Part 7
Dr. Johnson sneers at Milton for having come home from Italy because he could not stay abroad while his countrymen were struggling for their freedom, and then quietly settling down as a teacher of a few boys for bread. It might, with equal reason, have been asked of the Doctor why, instead of writing “Taxation no Tyranny,” he did not volunteer in the war against the rebel American provinces? Milton sacrificed to the cause he thought holy something dearer to him than life--the hope of an earthly immortality in a great poem. He suffered his eyes to be put out for the sake of his country as deliberately as Scævola thrust his hand into the flame. He gave to freedom something better than a sword--words that were victories. Around the memories of Bradshaw and his illustrious brethren his deathless soldiery still pitch their invincible tents, still keep their long-resounding march, sure warders against obloquy and oblivion.
After the death of Cromwell, Milton continued faithful to republicanism, and on the very eve of the Restoration published his last political tract, showing a short and easy way to establish a Christian commonwealth. He had long ago quarreled with the Presbyterians in discipline, and separated from the Independents in doctrine. For many years he did not go within any church and had become a Unitarian. He had begun “Paradise Lost” in 1658, and after the Restoration, with a broken fortune, but with a constancy which nothing could break, shattered in health, blind, and for a time in danger, he continued the composition of it. It was complete in 1665, when Elwood, the Quaker, had the reading of it, and it was published in 1667.
The translation of the Bible had to a very great extent Judaized the Puritan mind. England was no longer England, but Israel. Those fierce enthusiasts could always find Amalek and Philistia in the men who met them in the field, and one horn or the other of the beast in every doctrine of their theological adversaries. The spiritual provincialism of the Jewish race found something congenial in the Anglo-Saxon intellect. This element of the Puritan character appears in Milton also, as in that stern sonnet:
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold, Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.
In Milton’s prose there is a constant assertion of himself as a man set apart to a divine ministry. He seems to translate himself out of Hebrew into English. And yet so steeped was he in Greek culture that it is sometimes hard to say whether he would rather call himself the messenger of Jehovah or the son of Phœbus. Continually the fugitive mists of dialectics are rent, and through them shine down serene and solemn peaks that make us feel that we are encamped about by the sacred mounts of song, but whether of Palestine or of Greece is doubtful. We may apply to Milton what Schiller says of the poet, “Let the kind divinity snatch the suckling from his mother’s breast, nourish him with the milk of a better age, and let him come to maturity beneath a distant Grecian sky. Then when he has become a man let him return, a foreign shape, into his century, not to delight it with his apparition, but terrible, like Agamemnon’s son, to purify it.”
I said that Milton had a sublime egotism. The egotism of a great character is inspiration because it generalizes self into universal law. It is a very different thing from the vulgar egotism of a little nature which contracts universal Law into self. The one expands with a feeling that it is a part of the law-making power, the other offers an amendment in town-meeting as if it came from Sinai. Milton’s superb conception of himself enters into all he does; if _he_ is blind, it is with excess of light--it is a divine favor, an overshadowing with angel’s wings. Phineus and Tiresias are admitted among the prophets because they, too, had lost their sight. There is more merit in the blindness of Mæonides than in his “Iliad” or “Odyssey.” If the structure of _his_ mind is undramatic, why, then the English drama is barbarous, and he will write a tragedy on a Greek model with blind Samson for a hero.
It results from this that no great poet is so uniformly self-conscious as he. Dante is individual rather than self-conscious, and the cast-iron Dante becomes pliable as a field of grain at the breath of Beatrice, and his whole nature, rooted as it is, seems to flow away in waves of sunshine. But Milton never lets himself go for a moment. As other poets are possessed by their theme, so is he always self-possessed, his great theme being Milton, and his duty being that of interpreter between John Milton and the world. I speak it reverently--he was worth translating.
We should say of Shakspeare that he had the power of transforming himself into everything, and of Milton that he had that of transforming everything into himself. He is the most learned of poets. Dante, it is true, represents all the scholarship of his age, but Milton belonged to a more learned age, was himself one of the most learned men in it, and included Dante himself among his learning. No poet is so indebted to books and so little to personal observation as he. I thought once that he had created out of his own consciousness those exquisite lines in “Comus”:
A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men’s names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.
But I afterwards found that he had built them up out of a dry sentence in Marco Polo’s “Travels.” The wealth of Milton in this respect is wonderful. He subsidizes whole provinces of learning to spend their revenues upon one lavish sentence, and melts history, poetry, mythology, and philosophy together to make the rich Miltonic metal of a single verse.
