Non viste mai fuor ch' alla prima gente—
Milton had a full share. He was not always, though he was most commonly, just. Prudence, the only virtue, says Carlyle, which gets its reward on earth, prudence he had, yet not a timid prudence. Of temperance—the Puritan virtue—and all that it includes, chastity, self-reverence, self-control, Comus is the beautiful hymn. But, above all, Milton had the heroic virtue, fortitude; not only passively in the proud and sublime endurance of the evil days and evil tongues on which he had fallen; of the darkness, dangers, solitude that compassed him round; but actively in "the unconquerable will * * * and courage never to submit or yield"; the courage which "bates no jot of heart or hope, but still bears up and steers right onward."
There is nothing more bracing in English poetry than those passages in the sonnets, in Paradise Lost and in Samson Agonistes where Milton speaks of his blindness. Yet here it is observable that Milton, who is never sentimental, is also never pathetic but when he speaks of himself, in such lines, e.g., as Samson's
My race of glory run, and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest."
Dante has this same touching dignity in alluding to his own sorrows; but his hard and rare pity is more often aroused by the sorrows of others: by Ugolino's little starving children, or by the doom of Francesca and her lover. Milton is untender. Yet virtue with him is not always forbidding and austere. As he was a poet, he felt the "beauty of holiness," though in another sense than Archbishop Laud's use of that famous phrase. It was his "natural haughtiness," he tells us, that saved him from sensuality and base descents of mind. His virtue was a kind of good taste, a delicacy almost womanly. It is the "Lady of Christ's" speaking with the lips of the lady in Comus, who says
—That which is not good is not delicious
To a well governed and wise appetite."
But there is a special fitness in this commemoration at this place. For Milton is the scholar poet. He is the most learned, the most classical, the most bookish—I was about to say the most academic—of English poets; but I remember that academic, through its use in certain connections, might imply a timid conformity to rules and models, a lack of vital originality which would not be true of Milton. Still, Milton was an academic man in a broad sense of the word. A hard student of books, he injured his eyes in boyhood by too close application, working every day till midnight. He spent seven years at his university. He was a teacher and a writer on education. I need not give the catalog of his acquirements further than to say that he was the best educated Englishman of his generation.
Mark Pattison, indeed, who speaks for Oxford, denies that Milton was a regularly learned man, like Usher or Selden. That is, I understand, he had made no exhaustive studies in professional fields of knowledge such as patristic theology or legal antiquities. Of course not: Milton was a poet: he was studying for power, for self-culture and inspiration, and had little regard for a merely retrospective scholarship which would not aid him in the work of creation.
Be that as it may, all Milton's writings in prose and verse are so saturated with learning as greatly to limit the range of their appeal. A poem like Lycidas, loaded with allusions, can be fully enjoyed only by the classical scholar who is in the tradition of the Greek pastoralists, who "knows the Dorian water's gush divine." I have heard women and young people and unlettered readers who have a natural taste for poetry, and enjoy Burns and Longfellow, object to this classical stiffness in Milton as pedantry. Now pedantry is an ostentation of learning for its own sake, and none has said harder things of it than Milton.
"—Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior * *
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself."