The scheme of "Samson Agonistes" is that of the Greek drama, the only one appropriate to an action of such extreme simplicity, admitting so few personages, and these only as foils to the hero. It is, but for its Miltonisms of style and autobiographic and political allusion, just such a drama as Sophocles or Euripides would have written on the subject, and has all that depth of patriotic and religious sentiment which made the Greek drama so inexpressibly significant to Greeks. Consummate art is shown in the invention of the Philistine giant, Harapha, who not only enriches the meagre action, and brings out strong features in the character of Samson, but also prepares the reader for the catastrophe. We must say reader, for though the drama might conceivably be acted with effect on a Court or University stage, the real living theatre has been no place for it since the days of Greece. Milton confesses as much when in his preface he assails "the poet's error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people." In his view tragedy should be eclectic; in Shakespeare's it should be all embracing. Shelley, perhaps, judged more rightly than either when he said: "The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in 'King Lear,' universal, ideal, and sublime." On the whole, "Samson Agonistes" is a noble example of a style which we may hope will in no generation be entirely lacking to our literature, but which must always be exotic, from its want of harmony with the more essential characteristics of our tumultous, undisciplined, irrepressible national life.
In one point of view, however, "Samson Agonistes" deserves to be esteemed a national poem, pregnant with a deeper allusiveness than has always been recognized. Samson's impersonation of the author himself can escape no one. Old, blind, captive, helpless, mocked, decried, miserable in the failure of all his ideals, upheld only by faith and his own unconquerable spirit, Milton is the counterpart of his hero. Particular references to the circumstances of his life are not wanting: his bitter self-condemnation for having chosen his first wife in the camp of the enemy, and his surprise that near the close of an austere life he should be afflicted by the malady appointed to chastise intemperance. But, as in the Hebrew prophets Israel sometimes denotes a person, sometimes a nation, Samson seems no less the representative of the English people in the age of Charles the Second. His heaviest burden is his remorse, a remorse which could not weigh on Milton:—
"I do acknowledge and confess
That I this honour, I this pomp have brought
To Dagon, and advanced his praises high
Among the heathen round; to God have brought
Dishonour, obloquy, and oped the mouths
Of idolists and atheists; have brought scandal
To Israel, diffidence of God, and doubt
In feeble hearts, propense enough before
To waver, to fall off, and join with idols;
Which is my chief affliction, shame, and sorrow,
The anguish of my soul, that suffers not
My eye to harbour sleep, or thoughts to rest."
Milton might reproach himself for having taken a Philistine wife, but not with having suffered her to shear him. But the same could not be said of the English nation, which had in his view most foully apostatized from its pure creed, and most perfidiously betrayed the high commission it had received from Heaven. "This extolled and magnified nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed, to fall back, or rather to creep back, so poorly as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship! To be ourselves the slanderers of our own just and religious deeds! To verify all the bitter predictions of our triumphing enemies, who will now think they wisely discerned and justly censured us and all our actions as rash, rebellious, hypocritical, and impious!" These things, which Milton refused to contemplate as possible when he wrote his "Ready Way to establish a Free Commonwealth," had actually come to pass. The English nation is to him the enslaved and erring Samson—a Samson, however, yet to burst his bonds, and bring down ruin upon Philistia. "Samson Agonistes" is thus a prophetic drama, the English counterpart of the world-drama of "Prometheus Bound."
