No More Learning

Now the
ancients never could rid themselves of the idea that poetry and
oratory were very close together: and Milton was largely an
ancient. Secondly, let it be considered how little it would take to
turn the passage into a blank verse tirade, not quite of Paradise
Lost quality, but of good Comus type. And, thirdly, let the
positive excellencies be noted. If the word-selection be sometimes
bad, it is not always so. How much better is 'overdated' than
our 'out of date’; how fine the kindred 'overbodying herself';
how happy the reversal of epithet order (always a favourite device
of Milton) in 'a formal reverence and worship circumscribed'!
While, all through, even if half whelmed by the over-sentencing,
there rings the wonderful prose cadence which we never find in
English—not even in Malory-till the early translators of the
Bible got it somehow from their originals and infused it into our
literature for ever.
This passionate, voluminous, eloquent, unequal medium served
Milton, when he did not use Latin (in which his manner was not
very different), throughout his life, and on almost all occasions. An
intenser passion, with a nobler subject,'elevated it into the noble, but
even then not always faultless, style of the great Areopagitica
passages; of the fine prayers at the close of Reformation touching
Church-Discipline in England; of the enthusiastic autobiography
of An Apology [for] Smectymnuus; of some parts even of the un-
fortunate divorce tracts. Less fortunate occasions and a lower
mood degrade it into the 'rude railing and insolent swagger' of
Eikonoklastes, which Mark Pattison, for all his liberalism and his
Milton-worship, describes as 'grossly indecent'; or into the in-
conceivably dreary horseplay—or worse of the Animadversions
upon the Remonstrant's defence. With passion and 'interest' (in
the doubtful sense) almost entirely absent, it composes itself into
the sober, businesslike, yet very far from inelegant, vehicle of the
Education tractate. It is really curious to see how, for the most
part, the sentences shorten themselves, how the composition is
clarified, the epithets are thinned and carefully sifted, in this tract.
And it is still more curious to note the exceptions to this-as in
the sentence of the third paragraph beginning, 'And for the usual


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128
Milton
method of teaching arts,' where the unblessed memory of his tutor
occurs to him, where he loses his temper, his head, his command of
the rudder of style, and once more welters and wallows through
clause after clause of ill-jointed afterthought and ill-selected
abuse.
Lastly, it finds its way into channels again different—those of
the two Histories; and has something of surprise for us still.
Most people who have read it have been more or less fascinated
by the little History of Moscovia. The oddity of it is, of course,
less than it may seem to the modern reader. The seventeenth
century was, perhaps, the most learned of all centuries ; but-
some might say because—it was not largely provided with ready-
digested learning. Men, therefore, had to make their digests, their
conspectus, their abstracts for themselves : and this is a specimen.
It is singularly well done-quite a model of précis, with a little
expatiation and ornament betraying the poet's hand. The sentences
are mostly quite short, but not in the least snip-snappy, The
touches that had struck the writer's own attention are selected
and composed admirably to catch the reader's Manners, inci-
dents, local colour—all are used to relieve the mere gazetteer- or
chronicle-effect; and, where the piece becomes more dramatic and
less summary (as in the rather well known interview between Ivan
the Terrible and Sir Jerome Bowes), the style is perfectly equal to
the occasion. The reason, of course, is that there is nothing in the
subject which is cinis dolosus ; and so the foot never breaks
through the crust, and no 'curling tempests' of wrath and inco-
herence burst out.
This is not quite the case with the much longer and very much
odder History of England, where Milton gives himself the trouble
to tell over again what he well knew (and admits that he knew) to
be merely ‘modern fable. ' His reason is frankly given and it
makes us like him all the better—be it for nothing else but in
favour of our English poets and rhetoricians, who by their art will
know how to use them judiciously' as (let us say, though he does not)
Shakespeare had done in King Lear and Milton himself in Comus.
Here, there was certainly ‘miching mallecho' if wanted-monks
and popes and painted images and other dangerous things. But
either the ‘kind calm years' (he revised it in 1670), or the distance
of time, or the blessed influence of romance, though under the
mask of history, kept the coals from blazing; and the curious
power of dramatic recitative, little associated, as a rule, with
Milton, reappears. In the story of Edwin and Paulinus, he passes


## p. 129 (#145) ############################################

Prose Works
129
>
slightly over the famous incidents of the bird flying through the hall,
and the violent apostasy of the high priest, to dwell on the sign of
the imposition of the right hand. It is to be feared that we can
account for his slighting the heroism of Boadicea 'as if in Britain
women were men and men women. ' But the Caesarean invasions
are told with remarkable spirit; and the use of the historic present
in the account of the war between Brutus and the Greeks is
excellently vivid. Even the curious parallel introduced (in later
editions) at the beginning of the third book as to 'the late troubles,'
though, of course, one-sided, never lapses into the feverish in-
coherence of the earlier treatises; and it remains a strange
Epimethean criticism of the actual facts.
In these later years, too, he composed the longest of his prose
works, the Latin De Doctrina Christiana, which, after lying
unnoticed in the State Paper office for a century and a half, was
printed in 1825 by Sumner, and served as peg, though hardly as
subject, to Macaulay's essay. It is a curious document of its
author's tendency to 'ray out ’nonconformity in almost all direc-
tions and on almost all subjects : being pantheistic in philosophy,
Arian in theology, millenarian in eschatology, semi-Antinomian
in ethics (with advocacy of polygamy) and individualist as regards
church government, the whole, of course, being professedly Biblical
in origin. The recent attempt to attribute to Milton a Latin
religious romance entitled Nova Solyma will hardly commend
itself either to any impartial judge of evidence or to any competent
literary critic.
A complete list of Milton's prose will be subjoined ; and it
seems better to deal with it here in the manner adopted in the
foregoing pages than to tag more or less slight critical aperçus to
the several titles. More emphatically, perhaps, than is the case
with any portion of the work of an author of equal eminence, it is
a by-work. Except Areopagitica, there is hardly a piece of
it that can be said to be, in the common phrase, worthy of its
author, as a piece of literature ; and there is much in it that is
painful, much that is even offensive, to read. Yet it may be
questioned whether, from any literary point of view, one can wish
that it had not been written.
In the first place, it tells us a great deal about the author's
literary, as well as even more about his personal, character; and
it explains to us at once how the strong pleasure which he found
in form and the strong constraint which it imposes were needed to
produce the perfection of his poetic style, and how the volcanic
9
1
E. L. VII.
CH. V.


