MILTON THE POET OF THE REFORMATION IN the French Academy, that national Sanhedrin of savants and littérateurs, the custom is for each newly elected member to signalize his admission into the company of the immortals by delivering a eulogy upon the academician who has last died and whose place he has been chosen to fill. It is a curious fact that the first published poem of John Milton should have been his "Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatick Poet, W. Shakespeare." The six-year-old boy with auburn curls, who played before the door of his father's shop at the sign of the spread eagle in Bread Street, may possibly have attracted the attention of William Shakespeare, when he made his last visit to London town in 1614, and with Ben Jonson and other jovial spirits passed by the scrivener's door on their way to the Mermaid Inn. We know at any rate that, whether in the theatre or through the printed page, Milton very early heard Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild. He took the torch as it were, from Shakespeare's hand, and passed it on to after times. It is no wonder that one of the first uses to which Milton puts the torch is to light up the portrait of his great predecessor. He tells us that Shakespeare requires no monument of piled stones: Dear son of memory, great heir of fame, What needst thou such weak witness of thy name? The rapt and mute astonishment of mankind is itself a sort of stony monument to enshrine him : Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving, That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die. In this epitaph to the greatest of poets, whose sun had so lately set, we perceive already the signs that another sun had risen in the literary firmament. The new light was no mere reproduction of the old-it had a quality of its own. The world has agreed to call it "Miltonic," in token of its unique force and greatness. I shall make it my first business to define this epithet, and to show the new and peculiar sources of Milton's power. The one word which springs into mind, as we give account to ourselves of the impression he makes upon us, is the word "sublime." But the sublimity of Milton is a sublimity of his own. You cannot explain it as a composite of elements found separately in any past writings, whether secular or sacred. It is something larger and more complete than the broken and jagged grandeur of Eschylus. Milton's sublimity is a new majesty combined with a new harmony. In it you may discern a boom of lofty independence, of supersensual ideality, of free commerce with the invisible world. There is a "linked sweetness long drawn out," but there is also the os magna soniturum, the sustained THE MILTONIC SUBLIMITY 225 utterance of one who seems to be prophet as well as poet, and to repeat in our ears with not unaccustomed lips the whispers of the Infinite. Whether we can put into words the whole meaning of the word "Miltonic" may be doubtful. There can be no doubt, however, that the gift of sublime thought and expression was in this case inborn. The first productions of the poet reveal its existence not so fully, but just as truly, as the last. When he was twenty-six years of age he could describe in "Arcades" such meditations as these: In deep of night, when drowsiness That sit upon the nine infolded spheres, And sing to those that hold the vital shears And turn the adamantine spindle round On which the fates of gods and men are wound. And he was but twenty-one when he wrote his ode, "At a Solemn Musick," in which, not after the fashion of the classic Muse, but rather in language drawn from the treasuries of Holy Writ and in the spirit of Isaiah or of John, he presents "to our high-rais'd phantasy": That undisturbed song of pure consent, With saintly shout and solemn jubilee P |