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On John Milton^1 - Part I.
On John Milton^1 - Part I.
[Footnote 1: "The Life of John Milton, narrated in connection with the
Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his time." By David Masson,
M.A., Professor of English Literature in University College, London.
Cambridge: Macmillan. "An Account of the Life, Opinions, and Writings of John
Milton." By Thomas Keightley; with an Introduction to "Paradise Lost." London:
Chapman & Hall. "The Poems of Milton," with Notes by Thomas Keightley.
London: Chapman & Hall.]
The "Life of Milton," by Professor Masson, is a difficulty for the
critics. It is very laborious, very learned, and in the main, we believe, very
accurate; it is exceedingly long, - there are 780 pages in this volume, and
there are to be two volumes more; it touches on very many subjects, and each
of these has been investigated to the very best of the author`s ability. No
one can wish to speak with censure of a book on which so much genuine labor
has been expended; and yet we are bound, as true critics, to say that we think
it has been composed upon a principle that is utterly erroneous. In justice to
ourselves we must explain our meaning.
There are two methods on which biography may consistently be written. The
first of these is what we may call the exhaustive method. Every fact which is
known about the hero may be told us; everything which he did, everything which
he would not do, everything which other people did to him, everything which
other people would not do to him, may be narrated at full length. We may have
a complete picture of all the events of his life; of all which he underwent,
and all which he achieved. We may, as Mr. Carlyle expresses it, have a
complete account "of his effect upon the universe, and of the effect of the
universe upon him."^2 We admit that biographies of this species would be very
long, and generally very tedious; we know that the world could not contain
very many of them: but nevertheless, the principle on which they may be
written is intelligible.
[Footnote 2: Review of Lockhart`s "Scott." Copyright, 1891, by The Travelers
Insurance Company. Copyright, 1899, by The Travelers Insurance Company.]
The second method on which the life of a man may be written is the
selective. Instead of telling everything, we may choose what we will tell. We
may select out of the numberless events, from among the innumerable actions of
his life, those events and those actions which exemplify his true character,
which prove to us what were the true limits of his talents, what was the
degree of his deficiencies, which were his defects, which his vices; in a
word, we may select the traits and the particulars which seem to give us the
best idea of the man as he lived and as he was. On this side the Flood, as
Sydney Smith would have said, we should have fancied that this was the only
practicable principle on which biographies can be written about persons of
whom many details are recorded. For ancient heroes the exhaustive method is
possible: all that can be known of them is contained in a few short passages
of Greek and Latin, and it is quite possible to say whatever can be said about
every one of these; the result would not be unreasonably bulky, though it
might be dull. But in the case of men who have lived in the thick of the
crowded modern world, no such course is admissible; overmuch may be said, and
we must choose what we will say. Biographers, however, are rarely bold enough
to adopt the selective method consistently. They have, we suspect, the fear of
the critics before their eyes. They do not like that it should be said that
"the work of the learned gentleman contains serious omissions: the events of
1562 are not mentioned; those of October, 1579, are narrated but very
cursorily"; and we fear that in any case such remarks will be made. Very
learned people are pleased to show that they know what is not in the book;
sometimes they may hint that perhaps the author did not know it, or surely he
would have mentioned it. But a biographer who wishes to write what most people
of cultivation will be pleased to read must be courageous enough to face the
pain of such censures. He must choose, as we have explained, the
characteristic parts of his subject: and all that he has to take care of
besides is, so to narrate them that their characteristic elements shall be
shown; to give such an account of the general career as may make it clear what
these chosen events really were, - to show their respective bearings to one
another; to delineate what is expressive in such a manner as to make it
expressive.
This plan of biography is, however, by no means that of Mr. Masson: he
has no dread of overgrown bulk and overwhelming copiousness. He finds indeed
what we have called the "exhaustive method" insufficient: he not only wishes
to narrate in full the life of Milton, but to add those of his contemporaries
likewise; he seems to wish to tell us not only what Milton did, but also what
every one else did in Great Britain during his lifetime. He intends his book
to be not
"merely a biography of Milton, but also in some sort a continuous history of
his time. . . . The suggestions of Milton`s life have indeed determined the
tracks of these historical researches and expositions, sometimes through the
literature of the period, sometimes through its civil and ecclesiastical
politics; but the extent to which I have pursued them, and the space which I
have assigned to them, have been determined by my desire to present, by their
combination, something like a connected historical view of British thought
and British society in general prior to the great Revolution."
