120 Milton's Sonnets [1642-58 yet more certain guide, and by the intellectual and aristocratic love of order. And the passion is increased by the fact that many of these pamphlets are strongly autobiographical. The Areopagitica was written in order to facilitate the publication of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, which in its turn was written (whether Masson's later theory of its date be correct or not) because of the author's personal sufferings in wedlock sufferings, if this theory be indeed correct, sufficient of themselves to account for his mainly Hebraic view of woman. The aspiration, therefore, is never feigned. Milton speaks from his heart of hearts, his rare spirit elevated with conscious superiority to time-servers, slaves, demagogues and fools, stung by personal griefs and inflamed with a passion for freedom and order; and his prose is typical of his age age of vast ideals and makeshift practice. an If it is impossible to read Milton's prose without as much pain and disappointment as pleasure, it is also impossible not to realise that its whole effect was greatly for the good of English prose. His lowest vituperation, hardly less than his loftiest flights, helped to stretch the capacity of the tongue; and the application of Milton's scholarship to his own language resulted in the fortifying and enriching of it for the benefit of those that came after. In the twenty years of battle, almost the only poetry produced by him consists of a few sonnets; not founded, like those of the Elizabethans, on accepted conceits and fashionable ardours, but struck out from the poet's heart. Perhaps for the first time in English literature we find the sonnet used for an expression of genuine personal feeling which owed nothing to Italian or French originals; Milton's sonnets were written not because the poet would, but because he must; and no more passionate or truly lyrical sonnets are to be found in the language. And, when the battle was over and the cause practically lost, the poet returned, old, blind and unhappy, to the work to which he believed himself dedicated. The twenty years had left their mark. If there is much of the poet in the politician and theologian, there is a great deal of the theologian in the poet. It is a useless but fascinating task to speculate what the great epic or drama would have been like, had Milton produced it ten years earlier, after years of peace and retirement. and retirement. One thing is certain: that the poem would have lacked certain priceless touches of self-revelation. The best-known passage in Paradise Lost is that in which the poet speaks directly of his own blindness (III. 1-55); On the other hand, it is easy to imagine that the poem, whether epical or dramatic, historical or sacred, would have been a more human poem. Aristocratic and aloof, "nice of nature, honestly haughty and self-esteeming" as Milton had always been, he found himself between 1658 and 1663 more out of sympathy with the world about him than he had been before. The principles that were the passion of his life were denied; he was blind, poor, surrounded by enemies and, during part of the time, in 1667] Paradise Lost 121 personal danger. It is not surprising that, in addition to some outbreaks of bitterness, the poem shows an increase, an excess, of that detachment from the affairs of common humanity which had always been a feature of his sublime mind. Chosen many years earlier for the very reason that it relieved him of the necessity of dramatising, of characterising, men and women, his subject now formed at once a refuge from an overwhelming disappointment and a means of expressing his own exaltation above the study of his worthless fellow men. At the same time, it may well seem to the modern reader to be more aloof from the concerns of humanity than it seemed to Milton. If he had rejected the idea of an Arthurian or other legendary subject in favour of a Scriptural, it was because the legends, even history itself, had less of actuality, of literal truth and of human moment, than the subject of Paradise Lost. To Milton, his angels and his demons were not only eternally, essentially x true, but more exactly and literally true than King Arthur. He took the Bible narrative and enlarged it, supplying nothing from uninspired sources but the imagery of his poem and such names and figures as were regarded by himself and his times as essentially linked with eternal truth by being personally existent sources of error and opposition. (Criticism has succeeded in discovering only a single passage where Milton represents an incident in his story otherwise than as recorded in the Bible; and his authority in that case (IX. 179-191, and 494 8qq.) is the Book of Wisdom. Though to-day, therefore, the poem is read mainly by scholars, who admire its learning, its technical beauties, and the constant stream of classical allusion which gives a deeper meaning to every line, and by such classes as the Russian peasants, to whom its story is still literally true and capable of being illustrated by flaming woodcuts, it is possible to regard Paradise Lost as more remote from the concerns of common humanity than it was. It contains no human sweetness, no charity, no love. Whatever