## p. 130 (#146) ############################################

130
Milton
quality of his genius forced even that constraint to permit the
variety, the pulse, the fluctuation, which made English blank verse
of the non-dramatic type.
In the second, it has given us passages the longer of them well
known by quotation and selection, the shorter constantly, as has
been said, to be found in all the welter and confusion of the mass of
extraordinary beauty, passages without which the crown of English
prose writing would show miserable gaps and empty socket-holes.
In the third, it is the strongest possible historical document as
to the necessity of an alteration—for a time, at any rate in the
dominant character of English prose style. In the other greatest
pre-restoration prose writers—in Donne, in Taylor, in Browne
-the solace is altogether above the sin. In Milton, it is not. Take
them, and you may say “Well, under this dispensation, a great
writer may slip, but look what he can do constantly without
slipping ! ' Take Milton, and the most that can be said is 'Such a
writer could never have written so ill so often under the other
dispensation ; but, at any rate, there are some passages, and those
very precious ones, which he would only have been likely to
produce under this. '
Glances have already been made, for special reasons, at some
of Milton's Latin works, but, when they are taken as a whole, their
interest is very considerable; and it is unfortunate with a mis-
fortune not likely now to be decreased—that few people know them
at first hand. Here, also, there is no comparison between the verse
and the prose-in fact, the latter is worse off even than its English
companion. A Latin Areopagitica would have given opportunity
for that stateliness, which is almost as characteristic of Milton's
prose as of his verse, to show itself almost unhindered. There are
flashes and glimmerings of it in the Latin pamphlets as it is.
Even the dull and discreditable Billingsgate against Morus is
relieved, so far as literary relief goes, by the passage on the
consolations of Milton's blindness and by the encomia on Christina
and on Cromwell. But these things are almost perforce drowned
in matter of a very different quality. The most enthusiastic de-
votee of the classics, if he retains any critical faculty, must pronounce
the usual controversial style, even of Greek, but, much more, of
Latin, to be deplorable; and the comparatively few people who
have studied technical classical rhetoric know why it was so.
The whole thing was conducted on more or less cut-and-dried
rules, which were only neglected-and that not always-by irre-
pressible genius like that of Demosthenes, or by eccentric


## p. 131 (#147) ############################################

Latin Works
131
individualities of late date like that of Lucian. With Lucian,
Milton had nothing in common : with Demosthenes, he had some-
thing, but not enough for the purpose. His models were Latin ;
and not so much the terser and more austere phrases of Tacitus or
the vivid cleverness of Sallust, as the academic and parliamentary
volubility of Cicero, largely adulterated with the ditch water of
many of the renascence Ciceronians. The consequence is that the
compositions are merely large themes, patched together with
commonplaces of the stalest kind. With a perfect command of
such Latin as he chose to use, Milton rarely, if ever, lets himself go
into a sublime or eloquent passage such as those which lighten the
a
darkness of the English polemic. The inability to carry the actual
argument into any equal court is the same, or greater ; but the
purple patches of declamation are rarely present. There is a good
deal of bandying of authority and of wearisome rebutting on
particular points. But, on the whole, the two sentences 'Salmasius
is an old fool' and 'Morus is a rascally and vulgar libertine,'
represent the whole gist of the two Defensiones and their supple-
ments, watered out into hundreds of pages, with floods of bad
jokes, trivial minutiae and verbose vituperation.
The verse, for the most part, is free from this great drawback? :
and, though it has something of the same quality of pastiche, stock
diction is more tolerable in poetry than in prose. Moreover, these
pieces have the distinction of belonging to a body of composition
which was the favourite literary exercise of good wits, and was
cultivated all over Europe for at least three centuries, if not more,
besides that of being written by the greatest poet who ever indulged
in this exercise. Many of them are only schoolboy or under-
graduate taskwork; but some, even of these, especially that entitled
In quintum Novembris, Anno ætatis 17, have interest; and
three of the later, Ad Patrem, Mansus, a graceful tribute to his
old Neapolitan friend, and Epitaphium Damonis, an elegy on the
companion of his youth Charles Diodati, have much more. Perhaps
the unusual opportunity of comparison with Lycidas has somewhat
enhanced the appreciation with which Epitaphium has been some-
times received ; and one may not be quite sure that, if we did not
know that Diodati was really a friend, and King but an acquaintance,
we could discover it from impartial reading of the poems. Perhaps,
the extreme rarity of acquaintance with the voluminous deliciae of
1 One or two epigrams on the abhorred Salmasius and Morus are not important
enough to form substantial exceptions; indeed, a broad, but rather neat, Martialesque
distich on Morus seems to be not Milton's at all, but some Dutchman's.
9_2