We need not do more than observe that this union of heterogeneous aims
must always end, as it has in this case, in the production of a work at once
overgrown and incomplete. A great deal which has only a slight bearing on the
character of Milton is inserted; much that is necessary to a true history of
"British thought and British society" is of necessity left out. The period of
Milton`s life which is included in the published volume makes the absurdity
especially apparent. In middle life Milton was a great controversialist on
contemporary topics; and though it would not be proper for a biographer to
load his pages with a full account of all such controversies, yet some notice
of the most characteristic of them would be expected from him. In this part of
Milton`s life some reference to public events would be necessary; and we
should not severely censure a biographer if the great interest of those events
induced him to stray a little from his topic. But the first thirty years of
Milton`s life require a very different treatment. He passed those years in the
ordinary musings of a studious and meditative youth; it was the period of
"Lycidas" and "Comus"; he then dreamed the
"Sights which youthful poets dream
On summer eve by haunted stream."^3
[Footnote 3: "L`Allegro."]
We do not wish to have this part of his life disturbed, to a greater
extent than may be necessary, with the harshness of public affairs. Nor is it
necessary that it should be so disturbed: a life of poetic retirement requires
but little reference to anything except itself; in a biography of Mr. Tennyson
we should not expect to hear of the Reform Bill or the Corn Laws. Mr. Masson
is, however, of a different opinion: he thinks it necessary to tell us, not
only all which Milton did, but everything also that he might have heard of.
The biography of Mr. Keightley is on a very different scale: he tells the
story of Milton`s career in about half a small volume. Probably this is a
little too concise, and the narrative is somewhat dry and bare. It is often,
however, acute, and is always clear; and even were its defects greater than
they are, we should think it unseemly to criticize the last work of one who
has performed so many useful services to literature with extreme severity.
The bare outline of Milton`s life is very well known. We have all heard
that he was born in the latter years of King James, just when Puritanism was
collecting its strength for the approaching struggle; that his father and
mother were quiet good people, inclined, but not immoderately, to that
persuasion; that he went up to Cambridge early, and had some kind of
dissension with the authorities there; that the course of his youth was in a
singular degree pure and staid; that in boyhood he was a devourer of books,
and that he early became, and always remained, as severely studious man; that
he married and had difficulties of a peculiar character with his first wife;
that he wrote on divorce; that after the death of his first wife, he married a
second time a lady who died very soon, and a third time a person who survived
him more than fifty years; that he wrote early poems of singular beauty, which
we still read; that he traveled in Italy, and exhibited his learning in the
academies there; that he plunged deep in the theological and political
controversies of his time; that he kept a school, - or rather, in our more
modern phrase, took pupils; that he was a republican of a peculiar kind, and
of "no church," which Dr. Johnson thought dangerous;^4 that he was Secretary
for Foreign Languages under the Long Parliament, and retained that office
after the coup d`etat of Cromwell; that he defended the death of Charles I.,
and became blind from writing a book in haste upon that subject; that after
the Restoration he was naturally in a position of some danger and much
difficulty; that in the midst of that difficulty he wrote "Paradise Lost";
that he did not fail in "heart or hope,"^5 but lived for fourteen years after
the destruction of all for which he had labored, in serene retirement, "though
fallen on evil days, though fallen on evil times,"^6 - all this we have heard
from our boyhood. How much is wanting to complete the picture - how many
traits, both noble and painful, might be recovered from the past - we shall
never know, till some biographer skilled in interpreting the details of human
nature shall select this subject for his art. All that we can hope to do in an
essay like this is, to throw together some miscellaneous remarks on the
character of the Puritan poet, and on the peculiarities of his works; and if
in any part of them we may seem to make unusual criticisms, and to be
overready with depreciation or objection, our excuse must be, that we wish to
paint a likeness and that the harsher features of the subject should have a
prominence even in an outline.
[Footnote 4: "Life of Milton."]
[Footnote 5: Sonnet xix.]
[Footnote 6: "Though fallen on evil days, One evil days though fallen, and
evil tongues." - "Paradise Lost," Book vii.]
There are two kinds of goodness conspicuous in the world, and often made
the subject of contrast there; for which, however, we seem to want exact
words, and which we are obliged to describe rather vaguely and incompletely.
These characters may in one aspect be called the "sensuous" and the "ascetic."
The character of the first is that which is almost personified in the poet -
king of Israel, whose actions and whose history have been "improved" so often
by various writers that it now seems trite even to allude to them.
