CHAPTER VIII.
In recording the publication of "Paradise Lost" in 1667, we have passed over the interval of Milton's life immediately subsequent to the completion of the poem in 1663. The first incident of any importance is his migration to Chalfont St. Giles, near Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire, about July, 1665, to escape the plague then devastating London. Ell wood, whose family lived in the neighbourhood of Chalfont, had at his request taken for him "a pretty box" in that village; and we are, says Professor Masson, "to imagine Milton's house in Artillery Walk shuttered up, and a coach and a large waggon brought to the door, and the blind man helped in, and the wife and the three daughters following, with a servant to look after the books and other things they have taken with them, and the whole party driven away towards Giles-Chalfont." According to the same authority, Chalfont well deserves the name of Sleepy Hollow, lying at the bottom of a leafy dell. Milton's cottage, alone of his residences, still exists, though divided into two tenements. It is a two-storey dwelling, with a garden, is built of brick, with wooden beams, musters nine rooms—though a question arises whether some of them ought not rather to be described as closets; the porch in which Milton may have breathed the summer air is gone, but the parlour retains the latticed casement at which he sat, though through it he could not see. His infirmity rendered the confined situation less of a drawback, and there are abundance of pleasant lanes, along which he could be conducted in his sightless strolls:—
"As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each new thing conceives delight,
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound."
Milton was probably no stranger to the neighbourhood, having lived within thirteen miles of it when he dwelt at Horton. Ellwood could not welcome him on his arrival, being in prison on account of an affray at what should have been the paragon of decorous solemnities—a Quaker funeral. When released, about the end of August or the beginning of September, he waited upon Milton, who, "after some discourses, called for a manuscript of his; which he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me and read it at my leisure. When I set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entitled 'Paradise Lost.'" Professor Masson justly remarks that Milton would not have trusted the worthy Quaker adolescent with the only copy of his epic; we may be sure, therefore, that other copies existed, and that the poem was at this date virtually completed and ready for press. When the manuscript was returned, Ellwood, after "modestly, but freely, imparting his judgment," observed, "Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found? He made no answer, but sat some time in a muse; then brake off that discourse, and fell on another subject." The plague was then at its height, and did not abate sufficiently for Milton to return to town with safety until about February in the following year, leaving, it has been asserted, a record of himself at Chalfont in the shape of a sonnet on the pestilence regarded as a judgment for the sins of the King, written with a diamond on a window-pane—as if the blind poet could write even with a pen! The verses, nevertheless, may not impossibly be genuine: they are almost too Miltonic for an imitator between 1665 and 1738, when they were first published.
The public calamity of 1666 affected Milton more nearly than that of 1665. The Great Fire came within a quarter of a mile of his house, and though he happily escaped the fate of Shirley, and did not make one of the helpless crowd of the homeless and destitute, his means were seriously abridged by the destruction of the house in Bread Street where he had first seen the light, and which he had retained through all the vicissitudes of his fortunes. He could not, probably, have published "Paradise Lost" without the co-operation of Samuel Symmons. Symmons's endeavours to push the sale of the book make the bibliographical history of the first edition unusually interesting. There were at least nine different issues, as fresh batches were successively bound up, with frequent alterations of title-page as reasonable cause became apparent to the strategic Symmons. First Milton's name is given in full, then he is reduced to initials, then restored; Symmons's own name, at first suppressed, by and by appears; his agents are frequently changed; and the title is altered to suit the year of issue, that the book may seem a novelty. The most important of all these alterations is one in which the author must have actively participated—the introduction of the Argument which, a hundred and forty years afterwards, was to cause Harriet Martineau to take up "Paradise Lost" at the age of seven, and of the Note on the metre conveying "a reason of that which stumbled many, why this poem rimes not." Partly, perhaps, by help of these devices, certainly without any aid from advertising or reviewing, the impression of thirteen hundred copies was disposed of within twenty months, as attested by Milton's receipt for his second five pounds, April 26, 1669—two years, less one day, since the signature of the original contract. The first printed notice appeared after the edition had been entirely sold. It was by Milton's nephew, Edward Phillips, and was contained in a little Latin essay appended to Buchlerus's "Treasury of Poetical Phrases."