of those elements there may have been in a man austere and sublime from youth, twenty years of pamphleteering, together with his private sorrows and the rejection of his ideals, had killed in him. The world of chivalry had passed for ever. Woman was no longer the lodestar, but the source of error; and man no longer the lord of the world, but a traitor to his own greatness. The voice is the voice of a man defeated. But to Milton, his contemporaries, and his successors for some generations, it seemed that Paradise Lost stood not only for an expression of the eternal truth, of matters of supreme and eternal moment to mankind, but for a story of the warfare between combatants, all of whom were perfectly familiar and personally existent beings. That the story should be presented with all the learning at the poet's command was in accordance not only with Milton's exalted idea of the office of poetry, but with the constant humanist element in him. Aspiring to the expression of thoughts and truths vaster than any that poetry had yet dealt with, he lavished on his poem all the knowledge, 122 Paradise Regained [1671 the accomplishment, and the beauty, that he had to bestow. But the humanist in him was not now, as in the days of Lycidas, the master of the Calvinistic theologian. Not only in the doctrine of victory over evil by force, and the passages in which the spirit of the war still rings, may we trace the influence of the twenty intervening years. Setting out to place on record, as it were, as much of the eternal truth about God, the Devil, and Man as his poem could contain, in the face of an age which threatened already to forget or to deny that truth, Milton was led into regions of disquisition outside the scope of epical poetry proper. Paradise Lost is the last and belated voice of a great age that was gone. It gathers up all the idealism, all the poetic labours, all and far more than all the learning of the Elizabethans; it takes the instru ment which from the days of Surrey onwards had grown slowly towards perfection, and rescues it from misuse in order to employ it on greater themes than it had ever known. If the debt of the poem to the Renais sance is great, its debt to the Reformation is hardly less great, though it contains in it the seeds of decay. The spiritual scope of the poem could only be commanded by the choicest of the minds which were able to understand and assimilate all that was vital in the Genevan doctrinethe realisation of the justice and might of God and His direct concern with the affairs of man; the malignity and persistence of the Powers of Evil; the vastness of the scheme in which man is a minute, but responsible and therefore important, element. Of the world into which the poem was born, it shows no impress, though here and there a bitter reference recalls it. The nature of that world will be seen shortly; it was a world in which Calvinism was, except for an inarticulate remnant, as dead as the tradition of the English Renaissance. That the poem was read, we know; and it is to Dryden's honour that he saw its merit. But, so far as actual effect went, it fell on deaf ears. For its public appreciation, Paradise Lost had to wait not only till the Revolution but even later, till Addison, the mouthpiece of the greatly changed party of the Whigs, expounded such of its beauties as he and his age could grasp. Paradise Lost, if Milton's greatest, was not his last message to the faithful remnant and the host of foes that surrounded them. Paradise Regained, his own favourite, and Samson Agonistes, published together in one volume, followed. And it is difficult not to see in these two very different works a kind of alternative suggested to the losing side. Paradise Regained, a "poets' poem," has been even less widely read, but more enthusiastically admired by a few, than Paradise Lost. Its severity is greater, its display of imagination, learning, and poetic adornment less; its nakedness being partly perhaps a protest against the false poetry, as Milton considered it, in fashion during his later years, and partly due to a feeling that the word of truth was sufficient of itself. Paradise Regained has, however, a unity and a closeness of form that have induced Wordsworth and Coleridge, among others, to rank it higher ļ 1671] Samson Agonistes 123 than any other of Milton's poems. Its message is one of humility and hope, of a peaceful expectation of release from the bondage of evil. The message of Samson Agonistes is very different. In adopting the dramatic form and modelling his tragedy on Greek lines, Milton was only carrying into execution an idea that had possessed him from his earliest days. Since his return from Italy, the views of the author of the Sonnet on Shakespeare, of Arcades and of Comus, with regard to the acted drama had undergone a change, an approximation to the views of Histriomastix, which may be noticed in the reference to Shakespeare in Eikonoklastes (1649) and even earlier. He had rejected the dramatic form for Paradise Lost, influenced, no doubt, to some extent by the discredit into which the theatre had fallen, as well as by his sense of poetic fitness. But he had retained his admiration of the dramatic form of tragedy as "the gravest, moralest and