## p. 132 (#148) ############################################

132
Milton
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has also enhanced opinion
of this piece among those who are competent to read it, but do not
know much of the corpus to which it belongs. But it certainly
has both elegance and pathos.
What seems to have been Milton's last Latin' verse of import-
ance, though it is not exactly a success in itself, has extraordinary,
and generally overlooked, interest of form? . Ad Joannem
Rousium is an attempt (explained carefully in scheme by Milton
himself) at a Latin strophic ode, in which the most singular
liberties are taken with the construction and correspondence
of the lines and, indeed, with the whole arrangement. His
explanation leaves us a good deal in the dark, and, whereas
he says that he has 'looked rather at a method of convenient
reading than at one of singing on old modes' it seems more like a
sort of musical chase of a chain of motives through variations of
metre. But it is very valuable for purposes of comparison with
the choruses of Samson ; and it could hardly be more so as an
indication of Milton's own interest in metrical experiment.
At this point, we may naturally pass to a general consideration
of Milton's literary form, which, in his case, is almost more im-
portant than in that of any other very great English writer. In
general style, Milton's peculiarity appears, as has been pointed out,
so early as the poem on the Morning of Christ's Nativity: and it
perseveres until Samson. Even the furious welter of the prose
cannot prevent the calm and stately phraseology from emerging--at
least occasionally—the mighty rhythm from subjugating the chaotic
throng of words, now and then. In the verse, the phenomena go all
the other way. It is only on the rarest occasions—when he attempts
humour, or when he becomes simply didactic—that the style is other
than consummate in its own way. To that way, hardly more than
one epithet of praise, in the wider and higher range, can be denied.
Milton's style is never exactly natural; it never has even the
quaint eccentric nature which the conceit of the time sometimes
takes on, as, for instance, eminently in Browne. It is always con-
fessed and almost ostentatious art: art attained, to some extent,
by definite and obvious rhetorical devices, such as apposition; the
old Chaucerian posing of the substantive between two epithets for
the special purpose of drawing attention to some connection or
opposition between the two; the reversal of the order of noun and
1 He has left us a few Greek pieces of no value.
? There is a MS copy of this in the Bodleian which has been sometimes thought to
be autograph.


## p. 133 (#149) ############################################

Versification
133
adjective in the same line, or clause. In his poetry, he particularly
affects proper names of resonance and colour-scattering them over
his verse paragraphs with an effect that is almost pyrotechnical.
But these verse paragraphs themselves are almost the central
secret and peculiarity of the Miltonic manner-serving as a bridge
between his style proper and his versification. It is perfectly clear
that he was dimly aiming at something of the same kind in prose ;
and he sometimes came near it. In verse, he attained it very
early, and perfected it more and more. The thing is not, of course,
of his own invention: it is an inspiration from drama and, especially,
from the soliloquies of Shakespeare. But non-dramatic blank verse
had been little practised by anyone, and the first and chief example
of it, Surrey's translation of the Aeneid, though Vergil gives ex-
cellent opportunity, was not likely to arrive at any such mastery.
The early blank verse writer was too glad to get safely to the end
of his line to think about playing tricks with that line, so as to put
it in concatenation with others. But the dramatist had to do this;
and, in doing it, he discovered—in Shakespeare's case perfectly, in
others less so—the various secrets of the mystery. And the average
dramatist had not only discovered them, but, about the time when
Milton entered upon serious verse writing, had begun to abuse and
degrade the art-making his lines battered deformities and his
verse sentences ruinous heaps.
To Milton's sense of stately order, such things must have been
abhorrent; and his musical training, no doubt, strengthened his
aversion. His first finished poems are in tight, not loose, verse-
the sonnet, the solemn stanzas of On the Morning of Christ's
Nativity, the easy, but fairly regular and uniform, as well as uncom-
plicated, sevens and eights of L'Allegro and its companion. When
he makes a serious attempt with blank verse in Comus, there is even
noticeable a tendency to fall back on the single-moulded line of
Marlowe, accurately constructed in itself and correctly accumulated,
but not jointed, and continued, and twined into a contrasted pattern
of various but homogeneous design. Yet, even here, the power of
his own genius for verse, and his matchless daring in experiment,
introduced variety. And when, some twenty years after, he perhaps
began, and some thirty years after definitely set to work on and
completed, Paradise Lost, he had become an absolute master of
the blank verse line, single and combined.
The exact principles of Miltonic versification, in the epics and
Samson, have been matters of sharp controversy; and, in such a
History as this, it is the duty of a writer to be an expositor and


