The least critical reader, when he is told that the daffodil and amaranthus lines were once in the reverse order, that the "frail thoughts" were at first "sad," and the "shores" "floods," and above all that the "whelming tide" was once a thing so insignificant as the "humming tide," can judge for himself by what a succession of inspirations a work of consummate art is produced.
There remain the sonnets, whose sufficient praise is given in an immortal line of Wordsworth, while all that a fine critic had thought or learnt about them is contained in the scholarly edition of Mark Pattison. Technically they are remarkable, like everything else of Milton's, at once for their conservatism and their originality; while their content has all his characteristic sincerity. They occupy a most important place in the history of the English sonnet, which had so far been almost entirely given up to a single theme, that of the poet's unhappy love, which had commonly little existence outside his verses. The shadowy mistresses who emulated the glories of Beatrice and Laura were even less substantial than they; and, though that could {132} not hinder great poets from making fine poetry out of them, it was fatal to the ordinary sonnetteer, and gave the sonnet a tradition of overblown and insincere verbiage. From all this Milton emancipated it and, as Landor said, "gave the notes to glory." To glory and to other things; for not all his sonnets are consecrated to glory. They deal with various subjects; but each, whether its topic be his blindness, the death of his wife, or the fame of Fairfax or Cromwell, is the product of a personal experience of his own. No one can read them through without feeling that he gets from them a true knowledge of the man. At their weakest, as in that To a Lady, they convey, in the words of Mark Pattison, "the sense that here is a true utterance of a great soul." The rather commonplace thought and language somehow do not prevent the total effect from being impressive. He entirely fails only when he goes below the level of poetry altogether and repeats in verse the angry scurrility of his divorce pamphlets. And even there some remnant of his artist's sense of the self-restraint of verse preserves him from the worst degradations of his prose. For the rest, they give us his musical and scholarly tastes, his temperate pleasures and his love of that sort of company which Shelley {133} confessed to preferring, "such society as is quiet, wise and good"; they give us the high ideal with which he became a poet, the high patriotism that drew him into politics, and that sense, both for himself and for others, of life as a thing to be lived in the presence and service of God which was the eternally true part of his religion. The four finest are those on the Massacre in Piedmont, On his Blindness, On attaining the age of twenty-three, and that addressed to Cromwell, which perhaps has the finest touch of all in the pause which comes with such tremendous effect after "And Worcester's laureate wreath." But that to the memory of his wife and "Captain or Colonel or Knight in Arms," the one addressed to Lawrence and the first of those addressed to Skinner, come very near the best; and the whole eight would be included by any good judge in a collection of the fifty best English sonnets, to which Milton would make a larger contribution than any one except, perhaps, Wordsworth and Shakspeare.
And both of these poets, Shakspeare always and Wordsworth often, sinned as Milton did not against the true genius of the sonnet. No doubt they had nearly all precedent with them, and their successors down to Rossetti {134} and Meredith have followed in the same path. But not even Shakspeare and Petrarch can alter the fact that the genius of the sonnet is solitary and self-contained. A series of sonnets is an artistic contradiction in terms. There may be magnificent individual sonnets in it which can stand alone, without reference to those that precede or follow; and so far so good; but on the bulk of the series there inevitably rests the taint of incompleteness. They do not explain themselves. They are chapters not books, parts of a composition and not the whole. It is scarcely possible to doubt that, fine as they may be, the effect they produce is not that of the finest single sonnets, beginning and ending within their own limits. Milton may never have been under any special temptation to write a set of consecutive sonnets; but it is in any case like his habitual submission of all authority to his own judgment that he wrote sonnets and yet defied the tradition of writing them as a continuous series, as he had also disdained the amorous affectations which had been their established subject. But in this, as in everything else where art was concerned, he was as much a conservative as a revolutionary. And so his scholarly interest in the Italian sonnet, and, we may be sure, his consummate {135} critical judgment, made him set aside the various sonnet forms adopted by Shakspeare, Spenser and other famous English poets, and follow the original model of Petrarch more strictly than it had been followed by any English poet of importance before him; for the Petrarchan sonnets of Sidney, Constable and Drummond all end with the unItalian concluding couplet. But here again Milton's example has not proved decisive. Wordsworth did not always follow it, though he never deserted it with success. Keats began with it and gave it up for the Shakspearean model with the concluding couplet. But of him again, it may be said that, while he only wrote three great sonnets and two of them are Shakspearean, his single masterpiece is Petrarchan or Miltonic. Rossetti, on the other hand, has no Shakspearean sonnets, and his finest are among the best proofs of how much a sonnet gains in unity by the single pause between the eight lines and the six instead of Shakspeare's fourfold division, and especially by the interlocking of the rhymes in the second half of the sonnet as opposed to Shakspeare's isolated and half-epigrammatic final couplet.
