Chapter 5

_PARADISE REGAINED_ AND _SAMSON AGONISTES_

_Paradise Regained_, like the _Odyssey_, the _Aeneid_ and the second part of _Faust_, has been an inevitable victim of the human taste for comparison. It cannot fail to be compared with _Paradise Lost_ and cannot fail to suffer by it. The poets and critics have indeed been kinder to it than the public. Johnson said that if it had not been written by Milton "it would receive universal praise." Wordsworth thought it "the most perfect in execution of anything written by Milton." But the great body of readers finds an epic with only two main actors in it, and hardly anything that can be called a story, too severe a demand upon its poetic taste. And when unprofessional opinion remains constant for several generations, as it has in this case, it is never wise to ignore or defy it. _Paradise Regained_ is a very bare poem. It has none of the splendours of its predecessor: no {197} scenes in which we hear the full voice of that Milton

"Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries, Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean Rings to the roar of an angel onset;"

nor yet any of those others which delighted Tennyson even more, the scenes of Adam's

"bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, And bloom profuse and cedar arches."

It has no love, no sin, no quarrel, no reconciliation, no central moment of tragic suspense, indeed no human action at all. And Milton has refrained almost absolutely from adorning it with the similes which are among the chief glories of _Paradise Lost_. It is, in fact, as Mark Pattison has said, "probably the most unadorned poem extant in any language."

At the very beginning of _Paradise Lost_ Milton had cast his eye on to that second chapter in the Christian history of man without which the first is a mere picture of despair. His subject was to be man's first disobedience and its results; death, woe and loss of Eden

"till one greater Man Restore us and regain the blissful seat."

{198} Whether he then had any thought of attempting to deal with that restoration we do not know. Nor do we know what motives induced him to choose the story of the Temptation in the Wilderness as the action in which the new order of things was to be manifested. Some critics have been surprised that he did not take the Crucifixion or the Resurrection. And it is obvious that the first, with the Tree of Calvary pointing back to the Tree in the Garden, would have afforded a natural sequence to _Paradise Lost_. Others have wondered that he did not use the Descent into Hell in which the liberation of Satan's captives would have followed on the story of how they fell into his power. And it is obvious that there were great poetic, and especially Miltonic, possibilities in the theme of the victorious Son of God entering the very kingdom in which the Satan of _Paradise Lost_ had exercised such splendid rule, and setting free the saints and prophets and kings of the Old Testament. But it is possible, as Sir Walter Raleigh has suggested, that Milton was no longer in the vein for grandiose themes of external majesty and might such as this story would have afforded. "His interest was now centred rather in the sayings of the wise than in the deeds of the mighty." That {199} may be so: though his _Samson_ which was yet to come is certainly not without its mighty deeds. But, whatever were his reasons for putting aside such subjects as the Descent into Hell, it is not difficult to discover several which he probably found decisive in inducing him to prefer the Temptation to the Passion. To begin with, he must have been conscious of the immensely greater difficulty of handling the story of the Passion in such a way that Christian readers could bear to read it. Then, even more certainly operative on his mind was the fact that the Passion is related to us in great detail, the Temptation in a few words of mysterious import; so that the one leaves almost no freedom of invention to the poet, while the other scarcely binds him at all. Then again there is the close parallelism between the temptation in the Garden and the temptation in the Wilderness; and finally, most important of all, the fact that the Temptation is the only event in the life of Christ in which Satan plays a visible and important part. A poem that was to be a second part of _Paradise Lost_ could not do without Satan; and in fact he is even more prominent in _Paradise Regained_, where he is present throughout, than in its predecessor of which there are several books which scarcely so {200} much as mention him. This was no doubt decisive.

So Milton chose the Temptation in the Wilderness as his subject, with Satan once more as one of the two principal actors in his story. But the actor is even more changed than the story. The Satan of the later poem is no longer the splendid rebel of _Paradise Lost_. _Paradise Regained_ has in it no heavenly battles and its council of devils is a mere shadow of the great parliament of hell. It has, therefore, no place either for the general of the infernal armies or for the Prime Minister of the infernal Senate. The magnificent figure who imposes himself on the imagination--

"Like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved"--

becomes in it something far less impressive, a political theorist instead of a statesman, a student of the balance of power instead of a soldier, a casuistical disputant about culture and morals in place of a devil venturing all for empire and revenge. It is as if Alexander were exchanged for Aristotle: almost as if St. George were replaced by Mr. Worldly Wiseman. The imagination is affected by the inevitable loss of colour, and _Paradise Regained_ is the sufferer in fame and popularity. It also suffers from the old difficulty {201} inherent in supernatural personages which affects it even more than _Paradise Lost_. The whole action is a succession of Temptations. The question how far such attempts by a devil upon a Divine Being can afford any hope to the one or any fear or danger to the other is a mystery of which the Church itself scarcely claims to offer a full explanation. Into the theological difficulty this is not the place to enter. It is only with the corresponding poetic difficulty which we are concerned. Just as in _Paradise Lost_ it is impossible not to feel the unreality of the war in heaven, so in _Paradise Regained_ it is impossible not to feel, in spite of some inconsistency of language on the subject, that Satan commonly knows who it is whom he is assailing and is known by Him in return, and that consequently the whole action has for poetic purposes a certain unreality. He knows that Jesus is the Son of God; with a right to the homage of all nature and the power to take all as His own. He asks--

"Hast thou not right to all created things? Owe not all creatures, by just right, to thee service?"