Goethe says that our final impression of any one is derived from the last circumstances in which we have beheld him. Let us, therefore, endeavour to behold Milton as he appeared about the time of the publication of his last poems, to which period of his life the descriptions we possess seem to apply. Richardson heard of his sitting habitually "in a grey coarse cloth coat at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, in warm sunny weather to enjoy the fresh air"—a suggestive picture. What thoughts must have been travelling through his mind, undisturbed by external things! How many of the passers knew that they flitted past the greatest glory of the age of Newton, Locke, and Wren? For one who would reverence the author of "Paradise Lost," there were probably twenty who would have been ready with a curse for the apologist of the killing of the King. In-doors he was seen by Dr. Wright, in Richardson's time an aged clergyman in Dorsetshire, who found him up one pair of stairs, in a room hung with rusty green "sitting in an elbow chair, black clothes, and neat enough, pale but not cadaverous; his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones." Gout was the enemy of Milton's latter days; we have seen that he had begun to suffer from it before he wrote "Samson Agonistes." Without it, he said, he could find blindness tolerable. Yet even in the fit he would be cheerful, and would sing. It is grievous to write that, about 1670, the departure of his daughters promoted the comfort of his household. They were sent out to learn embroidery as a means of future support—a proper step in itself, and one which would appear to have entailed considerable expense upon Milton. But they might perfectly well have remained inmates of the family, and the inference is that domestic discord had at length grown unbearable to all. Friends, or at least visitors, were, on the other hand, more numerous than of late years. The most interesting were the "subtle, cunning, and reserved" Earl of Anglesey, who must have "coveted Milton's society and converse" very much if, as Phillips reports, he often came all the way to Bunhill Fields to enjoy it; and Dryden, whose generous admiration does not seem to have been affected by Milton's over-hasty sentence upon him as "a good rhymester, but no poet." One of Dryden's visits is famous in literary history, when he came with the modest request that Milton would let him turn his epic into an opera. "Aye," responded Milton, equal to the occasion, "tag my verses if you will"—to tag being to put a shining metal point—compared in Milton's fancy to a rhyme—at the end of a lace or cord. Dryden took him at his word, and in due time "Paradise Lost" had become an opera under the title of "The State of Innocence and Fall of Man," which may also be interpreted as referring to the condition of the poem before Dryden laid hands upon it and afterwards. It is a puzzling performance altogether; one sees not any more than Sir Walter Scott could see how a drama requiring paradisiacal costume could have been acted even in the age of Nell Gwyn; and yet it is even more unlikely that Dryden should have written a play not intended for the stage. The same contradiction prevails in the piece itself; it would not be unfair to call it the most absurd burlesque ever written without burlesque intention; and yet it displays such intellectual resources, such vigour, bustle, adroitness, and bright impudence, that admiration almost counterweighs derision. Dryden could not have made such an exhibition of Milton and himself twenty years afterwards, when he said that, much as he had always admired Milton, he felt that he had not admired him half enough. The reverence which he felt even in 1674 for "one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced," contrasts finely with the ordinary Restoration estimate of Milton conveyed in the complimentary verses by Lee, prefixed to "The State of Innocence":—
"To the dead bard your fame a little owes,
For Milton did the wealthy mine disclose,
And rudely cast what you could well dispose.
He roughly drew, on an old-fashioned ground,
A chaos, for no perfect world was found,
Till through the heap your mighty genius shined;
He was the golden ore, which you refined."
These later years also produced several little publications of Milton's own, mostly of manuscripts long lying by him, now slightly revised and fitted for the press. Such were his miniature Latin grammar, published in 1669; and his "Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio; or The Method of Ramus," 1672. The first is insignificant; and the second even Professor Masson pronounces, "as a digest of logic, disorderly and unedifying." Both apparently belong to his school-keeping days: the little tract, "Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration," (1673) is, on the other hand, contemporary with a period of great public excitement, when Parliament (March, 1673) compelled the king to revoke his edict of toleration autocratically promulgated in the preceding year, and to assent to a severe Test Act against Roman Catholics. The good sense and good nature which inclined Charles to toleration were unfortunately alloyed with less creditable motives. Protestants justly suspected him of insidiously aiming at the re-establishment of Roman Catholicism, and even the persecuted Nonconformists patriotically joined with High Churchmen to adjourn their own deliverance until the country should be safe from the common enemy. The wisdom and necessity of this course were abundantly evinced under the next reign, and while we must regret that Milton contributed his superfluous aid to restrictions only defensible on the ground of expediency, we must admit that he could not well avoid making Roman Catholics an exception to the broad tolerance he claims for all denominations of Protestants. And, after all, has not the Roman Catholic Church's notion of tolerance always been that which Macaulay imputes to Southey, that everybody should tolerate her, and that she should tolerate nobody?
A more important work, though scarcely worthy of Milton's industry, was his "History of Britain" (1670). This was a comparatively early labour, four of the six books having been written before he entered upon the Latin Secretaryship, and two under the Commonwealth. From its own point of view, this is a meritorious performance, making no pretensions to the character of a philosophical history, but a clear, easy narrative, sometimes interrupted by sententious disquisition, of transactions down to the Conquest. Like Grote, though not precisely for the same reason, Milton hands down picturesque legendary matter as he finds it, and it is to those who would see English history in its romantic aspect that, in these days of exact research, his work is chiefly to be recommended. It is also memorable for what he never saw himself, the engraved portrait, after Faithorne's crayon sketch.
"No one," says Professor Masson, "can desire a more impressive and authentic portrait of Milton in his later life. The face is such as has been given to no other human being; it was and is uniquely Milton's. Underneath the broad forehead and arched temples there are the great rings of eye-socket, with the blind, unblemished eyes in them, drawn straight upon you by your voice, and speculating who and what you are; there is a severe composure in the beautiful oval of the whole countenance, disturbed only by the singular pouting of the rich mouth; and the entire expression is that of English intrepidity mixed with unutterable sorrow."