There can be little doubt, though attempts have been made to deny it, that nothing but {136} the prestige of the greatest of all poetic names has prevented the superiority of the Petrarchan model from being universally recognized. Shakspeare could do anything. But the greatness of his sonnets is due not to their form but simply to their being his; and the fact that he could triumph over the defects of that form ought not to make other people fancy that these defects do not exist. They do; and but for the courage and genius of Milton they might have dominated the history of the English sonnet to this day. That is part of our great debt to Milton. He could not give the sonnet the supple and insinuating sweetness with which Shakspeare often filled it. He had not got that in him, and perhaps it would scarcely have proved tolerable except as part of a sequence in which it could be balanced by sterner matter. Nor, again, could he give it Shakspeare's infinite tenderness, nor his sense of the world's brooding mystery. But he could and did give it his own high spirit of courage, sincerity and strength, and his own masterly cunning of craftsmanship. And no just reader of the greatest sonnets of the nineteenth century forgets Milton's share in their greatness. Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie has lately remarked that it is in the Prelude and Excursion of {137} Wordsworth that "more profoundly than anywhere out of Milton himself Milton's spiritual legacy is employed." The same thing may be as truly said of Wordsworth's sonnets. If, as he said, in Milton's hands "the thing became a trumpet," there is no doubt that it remained one in his own. He is a greater master of the sonnet than Milton; the greatest on the whole that England has known. He used it far more freely than Milton and for more varied purposes. Perhaps it hardly afforded room enough for one the peculiar note of whose genius was vastness. It is seldom possible to do justice to a quotation from Paradise Lost without giving at least twenty lines. The sense, and especially the musical effect, is incomplete with less; for a Miltonic period is a series of intellectual and rhythmical actions and reactions which cannot be detached from each other without loss. It is obvious that a poet whose natural range is so great can hardly be fully himself in the sonnet. But Wordsworth had little of this spacious freedom of poetic energy; to him—
"'twas pastime to be bound Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground."
And so he could use it for everything; for great events and also for very small; not {138} exhausting great or small, but finding in each, whatever it might be, some single aspect or quality which he could touch to new power by that meditative tenderness of his to which Milton was, to his great loss, an entire stranger. The natural mysticism, for instance, of such sonnets as, "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," or, "Earth has not anything to show more fair," is quite out of Milton's reach. In this and other ways Wordsworth could do much more with the sonnet than Milton could. But without Milton some of his very greatest things would scarcely have been attempted. All the sonnets that utter his magnanimous patriotism, his dauntless passion for English liberty, his burning sympathy with the oppressed, the "holy glee" of his hatred of tyranny, are of the right lineage of Milton himself. One can almost hear Milton crying—
"It is not to be thought of that the Flood
Of British freedom, which to the open sea
Of the world's praise from dark antiquity
Hath flowed 'with pomp of waters unwithstood,'
Roused though it be full often to a mood
Which spurns the checks of salutary bands,
That this most famous Stream in Bogs and Sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever."
{139} There and in the "Two Voices" and in the "Inland within a Hollow Vale" and in the Toussaint l'Ouverture sonnet, and others, we cannot fail to catch an echo of the poet who first "gave the sonnet's notes to glory." No one can count up all the things which have united in the making of any poem, but among those which made these sonnets possible must certainly be reckoned the Fairfax and Cromwell sonnets, and above all the still more famous one on the Massacre in Piedmont. The forces which animated England to defy and defeat Napoleon were only partly moral; but so far as they were that they found perfect expression through only one voice, that of Wordsworth. And there is no doubt as to where he caught the note which he struck again to such high purpose. He has told us himself—
"Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour;
England hath need of thee."
And, what seems stranger, he has now had in return a kind of reflected influence upon Milton. The total experience of a reader of poetry is a thing of many actions and reactions, co-operating and intermingling with each other. And as we can hardly read Virgil or the Psalms now without thinking of all {140} that has come of them, and reading some of it back into the old words whose first creator could not foresee all that would be found in them, so it is with Milton and Wordsworth. There are many things in Milton which no Wordsworthian can now read exactly as they were read in the seventeenth century. Wordsworth's line