No more need to be said of sorrow or failure. The rest is a serene and productive old age. Paradise Lost was published in 1667, Paradise Regained and Samson in 1671. Besides these there was, in 1673, a new edition of his earlier poems reprinted, with additions from that of 1645; and many publications of prose works mostly written in earlier years but never printed, such as his History of Britain, and little books on Education, Logic and Grammar. He kept up his strenuous life of study and composition apparently to the end. He is said to have got up at four or five in the morning, and, after hearing a chapter or two from the Hebrew Bible and breakfasting, to have passed the five hours before his midday dinner dictating or having some book read to him. In the afternoon he would walk a little in his garden; all his life a garden had been one of the things he would not do without. Then music and more private study carried him on to an Horatian supper of olives or other "light things"; and so to a pipe of tobacco, a glass of water and bed. He drank but little wine, and that only with his meals. {79} Such a way of life deserved a healthful old age, which, but for that healthy man's disease the gout, he had, and a death such as he had, so easy as to be imperceptible to the bystanders. That was on November 8, 1674. Four days later his body was buried in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where his grave may still be seen; the funeral being accompanied by "all his learned and great friends in London, not without a concourse of the vulgar."
By that time the battle of his life had been won. The astonishing achievements of his last years had more than fulfilled the high promise and proud words of his long distant youth. Perhaps no seven years in all literary history provide a finer record of poetic genius triumphing over difficulties external and internal than these last seven of Milton's life from 1667 to 1674. They had their reward and not only from posterity. There is a still lingering delusion, based chiefly on the five pounds paid for the first edition of Paradise Lost, that Milton's greatness was little recognized in his lifetime. The truth is the exact reverse. He had far more chance of hearing his own praises, if he cared for that, than most of the great English poets: than Keats and Shelley, for instance; than Wordsworth, {80} at least till he was old; nay, in all probability than Shakspeare himself. Which of them heard the most popular poet of their day say of them anything at all like Dryden's famous and generous "This man cuts us all out and the ancients too"? It is not even true that Paradise Lost sold badly. On the contrary, in a year and a half from the day of publication over thirteen hundred copies had been sold, from which the author received 10 pounds and the publisher, it is believed, 50 pounds or 60 pounds. He would be a sanguine publisher to-day who would be quite certain of making in eighteen months the modern equivalent of this sum, say 180 pounds, out of a new epic, even if it were as great as Milton's.
But the money question was not of the first importance to Milton and is of none to us. The interesting thing is the almost immediate recognition of the greatness of the poem. Nothing in the world could be more alien to the tone of the society and literature of the London of Charles II than this long Biblical Puritan poem with its scarcely veiled attacks on the revived Monarchy and Episcopacy and its entirely unveiled attacks on the fashionable men of Belial. Yet it was from the very high priests of this society that the most unstinted praise came. Of its professional men of {81} letters Dryden was already rapidly advancing to the unquestioned primacy which was soon to be his, and to remain his for his life; of its amateurs Lord Dorset had perhaps the most brilliant reputation. It was these two men who, more than any others, made the town recognize the greatness of Milton. Both were as unlike Milton as men could be, and Dryden had just committed himself to a strong championship of rhymed verse as against blank. There is nowhere a finer proof of the compelling power of great art upon those who know it when they see it than the unbounded praise with which Dryden at once saluted Milton. The fact that his admiration at first took the absurd form of turning Milton's epic into a "heroic opera" in rhyme does not detract from the significance of his writing publicly within a year of Milton's death that the blind old regicide's poem was "one of the greatest, most noble and sublime which either this age or nation has produced," and to this he was to add, thirteen years later, the still bolder tribute of the well-known epigram about "three poets in three distant ages born" which gives Milton a place above Homer and Virgil. The lines are in detail absurd; but their absurdity does not destroy the fact that the intellectual life of England was never {82} keener, or more eager to welcome talent in art or letters, than in the reign of Charles II; and nothing is clearer proof of it than the honours received by the rebel Milton from a Court composer like Henry Lawes, a Court physician like Samuel Barrow, a statesman and minister like Lord Anglesey, and a poet laureate like Dryden.
So we may think of him happily enough in these last years. He had now done the work which from his early manhood he had felt it was his task in life to do. When he was not much over thirty he had boldly written in public of what his mind, "in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse and the book of Job a brief model . . . or whether those dramatic constitutions, wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign, shall be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a nation." For the moment nothing seemed to come of these high words; but before he died not one only, but both of his dreams, the drama as well as the epic, were accomplished facts. Paradise Lost, begun as a drama, had become the greatest of modern {83} epics; and the abandoned drama had reappeared in Samson, not the greatest of English tragedies, but the one which best recalls the peculiar greatness of the drama of Greece. Self-confident young men have always been common enough, but there are two differences between them and Milton: their performance falls far short of their promise instead of exceeding it; and neither promise nor performance is marked by this exalting and purifying sense of a thing divinely inspired and divinely aided. Such work can wait, as his did, being such as is "not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine; like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite; nor to be obtained by the invocation of dame memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases."