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134
Milton
2
not an advocate. The various opinions on the subject may be
reduced, with less violence than in some other cases, to the usual
three. The older opinion-long considered the orthodox one and
still held by some, though chiefly by foreign, critics-is that Milton's
blank verse lines are strictly decasyllabic, apparent exceptions
being due to actual elision or running together of syllables; and that,
though it cannot be said that they are all strictly iambic or arranged
in rising stress, variations from this are due only to wrenched accent,
'impure' construction for the sake of preventing monotony and so
forth. The opposite view is that Milton, not more from his study
of the classics than from that of English poets and, especially,
Shakespeare, was fully conversant with the practice, if not the
theory, of substitution of equivalent feet-disyllabic or trisyllabic,
trochee, spondee, dactyl, anapaest—for the iambic; and that he used
this deliberately for the purpose of obtaining varied and concerted
music. This opinion, which is that of the present writer, grew up
slowly during the eighteenth century, but has been increasingly
common in the nineteenth, though not often thoroughly worked
out. Between the two, and held by some critics of great distinc-
tion, is a theory (or, perhaps, more than one) according to which
Milton always intended the strict five-foot ten-syllabled line, but
gave himself certain intricate dispensations, capable of being more
or less rigidly systematised, by which a larger number of syllables
than ten could be written in the line; could (in some cases, though
not in all) be actually pronounced in it; but could be metrically
elided. To put the thing, perhaps, more intelligibly by examples :
according to theory (i) ominous,' when the i makes an eleventh
syllable, and 'the Eternal,' when the is in the same case, should be
pronounced 'om'nous' and 'th' Eternal' and, in at least the latter
case, printed so. According to (ii) ominous' and 'the Eternal'
should be written in full, pronounced in full, and reckoned metri-
cally as trisyllabic feet, or in another notation) as combinations
of two unaccented and one accented syllables. According to
(iii) they should be written and pronounced in full, but the i
and the first e should be regarded as metrically 'vanished. '
Putting aside this capital point, on which the student must
make
up his mind after full consideration of the subject, there are
not a few lines of Milton where unusual combinations of foot or
arrangements of stress give rise to difficulty. On another great
general feature, there is not, nor can there be, any difference of
opinion as to fact; and this is that Milton pays no attention to the
supposed necessity, or, at least, propriety, of putting a pause near
>


## p. 135 (#151) ############################################

Versification and Style 135
the middle of the line, and that his freedom of handling here is vital
to his versification. On the propriety, as distinguished from the
fact, of the variation, such unanimity has not prevailed. The more
rigid eighteenth century critics regarded the central or centripetal
pause as an absolute law, the breach of which was to be justified
by no success of result. Johnson was not quite so strait-laced as
this; but as, with him, regularity of correspondence was the main
article of poetry, he objected to such confusions of the methods
of the poet and the declaimer’; and, consistently enough, disliked
blank verse altogether. It is, at any rate, certain, that it is by
variety of line material (attained by whatever means), and by
further variation of pause, that Milton achieves the extraordinary
freedom from monotony, and the force of character, which dis-
tinguish his verse. And it has been recognised, with increasing
decision, that he does not employ these means in a fashion merely
continuous or strung together, that his verse construction is really
periodic or paragraphic—the sections corresponding in division of
sense and substance, as it were, to long but unequal stanzas or
strophes of verses identical at first sight, but individually variable.
If the reader will compare the sketches of the progress of
English prosody given at intervals in this History; if he will
remember that Milton was a careful scholar and a fluent writer
of Latin verse; and if he will pay particular attention to the
Rous ode in Latin, and to Samson in English-he will not have
much difficulty in appreciating the position of the poet in regard
to quality of versification. So far as Milton's historical position is
concerned, he is almost the central figure in the whole history of
our verse. Brought into definite form as that verse had been,
after two centuries of experiment, by Chaucer; restored and re-
formed, after nearly two more of disarray, by Spenser; enormously
varied and advanced by Shakespeare and the later Elizabethans
Milton found it liable to fresh disorders. He did not so much
directly attack these as elaborate, for non-dramatic poetry, a
medium practically involving all the order and all the freedom
possible in English verse—yet without rime. And, in Samson, he
returned to rime itself in choruses, though not universally or
regularly, but, rather, with an extension of the occasional use
which he had tried in Lycidas.
In the larger sense of style, Milton holds so great a place that
we may almost let the arrangement of this chapter pass here
into a conclusion-summary. He is, admittedly, in the least
disputed sense of that much debated term, 'the grand style,' the


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136
Milton
grandest-styled of English poets. He never, indeed, attains to
the absolute zenith of expression-As does Shakespeare often and,
perhaps, Dante sometimes. He is, unlike them, strangely un-
modern; he has, indeed, it has been quite correctly said,
little even of the renascence about him, except those tricks and
fashions of form which have been noticed. Biblical, classical
and medieval influences almost alone work on him—especially the
former two. Under their joint pressure, he has elaborated a
manner so all-pervading, that, if it were not also great, it might,
or must, be called a mannerism. But it is always a mannerism of
grandeur and never-this is another of the points in which Milton
is unique one of grandiosity. It does break down sometimes,
though rarely, when he attempts humour ; when he lets himself
prose, and so forth ; but, even then, it does not become grandiose,
still less bombastic: it is merely flat and dull or, sometimes,
grotesque. Almost everywhere, the magnificent state and cere-
mony covers and carries off the occasion, the subject, resistlessly,
This manner has some modes and phases which are worth
particularising, especially in the attempt to complete the presenta-
tion in little of the work and figure of so great a poet. One of the
most remarkable of these is the famous ‘Miltonic vague'-the
preference of vast but rather indeterminate pictures, tinted with a
sort of dim gorgeousness or luridity, as the case may be—to sharper
outlines and more definite colours. Another—as it may seem in a
different sphere of thought—is the peculiar moral atmosphere of a
kind of magnanimous intransigeance which pervades the whole.
The common saying that 'Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost' is
merely a way of expressing this wider truth to the vulgar mind.
It is not at all probable that Milton meant anything of the kind ;
according to 'the rules,' a hero ought to be victorious, and Satan's
victory is exceedingly Pyrrhic; according to 'the rules,' he ought to
be good, if not faultless, and certainly Milton did not think Satan
good. But he has made Satan the most interesting person, and
his unflinching nonconformity the most interesting thing, in the
poem. In Paradise Regained, he enjoys a double presentation of
this kind the persistence of Satan, unconquered by past or future
certainty of defeat, and the resistance of Christ, to which Milton's
semi-Arian views must, as has been said, have given a peculiar
interest. As regards Agonistes, the other common saying, that
'Samson is Milton,' contains the general truth again. Samson
is incarnate resistance; he has resisted grace and the Philistines
alike, in the past ; his repentance and atonement consist in re-


