Milton

by John Cann Bailey

"Thy Soul was like a Star and dwelt apart"

was strangely true of Milton as he lived in his own day. But it is less true now that his place is among the spiritual company of the English poets and that Wordsworth stands by his side, or sits at his feet. That does not detract from his greatness. Indeed, it adds to it; for it is only the greater poets who thus transcend their own day and cannot be read as if they belonged to it alone. Read the great sonnet on the Massacre—

"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,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
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Forget not; in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks.
Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."

Is there not more in it than the Hebrew prophet or psalmist and the English Puritan? Is there not, for us now, something beside the past of which Milton had read, and the present which he knew by experience? Is there not an anticipation of another struggle against another tyrant—nay, the creation of the very spirit in which that struggle was to be faced? So Milton influences Wordsworth and the England of Wordsworth's day; and they in their turn inevitably influence our minds as we read him. There lies one part of the secret of his greatness; a part which is seen at its highest in his sonnets.

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CHAPTER IV

PARADISE LOST

Paradise Lost is in several ways one of the most wonderful of the works of man. And not least in the circumstances of its composition. The Restoration found Milton blind, and to blindness it added disappointment, defeat, obscurity, and fear of the public or private revenge of his victorious enemies. Yet out of such a situation as this the most indomitable will that ever inhabited the soul of a poet produced three great poems, every one of which would have been enough to give him a place among the poets who belong to the whole world.

The first and greatest of these was, of course, Paradise Lost. Unlike many great poems, but like all the great epics of the world, it obtained recognition at once. It sold well for a work of its bulk and seriousness, and it received the highest praise from those whose word was and deserved to be law in questions of literature. Throughout the eighteenth {143} century its fame and popularity increased. Literary people read it because Dryden and Addison and all the established authorities recommended it to them, and also because those of them whose turn for literature was a reality found that these recommendations were confirmed by their own experience. But the poem also appealed to another and a larger public. To the serious world it appeared to be a religious book and as such enjoyed the great advantage of being thought fit to be read on the only day in the week on which many people were accustomed to read at all. This distinction grew in importance with the progress of the Wesleyan revival and with it grew the number of Milton's admirers. When Sunday readers were tired of the Bible they were apt to turn to Paradise Lost. How many of them did so is proved by the influence Milton has had on English religious beliefs. To this day if an ordinary man is asked to give his recollections of the story of Adam and Eve he is sure to put Milton as well as Genesis into them. For instance, the Miltonic Satan is almost sure to take the place of the scriptural serpent. The influence Milton has had is unfortunately also seen in less satisfactory ways. He claimed to justify the ways of God to men. Perhaps he did so to his own mind {144} which, in these questions, was curiously matter-of-fact, literal, legal and unmystical. He was determined to explain everything and provide for all contingencies by his legal instrument of the government of the world: and he did so after the cold fashion of a lawyer defining rights on each side, and assuming that the stronger party will exert his strength. So far as his genius made his readers accept his views of the relation between God and man it cannot be denied that he did a great injury to English religious thought. Everybody who stops to reflect now feels that the attitude of his God to the rebel angels and to man is hard and unforgiving, below the standard of any decent human morality, far below the Christian charity of St. Paul. The atmosphere of the poem when it deals with these matters is often suggestive of a tyrant's attorney-general whose business is to find plausible excuses for an arbitrary despot. Milton had his share in creating that bad sort of fear of God which is always appearing as the thorn in the theological rose-bed of the eighteenth century, and, later on, becomes the nightmare of the Evangelical revival. None of these conceptions, the capricious despot, the remorseless creditor, the Judge whose {145} invariable sentence is hell fire, have proved easy to get rid of: and part of their permanence may be laid to the account of Paradise Lost.

But Milton, who is like the Bible in so many ways, is not least like it in his happy unconsciousness of his own immorality. The writer of the story of Samuel and Agag, or that of Rebekah and Jacob, was perfectly unaware that he was immoral: and so was Milton in Paradise Lost: and so also and for that very reason were the majority of their readers. Happily most of us when we read a book that makes for righteousness are like children reading Shakspeare, who simply do not notice the things that make their elders nervous. It is not that we refuse the evil and choose the good: we are quite unaware of the presence of the evil at all. No doubt that sometimes makes its influence the more powerful because unperceived: and for this kind of subtle influence both Milton and the Old Testament have to answer. But with many happy natures an escape is made by the process of selection: and, as they manage to acquire the God-fearing righteousness of the Old Testament without its ferocity, so they manage to receive from Milton his high emotional consciousness of life as the glad and {146} free service of God and to ignore altogether his intellectual description of it as a very one-sided bargain with a very dangerous Potentate.