Now the task is done; and he can sit alone in his upstairs room in Artillery Walk and thank God that in spite of blindness, private sorrows and public disappointments, he had been enabled at last to bear the witness of a work of immortal beauty to the high truth {84} that had been in him even from a boy. So it may have been in the graver moments of solitude; while, as we know from several sources, there were other times, when he would enjoy the companionship of friends and the homage of learned strangers by whom we are told he was "much visited, more than he did desire." The picture suggested to us is that of a man who at sixty-five, then a greater age than now, retained all his powers of mind and much of the physical beauty which had been so remarkable in his youth; who was gracious but somewhat reserved and dignified with strangers; a delightful companion to friends and especially to younger men; full of literature, especially of poetry, and with a memory that enabled him to recite long passages from Homer and Virgil; above all, an ardent lover of music, making a practice, so far as possible, of hearing some, whether vocal or instrumental, every afternoon. His ears were eyes to him; and when he heard a lady sing finely he would say: "Now will I swear this lady is handsome." All kinds of music, and not only the severer, were delightful to the "organ-voice of England."
That is not the least interesting thing about him. The greatest of England's Puritans {85} was also the greatest of her artists. He had nothing in him of the morbid scrupulosity which is such an inhuman feature in French Jansenism and some of the English sects. His was a large nature which demanded a free expansion of life. Lonely figure as he is in our literary history, with no real predecessors or followers, his mighty arch yet bridges the gulf between Elizabeth and the Revolution, and is of nearer or less distant kin to Shakspeare than to Pope. His prose is the swan song of the old eloquence, as inspired and as confused as an oracle. To read it when it is at its best is to soar on wings through the empyrean and despise Swift and Addison walking in neat politeness on the pavement. There as everywhere, in his verse, in his character, in his mind, in his life, he has the strength and the weakness of an aristocrat. The youth who in his Cambridge days was "esteemed a virtuous person yet not to be ignorant of his parts" did not belie the opinion formed of him in either of those respects. His Republicanism was of the proud Roman sort, and at least as near Coriolanus as Gracchus; a boundless faith in the State and a boundless desire to spend and be spent in its service, a total and scornful indifference to the opinions of all {86} those, though they might be five-sixths of the nation, who did not desire to be served in the way which he had decided to be for their good. The modern way of deciding matters of State by counting heads may very likely be the best of many unsatisfactory ways of accomplishing a very difficult business; but it has always been peculiarly exasperating to men of genius who see their way plainly and cannot understand why a million blind men are to keep them out of it. Milton liked the voice of the majority well enough when he could plead it against Charles I; but when he found it calling for Charles II he treated it as a mere impertinent absurdity; the vain babble of a "misguided and abused multitude" with whom wise men have nothing to do except to keep them in their place. And it is in the latter attitude that he is most really himself. His is, of course, an aristocracy of mind and character, not of birth and wealth; but the self-sufficient scorn which was almost a virtue in Aristotle's eyes, and is in ours the besetting sin of even the noblest of aristocrats, is too frequent a note in all his prose, and even in his poetry; and it is sometimes poured out upon those who are fitter subjects for tenderness than for contempt. One can scarcely imagine a child {87} or an ignorant man being quite at ease in Milton's company.
But these are the penalties that greatness has too often to pay for being itself. So long as we remain human beings and not divine, it will be found hard to unite humility, ease of manner, and the glad sufferance of fools with a mind struggling in a storm of sublime thoughts, with powers that are and know themselves to be far above those of ordinary men. It will never be easy for men of supreme genius to behave to their inferiors as if they were their equals. But that is not the side of Milton of which we ought to think most often now. It is more just as well as more merciful to him, and it is of more use to ourselves, to fix our eyes on his strength, and not on the weakness that more or less inevitably accompanied it. The ancients admired strength more than the moderns have, at least until lately. But no one can refuse to admire such strength as Milton's, so continuous, so triumphant over exceptional obstacles, so disdainful of all petty or personal ends. There is a majesty about it to which one scarcely knows any real parallel. Strength implies purpose and art implies unity of conception; the instinct of art was only less strong in Milton than the resolute will; so that it {88} is not surprising that scarcely any life has such unity as his. It is itself a perfect work of art. If we put aside, as we may fairly, the partial political inconsistencies, the rest is absolutely of one piece; a great building, nobly planned from the beginning and nobly executed to the last harmonious detail of the original design. We men are, most of us, weak creatures who accomplish but the tiniest fragments of even such poor designs as we make for our lives. There is something that uplifts us in the spectacle of the triumphant completion of so great a plan as the life of Milton. We are exalted by the thought that, after all, we are of the same flesh and blood, nay, even of the same breed, as this wonderful man. To read the Paradise Lost is to realize, in the highest degree, how the poet's imagination can impose a majestic order on the tumultuous confusion of human speech and knowledge. To read its author's life is to realize, with equally exalting clearness, how a strong man's will can so victoriously mould a world of adverse circumstances that affliction, defeat—nay, even the threatening shadow of death itself—are made the very instruments by which he becomes that which he has, from the beginning of his years, chosen for himself to be.
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