The first noticeable poem of Milton is his “Hymn of the Nativity,” and the long-enwoven harmony of the versification is what chiefly deserves attention in it. It is this which marks the advent of a new power into English poetry.
In Spenser meaning and music are fused together; in Shakspeare the meaning dominates always (and I intend the sentiment as included in the word meaning); but in Milton the music is always a primary consideration. He is always as much musician as poet. And he is a harmonist, not a melodist. He loves great pomps and sequences of verse, and his first passages move like long processions, winding with sacred chant, and priestly robes rich with emblematic gold, and waving of holy banners, along the echoing aisles of some cathedral. Accordingly, no reader of Milton can fail to notice that he is fond of lists of proper names which can have only an acquired imaginative value, and in that way serve to excite our poetic sensibility, but which also are of deep musical significance.
This was illustrated by reading various passages from “Paradise Lost.”
Another striking peculiarity of Milton is the feeling of _spaciousness_ which his poetry gives us, and that not only in whole paragraphs, but even in single words. His mind was one which demanded illimitable room to turn in. His finest passages are those in which the imagination diffuses itself over a whole scene or landscape, or where it seems to circle like an eagle controlling with its eye broad sweeps of champaign and of sea, bathing itself in the blue streams of air, and seldom drawn earthward in the concentrated energy of its swoop.
This shows itself unmistakably in the epithets of his earlier poems. In “Il Penseroso,” for example, where he hears
The far-off curfew sound Over some _wide-watered_ shore Swinging slow with sullen roar;
where he sees
Gorgeous Tragedy In sceptered pall come sweeping by,
or calls up the great bards who have sung
Of forests and enchantments drear Where more is meant than meets the ear.
Milton seems to produce his effects by exciting or dilating our own imaginations; and this excitement accomplished, he is satisfied. Shakspeare, on the other hand, seldom leaves any work to be done by the imagination of his readers; and after we have enjoyed the total effect of a passage, we may always study the particulars with advantage. Shakspeare never attaches any particular value to his thoughts, or images, or phrases, but scatters them with a royal carelessness. Milton seems always to respect his; he lays out broad avenues for the triumphal processions of his verse; covers the ground with tapestry inwoven with figures of mythology and romance; builds up arches rich with historic carvings for them to march under, and accompanies them with swells and cadences of inspiring music. “Paradise Lost” is full of what may be called _vistas_ of verse. Notice, for example, how far off he begins when he is about to speak of himself--as at the beginning of the third book and of the seventh. When you read “Paradise Lost” the feeling you have is one of _vastness_. You float under a great sky brimmed with sunshine, or hung with constellations; the abyss of space is around you; thunders mutter on the horizon; you hear the mysterious sigh of an unseen ocean; and if the scene changes, it is with an elemental movement like the shifting of mighty winds. Of all books it seems most purely the work of a disembodied mind. Of all poets he could most easily afford to be blind; of all, his poetry owes least to the senses, except that of hearing; everything, except his music, came to him through a mental medium, and perhaps even that may have been intellectual--as in Beethoven, who composed behind the veil of deafness.
Milton is a remarkable instance of a great imaginative faculty fed by books instead of Nature. One has only to read the notes of the commentators upon his poems to see how perfectly he made whatever he took his own. Everything that he touches swells and towers into vastness. It is wonderful to see how, from the most withered and juiceless hint that he met in his reading, his grand images “rise like an exhalation”; how from the most hopeless-looking leaden box that he found in that huge drag-net with which he gathered everything from the waters of learning, he could conjure a tall genius to do his bidding.
That proud consciousness of his own strength, and confidence at the same time that he is the messenger of the Most High, never forsake him. It is they which give him his grand manner, and make him speak as if with the voice of a continent. He reverenced always the sacredness of his own calling and character. As poet, full of the lore of antiquity, and, as prophet, charged to vindicate the ways of God, it seems to me that I see the majestic old man laying one hand upon the shoulder of the Past, and the other upon that of the Future, and so standing sublimely erect above that abject age to pour his voice along the centuries. We are reminded of what is told of Firdusi, whose father on the night he was born dreamed he saw him standing in the middle of the earth and singing so loud and clear that he was heard in all four quarters of the heavens at once.
I feel how utterly inadequate any single lecture must be on such a theme, and how impossible it is to say anything about Milton in an hour. I have merely touched upon three or four points that seemed to me most characteristic of his style, for our concern with him is solely as a poet. Yet it would be an unpardonable reticence if I did not say, before I close, how profoundly we ought to reverence the grandeur of the man, his incorruptible love of freedom, his scholarly and unvulgar republicanism, his scorn of contemporary success, his faith in the future and in God, his noble frugality of life.
