secret lies in his mastery over the rich treasure of this inherited vocabulary. He wielded it as his own, as a second mother-tongue, the native and habitual idiom of his thought and feeling, backed by a massive frame of character, and "a power which is got within me to a passion." (Areopagitica.) When Wordsworth came forward at the end of the eighteenth century with his famous reform of the language of English poetry, the Miltonic diction was the current coin paid out by every versifier. Wordsworth revolted against this dialect as unmeaning, hollow, gaudy, and inane. His reform consisted in dropping the consecrated phraseology altogether, and reverting to the common language of ordinary life. It was necessary to do this in order to reconnect poetry with the sympathies of men, and make it again a true utterance, instead of the ingenious exercise in putting together words which it had become. In projecting this abandonment of the received tradition, it may be thought that Wordsworth was condemning the Miltonic system of expression in itself. But this was not so. Milton's language had become, in the hands of the imitators of the eighteenth century, sound without sense, a husk without the kernel, a body of words without the soul of poetry. Milton had created and wielded an instrument which was beyond the control of any less than himself. He wrote it as a living language; the poetasters of the eighteenth century wrote it as dead language, as boys make Latin verses. Their poetry is to Paradise Lost, as a modern Gothic restoration is to a genuine middle-age church. It was against the feeble race of imitators, and not against the master himself, that the protest of the lake poet was raised. He proposed to do away with the Miltonic vocabulary altogether, not because it was in itself vicious, but because it could now only be employed at second-hand. One drawback there was attendant upon the style chosen by Milton, viz., that it narrowly limited the circle of his readers. All words are addressed to those who understand them. The Welsh triads are not for those who have not learnt Welsh; an English poem is only for those who understand English. But of understanding English there are many degrees; it requires some education to understand literary style at all. A large majority of the natives of any country possess, and use, only a small fraction of their mother-tongue. These people may be left out of the discussion. Confining ourselves only to that small part of our millions which we speak of as the educated classes-that is, those whose schooling is carried on beyond fourteen years of age-it will be found that only a small fraction of the men, and a still smaller fraction of the women, fully apprehend the meaning of words. This is the case with what is written in the ordinary language of books. When we pass from a style in which words have only their simple signification, to a style of which the effect depends on the sugges tion of collateral associati we leave behind the majority even of these few. This is what is meant by the standing charge against Milton that he is too learned. It is no paradox to say that Milton was not a learned man. Such men there were in his day-Usher, Selden, Voss, in England; in Holland, Milton's adversary Salmanasius, and many more. A learned man was one who could range freely and surely over the whole of classical and patristic remains in the Greek and Latin languages (at least), with the accumulated stores of philological, chronological, historical criticism necessary for the interpretation of those remains. Milton had neither made these acquisitions nor aimed at them. He even expresses himself, in his vehement way, with contempt of them. “Hollow antiquities soldby the seeming bulk," "marginal stuffings," "horse-loads of citations and fathers," are some of his petulant outbursts against the learning that had been played upon his position by his adversaries. He says expressly that he had "not read the Councils, save here and there" (Smectymnuus). His own practice had been "industrious and select reading." He chose to make himself a scholar rather than a learned man. The aim of his studies was to improve faculty, not to acquire knowledge. "Who would be a poet must himself be a true poem;" his heart should "contain of just, wise, good, the perfect shape." He devoted himself to selfpreparation with the assiduity of Petrarch or of Goethe. "In wearisome labour and studious watchings I have tired out almost a whole youth." "Labour and intense study I take to be my portion in this life.” He would know, not all, but “what was of use to know," and form himself by assiduous culture. The first Englishman of whom the designation of our series, Men of Letters, is appropriate, Milton was also the noblest example of the type. He cultivated, not letters, but himself, and sought to enter into possession of his own mental kingdom, not that he might reign there, but that he might royally use its resources in building up a work which should bring honour to