There remains Lycidas, in which Milton out-distances all previous English elegy almost as easily as in Comus he had out-distanced all the earlier masks. It stands with the great passages of Paradise Lost as the most consummate blending of scholarship and poetry in Milton and therefore in English. All {124} pastoral poetry is in it, Theocritus and Virgil, Spenser and Sidney, Drayton and Drummond, with memories, too, of Ovid and Shakspeare and the Bible; and yet it is pure and undiluted Milton, with the signet of his peculiar mind and temper stamped on its every phrase. It was his contribution to a volume of verses published at Cambridge in 1638 to the memory of Edward King, a younger contemporary of his at Christ's who was drowned off the Welsh coast in August 1637. King was already a Fellow of his college, and one of the most promising young clergymen of his day. Milton had liked and respected him, no doubt, but had certainly not been so intimate with him as with young Charles Diodati who died almost exactly a year later, and was lamented by his great friend in the Epitaphium Damonis which is the finest of the Latin poems. Those who read Latin will enjoy its close parallelism with Lycidas and its touches of a still closer bond of affection, as that in which the poet contrasts the easy friendships of birds and animals, soon won, soon lost and soon replaced by others, with their hard rareness among men who scarcely find one kindred spirit in a thousand, and too often lose that one by premature fate before the fruit of {125} friendship has had time to ripen. But if the death of Diodati aroused the deeper sorrow in Milton, that of King produced unquestionably the greater poem. It is a common mistake to think that to write a great elegy a man must have suffered a great sorrow. That is not the case. Shelley wrote Adonais about Keats whom he knew very little; Spenser Daphnaïda about a lady whom he did not know at all. It is not the actual experience of sorrow that the elegiac poet needs; but the power of heart and imagination to conceive it and the power of language to give it fit expression. Moreover, the poet's real subject is not the death of Keats or King or Mrs. Gorges: it is the death of all who have been or will be loved in all the world, and the sorrow of all the survivors, the tragic destiny of youth and hope and fame, the doom of frailty and transience which has been eternally pronounced on so many of the fairest gifts of Nature and all the noblest works of man.
About Lycidas criticism has less to say than to unsay. Johnson's notorious attack upon it is only the extremest instance of the futility of applying to poetry the tests of prose and of the general incapacity of that generation to apply any other. Even {126} Warton, who really loved these early poems of Milton and did so much to recall them to public notice, could speak of him as appearing to have had "a very bad ear"! At such a time it was inevitable that the artificial absurdity of pastoral poetry which is a prose fact should blind all but the finest judges to the poetic fact that living spirit can animate every form it finds prepared for its indwelling. Johnson and the rest were right in perceiving that pastoral elegy had very commonly been an insincere affectation, a mere exercise in writing; the age into which they were born denied them the ear that could hear the amazing music of Lycidas, or perceive the sensuous, imaginative, spiritual intensity which drowns its incongruities in a flood of poetic life. There is a still more important truth which that generation could not see. Prose aims at expressing facts directly, and sometimes succeeds. That is what Johnson liked, and practised himself with masterly success. But when he and his asked that poetry should do the same they were asking that she should deny her nature. She knows that her truth can only be expressed or suggested by its imaginative equivalents. It is with poetry as with religion. Religious truth stated directly becomes philosophy or science, {127} conveying other elements of truth, perhaps, but failing to convey the element which is specifically religious; and therefore religion employs parable, ceremony, sacrament, mystery, to express what scientifically exact prose cannot express. So poetry can neither deal directly with King's death or Milton's grief nor be content with a subject which is a mere fact in time and space. If it did, the effect produced would not be a poetic effect; the experience of the reader would not be a poetic experience. The poet must transform or transcend the facts which have set his powers to work; he must escape from them or rather lift them up with him new-created into the world of the imagination; he must impose upon them a new form, invented or accepted by himself, and in any case so heated by his own fire of poetry that it can fuse and reshape the matter submitted to it into that unity of beauty which is a work of art. That is what Milton does in Lycidas by the help of the pastoral fiction; and what he could not have done without it or some imaginative substitute for it.
The truest criticism on his pastoralism is really that that mould was too small and fragile to hold all he wanted to put into it. The great outburst of St. Peter, with its {128} scarcely disguised assault upon the Laudian clergy, strains it almost to bursting. Yet no one would wish it away; for it adds a passage of Miltonic fire to what but for Phoebus and St. Peter would be too plaintive to be fully characteristic of Milton whose genius lay rather in strength than in tenderness. Yet perhaps we love Lycidas all the more for giving us our almost solitary glimpse of a Milton in whom the affections are more than the will, and sorrow not sublimated into resolution. Its modesty, too, is astonishing. He had already written the Nativity Ode, Comus and Allegro and Penseroso, and yet he fancies himself still unripe for poetry and is only forced by the "bitter constraint" of the death of his friend to pluck the berries of his laurel which seem to him still "harsh and crude"; for of course these allusions refer to his own immaturity and not, as Todd thought, to that of his dead friend. And the presence of the same over-mastering emotion which compelled him to begin is felt throughout. There is no poem of his in which he appears to make so complete a surrender to the changing moods of passion. The verses seem to follow his heart and fancy just where they choose to lead. We watch him as he thinks first of his friend's death and then of the {129} duty of paying some poetic tribute to him; and so of his own death and of some other poet of the future who may write of it and—
"bid fair peace be to my sable shroud."
How natural it is in all its superficial unnaturalness! The walks and talks and verses made together at Cambridge so inevitably leading to the "heavy change now thou art gone. Now thou art gone and never must return"; and the fancy, partly but not wholly a reminiscence of their classical studies, that the trees and flowers which they had loved together must now be sharing the survivor's grief; the reproach to Nature and Nature's divinities following on the thought of Nature's sympathy, and followed by the first of the two incomparable returns upon himself which are among the chief beauties of the poem—
"Ay me! I fondly dream!
'Had ye been there,' for what could that have done?"
And so to the vanity of earthly fame and the thought of another fame which is not vanity. Twice he seems to be going to escape out of the world of pastoral, as he strikes his own trumpet note of confident {130} faith and stern judgment; twice the unfailing instinct of art calls him back and makes a beauty of what might have been a mere incongruity—
"Return, Alpheus; the dread voice is past,
That shrunk thy streams: return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues."
The flowers come, in their amazing beauty, as poetry knows and names them, not altogether after the order of nature; till the fine flight is once more recalled to earth in that second return to the sad reality of things which provides the most beautiful, and as the manuscript shows, one of the most carefully elaborated passages in the whole—
"Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
For so, to interpose a little ease,
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
{131}
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world."