Like all who have recently written of Milton—with the exception of Masson—Lowell looks upon him as a being “set apart.” To idealize the author of Paradise Lost is quite as natural as to idealize Dante, notwithstanding their relative distances from us; but in the former case, with Lowell, it is the idealization of admiring awe; in the latter, of tender and exquisitely appreciative love. He does not appear to hold Milton in any degree of the personal affection which he feels for the inspired Florentine, but is constrained to insist that Masson is disrespectful toward his subject, and that “Milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with impunity.”
When Lowell writes of Milton’s literary style, although he does it sparingly, every stroke is a master’s. His estimate of Milton as a man is calm, judicial, and courageous. “He stands out,” he says, “in marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great movement of the civil war, apart from the supine acquiescence of the Restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man.” It is the habit of hurried teachers of our day, who have to teach so many more things than they know, to exalt Milton
“High on a throne of royal state,”
and swing before him the incense of a senseless and absurd homage.
In our school-days most of us were led to look upon the sightless poet as a being more than man, if a little less than God. Virtues, as he understood them, he certainly possessed; but many more virtuous than he suffered ignominy and death for presuming to exercise the very liberty which he grandly claimed for himself, but which, we find on examining his prose, he was dilatory in awarding to others, even in the abstract. These prose writings are at once curious and monstrous, and exhibit the real Milton in a true and natural light, even as Samson Agonistes, Lycidas, and Paradise Lost manifest his superb and supreme characteristics as a poet. In prose he wrote as he thought; in verse he wrote as he could. He was always the rhetorician, making an art of what men of less genius can display only as the artificial; but while his poetry is the complete manifestation of his art, his prose, always written with an obvious and acknowledged personal purpose, manifests himself. His prose works are already scarce; the day is not distant when nothing will remain of them but their ashes, for the types will plead release from perpetuating the hard, angular, stony reality of a man whom taste, if not instinct, yearns to withdraw from our painful knowledge of what he was, and veil him in a radiant mistiness of what we wish he might have been. Nothing better illustrates the idealism with which the pencil of youth paints Milton than Macaulay’s essay, written while he was still a boy, but included with the mature expressions of his manhood. Nothing could more completely pulverize this roseate estimate than Milton’s own works in the days when he wrote for time and not for immortality. No matter what the theme, his prose is always ponderous and polysyllabic,
abounding in magnificent metaphor, violent epithets, arrogant dogmatism, and personal abuse of those who differed from him, of which no trace, happily, remains in our day. The higher the man, the coarser the missile which he hurled at him with a giant’s force. In his reply to Salmasius he addresses that eminent scholar as “a vain, flashy man,” and, in the progress of his argument, reminds him that he is also a knave, a pragmatical coxcomb, a bribed beggar, a whipped dog, an impotent slave, a renegade, a sacrilegious wretch, a mongrel cur, an obscure scoundrel, a fearful liar, and a mass of corruption.
He seems to have lacked both consistency and clearness of conviction. He was apparently incapable of loving woman; he scarcely respected her; and, in his social theory, awarded the sex a place somewhat below that which it occupied under the patriarchs, and considerably lower than that described by Homer as peculiar to the heroic age of Greece. He obtained coy and pretty Mary Powell from her father in consideration of so many pounds of the coin of the realm, at a time when a mortgage had become embarrassing and a daughter was the only available means of extinguishing it. When that volatile young woman, shivering in the shadows of a Puritan despot, found courage enough to leave his roof, Milton was undoubtedly more impressed by her audacity than grieved by her absence. It was his pride that was hurt; and notwithstanding that he had previously advocated social views of the straitest and most conservative kind, he then published his essay on divorce, which, in amazing egotism, in wealth of classical and Scriptural allusion, in looseness of morals, and in equality of social privileges as between man and
woman, is as veritable a curiosity as antiquarians have yet rescued from the monumental mysteries of old Assyria. In politics and religion he was as unsound and wavering as in his laws for society. An aristocrat of the most despotic type, he enthroned learning, and yet permitted his daughters to acquire only the alphabets, that he might use their senses as his slaves. He despised them as human beings, and they, in turn, hated and deceived him, and almost his last words on earth were terrible denunciations of those whom God intended to illumine his home, soothe his life, and deliver his whitened head, already aureoled, to
“Dear, beauteous Death.”
For many years—the very best of his life—he lent himself to the political schemes of Oliver Cromwell, and the violence and coarseness of his pamphlets made him one of the most conspicuous figures of a long series of civil storms; yet Lowell is constrained to admit that “neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics did Milton leave any distinguishable trace on the thought of his time or in the history of opinion.” He considered his ideas and inclinations correct and above appeal, simply because they were John Milton’s. The harshest word which Lowell says of his prose style is his comparison of a man of Milton’s personal character, which was without taint, to Martin Luther, whose writings were a true reflection of their author. Lowell is very gentle in saying of so noted a plagiarist as Milton: “A true Attic bee, he made boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly classic honey.” He did indeed, not in prose only, but in his verse. But we easily forgive him. There are thieves whom stolen garments more become than their owners.