It is a remarkable fact that the poetry of Shakspeare is at the same time more English and more universally human than any that was ever written. The two great poets who came before Shakspeare had both of them enlarged the revenues of the English muse. Chaucer had added character and incident, and had shown the capacities of the language and of the metre. Spenser left it enriched with a luxury of diction, with harmony of verse, and with the lovely images of the classical mythology. But Shakspeare came in like an unthrift heir. He squandered everything. From king to clown he used up all character; there is no passion, or fancy, or feeling that he has not spent; no question of philosophy, morals, politics, or metaphysics that he has not solved; he poured out all the golden accumulations of diction like water. And his younger brethren, the other dramatists, helped him. What was there left? Certainly, this wonderful being has expressed every sentiment, every thought, that is universal in its relations. All the poetry of this world he exhausted. Accordingly, in the time immediately following this splendidly imaginative period, we find only a development of fancy under one or other of its disguises. Fancy deals with limited and personal experiences, and interests us by the grace or perfectness of its expression of these. The Dramatists were tremendously in earnest, as they had need to be, to please a people who were getting in earnest themselves. But now the time itself was preparing a drama, and on no mimic scene, but with England for a stage and with all Europe for spectators. A real historical play was in rehearsal, no petty war of York and Lancaster, but the death-grapple of two eras. The time was in travail with the Ishmael of Puritanism who, exiled from his father’s house, was to found here in this Western wilderness an empire for himself and his wandering descendants. England herself was turning poet, and would add her rhapsody to the great epic of the nations.
That was a day of earnest and painful thinking, and poetical temperaments naturally found relief in turning away from actual life to the play of the fancy. We find no trace of high imagination here. Certainly, Herbert and Vaughan and even Quarles are sometimes snatched into something above common fancy by religious fervor, but how cold and experimental is the greater part of their poetry—not poetry, indeed, but devotional exercises in verse. Cowley wrote imaginary love-songs to an imaginary mistress, and Waller the same sort of stuff to a real one. Catullus revived in Herrick, a country parson. Wither, a Puritan, wrote some poems full of nature and feeling, and remarkable for purity of sentiment. Donne, a deep thinker, carried on his anatomical studies into his verse, and dissected his thoughts and feelings to the smallest nerve. A great many nice things got said, no doubt, and many charming little poems were written—but the great style appears no longer.
It was during this lull, as we may call it, that followed the mighty day of the Dramatists, that Milton was growing up. He was born in London on the ninth of December, 1608, and was therefore in his eighth year when Shakspeare died. His father was of a good family, which still adhered to the Roman Catholic faith. What is of more importance, he was disinherited by his father for having adopted Puritan principles; and he was a excellent musician. Milton was very early an indefatigable student, even in his twelfth year seldom leaving his books before midnight. At the university he was distinguished as a Latin scholar and writer of Latin verses. He was intended for the Church, but had already formed opinions of his own which put conformity out of the question. He was by nature an Independent, and could not, as he says, “subscribe slave.”
Leaving the university in 1632, he passed the five following years in a studious seclusion at his father’s house at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. During these five years he wrote most of his smaller poems. In 1638 he set out for Italy. The most important events of his stay in that country were his meetings with Galileo, and the Marquis Manso, who had been Tasso’s friend. After refreshing his Protestantism at Geneva, he passed through France and came back to England to find the Civil War already begun.
Dr. Johnson sneers at Milton for having come home from Italy because he could not stay abroad while his countrymen were struggling for their freedom, and then quietly settling down as a teacher of a few boys for bread. It might, with equal reason, have been asked of the Doctor why, instead of writing “Taxation no Tyranny,” he did not volunteer in the war against the rebel American provinces? Milton sacrificed to the cause he thought holy something dearer to him than life—the hope of an earthly immortality in a great poem. He suffered his eyes to be put out for the sake of his country as deliberately as Scævola thrust his hand into the flame. He gave to freedom something better than a sword—words that were victories. Around the memories of Bradshaw and his illustrious brethren his deathless soldiery still pitch their invincible tents, still keep their long-resounding march, sure warders against obloquy and oblivion.
After the death of Cromwell, Milton continued faithful to republicanism, and on the very eve of the Restoration published his last political tract, showing a short and easy way to establish a Christian commonwealth. He had long ago quarreled with the Presbyterians in discipline, and separated from the Independents in doctrine. For many years he did not go within any church and had become a Unitarian. He had begun “Paradise Lost” in 1658, and after the Restoration, with a broken fortune, but with a constancy which nothing could break, shattered in health, blind, and for a time in danger, he continued the composition of it. It was complete in 1665, when Elwood, the Quaker, had the reading of it, and it was published in 1667.
The translation of the Bible had to a very great extent Judaized the Puritan mind. England was no longer England, but Israel. Those fierce enthusiasts could always find Amalek and Philistia in the men who met them in the field, and one horn or the other of the beast in every doctrine of their theological adversaries. The spiritual provincialism of the Jewish race found something congenial in the Anglo-Saxon intellect. This element of the Puritan character appears in Milton also, as in that stern sonnet:
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old