We think to-day of Milton chiefly as the author of Paradise Lost, as we think of Wren as the builder of St. Paul's. And we are right. When a man has been the creator of the only very great building in the world which bears upon it from the first stone to the last the mark of a single mind, his other achievements, even though they include Greenwich, Hampton Court, Trinity College Library, and some fifty churches, inevitably fall into the background. So when the world has admitted that a poet has disputed the supreme palm of epic with Homer and Virgil, it hardly cares to remember that he has also challenged all rivals in such forms as the Pastoral Elegy, the Mask, and the Sonnet. De minimis non curat might be applied to such cases without any very violent extravagance. The first thought that must always rise to the mind at the mention of Milton's name must be the stupendous achievement of Paradise Lost.
Yet if Milton had been hanged at Tyburn {90} in 1660 he would still unquestionably rank with the half-dozen greatest of the English poets. Chaucer and Spenser would then have ranked after Shakspeare as higher names than his: and possibly also Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. But he could have feared no other rival: for Dryden is too much a mere man of letters, Pope too much a mere wit, Byron too exclusively a rhetorician, Tennyson too exclusively an artist, to rank with a man in whom burned the divine fire of Lycidas and the great Ode. What would Milton's fame have rested upon if he had not lived to write Paradise Lost and its two successors? Upon the volume published in the year 1645, the year of Naseby, when people, one would have supposed, were not thinking much of poetry, and those who were most likely to be doing so were just those least inclined to look for it from John Milton, the Puritan pamphleteer. Yet in that little book was heard for the last time the voice, now raised above itself, of the old poetry which the Cavaliers and courtiers had loved.
No single volume has ever contained so much fine English verse by an unknown or almost unknown poet. It is true that Lycidas and Comus had been printed before, but Comus had appeared anonymously and {91} Lycidas had been signed only with initials. So that only friends, or people behind the scenes in the literary world, could know anything of Milton's poetry. Nor does he seem to have been very anxious that they should. The other contributors to the volume in memory of Edward King gave their names: the only signature to Lycidas is J. M. It was Lawes the composer, not Milton the author, who published Comus in 1637. Milton's feelings about it are indicated by the motto on the title page—
"Eheu quid volui misero mihi! floribus Austrum
Perditus—"
Quotations can often say for us what we cannot say for ourselves. What Virgil says for Milton is "Alas what is this that I have done? poor fool that I am, could not I have kept my tender buds of verse a little longer from the cutting blasts of public criticism?" Yet no one knew better than Milton that Comus was incomparably the greatest of the masks. So in the sonnet on reaching the age of twenty-three he says that his "late spring no bud or blossom shew'th." Yet he had already written the Ode on the Nativity, a performance sufficient, one would have {92} thought, to give a young poet reasonable self-satisfaction in what he had done, as well as confidence in what he would be able to do. Nor was Milton in the ordinary sense, or perhaps in any, a humble man. Of that false kind of humility, too often recommended from the pulpit, which consists in a beautiful woman trying to suppose herself plain, or an able man trying to be unaware of his ability, no man ever had less than Milton. Neither from himself nor from others did he ever conceal the fact that he was a man of genius. In his eyes no kind of untruth, however specious, could be a virtue. But of a finer humility, built on truth, he was not without his share. The truly humble man may be a genius and may know it and may never affect to deny it: he may know that he has done great things, far greater than have been done by the men he sees around him: but he is not judging himself by the standard of other men: he has another standard, that of "the perfect witness of all-judging Jove," that of "as ever in my great Taskmaster's eye," and of that he knows how very far he has fallen short. Of this nobler humility Milton had something all his life and in his youth much. It is this which reconciles the apparent inconsistency between his many proud {93} confessions that he knows himself to be a man called to do great things and his reluctance to let the world see what he had already done: between his keeping L'Allegro and Il Penseroso ten years unpublished and his preserving and ultimately publishing almost everything he had ever written, even to scraps of boyish and undergraduate verse. From one point of view his best was nothing: from the other, more than equally true, the humblest line that had come from his pen had received a passport to immortality.
What does the famous volume contain? It opens with the noble Ode on the Nativity, as if to give the discerning reader invincible proof in the first twenty lines put before him that the proud words of the publisher's preface were amply justified. "Let the event guide itself which way it will, I shall deserve of the age by bringing into the light as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous Spenser wrote; whose poems in these English ones are as rarely imitated as sweetly excelled. Reader, if thou art eagle-eyed to censure their worth, I am not fearful to expose them to thy exactest perusal." So the preface ends: and then what follows is—
"This is the month, and this the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heaven's Eternal King,
{94}
Of wedded maid and virgin mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace."
Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. No one had ever written such English verse as this before: no one ever would again. Here was a poet, writing at the age of twenty-one, for whom it was evident that no theme could be so high that he could not find it fit utterance. Fit and also peculiar to himself. The peculiar Miltonic note which none of his innumerable imitators have ever caught for more than a few lines, which he himself never in all his works loses for more than a moment, is instantly struck. As Mr. Mackail has said, "there is not a square inch of his poetry from first to last of which one could not confidently say, 'This is Milton and no one else.'" One may even go further than Mr. Mackail. For he seems to make an exception where certainly none is needed. He is justly insisting that one of the most remarkable things about Milton is that, while English poetry spoke one language in his youth and another in his age, he himself spoke neither. His "accent and speech" alike in Lycidas and in Paradise Lost {95} are his own, and in marked contrast to those of contemporary poets. But here Mr. Mackail adds the qualification "if we exclude a few slight juvenile pieces of his boyhood and those metrical versions of the Psalms in which he elected not to be a poet." He asserts, that is, that neither in the Psalms nor in the "juvenile pieces" is Milton characteristically himself and that in the Psalms he is not a poet at all. And no one will care to deny that many of the versions of the Psalms have little Milton and less poetry in them. But is this true of all? And in particular is it true of the paraphrase of Psalm cxxxvi. which, with its companion version of Psalm cxiv. is the most "juvenile" of all? A boy of fifteen has not usually much power of "electing" to be or not to be a poet. But it can only be inadvertence on Mr. Mackail's part that would deny that the boy Milton at that age, though not a great poet, was already himself and, more than that, was already promising what he was soon to perform. Who, looking back from the Ode and Comus and Paradise Lost, does not hear some preluding of the authentic strain of Milton in
"Who by his all-commanding might
Did fill the new-made world with light"?
{96} Is it fanciful to note that we have here, no doubt in their barest primitive form, two of Milton's life-long themes? The Authorized Version speaks of "him that made great lights": how Miltonically transformed those words already are in the two quoted lines! De Quincey said that Milton was "not an author amongst authors, not a poet amongst poets, but a power amongst powers." However that may be, it is certain that he, so occupied all his life with thinking and writing about God, thought of God habitually as a power. For him God is Creator, Sovereign, Judge, much more often than Father: we hear from Milton more of his might than of his love. So at once here, at the age of fifteen, he inserts into the Psalm he is paraphrasing that characteristic phrase, so splendid and potent itself, so gladly speaking of potency and splendour,