Nevertheless, the particular virtues and the particular career of David seem
to embody the idea of what may be called "sensuous goodness" far more
completely than a living being in general comes near to an abstract idea.
There may have been shades in the actual man which would have modified the
resemblance; but in the portrait which has been handed down to us, the traits
are perfect and the approximation exact. The principle of this character is
its sensibility to outward stimulus: it is moved by all which occurs, stirred
by all which happens, open to the influences of whatever it sees, hears, or
meets with. The certain consequence of this mental constitution is a peculiar
liability to temptation. Men are, according to the divine, "put upon their
trial through the senses." It is through the constant suggestions of the outer
world that our minds are stimulated, that our will has the chance of a choice,
that moral life becomes possible. The sensibility to this external stimulus
brings with it, when men have it to excess, an unusual access of moral
difficulty. Everything acts on them, and everything has a chance of turning
them aside; the most tempting things act upon them very deeply, and their
influence, in consequence, is extreme. Naturally, therefore, the errors of
such men are great. We need not point the moral: -
"Dizzied faith and guilt and woe,
Loftiest aims by earth defiled,
Gleams of wisdom sin-beguiled,
Sated power`s tyrannic mood,
Counsels shared with men of blood,
Sad success, parental tears,
And a dreary gift of years."^7
[Footnote 7: John Henry Newman`s "Call of David."]
But on the other hand, the excellence of such men has a charm, a kind of
sensuous sweetness, that is its own. Being conscious of frailty, they are
tender to the imperfect; being sensitive to this world, they sympathize with
the world; being familiar with all the moral incidents of life, their goodness
has a richness and a complication: they fascinate their own age, and in their
deaths they are "not divided" from the love of others. Their peculiar
sensibility gives a depth to their religion: it is at once deeper and more
human than that of other men. As their sympathetic knowledge of those whom
they have seen is great, so it is with their knowledge of Him whom they have
not seen; and as is their knowledge, so is their love: it is deep, from
their nature; rich and intimate, from the variety of their experience;
chastened by the ever-present sense of their weakness and of its
consequences.
In extreme opposition to this is the ascetic species of goodness. This is
not, as is sometimes believed, a self-produced ideal, - a simply voluntary
result of discipline and restraint. Some men have by nature what others have
to elaborate by effort. Some men have a repulsion from the world. All of us
have, in some degree, a protective instinct; an impulse, that is to say, to
start back from what may trouble us, to shun what may fascinate us, to avoid
what may tempt us. On the moral side of human nature this preventive check is
occasionally imperious: it holds the whole man under its control, - makes him
recoil from the world, be offended at its amusements, be repelled by its
occupations, be scared by its sins. The consequences of this tendency, when it
is thus in excess, upon the character are very great and very singular. It
secludes a man in a sort of natural monastery; he lives in a kind of moral
solitude: and the effects of his isolation, for good and for evil, on his
disposition are very many. The best result is a singular capacity for
meditative religion. Being aloof from what is earthly, such persons are shut
up with what is spiritual; being unstirred by the incidents of time, they are
alone with the eternal; rejecting this life, they are alone with what is
beyond. According to the measure of their minds, men of this removed and
secluded excellence become eminent for a settled and brooding piety, for a
strong and predominant religion. In human life, too, in a thousand ways, their
isolated excellence is apparent. They walk through the whole of it with an
abstinence from sense, a zeal of morality, a purity of ideal, which other men
have not; their religion has an imaginative grandeur, and their life something
of an unusual impeccability: and these are obviously singular excellences. But
the deficiencies to which the same character tends are equally singular. In
the first place, their isolation gives them a certain pride in themselves and
an inevitable ignorance of others. They are secluded by their constitutional
daiuwv from life; they are repelled from the pursuits which others care for;
they are alarmed at the amusements which others enjoy. In consequence, they
trust in their own thoughts; they come to magnify both them and themselves, -
for being able to think and to retain them. The greater the nature of the man,
the greater is this temptation. His thoughts are greater, and in consequence
the greater is his tendency to prize them, the more extreme is his tendency to
overrate them. This pride, too, goes side by side with a want of sympathy.