The noise of those old warfares is hushed; the song of Cavalier and the fierce psalm of the Puritan are silent now; the hands of his episcopal adversaries no longer hold pen or crozier--they and their works are dust; but he who loved truth more than life, who was faithful to the other world while he did his work in this; his seat is in that great cathedral whose far-echoing aisles are the ages whispering with blessed feet of the Saints, Martyrs, and Confessors of every clime and creed; whose bells sound only centurial hours; about whose spire crowned with the constellation of the cross no meaner birds than missioned angels hover; whose organ music is the various stops of endless changes breathed through by endless good; whose choristers are the elect spirits of all time, that sing, serene and shining as morning stars, the ever-renewed mystery of Creative Power.
LECTURE VIII
BUTLER
(_Friday Evening, February 2, 1855_)
VIII
Neither the Understanding nor the Imagination is sane by itself; the one becomes blank worldliness, the other hypochondria. A very little imagination is able to intoxicate a weak understanding, and this appears to be the condition of religious enthusiasm in vulgar minds. Puritanism, as long as it had a material object to look forward to, was strong and healthy. But Fanaticism is always defeated by success; the moment it is established in the repose of power, it necessarily crystallizes into cant and formalism around any slenderest threads of dogma; and if the intellectual fermentation continue after the spiritual has ceased, as it constantly does, it is the fermentation of putrefaction, breeding nothing but the vermin of incoherent and destructively-active metaphysic subtleties--the maggots, as Butler, condensing Lord Bacon, calls them, of corrupted texts. That wise man Oliver Cromwell has been reproached for desertion of principles because he recognized the truth that though enthusiasm may overturn a government, it can never carry on one. Our Puritan ancestors came to the same conclusion, and have been as unwisely blamed for it. While we wonder at the prophetic imagination of those heroic souls who could see in the little _Mayflower_ the seeds of an empire, while we honor (as it can only truly be honored--by imitating) that fervor of purpose which could give up everything for principle, let us be thankful that they had also that manly English sense which refused to sacrifice _their_ principles to the fantasy of every wandering Adoniram or Shear-Jashub who mistook himself for Providence as naturally and as obstinately as some lunatics suppose themselves to be tea-pots.
The imaginative side of Puritanism found its poetical expression in Milton and its prose in Bunyan. The intellectual vagaries of its decline were to have their satirist in Butler. He was born at Strensham in Worcestershire in 1612, the son of a small farmer who was obliged to pinch himself to afford his son a grammar-school education. It is more than doubtful whether he were ever at any university at all. His first employment was as clerk to Mr. Jeffereys, a Worcestershire justice of the peace, called by the poet’s biographers an eminent one. While in this situation he employed his leisure in study, and in cultivating music and painting, for both of which arts he had a predilection. He next went into the family of the Countess of Kent, where he had the use of a fine library, and where he acted as amanuensis to John Selden--the mere drippings of whose learning were enough to make a great scholar of him. After this he was employed (in what capacity is unknown) in the house of Sir Samuel Luke, an officer of Cromwell, and a rigid Presbyterian. It was here that he made his studies for the characters of _Sir Hudibras_ and his squire, _Ralpho_, and is supposed to have begun the composition of his great work. There is hardly anything more comic in “Hudibras” itself than the solemn Country Knight unconsciously furnishing clothes from his wardrobe, and a rope of his own twisting, to hang himself in eternal effigy with. Butler has been charged with ingratitude for having caricatured his employer; but there is no hint of any obligation he was under, and the service of a man like him must have been a fair equivalent for any wages.
On the other hand, it has been asserted that Butler did not mean Sir Samuel Luke at all, but a certain Sir Henry Rosewell, or a certain Colonel Rolle, both Devonshire men. And in confirmation of it we are told that Sir Hugh de Bras was the tutelary saint of Devonshire. Butler, however, did not have so far to go for a name, but borrowed it from Spenser. He himself is the authority for the “conjecture,” as it is called, that his hero and Sir Samuel Luke were identical. At the end of the first canto of part first of “Hudibras” occurs a couplet of which the last part of the second verse is left blank. This couplet, for want of attention to the accent, has been taken to be in ten-syllable measure, and therefore an exception to the rest of the poem. But it is only where we read it as a verse of four feet that the inevitable rhyme becomes perfectly Hudibrastic. The knight himself is the speaker:
’Tis sung there is a valiant Mameluke In foreign lands yclept (Sir Sam Luke) To whom we have been oft compared For person, parts, address and beard.