"John Milton, in addition to other most elegant writings of his, both in English and Latin, has recently published 'Paradise Lost,' a poem which, whether we regard the sublimity of the subject, or the combined pleasantness and majesty of the style, or the sublimity of the invention, or the beauty of its images and descriptions of nature, will, if I mistake not, receive the name of truly heroic, inasmuch as by the suffrages of many not unqualified to judge, it is reputed to have reached the perfection of this kind of poetry."
The "many not unqualified" undoubtedly included the first critic of the age, Dryden. Lord Buckhurst is also named as an admirer—pleasing anecdotes respecting the practical expression of his admiration, and of Sir John Denham's, seem apocryphal.
While "Paradise Lost" was thus slowly upbearing its author to the highest heaven of fame, Milton was achieving other titles to renown, one of which he deemed nothing inferior. We shall remember Ellwood's hint that he might find something to say about Paradise Found, and the "muse" into which it cast him. When, says the Quaker, he waited upon Milton after the latter's return to London, Milton "showed me his second poem, called 'Paradise Regained,' and in a pleasant tone said to me, 'This is owing to you; for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont; which before I had not thought of.'" Ellwood does not tell us the date of this visit, and Phillips may be right in believing that "Paradise Regained" was entirely composed after the publication of "Paradise Lost"; but it seems unlikely that the conception should have slumbered so long in Milton's mind, and the most probable date is between Michaelmas, 1665, and Lady-day, 1666. Phillips records that Milton could never hear with patience "Paradise Regained" "censured to be much inferior" to "Paradise Lost." "The most judicious," he adds, agreed with him, while allowing that "the subject might not afford such variety of invention," which was probably all that the injudicious meant. There is no external evidence of the date of his next and last poem, "Samson Agonistes," but its development of Miltonic mannerisms would incline us to assign it to the latest period possible. The poems were licensed by Milton's old friend, Thomas Tomkyns, July 2, 1670, but did not appear until 1671. They were published in the same volume, but with distinct title-pages and paginations; the publisher was John Starkey; the printer an anonymous "J.M.," who was far from equalling Symmons in elegance and correctness.
"Paradise Regained" is in one point of view the confutation of a celebrated but eccentric definition of poetry as a "criticism of life." If this were true it would be a greater work than "Paradise Lost," which must be violently strained to admit a definition not wholly inapplicable to the minor poem. If, again, Wordsworth and Coleridge are right in pronouncing "Paradise Regained" the most perfect of Milton's works in point of execution, the proof is afforded that perfect execution is not the chief test of poetic excellence. Whatever these great men may have propounded in theory, it cannot be believed that they would not have rather written the first two books of "Paradise Lost" than ten such poems as "Paradise Regained," and yet they affirm that Milton's power is even more advantageously exhibited in the latter work than in the other. There can be no solution except that greatness in poetry depends mainly upon the subject, and that the subject of "Paradise Lost" is infinitely the finer. Perhaps this should not be. Perhaps to "the visual nerve purged with euphrasy and rue" the spectacle of the human soul successfully resisting supernatural temptation would be more impressive than the material sublimities of "Paradise Lost," but ordinary vision sees otherwise. Satan "floating many a rood" on the sulphurous lake, or "up to the fiery concave towering high," or confronting Death at the gate of Hell, kindles the imagination with quite other fire than the sage circumspection and the meek fortitude of the Son of God. "The reason," says Blake, "why Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it." The passages in "Paradise Regained" which most nearly approach the magnificence of "Paradise Lost," are those least closely connected with the proper action of the poem, the episodes with which Milton's consummate art and opulent fancy have veiled the bareness of his subject. The description of the Parthian military expedition; the picture, equally gorgeous and accurate, of the Roman Empire at the zenith of its greatness; the condensation into a single speech of all that has made Greece dear to humanity—these are the shining peaks of the regained "Paradise," marvels of art and eloquence, yet, unlike "Paradise Lost," beautiful rather than awful. The faults inherent in the theme cannot be imputed to the poet. No human skill could make the second Adam as great an object of sympathy as the first: it is enough, and it is wonderful, that spotless virtue should be so entirely exempt from formality and dulness. The baffled Satan, beaten at his own weapons, is necessarily a much less interesting personage than the heroic adventurer of "Paradise Lost." Milton has done what can be done by softening Satan's reprobate mood with exquisite strokes of pathos:—
"Though I have lost
Much lustre of my native brightness, lost
To be beloved of God, I have not lost
To love, at least contemplate and admire
What I see excellent in good or fair,
Or virtuous; I should so have lost all sense."