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Poetical Quality
137
sisting his father, the chorus, Harapha, the officer, the lords,
Dalila, everybody; and his final simulated compliance is only to
obtain the means of making this resistance triumph. Even some
forty years earlier, the centre of Comus is the invincible resolution
of the Lady; and the real inspiration of Lycidas, apart from the
poetry, is the defiant denunciation-utterly different from the
parallel and, no doubt, suggesting passage in Dante
of St Peter.
Now this pervading irreconcilableness, wherein Milton and Dante,
to some extent, come together again, can only be made poetical by
a style of severe splendour; and it meets this eminently in both,
but more exclusively and restrictively in Milton.
It is almost a necessary consequence of this peculiar kind of
magnificence that Milton has always been more admired and
written about than loved and read, except in his earlier and
smaller poems. Some have been bold enough to say that even
1 Penseroso is generally known only in a few passages of its
brightest purple; and the extraordinary beauty of the latter part
of Comus has not prevented persons who united cultivation with
frankness from pronouncing it heavy. That this is unfortunate
need hardly be said. To begin with, it is a loss, to him who does
not read it, of some of the greatest poetry in the world-of poetry
which scarcely ever declines below a level that most poets scarcely
ever reach. But the loss is greater than this. Careless folk are
sometimes found who decry the historic estimate altogether, and
who maintain that a minor poet of the twentieth century is better
worth reading than a minor poet of the thirteenth, though the
later, for the most part, is simply a hand at the machine which
the earlier had helped to construct. But Milton is not a minor
poet, and his influence is omnipresent in almost all later English
poetry, and in not a little of later prose English literature. At
first, at second, at third, hand, he has permeated almost all his
successors. Without Milton, you cannot understand, in the real
sense of understanding, writers so different as Landor and Tennyson,
as Thomson and Wordsworth. He might walk through English
letters and, like the unwelcome apparition in one of Dickens's
shorter stories, ejaculate ‘Mine ! ' as he laid his hand on rhythm
after rhythm, phrase after phrase, design after design, in poetical
arrangement. Although there was some plagiarism, even from his
early poems, by men like Baron and Benlowes, he was not much
followed immediately ; but, as usual, the long germinating seed
took the deeper and wider hold, and bore the most abundant and
perennial crops. In particular, he, with Shakespeare, maintained
a


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138
Milton
the citadel of true English prosody through all the deviations and
shortcomings of the eighteenth century. With whatever allowance,
in however grudging a manner, the greatness of these two was
always allowed, and could be taken as pattern when the time came.
But this reflected and incidental glory, of course, is not the
whole, or, with most people, the main, glory of Milton. His praises
have been the theme of many excellent discourses ; and it is quite
superfluous, especially in such a place as this, to be rhetorical in
regard to him. But the indication—if only the reindication of
the special quality and quiddity of writers great and small cannot
be superfluous in a history of literature.
Although Dryden was merely repeating the common criticism
on Homer and Vergil in ascribing ‘loftiness of mind’ to the first
and ‘majesty' to the second, and although his claim for a com-
bination of the two in Milton is a sufficiently obvious figure of
rhetoric, yet there was more of his own great critical genius in
the hyperbole. One would, perhaps, rather choose 'variety' and
'nature' for Homer, 'grace' and 'perfection of art' for Vergil.
But 'loftiness of mind' and 'majesty' (of expression, which, no
doubt, was understood) remain true and keep their combination in
regard to Milton. Great variety he has not; in his longer and later
poems certainly not; while the contrast of later and earlier only
supplies it to a limited extent. Although he is never unnatural,
nature is never the first thing that suggests itself in him ; and,
though he is never (except in the rare instances often referred to)
ungraceful, yet grace is too delicate a thing to be attributed to his
work, at least after Comus. But in loftiness-sublimity-of thought
and majesty of expression, both sustained at almost superhuman
pitch, he has no superior, and no rival except Dante. That, despite
this, he has had few admirers out of England and those few (like
Scherer for instance) for more or less special reasons, is not sur-
prising. For, in order to appreciate Milton, it is necessary to
know the English language not merely, as has sometimes been
said, with more than usual acquired scholarship, but thoroughly,
and with a native intimacy. His subjects may attract or repel;
his temper may be repellent and can hardly be very attractive
though it may have its admirers. But the magnificence of his
poetical command of the language in which he writes has only
to be perceived in order to carry all before it.
-


