Milton

by John Cann Bailey

"Hast thou not right to all created things?
Owe not all creatures, by just right, to thee service?"

Yet he discusses with Him various very human methods of arriving at power, just as {202} if He were subject to the same conditions as other men who desire to rule or influence the world. The consequence is that, although the speeches contain much interesting thought and much fine poetry, they are seldom or never dramatically convincing. Our Lord, in particular, instead of the gracious and winning figure of the Gospels, becomes a kind of self-sufficient aristocratic moralist. His speeches, as Milton gives them, display rather the defiant virtue of the Stoic, or the self-conscious righteousness of the Pharisee, than the simple and loving charity of the Christian. The weapon of moral and intellectual contempt, so freely employed in them and so natural both to Jew and to Greek, strikes to us a false and jarring note when put into the mouth of Him who taught His disciples that the only way of entry into His kingdom was that of being born again and becoming as little children.

These are all serious drawbacks and they are not the only ones. If from one point of view Milton in Paradise Regained is too little of a Christian, from another he is too much. One of the gravest difficulties with which Christian apologists have always had to contend is the entire indifference of the New Testament and, generally speaking, of the {203} Church in all ages, especially the most devout, not only to economic and material progress, but to all elements except the ethical and spiritual in the higher civilization of humanity. At its friendliest the Church has hardly ever been willing to allow to such things any inherent or independent importance of their own. Those who feel that they owe an incalculable debt to art and poetry and philosophy and therefore to the Greeks, have inevitably found this attitude a stumbling-block. And they will always read with exceptional surprise and indignation the narrow obscurantism of the speech which Milton, scholar and artist as he was, is not ashamed to put into the mouth of Christ in the fourth book. He cannot himself have been a victim of the shallow fallacy expressed in line 325 (he who reads gets little benefit unless he brings judgment to his reading "and what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?"); and his lifelong practice shows that he did not think Greek poetry was

"Thin-sown with aught of profit or delight."

Nor could he have seriously thought that the Hebrew prophets taught "the solid rules of civil government," of which in fact they knew nothing except on the moral side, better than the statesmen and philosophers of Rome and {204} Athens. The explanation is, perhaps, partly that Milton was an Arian, and therefore felt at liberty to emphasize the Jewish limitations of Christ: limitations the possibility of which, as recent controversies have shown, even Athanasian opinion has been forced to face. But, in any case, in the Paradise Regained stress is necessarily, for dramatic purposes, laid on the Hebrew and Messianic character of Christ, and from that point of view it is not unnatural to make Him the spokesman of Hebrew resistance to the intellectual encroachments of Greece and Rome. Another part of the explanation is that the strong Biblical and Hebraic element in Milton's character does seem to have increased in strength during his later years. It was far from getting exclusive possession even then, and all the evidence shows that he was always the very opposite of the narrow-minded Puritan fanatics of his day. But his tendencies in that direction would be exaggerated while he was occupied with a purely Biblical subject. And he may have thought, if he thought about the question at all, that the contemptuous tone adopted about classical culture in the speech of Christ was not only dramatically defensible, but balanced by the far finer passage, evidently written from his {205} heart, in which Satan exalts the glories of Athens. It is, perhaps, the most famous thing in the poem.

"Look once more, ere we leave this specular mount,
Westward, much nearer by south-west; behold
Where on the Aegean shore a city stands,
Built nobly, pure the air and light the soil—
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence, native to famous wits
Or hospitable, in her sweet recess,
City or suburban, studious walks and shades.
See there the olive-grove of Academe,
Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long;
There flow'ry hill Hymettus, with the sound
Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites
To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls
His whispering stream. Within the walls then view
The schools of ancient sages, his who bred
Great Alexander to subdue the world,
Lyceum there; and painted Stoa next.
There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power
Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit
By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,
Aeolian charms and Dorian lyric odes,
And his who gave them breath, but higher sung,
{206}
Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called,
Whose poem Phoebus challenged for his own.
Thence what the lofty grave Tragedians taught
In chorus or iambic, teachers best
Of moral prudence, with delight received
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life,
High actions and high passions best describing."

It is plainly the very voice of the poet himself, and he may have felt certain that we should so understand it. But it is difficult not to regret that it is the Devil who is made to pay Milton's great debt to Athens and Christ who is made to repudiate it.

Yet, in spite of all this, in spite of its disdain of the obvious attractions open to poetry, in spite of much in it that alienates the sympathies of many, the Paradise Regained has received very high praise from the finest judges of English poetry. Johnson and Wordsworth have already been quoted, and to them may be added Coleridge, who says of it that "in its kind it is the most perfect poem extant," and Mr. Mackail, who has spoken of its "unique poetic qualities." Why have the poets and critics been so much {207} more favourable to it than the public? Perhaps because artists are always inclined to value work in proportion to its difficulties. Indeed, this fallacy seems natural to all classes of men about their own work. Gardeners in England tend to admire a man who grows indifferent oranges more than a man who grows good strawberries. It is like what Johnson said of the preaching lady: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." This tendency to let surprise sit in the seat which belongs to judgment is greatly intensified by professional knowledge. The architect is apt to exaggerate the merit of a building placed on a very awkward site, the artist to think a piece of very difficult foreshortening more beautiful than it really is. The public may not be so good a judge either of the building or of the drawing: but, knowing nothing of the technical difficulties, it at least forms its judgment on the true criterion which is, of course, the value of the product, not the surprisingness of its having been produced or the difficulties overcome in its production.

Something of this kind may account for the fact that Paradise Regained has been more appreciated by the poets than by the public. {208} The public finds it rather bare and dry and judges accordingly. The poets know how infinitely hard a task it was that Milton set himself, and find no praise too great for the man who did not fail in it. They see a poem of two thousand lines whose single subject is the attempt of a devil who knows himself doomed to defeat to persuade a divine Person who knows Himself assured of victory to be false to the law of His being. And into this barren theme they see art and nature, ethics and politics, luxury and splendour and empire, cunningly interwoven and

"Eden raised in the waste Wilderness."