Being aloof from others, such a mind is unlike others; and it feels, and
sometimes it feels bitterly, its own unlikeness. Generally, however, it is too
wrapped up in its own exalted thoughts to be sensible of the pain of moral
isolation; it stands apart from others, unknowing and unknown. It is deprived
of moral experience in two ways, - it is not tempted itself, and it does not
comprehend the temptations of others. And this defect of moral experience is
almost certain to produce two effects, one practical and the other
speculative. When such a man is wrong, he will be apt to believe that he is
right. If his own judgment err, he will not have the habit of checking it by
the judgment of others: he will be accustomed to think most men wrong;
differing from them would be no proof of error, agreeing with them would
rather be a basis for suspicion. He may, too, be very wrong, for the
conscience of no man is perfect on all sides. The strangeness of secluded
excellence will be sometimes deeply shaded by very strange errors. To be
commonly above others, still more to think yourself above others, is to be
below them every now and then, and sometimes much below. Again, on the
speculative side, this defect of moral experience penetrates into the
distinguishing excellence of the character, - its brooding and meditative
religion. Those who see life under only one aspect can see religion under only
one likewise. This world is needful to interpret what is beyond; the seen must
explain the unseen. It is from a tried and a varied and a troubled moral life
that the deepst and truest idea of God arises. The ascetic character wants
these; therefore in its religion there will be a harshness of outline, - a
bareness, so to say, - as well as a grandeur. In life we may look for a
singular purity; but also, and with equal probability, for singular self-
confidence, a certain unsympathizing straitness, and perhaps a few singular
errors.
The character of the ascetic or austere species of goodness is almost
exactly embodied in Milton. Men, indeed, are formed on no ideal type: human
nature has tendencies too various, and circumstances too complex; all men`s
characters have sides and aspects not to be comprehended in a single
definition: but in this case, the extent to which the character of the man, as
we find it delineated, approaches to the moral abstraction which we sketch
from theory is remarkable. The whole being of Milton may, in some sort, be
summed up in the great commandment of the austere character, "Reverence
thyself." We find it expressed in almost every one of his singular
descriptions of himself, - of those striking passages which are scattered
through all his works, and which add to whatever interest may intrinsically
belong to them one of the rarest of artistic charms, that of magnanimous
autobiography. They have been quoted a thousand times, but one of them may
perhaps be quoted again: -
"I had my time, readers, as others have, who have good learning bestowed
upon them, to be sent to those places where, the opinion was, it might be
soonest attained; and as the manner is, was not unstudied in those authors
which are most commended: whereof some were grave orators and historians,
whose matter methought I loved indeed, but as my age then was, so I understood
them; others were the smooth elegiac poets, whereof the schools are not
scarce, whom both for the pleasing sound of their numerous writing, which in
imitation I found most easy and most agreeable to nature`s part in me, and for
their matter, which what it is, there be few who know not, I was so allured to
read, that no recreation came to me better welcome. For that it was then those
years with me which are excused, though they be least severe, I may be saved
the labor to remember ye. Whence having observed them to account it the chief
glory of their wit, in that they were ablest to judge, to praise, and by that
could esteem themselves worthiest to love, those high perfections which under
one or other name they took to celebrate, I thought with myself by every
instinct and presage of nature, which is not wont to be false, that what
emboldened them to this task might with such diligence as they used embolden
me; and that what judgment, wit, or elegance was my share would herein best
appear, and best value itself, by how much more wisely and with more love of
virtue I should choose (let rude ears be absent) the object of not unlike
praises. For albeit these thoughts to some will seem virtuous and commendable,
to others only pardonable, to a third sort perhaps idle, yet the mentioning of
them now will end in serious.
"Nor blame it, readers, in those years to propose to themselves such a
reward, as the noblest dispositions above other things in this life have
sometimes preferred: whereof not to be sensible when good and fair in one
person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment, and withal an ungentle
and swainish breast. For by the firm settling of these persuasions, I became,
to my best memory, so much a proficient, that if I found those authors
anywhere speaking unworthy things of themselves, or unchaste of those names
which before they had extolled, this effect it wrought with me, - from that
time forward their art I still applauded, but the men I deplored; and above
them all, preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never
write but honor of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime
and pure thoughts without transgression. And long it was not after, when I was
confirmed in this opinion, - that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to
write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem; that
is, a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things: not
presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have
in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is
praiseworthy."^8
[Footnote 8: "Apology for Smectymnuus."]