his country and his native tongue. The style of Paradise Lost is then only the natural expression of a soul thus exquisitely nourished upon the best thoughts and finest words of all ages. It is the language of one who lives in the companionship of the great and the wise of past time. It is inevitable that when such a one speaks, his tones, his accent, the melodies of his rhythm, the inner harmonies of his linked thoughts, the grace of his allusive touch, should escape the common ear. To follow Milton one should at least have tasted the same training through which he put himself. "Te quoque dignum finge deo." The many cannot see it, and complain that the poet is too learned. They would have Milton talk like Bunyan or William Cobbett, whom they understand. Milton did attempt the demagogue in his pamphlets, only with the result of blemishing his fame and degrading his genius. The best poetry is that which calls upon us to rise to it, not that which writes down to us. Milton knew that his was not the road to popularity. He thirsted for renown, but he did not confound renown with vogue. A poet has his choice between the many and the few; Milton chose the few. "Paucis hujusmodi lectoribus contentus," is his own inscription in a copy of his pamphlets sent by him to Patrick Young. He derived a stern satisfaction from the reprobation with which the vulgar visited him. His divorce tracts were addressed to men who dared to think, and ran the town "numbering good in. tellects." His poems he wished laid up in the Bodleian Library, "where the jabber of common people cannot penetrate, and whence the base throng of readers keep aloof" (Ode to Rouse). If Milton resembled a Roman republican in the severe and stoic elevation of his character, he also shared the aristocratic intellectualism of the classical type. He is in marked contrast to the levelling hatred of excellence, the Christian trades-unionism of the model Catholic of the mould of S. François de Sales, whose maxim of life is "marchons avec la troupe de nos frères et compagnons, doucement, paisiblement, et amiablement." To Milton the people are "But a herd confus'd, A miscellaneous rabble, who extol Things vulgar."-Paradise Regained, iii. 49. At times his indignation carries him past the courtesies of equal speech, to pour out the vials of prophetic rebuke, when he contemplates the hopeless struggle of those who are the salt of the earth, “amidst the throng and noises of vulgar and irrational men" (Tenure of Kings), and he rates to their face as owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs" (Sonnet XII.); not because they will not listen to him, but because they "hate learning more than toad or asp" (Sonnet IX.). 66 Milton's attitude must be distinguished from patrician pride, or the noli-me-tangere of social exclusiveness. Nor, again, was it, like Callimachus's, the fastidious repulsion of a delicate taste for the hackneyed in literary expression; it was the lofty disdain of aspiring virtue for the sordid and ignoble. Various ingredients, constitutional or circumstantial, concurred to produce this repellent or unsympathetic attitude in Milton. His dogmatic Calvinism, from the effects of which his mind never recovered a system which easily disposes to a cynical abasement of our fellow-men-counted for something. Something must be set down to habitual converse with the classics a converse which tends to impart to character, as Platner said of Godfrey Hermann, "a certain grandeur and generosity, removed from the spirit of cabal and mean cunning which prevail among men of the world." His blindness threw him out of the competition of life, and back upon himself, in a way which was sure to foster egotism. These were constitutional elements of that aloofness from men which characterised all his utterance. These disposing causes became inexorable fate, when, by the turn of the political wheel of fortune, he found himself alone amid the mindless dissipation and reckless materialism of the Restoration. He must have felt himself then, "Miltonus contra mundum," at war with human society as con 132 stituted around him, and driven to withdraw himself within a poetic world of his own creation. In this antagonism of the poet to his age much was lost; much energy was consumed in what was mere friction. The artist is then most powerful when he finds himself in accord with the age he lives in. The plenitude of art is only reached when it marches with the sentiments which possess a community. The defiant attitude easily slides into paradox, and the mind falls in love with its own wilfulness. The exceptional emergence of Milton's three poems, Paradise Lost, Regained, and Samson, deeply colours their context. The greatest achievement of art in their kinds have been the capital specimens of a large crop; as the Iliad and Odyssey are the picked lines out of many rhapsodies, and Shakspeare the king of an army of cotemporary dramatists. Milton was a survival, felt himself such, and resented it. Though fall'n on evil