergraduate Milton began to compose poems of remarkable maturity and promise. They include the fine and stately Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity (1629), and the poems On Shakespeare (1630) and On Arriving at the Age of Twenty-three (1631). These poems show Milton’s command of impressive diction and his high ideals, both literary and religious. While at Horton (1634) he composed L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, two longish poems in octosyllabic couplets dealing with the respective experiences of the gay and thoughtful man. The pieces are decorative rather than descriptive, artificial rather than natural, but they are full of scholarly fancy and adroit poetical phrasing. Comus (1637) belongs to this period, and is a masque containing some stiff but beautiful blank verse and some quite charming lyrical measures. Lycidas (1637) is an elegy on his friend Edward King, who was drowned on a voyage to Ireland.

Lycidas, which is to be reckoned as among the highest of Milton’s achievements, is something quite new in English poetry. In form it is pastoral, but this artificial medium serves only to show the power of Milton’s grip, which can wring from intractable material the very essence of poetry. The elegy has the color and music of the best Spenserian verse; but it has a climbing majesty of epithet and a dignified intensity of passion that Spenser does not possess. Its meter is an irregular stanza-sequence and rhyme-sequence of a peculiar haunting beauty.

For, so to interpose a little ease,

Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise;

Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas

Wash far away,—where’er thy bones are hurled,

Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides

Where thou perhaps, under the whelming tide,

Visitest the bottom of the monstrous world;

Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied,

Sleep’st by the fable of Bellerus old,

Where the great Vision of the guarded mount

Looks towards Namancos and Bayona’s hold....

(b) This period (1660–74) gives us the poetry of the matured Milton. The work of the middle years is composed of a few sonnets. These, with some others written at different times, sufficiently show Milton’s command of the Italian form, which he uses throughout. He gives it a sweep and sonorous impressiveness that set him alone beside Wordsworth, who in this respect is his poetical successor. The best of Milton’s sonnets are On his Blindness and On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.

The great work of this time is Paradise Lost. It was begun as early as 1658, and issued in 1667. At first it was divided into ten books or parts, but in the second edition it was redivided into twelve. In form it follows the strict unity of the classical epic; in theme it deals with the fall of man; but by means of introduced narratives it covers the rebellion of Lucifer in heaven, the celestial warfare, and the expulsion of the rebels. In conception the poem is spacious and commanding; it is sumptuously adorned with all the detail that Milton’s rich imagination, fed with classical and Biblical lore, can suggest; the characters, especially that of Lucifer, are drawn on a gigantic scale, and do not lack a certain tragic immensity; and the blank verse in which the work is composed is new and wonderful. This type of blank verse has founded a tradition in English; it has often been imitated and modified, but never paralleled. It lacks the suppleness of the Shakespearian measure; but it is instinct with beauty and scholarly care. It is almost infinite in modulation; varied cunningly in scansion, in pause, in cadence, and in sonorous dignity of music. It has its lapses into wordiness and bombast, but the lapses are few indeed.

In the following extract the construction of the blank verse should be carefully observed. The variation of foot, pause, and melody is worthy of the closest study.

No sooner had the Almighty ceased, but all

The multitude of angels, with a shout

Loud as from numbers without number, sweet

As from blest voices, uttering joy, Heaven rung

With jubilee, and loud hosannas filled

The eternal regions. Lowly reverent

Towards either throne they bow, and to the ground,

With solemn adoration, down they cast

Their crowns inwove with amarant and gold—

Immortal amarant, a flower which once

In Paradise, fast by the tree of life,

Began to bloom; but soon for man’s offence

To Heaven removed, where first it grew, there grows,

And flowers aloft, shading the fount of life,

And where the river of bliss, through midst of Heaven,

Rolls o’er Elysian flowers her amber stream.

In 1671 Milton issued his last volume of poetry, which contained Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. The former poem, which tells of Christ’s temptation and victory, is complementary to the earlier epic, and Milton hoped that it would surpass its predecessor. In this his hopes were dashed. It is briefer and poorer than Paradise Lost; it lacks the exalted imagination, the adornment, and the ornate rhythms of the earlier poem. There is little action, the characters are uninteresting, and the work approaches Paradise Lost only in a few outstanding passages.

Samson Agonistes, which tells of Samson’s death while a prisoner of the Philistines, has a curious interest, for in the Biblical hero Milton saw more than one resemblance to himself. In form the work has the strict unity of time, place, and action universal in Greek tragedy. In style it is bleak and bare, in places harsh and forbidding; but in several places Milton’s stubborn soul is wrung with pity and exalted by the hope that looks beyond. The speech of Samson’s father over his dead son is no inappropriate epitaph for Milton himself:

Come, come, no time for lamentation now,

Nor much more cause; Samson hath quit himself

Like Samson, and heroically hath finished

A life heroic, on his enemies

Fully revenged, hath left them years of mourning,

To himself and father’s house eternal fame;

And, which is best and happiest yet, all this

With God not parted from him, as was feared,

But favouring and assisting to the end.

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail

Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,

Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair,

And what may quiet us in a death so noble.

4. Features of his Poetry. (a) The Puritan Strain. All through his life Milton’s religious fervor was unshaken. Even his enemies did not deny his sincerity. It is seen even in one of his earliest sonnets:

All is, if I have grace to use it so,

As ever in my great Taskmaster’s eye.

It persists even to the end, when it runs deeper and darker. In Paradise Lost, for example, his chief motive is to “justify the ways of God to men.”

This religious tendency is apparent in (1) the choice of religious subjects, especially in the later poems; (2) the sense of responsibility and moral exaltation; (3) the fondness for preaching and lecturing, which in Paradise Lost is a positive weakness; (4) the narrowness of outlook, strongly Puritanical, seen in his outbursts against his opponents (as in Lycidas), in his belief regarding the inferiority of women, and in his scorn for the “miscellaneous rabble.”

(b) The Classical Strain. Curiously interwoven with the severity of his religious nature is a strong bent for the classics, which is pagan and sensuous. His learning was wide and matured; he wrote Latin prose and verse as freely as he wrote English. His classical bent is apparent in (1) his choice of classical and semi-classical forms—the epic, the Greek tragedy, the pastoral, and the sonnet; (2) the elaborate descriptions and enormous similes in Paradise Lost; (3) the fondness for classical allusion, which runs riot through all his poetry; (4) the dignity of his style, and its precision and care. His very egoism takes a high classical turn. In his blindness he compares himself with

Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides,

And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.

In his choice of diction we have the classical element abundantly apparent; and, lastly, the same element appears in the typical Miltonic grandeur and frigidity, the arrogant aloofness from men and mortals.

(c) His Poetical Genius. As a poet Milton is not a great innovator; his function is rather to refine and make perfect. Every form he touches acquires a finality of grace and dignity. The epic, the ode, the classical drama, the sonnet, the masque, and the elegy—his achievements in these have never been bettered and seldom approached. As a metrist he stands almost alone. In all his meters we observe the same ease, sureness, and success.

(d) His Position in Literature. In literature Milton occupies an important central or transitional position. He came immediately after the Elizabethan epoch, when the Elizabethan methods were crumbling into chaos. His hand and temper were firm enough to gather into one system the wavering tendencies of poetry, and to give them sureness, accuracy, and variety. The next generation, lacking the inspiration of the Elizabethans, found in him the necessary stimulus to order and accuracy; and from him, to a great extent, sprang the new “classicism” that was to be the rule for more than a century.