It may be fanciful to add, and we may be laughed at, but we believe that
the self-reverencing propensity was a little aided by his singular personal
beauty. All the describers of his youth concur in telling us that this was
very remarkable. Mr. Masson has the following account of it: -
"When Milton left Cambridge in July, 1632, he was twenty-three years
and eight months old. In stature, therefore, at least, he was already whatever
he was to be. `In stature,` he says himself at a later period, when driven to
speak on the subject, `I confess I am not tall, but still of what is nearer to
middle height than to little; and what if I were of little, of which stature
have often been very great men both in peace and war - though why should that
be called little which is great enough for virtue?` (`Statura, fateor, non sum
procera, sed quae mediocri tamen quam parvae propior sit; sed quid si parva,
qua et summi saepe tum pace tum bello viri fuere - quanquam parva cur dicitur,
quae ad virtutem satis magna est?`) This is precise enough; but we have
Aubrey`s words to the same effect. `He was scarce so tall as I am,` says
Aubrey; to which, to make it more intelligible, he appends the marginal note,
- `Qu. Quot feet I am high? Resp. Of middle stature`: i.e., Milton was a
little under middle height. `He had light-brown hair,` continues Aubrey, -
putting the word `abrown` (auburn) in the margin by way of synonym for `light
brown`; - `his complexion exceeding fair; oval face; his eye a dark gray.`"
We are far from accusing Milton of personal vanity: his character was too
enormous, if we may be allowed so to say, for a fault so petty. But a little
tinge of excessive self-respect will cling to those who can admire
themselves. Ugly men are and ought to be ashamed of their existence; Milton
was not so.
The peculiarities of the austere type of character stand out in Milton
more remarkably than in other men who partake of it, because of the extreme
strength of his nature. In reading him this is the first thing that strikes
us. We seem to have left the little world of ordinary writers. The words of
some authors are said to have "hands and feet"; they seem, that is, to have a
vigor and animation which only belong to things which live and move. Milton`s
words have not this animal life, - there is no rude energy about them; but on
the other hand, they have or seem to have a soul, a spirit which other words
have not. He was early aware that what he wrote, "by certain vital signs it
had," was such as the world would not "willingly let die,"^9 After two
centuries we feel the same. There is a solemn and firm music in the lines; a
brooding sublimity haunts them; the spirit of the great writer moves over the
face of the page. In life there seems to have been the same peculiar strength
that his works suggest to us. His moral tenacity is amazing: he took his own
course, and he kept his own course; and we may trace in his defects the same
characteristics. "Energy and ill temper," some say, "are the same thing"; and
though this is a strong exaggeration, yet there is a basis of truth in it.
People who labor much will be cross if they do not obtain that for which they
labor; those who desire vehemently will be vexed if they do not obtain that
which they desire. As is the strength of the impelling tendency, so, other
things being equal, is the pain which it will experience if it be baffled.
Those, too, who are set on what is high will be proportionately offended by
the intrusion of what is low. Accordingly, Milton is described by those who
knew him as "a harsh and choleric man." "He had," we are told, "a gravity in
his temper, not melancholy, or not till the latter part of his life, not sour,
not morose or ill-natured, but a certain severity of mind; a mind not
condescending to little things";^10 and this although his daughter remembered
that he was delightful company, the life of conversation, and that he was so
"on account of a flow of subject, and an unaffected cheerfulness and
civility." Doubtless this may have been so when he was at ease, and at home;
but there are unmistakable traces of the harsher tendency in almost all his
works.
[Footnote 9: "Reason of Church Government," introduction to Book iii.]
[Footnote 10: Philips.]
Some of the peculiarities of the ascetic character were likewise
augmented by his studious disposition. This began very early in life, and
continued till the end. "My father," he says, "destined me . . . to the study
of polite literature, which I embraced with such avidity, that from the
twelfth year of my age I hardly ever retired to rest from my studies till
midnight; which was the first source of injury to my eyes, to the natural
weakness of which were added frequent headaches: all of which not retarding my
eagerness after knowledge,he took care to have me instructed," etc.^11 Every
page of his works shows the result of this education. In spite of the
occupations of manhood, and the blindness and melancholy of old age, he still
continued to have his principal pleasure in that "studious and select"
reading, which, though often curiously transmuted, is perpetually involved in
the very texture of his works. We need not stay to observe how a habit in
itself so austere conduces to the development of an austere character. Deep
study, especially deep study which haunts and rules the imagination,
necessarily removes men from life, absorbs them in themselves; purifies their
conduct, with some risk of isolating their sympathies; develops that loftiness
of mood which is gifted with deep inspirations and indulged with great ideas,
but which tends in its excess to engender a contempt for others, and a self -
appreciation which is even more displeasing to them.
[Footnote 11: Translated by Keightley from "Defensio Secunda."]
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