## p. 139 (#155) ############################################

APPENDIX
A CONSPECTUS OF Milton's PROSE WORKS, WITH A NOTE ON THE
TEXT OF THE POEMS.
:
It has been thought that, considering the number of these prose works,
and the fact that there are very few modern editions of them, something more
than merely bibliographical notice and the critical remarks in the text should
be supplied.
1641. Of Reformation touching Church-Discipline in England. (English. )
Generally against Episcopacy: monarchy not attacked, although some
stress is laid on the liberty of the subject. No small part occupied by
instances of bishops being troublesome to rulers.
Of Prelatical Episcopacy. (English. )
Against the patristio arguments for it; James Archbishop of Ar-
magh'(Ussher) being expressly cited in the title, but not definitely named
or very specially attacked in the text.
Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's defence · Against Smectymnuus.
(English. )
Milton's temper here gets ruffled by fighting,' and the tract (in form
of dialogue between the Remonstrant (Bishop Hall] and an Answerer) is,
on the Answerer's side, entirely written in a savage and jeering tone.
Not completely intelligible without the previous documents in the
Smectymnuus controversy.
The Reason of Church-Government urg'd against Prelaty. (English. )
The argument against Episcopacy continued, chiefly on Biblical
grounds. Tone more personal; 'bishop Andrews' and 'the primate of
Armagh' named and both of them roughly handled; Milton's peculiar
form of dialectic sarcasm here appearing, with invective against some of
his poetio contemporaries and exaltation of his own studies and purposes.
1642. An Apology against a Pamphlet call'd a Modest Confutation of the
Animadversions of the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus. (English.
)
Begins with something in the more good-natured sense of its title, but
quickly turns to an attack on Hall more violent than the former, diversified
by fierce vindications of Milton himself, and bitter criticisms of the bishop's
earlier literary work.
(Of Education, 1644, and Areopagitica, same year, are generally accessible,
and are discussed in the text. They are in a more dignified tone of
controversy, and are mentioned here in anticipation of their strict
chronological order. )
1643-4. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. (English. )
The first of the Divorce Tracts, and much the longest. Deals with
the subject from various points of view, and is written with evidently
restrained passion, but without arowing a personal interest.


## p. 140 (#156) ############################################

140
Appendix to Chapter V
1644. The Judgement of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce. (English. )
A sort of appendix to Doctrine and Discipline. Milton here sometimes
translates bodily, and sometimes summarises his author, of whose agree-
ment with his own views he represents himself as having been ignorant
when he wrote the larger tract.
1644-5. Tetrachordon. (English. )
This, more widely known from the sonnet upon it than in itself,
is the third divorce pamphlet and deals (whence its name) with four
passages or batches of passages from Genesis, Denteronomy, the Gospel
of St Matthew and the First Epistle to the Corinthians.
1645. Colasterion. (English. )
The fourth and last piece on divorce, replying, touchily and with
much abuse, to a critic of Doctrine and Discipline.
1649. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. (English. )
Milton's first defence (thongh begun before the event) the execution
of Charles I. Being addressed to those members of the parliamentary and
presbyterian party who had stopped short of regicide, it is, with a few
outbreaks, for the most part written civilly and in a tone of sober argument.
Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels. (English. )
The articles themselves and some documents appartenant are first
printed. Milton's comment is not long; and, like The Tenure, seems to
have been written with some self-restraint, which, however, breaks down
with relatively greater frequency than in the earlier piece.
Eikonoklastes. (English. )
In this reply to Eikon Basilike (the effect of which was greatly
disturbing the regicides) a very few lines at the beginning seem to
promise a continnance of the comparative moderation of the two previous
pamphlets. But this is soon dropped, and every opportunity is taken of
invective and innuendo furnished by a continuous analysis of Eikon,
from the king's reading of Shakespeare and Sidney, through his political
conduct, to his affection for his wife, and the ill-hap of his grandmother;
from his writing Oglio for Olla' to his repentance for the death of
Strafford. Except in the preface, this line of bit-by-bit comment with
hostile discnssion is preserved throughont: there is no summary or
peroration. As to Eikon Basilike, see post, chap. VI.
(It is supposed that, during 1651, Milton may have written some articles
for the Mercurius Politicus which he apparently censured; but they have
never been anthoritatively identified. See post, chap. xv. )
1651. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. (Latin. ) On this and the next three
or four items, see text.
1654. Defensio Secunda. (Latin. ) Followed by Pro se Defensio, 1655, and a
Supplementum.
1658-9. A Treatise on Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes. (English. )
1659. Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings out of
the Church. (English. )
A Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth.
(English)
1660. The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.
(English. )
Preceded by a letter on the same subject to Monck, and in the later
printed form acknowledging that 'since the writing . . . the face of things
hath had some change. Argument against monarchy, with a good deal
about the Areopagus and the Ephors.
6


