MILTON

Milton is a great figure in our minds. He is a very lonely figure. For one thing, he has no companions of genius round him; there is no group about him, in his age. Again, he was a blind old man, and there is something in blindness that, more than anything else, isolates a man; and in his case, by strange but powerful contrast, his blindness is enlarged and glorified by the fact that he saw all the glory of the angels and the Godhead as no other mortal eye ever beheld them, and the fact that he was blind makes the vision itself more credible. And thirdly he has impressed himself on men's memories as unique in character; and, in his age defeated and given o'er, among his enemies exposed and left, with the Puritan cause lost, he is the very type and pattern of a great spirit in defeat - imprisoned in his blindness, poor, neglected, yet still faithful and the master of his own integrity; for us, almost as much as a poet, he remains the

⚫ intellectual champion of human liberty. So through centuries there has slowly formed itself this lonely figure in our minds as our thought of Milton, and as Cæsar is a universal name of imperial power, the name of Milton has become a synonym of moral majesty. But it was not thus that he was thought of in his own times. There is no evidence that Cromwell or the other important men of the state knew that Milton was greater than they, or that he was truly great at all; to them he was pre-eminently a secretary in the state department. The next generation of poets-Dryden-called him "the old schoolmaster," you remember. In his earlier years he appealed to the taste of a few cultivated and travelled gentlemen, like Sir Henry Wotton, as a graceful and noble-languaged poet; but it was a full generation after his death that he was accepted into the roll of the great, by Addison in the "Spectator," and the next century was well on

its

way before he was imitated by new men as the English model of blank verse. In the literary tradition of England, however, he is now established, and for all of us he stands apart, a majestic memory, as I have said, touched with the sublimity of his subject and with the sublimity of his own character. There is, too, in our thoughts of him, something grim, something of the sterner aspect of historical Puritanism; the softness of Spenser, the softness of his youth, had gone out of him,

- he was

he was austere. Yet I

and he had all the hardness of man in him trained down to the last ounce love to recall his youth -you remember the fair boyface of the first portrait - a face of singular beauty; and you know his pink and white complexion was such at the University that he was called "the Lady of Christ's"; and, in those first years of his poetizing, he was deep in the loveliest verse of Greece and Italy, in Pindar and Euripides, in Petrarch and Tasso, as well as in Shakspere and Spenser who were his English masters. He was a young humanist — filled to overflowing with the new learning and its artistic products, a lover of them and of music, and of everything beautiful in nature — he was especially a landscape-lover. Even then the clear spirit -the white soul-somewhat too unspotted for human affections to cling about, it may be was there; you hear it singing in the high and piercing melody of the "Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity," which happily is usually a child's first knowledge of him; a certain loofness of nature he has, and nowhere do you find in his English verse nor do I find it in his Latin verse where it is sometimes thought to be nowhere do you find the note of friendship, of that companionableness which is often so charming a trait in the young lives of the poets. But within his own reserves — and perhaps the more precious and refined for that very reason

there was the same sensuous delight in the artistic things of sense, in natural beauty, in romantic charm, in the lines of the old poets, that there was in Spenser; and in this he was, as we mark literary descent, the child of Spenser, though of course it was fed in him from other sources and in larger measure, too. For he was a better scholar than Spenser - his times allowed him to be and he had a far more powerful intellect. But, in these years of his milder and happier youth, when he was living in the country in his long studies — he was a student at ease till thirty — and when he was travelling in Italy, he was in the true path of Spenser and the Renaissance, the path of beauty. Thus he writes in a letter to a friend "What besides God has resolved concerning me, I know not, but this at least: He has instilled into me at all events a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labour as the fables have it, 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) and to follow it leading me on as with certain assured traces." This is that same creed of Plato that entered so deeply into Spenser the faith in the divine leading of beauty. How permanent its doctrine was in Milton's mind will appear later; but here its presence is to be observed, because it gives to