Comfort Found in Good Old Books

by George Hamlin Fitch

Milton's fame rests mainly on his Paradise Lost and on his sonnets and minor poems, although he wrote much in prose which was far in advance of his age in liberality of thought. He was a typical English Puritan, with much of the Cromwellian sternness of creed, but with a fine Greek culture that made him one of the great scholars of the world. His early life was singularly full and beautiful, and this peace and delight in all lovely things in nature and art may be found reflected in such poems as L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, and in the perfect masque of Comus.

His later life, after many years of good service to the state, was clouded by blindness and loss of fortune and menaced by fear of a shameful death on the gallows. And it was in these years, when the sun of his prosperity had set and when large honors had been succeeded by contumely and final neglect, that the old poet produced the great work which assured his fame as long as the English language endures.

Milton came of a good English family and he had the supreme advantage of splendid early training in all the knowledge of his time. The great Greek classics exercised the strongest influence over his youthful mind, but he knew all that the Latin writers had produced, and he acquired such a mastery of the native tongue of Virgil and Cicero that he wrote it like his own, and produced many Latin poems which have never been surpassed for easy command of this ancient language. Then for twenty years succeeded a period in which Milton devoted his great talents to the defense of his country in controversial papers, that are still the delight of scholars because of their high thought, their keen logic and their sonorous prose.

The noblest of these papers is that plea for the liberty of a free press which is buried under the long Greek name, Areopagitica. It contains some of the finest passages in defense of freedom of thought and speech. As Foreign Secretary to the Council of State under Cromwell, Milton labored ten years, and it was his voice that defended the acts of the Puritan government, and it was his pen that sounded the warning to monarchy, which was not heard again until the roaring French mob sacked the Bastile and mocked the King and Queen at Versailles.

At the age of forty-five Milton was stricken with total blindness, but he did not give up any of his activities under this crushing affliction. In these dark days also he learned what it was to have a home without peace or comfort and to be vexed daily by ungrateful children. When the monarchy was restored Milton was forced into retirement, and narrowly escaped the gallows for his part in sending Charles I to the block.

Thus in his old age, beaten down by misfortune, galled by neglect, he turned to the development of that rich poetic faculty which had lain fallow for a score of years. And in three years of silent meditation he produced Paradise Lost, which ranks very close to the Bible in religious fervor and in splendor of genuine poetic inspiration. It is Biblical in its subject, for it includes the revolt of the rebellious angels, the splendid picture of the Garden of Eden and the noble conception of the creation of the world. It is Biblical, also, in a certain sustained sweep of the imagination, such as is seen in the great picture of the burning lake, in which Satan first awakes from the shock of his fall, and in the impressive speeches that mark his plan of campaign against the Lord who had thrown him and his cohorts into outer darkness.

Yet this poem is modeled on the great epics of antiquity, and much of the splendor of the style is due to allusions to Greek and Roman history and mythology, with which Milton's mind was saturated. In other men this constant reference to the classics would be called pedantry; in him it was simply the struggle of a great mind to find fitting expression for his thoughts, just as in a later age we see the same process repeated in the essays of Macaulay, which are equally rich in references to the writers of all ages, whose works had been made a permanent part of this scholar's mental possessions.