## p. 141 (#157) ############################################

Appendix to Chapter V
141
6
1660. Brief Notes upon a late Sermon . . . by Matthew Griffith. (English. )
Opens with a reference to the last-named piece, and comments on
the text in the style (a little softened) of the Answer to the Remonstrant
and the Eikonoklastes.
1670. Written at uncertain dates.
The History of Britain. · History of Moscovia. Both English; see text.
1673. Of True Religion, etc. against the growth of Popery. (English. )
Very brief and rather ambiguous in its attitude to “toleration. '
'Popery . . . is not to be tolerated in public or private. But, later, it
seems that Papists may write at least in Latin. '
1674. Letters Patents of the Election of this present King of Poland, John
the third. (Translated from Latin. )
1649–59. Letters of State. (Latin. ) Published 1694.
1655. A Manifesto of the Lord Protector. (Latin. )
1625-66. Familiar Epistles (published 1674), including Milton's college
Prolusiones. (Latin. )
(Posthumous. ) De Doctrina Christiana. (Latin. )
Further light was thrown on the curious history of this after Sumner's
publication of it (see post and ante) by Smith’s Letters of Pepys, David
Skinner, the depositary who handed over the MS to Williamson, having
been one of the diarist's numerous clients.
Besides these, Milton made collections, utilised by Phillips, for a Latin
dictionary. He also issued the following compilations:
1669. Accedence commenc't Grammar (English, but on Latin, not English,
grammar).
1672. Artis Logicæ Plenior Institutio. (Latin, and based on Ramus. )
With regard to the text of the poems, it may be useful to enumerate the
The whole (except the four sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, Vane and
Cyriack Skinner (2), which were kept back for political reasons) was printed
in Milton's lifetime; but the vast majority of the verses did not appear till
after his blindness and, therefore, cannot possibly have been corrected by his
own hand. For, however carefully he may have had read to him his dictated
matter, the fair copies of it and the proofs, is it reasonably possible that
every word can have been spelt to him at length and his alterations (if any)
antomatically and infallibly recorded? The importance, therefore, which was
attached to the censor's copy (see ante) of Paradise Lost, Bk. I, recently
sold by descendants of Tonson, could be hardly more than an importance
of curiosity.
On the other hand, the Cambridge MS, already referred to, is of the
highest possible interest: for, with very few exceptions and those almost
entirely subsequent to the blindness), it is in Milton's own hand. There are
also large corrections in that hand: so that, altogether, it is invaluable—not
least so in regard to questions of versification and spelling. It gives us the
whole of Arcades, Comus and Lycidas; all the sonnets except four (the
'O Nightingale,''On the late Massacher in Piemont,' 'When I consider' and
the one to Lawrence), one or two minor things and the valuable notes of early
planned or suggested subjects, to which reference has been made above.
This is, practically, the only document of the kind that we have for the text
of a very great English poet before the eighteenth century: and it can hardly
be prized too highly.
Perhaps it should be added that, in some editions, translations, not Milton's
own,
of scraps of Latin verse in the pamphlets have been included without
warning.
sources.


## p. 142 (#158) ############################################

CHAPTER VI
CAROLINE DIVINES
In the earlier years of Charles I, when, according to the view
of intelligent contemporaries, there was the rare and happy union
of imperium and libertas and few perceived the approach of the
troubles which should lead to civil war, the English interest in
preaching was, perhaps, at its greatest. The stormiest controversies
of the reformation seemed, for a time, to have spent themselves.
The church of England was in settled possession, with a king who
was her devoted son. The wide interests of the Elizabethan age,
which inspired theologians as well as men of affairs, had tuned the
pulpits to themes of universal concern. As men thought and wrote,
so men preached, of matters beyond the ken of the cloister; and the
massive dignity of their fathers' prose was reflected from the lips
and the pens of those who were set to give God's message to men.
Nothing is more remarkable in an age of fading literary excellence
than the way in which the thoughts and methods of the great poets
and prose writers of the preceding generation were taken up and
handled by the clergy of the national church. The earlier age of
the Caroline divines was especially an age of great preachers.
For the most part, this development was confined to the
church of England. Roman Catholics, obscure when they were
not persecuted, did not seriously affect the national literature.
Their training as theologians was exclusive and foreign. They
did not write English very easily; and what they wrote had
not a large audience. Roman Catholic writers, where they had
influence at all, influenced English authors directly, as the
Spanish school influenced Crashaw and Vaughan. In every
sense, their English writings were exotic. But, apart though
this influence stands, it has not a little interest and charm, as
may be seen in Sancta Sophia, or Holy Wisdom . . . extracted out


## p. 143 (#159) ############################################

Thomas Traherne
143
of more than forty Treatises written by the Venerable Father
Augustin Baker by Father Cressy, first published in 1657.
Augustin Baker was a Welshman, who was taught at Christ's
hospital and at Broadgates hall in Oxford and who, after a few
years in practice as a country lawyer, became a Roman Catholic and,
at the age of thirty-one, a Benedictine. In England and while he
was at Cambridge, he wrote a number of ascetic treatises which,
after his death, the more famous Father Cressy (an Englishman,
and, at one time, chaplain to Falkland) collected and 'extracted'
into a devotional treatise of much beauty, to which he gave the
name Sancta Sophia, a study of contemplation and prayer. The
style is involved, and yet it is not cumbrous. There is a certain
exactness, as it were of legalism, which affects the language with
an obvious restraint. But, on the other hand, there are felicities
of thought, and, more rarely, of expression, which give the book
a definite place in the literature of devotion. Yet it is only
necessary to compare it with the Meditations of Traherne to
see how much the wider outlook of the English churchman has
affected the literary expression given to thoughts that were
common to meditative souls. The matter of Sancta Sophia
is an instruction in the method of meditation, or the prayer of
contemplation, owing a good deal to foreign mystics, whether
orthodox like Saint Teresa or quietist, and, by a systematic rule,
proceeding at last
unto the top of the mountain, where God is seen: a mountain, to us that
stand below, environed with clouds and darkness, but to them who have
their dwelling there it is peace and serenity and light. It is an intellectual
heaven, where there is no sun nor moon, but God and the Lamb are the light
of it.
The nearest parallel, in the English literature of the time,
to the Sancta Sophia of Baker is the centuries of Meditations
of Thomas Traherne? ; yet Traherne, above all things, is an
Anglican. His residence at the university in times of puritan
dominance did not give him any tincture of Calvinism. He
set himself to supply a private friend (as it appears) with
thoughts for divine contemplation, in his Centuries of Medita-
tions, a book which had the strange fortune to remain in manu-
script for nearly two hundred and fifty years. What strikes
the reader most, after the spiritual intensity of this remarkable
volume, is the wide scope of the writer's survey. All heaven
and earth he takes for the province of the pious soul, and the
1 See ante, pp. 42–44.


