Hymns devout and holy psalms There are certain constituents of the Miltonic poetry somewhat less obvious, and which go far to explain its power to move and awe. One of these is its intense personality. The subjective element is felt everywhere; the poem and the man are inseparable; the poet puts his own life and history into his verse. The contrast between Shakespeare and Dante in this matter is particularly instructive. Shakespearean poetry is objective -the author is lost in his work. It requires much subtlety and insight to gather anything with regard to the poet's idiosyncrasies from the plays or the poems; and, when we have drawn our inferences, we have to acknowledge that they are unpleasantly precarious. The poetry of Dante, on the contrary, is full of the poet himself; "The Divine Comedy" is the drama of his life; hell, purgatory, and heaven itself, are but the three-fold stage upon which the exiled patriot acts out his thoughts and sorrows. In a similar manner John Milton's personality shines through all his works. Out of his prose and poetry we can reconstruct the whole fabric of his life, as perfectly as if his main purpose had been to write for us an autobiography. Yet another note of the Miltonic poetry is its austere purity. The personality is a pure personality, and therefore the poet may, nay, he must, put it into his verse. Through all his writing there runs a strain of noble pride and self-assertion. Not for nothing had God made him what he was. He knew that he had received the full quota of ten talents. He would not waste his ITS AUSTERE PURITY 227 gifts in riot or self-indulgence, but would husband them, and increase them, by protracted studies and the opening of his heart to influences from above. "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well," he himself says, "ought himself to be a true poem." John Milton's life and work are a great object-lesson to the whole school of thinkers who maintain that the true artist must be a colorless mirror to reflect whatever images the pure or impure world may print upon its surface an object-lesson equally to that other school that regards the sowing of wild oats in youth merely as the gaining of a valuable experience. Our poet never forgot that he was a man, and a servant of the high and holy One. Of his travels in Italy he asseverates: "I again take God to witness that, in all those places where so many things are considered lawful, I lived sound and untouched by all profligacy and vice, having this thought perpetually with me, that, though I might escape the eyes of men, I certainly could not the eyes of God." And so through all his days there was not one line written which, so far as its moral tone was concerned, he or any other pure soul would have wished afterward to blot. The closing words of "Comus" are the consistent testimony both of his poetry and of his life: Mortals that would follow me, Love Virtue; she alone is free : Heaven itself would stoop to her. There is a third characteristic of Milton as a poet I mean his immense erudition. His verse not seldom requires learning to interpret it. The whole mythological world of Greece and Rome was native to him, and he was deeply read in sacred Scripture. The words of John the Baptist in "Paradise Regained" might have been Milton's own: When I was but a child, no childish play We are told that his father caused him to be "instructed daily . . . by sundry masters and teachers both at home and in the public schools." He had a passion for study, and from his twelfth year he scarcely ever until midnight went from books to bed it was this unseasonable diligence indeed that laid the foundation for disease of the eyes and subsequent total blindness. became the most distinguished Latinist at his university. Listen to his "Master's Oration on the Advantages of Knowledge": He No more in the orator than in the poet [he says] can anything common or mediocre be tolerated. . . It behooves him who would truly be and be considered an orator, to be instructed and thoroughly finished in a certain circular education in all the arts and all science. . . I would rather be working with severe study for that true reputation, by the preliminary practice of the necessary means, than hurrying on a false reputation by a forced and precocious style. He finds nothing more nourishing to his genius than a learned and liberal leisure, and thus he praises it: ITS RELIGIOUS FAITH 229 This I would fain believe to be the divine sleep of Hesiod; this to be Endymion's nightly meetings with the moon; this to be the retirement of Prometheus, under the guidance of Mercury, to the steepest solitudes of Mount Caucasus, where he became the wisest of gods and men, so that even Jupiter himself is said to have gone to consult him about the marriage of Thetis. I call to witness for myself the groves and rivers and the beloved village elms, under which I remember so pleasantly having had supreme delight with the Muses, where I too among rural scenes and remote forests seemed as if I could have grown and vegetated through a hidden eternity. His well-to-do and liberal The poet had his wish. father did not force him either into the law or into the church, but permitted him to spend the six years succeeding his graduation in storing his mind with various learning, though he was yet ignorant what his future work would be. It was a hazardous experiment. All depended upon the quality of the stock and his capacity for self-culture. Fortunately, these were of the best. Religious faith constituted a fourth element, more important and dominant than all the rest. John Milton was a profound believer. He believed in a personal God and in man's personal responsibility to him. In the Latin college oration, which I have already quoted in translation, there occurs also this sentence: This I consider, my hearers, as known and received by all, that the great Maker of the universe, when he had framed all else fleeting and subject to decay, did mingle with man, in addition to that of him which is mortal, a certain divine breath and, as it were, part of himself, immortal, indestructible, free from death and all hurt; which, after it had sojourned purely and holily for some time in the earth as a heavenly visitant, should flutter upward to its native heaven and return to its proper place and country; accordingly, that nothing can deservedly be taken into account among the causes of our happiness, unless it somehow or other regards not only this secular life, but also that life everlasting. On arriving at the age of twenty-three he mourns the fact that, while the days are hasting by, his late spring shows as yet no bud or blossom of completed work, and even inward ripeness does not yet appear: Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure even To that same lot, however mean or high, Toward which Time leads me, and the Will of Heaven; All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye. Here is a great mind and a great heart not ignorant of its own powers, yet humbly waiting its appointed. task. To his friend, Charles Diodati, he writes in 1637: What God has resolved concerning me I know not, but this at least I know he has instilled into me a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labor is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proserpine, as I am wont day and night to seek for this idea of the beautiful through all the forms and faces of things, for many are the shapes of things divine. . . But what am I doing? I am pluming my wings and meditating flight; but as yet our Pegasus raises himself on very tender pinions. Let us be lowly wise. It is evident that Milton, at the age of thirty-four, has both the literary training and the devout spirit which fit him to be a great religious poet. But he has not yet received his message. Form is assured, but substance is yet to come. As respects form, he is the product of the generation past-the spontaneity and |