It is curious how Milton's early poems have changed places in favor with Paradise Lost. They were neglected for over a century. Joseph Warton testifies in 1756 that they had only "very lately met with a suitable regard"; had lain "in a sort of obscurity, the private enjoyment of a few curious readers." And Dr. Johnson exclaims: "Surely no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure, had he not known its author." There can be little doubt that now-a-days Milton's juvenilia are more read than Paradise Lost, and by many—perhaps by a majority of readers—rated higher. In this opinion I do not share. Paradise Lost seems to me not only greater work, more important, than the minor pieces, but better poetry, richer and perfecter. Yet one quality these early poems have which Paradise Lost has not—charm. Milton's epic astonishes, moves, delights, but it does not fascinate. The youthful Milton was sensitive to many attractions which he afterwards came to look upon with stern disapproval. He went to the theatre and praised the comedies of Shakspere and Jonson; he loved the romances of chivalry and fairy tales; he had no objection to dancing, ale drinking, the music of the fiddle and rural sports; he writes to Diodati of the pretty girls on the London streets; he celebrates the Catholic and Gothic elegancies of English church architecture and ritual, the cloister's pale, the organ music and full voiced choir, the high embowed roof, and the storied windows which his military friends were soon to smash at Ely, Salisbury, Canterbury, Lichfield, as popish idolatries. But in Iconoclastes we find him sneering at the king for keeping a copy of Shakspere in his closet. In his treatise Of Reformation he denounces the prelates for "embezzling the treasury of the church on painted and gilded walls of temples, wherein God hath testified to have no delight." Evidently the Anglican service was one of those "gay religions, rich with pomp and gold" to which he alludes in Paradise Lost. A chorus commends Samson the Nazarene for drinking nothing but water. Modern tragedies are condemned for "mixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar persons"—as Shakspere does. In Paradise Lost the poet speaks with contempt of the romances whose "chief mastery" it was
—to dissect,
With long and tedious havoc, fabled knights
In battles feigned."
And in Paradise Regained he even disparages his beloved classics, preferring the psalms of David, the Hebrew prophecies and the Mosaic law, to the poets, philosophers and orators of Athens.
The Puritans were Old Testament men. Their God was the Hebrew Jehovah, their imaginations were filled with the wars of Israel and the militant theocracy of the Jews. In Milton's somewhat patronizing attitude toward women, there is something Mosaic—something almost Oriental. He always remained susceptible to beauty in women, but he treated it as a weakness, a temptation. The bitterness of his own marriage experience mingles with his words. I need not cite the well-known passages about Dalilah and Eve, where he who reads between the lines can always detect the figure of Mary Powell. There is no gallantry in Milton, but a deal of common sense. The love of the court poets, cavaliers and sonneteers, their hyperboles of passion, their abasement before their ladies he doubtless scorned as the fopperies of chivalry, fantastic and unnatural exaggerations, the insincerities of "vulgar amourists," the fume of
"—court amour,
Mixt dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenate which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain."
To the Puritan, woman was at best the helpmate and handmaid of man. Too often she was a snare, or a household foe, "a cleaving mischief far within defensive arms." L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are the only poems of Milton in which he surrenders himself spontaneously to the joy of living, to "unreproved pleasures free," with no arrière pensée, or intrusion of the conscience. Even in those pleasant Horatian lines to Lawrence, inviting him to spend a winter day by the fire, drink wine and hear music, he ends with a fine Puritan touch:
He who of these delights can judge, yet spare
To interpose them oft, is truly wise."
"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" inquires Sir Toby of Shakspere's only Puritan.
"Yes," adds the clown, "and ginger shall be hot in the mouth, too." And "wives may be merry and yet honest," asserts Mistress Page.
It is not without astonishment that one finds Emerson writing: "To this antique heroism Milton added the genius of the Christian sanctity * * * laying its chief stress on humility." Milton had a zeal for righteousness, a noble purity and noble pride. But if you look for saintly humility, for the spirit of the meek and lowly Jesus, the spirit of charity and forgiveness, look for them in the Anglican Herbert, not in the Puritan Milton. Humility was no fruit of the system which Calvin begot and which begot John Knox. The Puritans were great invokers of the sword of the Lord and of Gideon—the sword of Gideon and the dagger of Ehud. There went a sword out of Milton's mouth against the enemies of Israel, a sword of threatenings, the wrath of God upon the ungodly. The temper of his controversial writings is little short of ferocious. There was not much in him of that "sweet reasonableness" which Matthew Arnold thought the distinctive mark of Christian ethics. He was devout, but not with the Christian devoutness. I would not call him a Christian at all, except, of course, in his formal adherence to the creed of Christianity. Very significant is the inferiority of Paradise Regained to Paradise Lost. And in Paradise Lost itself, how weak and faint is the character of the Savior! You feel that he is superfluous, that the poet did not need him. He is simply the second person of the Trinity, the executive arm of the Godhead; and Milton is at pains to invent things for him to do—to drive the rebellious angels out of heaven, to preside over the six days' work of creation, etc. I believe it was Thomas Davidson who said that in Paradise Lost "Christ is God's good boy."