## p. 144 (#160) ############################################

144
Caroline Divines
:
breadth of his conception of true religion is reflected in the
richness of his style. From a book long undiscovered and
still little known, it may be well to quote a passage which
illustrates the freedom of the Anglican school to which Traherne
belonged no less than the characteristic manner of his own
English writing.
You never ſhe says) enjoy the world aright. . . . Till you can sing and
rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres,
you never enjoy the world. Till your spirit filleth the whole world,
and the stars are your jewels: till you are as familiar with the ways of
God in all ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately
acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till
you love men so as to desire their happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal
of your own: till you delight in God for ing good to all: you never enjoy
the world. Till you more feel it than your private estate, and are more
present in the hemisphere, considering the glories and the beauties there,
than in your own house: till you remember how lately you were made, and
how wonderful it was when you came into it: and more rejoice in the palace
of your glory, than if it had been made but today morning.
Fancy and insight are the masters of Traherne's imagination.
From a well-stored mind, and an experience of men and things
beyond that of his cloistered contemporaries, and equally remote
from the jarring contentions of school and camp, from controversies
about predestination or militia, he looks upon the hidden things
of the soul, and, in them, he sees the image of the glory and
love of God. The style is that of a poet who is also a master
of prose; and there is no monotony in the richness of medita-
tion after meditation on the eternal theme of the goodness and
the splendour of God. Traherne is markedly the product of his
age, in its ardour of expansion. He rivals Jeremy Taylor in
richness of imagery, but has not Taylor's learning. He even
suggests the style of the poet of two centuries later who brought
into his prose the ardour of his poetry, Algernon Charles
Swinburne.
Baker and Traherne may be compared, but, perhaps, as obviously
contrasted. Another contrast is equally significant of the interests of
the age of Charles I. If Roman Catholics lived and wrote apart from
the general life of the nation, no one could say that this was true
of the greater part of that large and ill-defined class to which the
name of puritan was given. The secrecy of Martin Marprelate was
a thing of the past, and, with it, for the most part, its scurrility
and vulgarity. But there were puritans and puritans. The puritan
literature of the earlier years of Charles I ranged, even in its
theological aspect, from the solemn and pedantic extravagance


## p. 145 (#161) ############################################

Richard Baxter
145
of Prynne (notably in Histriomastix, 1632)" through ponderous
verbiage with an occasional touch of humour, like The Dipper
Dipt, or the Anabaptist Duck’t and Plung'd over Head and Ears
in a Disputation by Daniel Featley, D. D. (1645), to the rough
force of Burton and Bastwick, and the mere ribaldry of the verses
and fly-sheets against prelacy such as Rot amongst the Bishops
and Rome for Canterbury or a true relation of the Birth and
Life of William Laud (1641). And, when this is said, there is still
.
omitted the solemn dignity of sermons like those of Stephen Marshall
(printed in A Brief Vindication of Mr Stephen Marshal by Giles
Firmin, 1681) and the impressive mass of the whole literature
produced by Richard Baxter.
To epitomise Baxter would be impossible--it was attempted
for one of his works by Edmund Calamy: almost equally impossible
is it to characterise in brief an author so stupendously prolific.
Reliquiae Baxterianae is a storehouse of information for the
religious and social history of the time, and it bears throughout
the impress of the writer's energetic, restless and masterful mind.
He describes the puritanism of his youth, exemplified in his own
father, as not nonconformist but set in contrast to the loose living
and laxity of the village where, on Sundays,
the reader read the Common Prayer briefly, and the rest of the day, even till
dark night almost, except eating-time, was spent in dancing under a May-pole
and a great tree, not far from my father's door, where all the town met
together;
and his father, who 'never scrupled the Common Prayer,' was yet
called puritan because he read the Scripture when the rest were
dancing, and quoted it, too, to the reproof of the drunkards and
profane. The clergy seemed to him lax, and, when one parish priest,
being old, said the prayers by heart and got two working men to
read the lessons, this employment of the laity was resented by the
scrupulous young man, himself the son of a freeholder. He grew
up with little education save what his own perseverance won, but
with knowledge of life in the country and at court, eventually
becoming a schoolmaster. He was ordained by bishop Thornborough
of Worcester in 1638. Gradually, he adopted views of semi-con-
formity; there were things the church allowed which he could not
approve. When he came to minister at Bridgnorth, he would not
make the sign of the cross in baptism or wear a surplice. Thence,
he went to Kidderminster, and, when the war broke out, he held,
at different times, different posts of chaplain in the parliamentary
1 See ante, vol. vi, chap. XIV.
E. L. VII. CH, VI.
10


## p. 146 (#162) ############################################

146
Caroline Divines
forces. He came to deplore the growth of sectarianism; he worked
as a pastor again at Kidderminster; be passed much time in
country retirement, writing the book which made him famous.
At the restoration, he was first offered a bishopric and, twenty
years later, he was put in prison'; and he lived to see the revolution
settlement. This varied life coloured the writing of one whose
senses were peculiarly acute and whose sympathies were wider than
his intellectual outlook.