Butler died poor, but not in want, on the 25th of September, 1680, in his sixty-eighth year.
Butler’s poem is commonly considered the type of the burlesque--that is, as the representative of the gravely ludicrous, which seems to occupy a kind of neutral ground between the witty and the humorous. But this is true of the form rather than the matter of the poem. Burlesque appears to be wit infused with animal spirits--satire for the mere fun of the thing, without any suggestion of intellectual disapproval, or moral indignation. True wit is a kind of instantaneous logic which gives us the _quod erat demonstrandum_ without the intermediate steps of the syllogism. Coleridge, with admirable acuteness, has said that “there is such a thing as scientific wit.” Therefore pure wit sometimes gives an intellectual pleasure without making us laugh. The wit that makes us laugh most freely is that which instantly accepts another man’s premises, and draws a conclusion from them in its own favor. A country gentleman was once showing his improvements to the Prince de Ligne, and, among other things, pointed out to him a muddy spot which he called his lake. “It is rather shallow, is it not?” said the Prince. “I assure you, Prince, a man drowned himself in it.” “Ah, he must have been a flatterer, then,” answered De Ligne. Of the same kind is the story told of one of our old Massachusetts clergymen, Dr. Morse. At an association dinner a debate arose as to the benefit of whipping in bringing up children. The doctor took the affirmative, and his chief opponent was a young minister whose reputation for veracity was not very high. He affirmed that parents often did harm to their children by unjust punishment from not knowing the facts in the case. “Why,” said he, “the only time my father ever whipped me was for telling the truth.” “Well,” retorted the doctor, “it cured you of it, didn’t it?” In wit of this sort, there is always a latent syllogism.
Then there is the wit which detects an unintentional bit of satire in a word of double meaning; as where Sir Henry Wotton takes advantage of the phrase commonly used in his day to imply merely residence, and finds an under meaning in it, saying that “ambassadors were persons sent to _lie_ abroad for the service of their prince.”
On the other hand I think unconsciousness and want of intention, or at least the pretense of it, is more or less essential to the ludicrous. For this reason what may be called the wit of events is always ludicrous. Nothing can be more so, for example, than the Pope’s sending a Cardinal’s hat to John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, which arrived in England after Henry VIII had taken off that prelate’s head. So, when Dr. Johnson said very gravely one day, that he had _often thought_ that if he had a harem he would dress all the ladies in white linen, the unintentional incongruity of the speech with the character of the great moralist threw Boswell into an ecstasy of laughter. Like this is the ludicrousness of Pope Paul III writing to the Council of Trent “that they should begin with original sin, observing yet a due respect unto the Emperor.”
Captain Basil Hall, when he traveled in this country, found the Yankees a people entirely destitute of wit and humor. Perhaps our gravity, which ought to have put him on the right scent, deceived him. I do not know a more perfect example of wit than something which, as I have heard, was said to the captain himself. Stopping at a village inn there came up a thunderstorm, and Captain Hall, surprised that a new country should have reached such perfection in these meteorological manufactures, said to a bystander, “Why, you have very heavy thunder here.” “Well, yes,” replied the man, “we _du_, considerin’ the number of inhabitants.” Here is another story which a stage-driver told me once. A wag on the outside of the coach called to a man by the roadside who was fencing some very poor land: “I say, mister, what are you fencing that pasture for? It would take forty acres on’t to starve a middle-sized cow.” “Jesso; and I’m a-fencing of it to keep eour kettle eout.”
Now in the “forty acre” part of this story we have an instance of what is called American exaggeration, and which I take to be the symptom of most promise in Yankee fun. For it marks that desire for intensity of expression which is one phase of imagination. Indeed many of these sayings are purely imaginative; as where a man said of a painter he knew, that “he painted a shingle so exactly like marble that when it fell into the river it sunk.” A man told me once that the people of a certain town were so universally dishonest that “they had to take in their stone walls at night.” In some of these stories imagination appears yet more strongly, and in that contradictory union with the understanding lies at the root of highest humor. For example, a coachman driving up some steep mountains in Vermont was asked if they were as steep on the other side also. “Steep! chain-lightnin’ couldn’t go down ’em without the breechin’ on.” I believe that there is more latent humor among the American people than in any other, and that it will one day develop itself and find expression through Art.