days, On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues; In darkness, and with dangers compass'd round, Poetry thus generated, we should naturally expect to meet with more admiration than sympathy. And such, on the whole, has been Milton's reception. In 1678, twenty years after the publication of Paradise Lost, Prior spoke of him (Hind Transversed) as "a rough, unhewn fellow, that a man must sweat to read him." And in 1842, Hallam had doubts "if Paradise Lost, published eleven years since, would have met with a greater demand " than it did at first. It has been much disputed by historians of our literature what inference is to be drawn from the numbers sold of Paradise Lost at its first publication. Between 1667 and 1688, a space of twenty years, three editions had been printed, making together some 4500 copies. Was this a large or a small circulation? Opinions are at variance on the point. Johnson and Hallam thought it a large sale, as books went at that time. Campbell, and the majority of our annalists of books, have considered it as evidence of neglect. Comparison with what is known of other cases of circulation leads to no more certain conclusion. On the one hand, the public could not take more than three editions-say 3000 copies of the plays of Shakspeare in sixty years, from 1623 to 1684. If this were a fair measure of possible circulation at the time, we should have to pronounce Milton's sale a great success. On the other hand, Cleveland's poems ran through sixteen or seventeen editions in about thirty years. If this were the average output of a popular book, the inference would be that Paradise Lost was not such a book. Whatever conclusion may be the true one from the amount of the public demand, we cannot be wrong in asserting that from the first, and now as then, Paradise Lost has been more admired than read. The poet's wish and expectation that he should find "fit audience, though few," has been fulfilled. Partly this has been due to his limitation, his unsympathetic disposition, the deficiency of the human element in his imagination, and his presentation of mythical instead of real beings. But it is also in part a tribute to his excellence, and is to be ascribed to the lofty strain, which requires more effort to accompany than an average reader is able to make, a majestic demeanour which no parodist has been able to degrade, and a wealth of allusion demanding more literature than is possessed by any but the few whose life is lived with the poets. An appreciation of Milton is the last reward of consummated scholarship; and we may apply to him what Quintilian has said of Cicero, "Ille se profecisse sciat, cui Cicero valde placebit." Causes other than the inherent faults of the poem long continued to weigh down the reputation of Paradise Lost. In Great Britain the sense for art, poetry, literature, is confined to a few, while our political life has been diffused and vigorous. Hence all judgment, even upon a poet, is biassed by considerations of party. Before 1688 it was impossible that the poet, who had justified regicide, could have any public beyond the suppressed and crouching Nonconformists. The Revolution of 1688 removed this ban, and from that date forward the liberal party in England adopted Milton as the Republican poet. William Hogg, writing in 1690, says of Paradise Lost that "the fame of the poem is spread through the whole of England, but being written in English, it is as yet unknown in foreign lands." This is obvious exaggeration. Lauder, about 1748, gives the date exactly, when he speaks of “that infinite tribute of veneration that has been paid to him these sixty years past." One distinguished exception there was. Dryden, royalist and Catholic though he was, was loyal to his art. Nothing which Dryden ever wrote is so creditable to his taste as to his being able to see, and daring to confess, in the day of disesteem, that the regicide poet alone deserved the honour which his cotemporaries were for rendering to himself. Dryden's saying, "This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too," is not perfectly well vouched, but it would hardly have been invented, if it had not been known to express his sentiments. And Dryden's sense of Milton's greatness grew with his taste. When, in the preface to his State of Innocence (1674), Dryden praised Paradise Lost, hé "knew not half the extent of its excellence," John Dennis says, as more than twenty years afterwards he confessed to me." Had he known it, he never could have produced his vulgar parody, The State of Innocence, a piece upon which he received the compliments of his cotemporaries, as having refined the ore of Milton." 66 66 With the one exception of Dryden, a better critic than poet, Milton's repute was the work of the Whigs. The first édition de luxe of Paradise Lost (1688) was brought out by a subscription got up by the Whig leader, Lord Somers. In this edition Dryden's pinchbeck epigram, so often quoted, first appeared,—— "Three poets in three distant ages born," &c. |