CHAPTER XIII. PARADISE LOST-PARADISE REGAINED-SAMSON AGONISTES. "MANY men of forty," it has been said, "are dead poets ; " and it might seem that Milton, Latin secretary, and party pamphleteer, had died to poetry about the fatal age. In 1645 when he made a gathering of his early pieces for the volume published by Humphry Moseley, he wanted three years of forty. That volume contained, besides other things, Comus, Lycidas, L'Allgero, and II Penseroso; then, when produced, as they remain to this day, the finest flower of English poesy. But, though thus like a wary husbandman, garnering his sheaves in presence of the threatening storm, Milton had no intention of bidding farewell to poetry. the contrary, he regarded this volume only as first-fruits, an earnest of greater things to come. On The ruling idea of Milton's life, and the key to his mental history, is his resolve to produce a great poem. Not that the aspiration in itself is singular, for it is probably shared by every young poet in his turn. As every clever school-boy is destined by himself or his friends to become Lord Chancellor, and every private in the French army carries in his haversack the baton of a marshal, so it is a necessary ingredient of the dream on Parnassus, that it should embody itself in a form of surpassing brilliance. What distinguishes Milton from the crowd of young ambition, "audax juventa," is the constancy of resolve. He not only nourished through manhood the dream of youth, keeping under the importunate instincts which carry off most ambitions in middle life into the pursuit of place, profit, honour-the thorns which spring up and smother the wheat-but carried out his dream in its integrity in old age. He formed himself for this achievement, and for no other. Study at home, travel abroad, the arena of political controversy, the public service, the practice of the domestic virtues, were so many parts of the schooling which was to make a poet. The reader who has traced with me thus far the course of Milton's mental development will perhaps be ready to believe that this idea had taken entire possession of his mind from a very early The earliest written record of it is of date 1632, in Sonnet II. This was written as early as the poet's twenty-third year; and in these lines the resolve is uttered, not as then just conceived, age. but as one long brooded upon, and its non-fulfilment matter of selfreproach. If this sonnet stood alone, its relevance to a poetical, or even a literary performance, might be doubtful. But at the time of its composition it is enclosed in a letter to an unnamed friend, who seems to have been expressing his surprise that the Cambridge B. A was not settling himself, now that his education was complete, to a profession. Milton's apologetic letter is extant, and was printed by Birch in 1738. It intimates that Milton did not consider his education, for the purposes he had in view, as anything like complete. It is not "the endless delight of speculation," but "a religious advisement how best to undergo; not taking thought of being late, so it give advantage to be more fit." He repudiates the love of learning for its own sake; knowledge is not an end, it is only equipment for performance. There is here no specific engagement as to the nature of the performance. But what it is to be, is suggested by the enclosure of the "Patriarchian stanza (i. e., the sonnet). This notion that his life was, like Samuel's, a dedicated life, dedicated to a service which required a long probation, recurs again more than once in his writings. It is emphatically repeated, in 1641, in a passage of the pamphlet No. 4: "None hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit none shall—that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and full license will extend. Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader that for some_few years yet I may go on trust with him towards the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amorist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the life of whom he pleases. To this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs. Till which in some measure be compassed, at mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to sustain this expectation, from as many as are not loth to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges I can give them." In 1638, at the age of nine and twenty Milton has already determined that this lifework shall be a poem, an epic poem, and that its subject shall probably be the Arthurian legend. "Si quando indigenas revocabo in carmina reges, "May I find such a friend . . . when, if ever, I shall revive in song our native princes, and among them Arthur moving to the fray even in the nether world, and when I will, if only God's Spirit aid me, break the Saxon bands before our Britons' prowess." The same announcement is reproduced in the Epitaphium Damonis, 1639, and, in Pamphlet No. 4, in the often quoted words: "Perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, composed at under twenty, or thereabout, met with acceptance, I began to assent to them (the Italians) and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting which nows grows daily upon me, that my labour and intent study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die." Between the publication of the collected Poems in 1645, and the appearance of Paradise Lost in 1667, a period of twenty-seven years, Milton gave no public sign of redeeming this pledge. He seemed to his cotemporaries to have renounced the follies of his youth, the gew-gaws of verse, and to have sobered down into the useful citizen. "Le bon poëte," thought Malherbe, "n'est pas plus utile à l'état qu'un bon joueur de quilles." Milton had postponed his poem, in 1641, till "the land had once enfranchised herself from this impertinent yoke of prelatry, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish." Prelatry was swept away, and he asked for further remand on account of the war. Peace was concluded, the country was settled under the strong government of a Protector, and Milton's great work did not appear. It was not even preparing. He was writing not poetry but prose, and that most ephemeral and valueless kind of prose, pamphlets, extempore articles on the topics of the day. He poured out reams of them, in simple unconsciousness that they had no influence whatever on the current of events. Nor was it that, during these five-and-twenty years, Milton was meditating in secret what he could not bring forward in public; that he was only holding back from publishing, because there was no public ready to listen to his song. In these years Milton was neither writing nor thinking poetry. Of the twenty-four sonnets, indeed-twenty-four, reckoning the twenty-lined piece, "The forcers of conscience," as a sonnet-eleven belong to this period. But they do not form a continuous series, such as do Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, nor do they evince a sustained mood of poetical meditation. On the contrary, their very force and beauty consist in their being the momentary and spontaneous explosion of an emotion welling up from the depths of the soul, and forcing itself into metrical expression, as it were, in spite of the writer. While the first eight sonnets, written before 1645, are sonnets of reminiscence and intention, like those of the Italians, or the ordinary English sonnnet, the eleven sonnets of Milton's silent period -from 1645 to 1658—are records of present feeling kindled by actual facts. In their naked, unadorned simplicity of language, they may easily seem, to a reader fresh from Petrarch, to be homely and prosaic. Place them in relation to the circumstance on which each piece turns, and we begin to feel the superiority for poetic effect of real emotion over emotion meditated and revived. His tory has in it that which can touch us more abidingly than any fiction. It is this actuality which distinguishes the sonnets of Milton from any other sonnets. Of this difference Wordsworth was conscious when he struck out the phrase, "In his hand the thing became a trump." Macaulay compared the sonnets in their majestic severity to the collects. They remind us of a Hebrew psalm, with its undisguised outrush of rage, revenge, exultation, or despair, where nothing is due to art or artifice, and whose poetry is the expression of the heart, and not a branch of literature. It is in the sonnets we most realise the force of Wordsworth's image "Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea." We are not then to look in the sonnets for latent traces of the suspended poetic creation. They come from the other side of Milton's nature, the political, not the artistic. They are akin to the prose pamphlets, not to Paradise Lost. Just when the sonnets end, the composition of the epic was taken in hand. The last of the sonnets (23 in the ordinary numeration) was written in 1658; and it was to the same year that our authority, Aubrey-Phillips, refers his beginning to occupy himself with Paradise Lost. He had by this time settled the two points about which he had been long in doubt, the subject and the form. Long before bringing himself to the point of composition, he had decided upon the fall of man as subject, and upon the narrative, or epic, form, in preference to the dramatic. It is even possible that a few isolated passages of the poem, as it now stands, may have been written before. Of one such passage we have Aubrey's assurance that it was written fifteen or sixteen years before 1658, and while he was still contemplating a drama. The lines are Satan's speech, P. L. iv. 32, beginning "O, thou that with surpassing glory crowned." These lines, Phillips says, his uncle recited to him, as forming the opening of his tragedy. They are modelled, as the classical reader will perceive, upon Euripides. Possibly they were not intended for the very first lines, since if Milton intended to follow the practice of his model, the lofty lyrical tone of this address should have been introduced by a prosaic matter-of-fact setting forth of the situation, as in the Euripidean prologue. There are other passages in the poem which have the air of being insitious in the place where they stand. The lines in Book iv., now in question, may reasonably be referred to 1640-42, the date of those leaves in the Trinity College MS., in which Milton has written down, with his own hand, various sketches of tragedies, which might possibly be adopted as his final choice. A passage in The Reason of Church Government, written at the same period, 1641, gives us the fullest account of his hesitation. It was a hesitation caused partly by the wealth of matter which his reading suggested to him, partly by the consciousness that he ought not to begin in haste while each year was ripening his powers. Every one who has undertaken a work of any length has made the experience, that the faculty of composition will not work with ease until the reason is satisfied that the subject chosen is a congenial one. Gibbon has told us himself that many periods of history upon which he tried his pen, even after the memorable 15th October, 1764, when he "sate musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter." We know how many sketches of possible tragedies Racine would make before he could adopt one as the appropriate theme, on which he could work with that thorough enjoyment of the labour, which is necessary to give life and verve to any creation, whether of the poet or the orator. The leaves of the Trinity College MS., which are cotemporary with his confidence to the readers of his tract Of Church Government, exhibit a list of nearly one hundred subjects, which had occurred to him from time to time as practicable subjects. From the mode of entry we see that, already in 1641, a scriptural was likely to have the preference over a profane subject, and that among scriptural subjects Paradise Lost (the familiar title appears in this early note) stands out prominently above the next. The historical subjects are all taken from native history, none are foreign, and all from the time before the Roman conquest. The scriptural subjects are partly from the Old, partly from the New, Testament. Some of these subjects are named and nothing more, while others are slightly sketched out. Among these latter are Baptistes, on the death of John the Baptist; and Christus Patiens, apparently to be confined to the agony in the garden. Of Paradise Lost there are four drafts in greater detail than any of the others. These drafts of the plot or action, though none of them that which was finally adopted, are sufficiently near to the action of the poem as it stands, to reveal to us the fact that the author's imaginative conception of what he intended to produce was generated, cast, and moulded at a comparatively early age. The commonly received notion, therefore, with which authors, as they age, are wont to comfort themselves, that one of the greatest feats of original invention achieved by man was begun after fifty, must be thus far modified. Paradise Lost was composed after fifty, but was conceived at thirty-two. Hence the high degree of perfection realised in the total result. For there were combined to produce it the opposite virtues of two distinct periods of mental development; the daring imagination and fresh emotional play of early manhood, with the exercised judgment and chastened taste of ripened years. We have regarded the twenty-five years of Milton's life between 1641 and the commencement of Paradise Lost, as time ill laid out upon inferior work which any one could do, and which was not worth doing by any one. Yet it may be made a question if in any other mode than by adjournment of his early design, Milton could have attained to that union of original strength with severe re |