Cowley was the true pedant: his erudition was crabbed and encumbered the free movement of his mind, while Milton made his the grace and ornament of his verse.
How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute."
I think we may attribute Milton's apparent pedantry, not to a wish for display, but to an imagination familiarized with a somewhat special range of associations. This is a note of the Renaissance, and Milton's culture was Renaissance culture. That his mind derived its impetus more directly from books than from life; that his pages swarm with the figures of mythology and the imagery of the ancient poets is true. In his youthful poems he accepted and perfected Elizabethan, that is, Renaissance, forms: the court masque, the Italian sonnet, the artificial pastoral. But as he advanced in art and life, he became classical in a severer sense, discarding the Italianate conceits of his early verse, rejecting rhyme and romance, replacing decoration with construction; and finally, in his epic and tragedy modeled on the pure antique, applying Hellenic form to Hebraic material. His political and social, no less than his literary, ideals were classical. The English church ritual, with its Catholic ceremonies; the universities, with their scholastic curricula; the feudal monarchy, the medieval court and peerage—of all these barbarous survivals of the Middle Ages he would have made a clean sweep, to set up in their stead a commonwealth modeled on the democracies of Greece and Rome, schools of philosophy like the Academy and the Porch, and voluntary congregations of Protestant worshipers without priest, liturgy or symbol, practicing a purely rational and spiritual religion. He says to the Parliament: "How much better I find ye esteem it to imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece than the barbaric pride of a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness." And elsewhere: "Those ages to whose polite wisdom and letters we owe that we are not yet Goths and Jutlanders."
So in his treatment of public questions Milton had what Bacon calls "the humor of a scholar." He was an idealist and a doctrinaire, with little historic sense and small notion of what is practicable here and now. England is still a monarchy; the English church is still prelatical and has its hireling clergy; Parliament keeps its two chambers, and the bishops sit and vote in the house of peers; ritualism and tractarianism gain apace upon low church and evangelical; the Areopagitica had no effect whatever in hastening the freedom of the press; and, ironically enough, Milton himself, under the protectorate, became an official book licenser.
England was not ripe for a republic; she was returning to her idols, "choosing herself a captain back to Egypt." It took a century and a half for English liberty to recover the ground lost at the Restoration. Nevertheless that little group of republican idealists, Vane, Bradshaw, Lambert and the rest, with Milton their literary spokesman, must always interest us as Americans and republicans. Let us, however, not mistake. Milton was no democrat. His political principles were republican, or democratic if you please, but his personal feelings were intensely aristocratic. Even that free commonwealth which he thought he saw so easy and ready a way to establish, and the constitution of which he sketched on the eve of the Restoration, was no democracy, but an aristocratic, senatorial republic like Venice, a government of the optimates, not of the populace. For the trappings of royalty, the pomp and pageantry, the servility and flunkeyism of a court, Milton had the contempt of a plain republican:
"How poor their outworn coronets
Beside one leaf of that plain civic wreath!"
But for the people, as a whole, he had an almost equal contempt. They were "the ungrateful multitude," "the inconsiderate multitude," the profanum vulgus, "the throng and noises of vulgar and irrational men." There was not a popular drop of blood in him. He had no faith in universal suffrage or majority rule. "More just it is," he wrote, "that a less number compel a greater to retain their liberty, than that a greater number compel a less to be their fellow slaves," i.e. to bring back the king by a plébescite. And again: "The best affected and best principled of the people stood not numbering or computing on which side were most voices in Parliament, but on which side appeared to them most reason."
Milton was a Puritan; and the Puritans, though socially belonging, for the most part, among the plain people, and though made by accident the champions of popular rights against privilege, were yet a kind of spiritual aristocrats. Calvinistic doctrine made of the elect a chosen few, a congregation of saints, set apart from the world. To this feeling of religious exclusiveness Milton's pride of intellect added a personal intensity. He respects distinction and is always rather scornful of the average man, the pecus ignavum silentum, the herd of the obscure and unfamed.
"Nor do I name of men the common rout
That, wandering loose about,
Grow up and perish like the summer fly,
Heads without names, no more remembered."
Hazlitt insisted that Shakspere's principles were aristocratic, chiefly, I believe, because of his handling of the tribunes and the plebs in Coriolanus. Shakspere does treat his mobs with a kindly and amused contempt. They are fickle, ignorant, illogical, thick-headed, easily imposed upon. Still he makes you feel that they are composed of good fellows at bottom, quickly placated and disposed to do the fair thing. I think that Shakspere's is the more democratic nature; that his distrust of the people is much less radical than Milton's. Walt Whitman's obstreperous democracy, his all-embracing camaraderie, his liking for the warm, gregarious pressure of the crowd, was a spirit quite alien from his whose "soul was like a star and dwelt apart." Anything vulgar was outside or below the sympathies of this Puritan gentleman. Falstaff must have been merely disgusting to him; and fancy him reading Mark Twain! In Milton's references to popular pastimes there is always a mixture of disapproval, the air of the superior person. "The people on their holidays," says Samson, are "impetuous, insolent, unquenchable." "Methought," says the lady in Comus,