most profitable." Had the play been written in his youth, there would have been, perhaps, no need for an apology. To Samson Agonistes he prefixed an essay of that sort of Dramatic Poetry called Tragedy, partly in order to justify his choice of form to those remaining Puritans who might not grasp the distinction between the acted and the unactable drama; and partly to protest against what he held to be the lower kind, which intermixed "comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity...corruptly to gratify the people." If the simplicity of Paradise Regained is a rejection of the Restoration ideal and practice of poetry, it is also perhaps a rejection of the Spenserian. It is impossible not to see in Samson' Agonistes a complete rejection of Elizabethan tragedy. The play, then, is a tragedy on the Greek lines; it has been accused of lacking strength of design and vigour of handling. Read in the light of Milton's life and times, it becomes the most passionately personal expression he has left. Of direct symbolism the play contains much. The Philistines have triumphed over the chosen people; Samson is blind and at the mercy of his foes. Moreover, his chief fault is his marriage with a Philistine woman; and there can be no doubt that to some extent Dalila stands for Milton's first wife, Mary Powell, and that Samson's self-reproaches addressed to the Chorus and to Manoah and his scene with Dalila represent a recrudescence of the old wound. The Chorus, indeed, that follows the scene between Samson and Dalila is taken almost literally from the pamphlets on divorce. In spite of the final words of the Chorus, the burden of the play is no message of resignation or patience. The prophet once more lifts up his voice to denounce, not only the victorious enemy but the half-hearted of his own side; to draw a picture of the doom awaiting the oppressor; almost to advise a last desperate struggle. The play and poem issued in one volume represent what may be supposed to have been Milton's two main moods during the last years of his life: violent indignation, reaching almost to despair, and a withdrawal from the memories of the past, 124 The age succeeding Milton [1660-88 and from the hateful present which he could not see, into the inner world of his genius and his religion. The tragedy that was then occupying the theatres was of a very different kind; but before it is examined the characteristics of the age as a whole may be briefly noted. In the age of Milton men had first fought with sword and pen for their ideals, and afterwards tried in many ways to find practical expression for them; in the age of Dryden, the men of ideals were silent, and the defeated party had returned to prominence, some of them weary of exile and poverty, others of an order of things which had discouraged the decoration of life. Between the two periods comes one of the sharpest divisions in the history of arts and manners. It was natural that there should be among the Royalists a reaction in favour of pleasure too strong for moderation and fine taste. The ideals, again, that had sought for expression in revolt had sought for it unsuccessfully, and the failure disposed men against ideals of any kind and in favour, rather, of ease and security. And, in the third place, the years of Puritan rule had effected so sharp and complete a cleavage between what we may call the age of the English Renaissance and the age succeeding them, that the nation found itself, in matters of art and literature, beginning afresh, with no living or continuous standard of taste for reference. We have seen the significant change of Milton's attitude to Shakespeare; by the time of the Restoration the spirit of the Elizabethan world was completely dead, and the only use of the Elizabethans which we find amounts practically to parody. The period, then, was one of low ideals; it was one in which the mind, starting anew, set to work to learn over again the world in which it found itself; it was one in which material aims and pleasures, things of certain if small return, were placed in the foreground; and it was one which, feeling the necessity of a new technique for the expression of its thoughts and desires, chose its own models and developed them according to its own needs. We have passed into a prosaic, a curious, a materialist, and an experimental period. For something of the temper of the times, no doubt, Charles II in person was responsible. Charles was a man, as the epitaph ascribed to Rochester, and the information given by Pepys, Hamilton and others imply, of sound sense, low ideals, and shrewd taste, imbued with French feeling in matters of literature, and preferring wit to aspiration. His age is the age of the heroic drama —an attempt to nationalise an exotic; of the comedy of wit and manners and the death of romantic comedy; of the foundation of the Royal Society, of curiosity about natural phenomena, and of such curiosity about the arts as may be found in Evelyn's Sculptura, that strange book which not only deals with the minutiae of processes, but attempts to link up the arts and sciences in a "philosophy" which was the prominent need of the age. Later come the philosophy of Locke, a patient investigation of the actual facts of |