Yet he discusses with Him various very human methods of arriving at power, just as {202} if He were subject to the same conditions as other men who desire to rule or influence the world. The consequence is that, although the speeches contain much interesting thought and much fine poetry, they are seldom or never dramatically convincing. Our Lord, in particular, instead of the gracious and winning figure of the Gospels, becomes a kind of self-sufficient aristocratic moralist. His speeches, as Milton gives them, display rather the defiant virtue of the Stoic, or the self-conscious righteousness of the Pharisee, than the simple and loving charity of the Christian. The weapon of moral and intellectual contempt, so freely employed in them and so natural both to Jew and to Greek, strikes to us a false and jarring note when put into the mouth of Him who taught His disciples that the only way of entry into His kingdom was that of being born again and becoming as little children.

These are all serious drawbacks and they are not the only ones. If from one point of view Milton in _Paradise Regained_ is too little of a Christian, from another he is too much. One of the gravest difficulties with which Christian apologists have always had to contend is the entire indifference of the New Testament and, generally speaking, of the {203} Church in all ages, especially the most devout, not only to economic and material progress, but to all elements except the ethical and spiritual in the higher civilization of humanity. At its friendliest the Church has hardly ever been willing to allow to such things any inherent or independent importance of their own. Those who feel that they owe an incalculable debt to art and poetry and philosophy and therefore to the Greeks, have inevitably found this attitude a stumbling-block. And they will always read with exceptional surprise and indignation the narrow obscurantism of the speech which Milton, scholar and artist as he was, is not ashamed to put into the mouth of Christ in the fourth book. He cannot himself have been a victim of the shallow fallacy expressed in line 325 (he who reads gets little benefit unless he brings judgment to his reading "and what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?"); and his lifelong practice shows that he did not think Greek poetry was

"Thin-sown with aught of profit or delight."

Nor could he have seriously thought that the Hebrew prophets taught "the solid rules of civil government," of which in fact they knew nothing except on the moral side, better than the statesmen and philosophers of Rome and {204} Athens. The explanation is, perhaps, partly that Milton was an Arian, and therefore felt at liberty to emphasize the Jewish limitations of Christ: limitations the possibility of which, as recent controversies have shown, even Athanasian opinion has been forced to face. But, in any case, in the _Paradise Regained_ stress is necessarily, for dramatic purposes, laid on the Hebrew and Messianic character of Christ, and from that point of view it is not unnatural to make Him the spokesman of Hebrew resistance to the intellectual encroachments of Greece and Rome. Another part of the explanation is that the strong Biblical and Hebraic element in Milton's character does seem to have increased in strength during his later years. It was far from getting exclusive possession even then, and all the evidence shows that he was always the very opposite of the narrow-minded Puritan fanatics of his day. But his tendencies in that direction would be exaggerated while he was occupied with a purely Biblical subject. And he may have thought, if he thought about the question at all, that the contemptuous tone adopted about classical culture in the speech of Christ was not only dramatically defensible, but balanced by the far finer passage, evidently written from his {205} heart, in which Satan exalts the glories of Athens. It is, perhaps, the most famous thing in the poem.

"Look once more, ere we leave this specular mount, Westward, much nearer by south-west; behold Where on the Aegean shore a city stands, Built nobly, pure the air and light the soil-- Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts And eloquence, native to famous wits Or hospitable, in her sweet recess, City or suburban, studious walks and shades. See there the olive-grove of Academe, Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long; There flow'ry hill Hymettus, with the sound Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls His whispering stream. Within the walls then view The schools of ancient sages, his who bred Great Alexander to subdue the world, Lyceum there; and painted Stoa next. There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit By voice or hand, and various-measured verse, Aeolian charms and Dorian lyric odes, And his who gave them breath, but higher sung, {206} Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called, Whose poem Phoebus challenged for his own. Thence what the lofty grave Tragedians taught In chorus or iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight received In brief sententious precepts, while they treat Of fate, and chance, and change in human life, High actions and high passions best describing."

It is plainly the very voice of the poet himself, and he may have felt certain that we should so understand it. But it is difficult not to regret that it is the Devil who is made to pay Milton's great debt to Athens and Christ who is made to repudiate it.

Yet, in spite of all this, in spite of its disdain of the obvious attractions open to poetry, in spite of much in it that alienates the sympathies of many, the _Paradise Regained_ has received very high praise from the finest judges of English poetry. Johnson and Wordsworth have already been quoted, and to them may be added Coleridge, who says of it that "in its kind it is the most perfect poem extant," and Mr. Mackail, who has spoken of its "unique poetic qualities." Why have the poets and critics been so much {207} more favourable to it than the public? Perhaps because artists are always inclined to value work in proportion to its difficulties. Indeed, this fallacy seems natural to all classes of men about their own work. Gardeners in England tend to admire a man who grows indifferent oranges more than a man who grows good strawberries. It is like what Johnson said of the preaching lady: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." This tendency to let surprise sit in the seat which belongs to judgment is greatly intensified by professional knowledge. The architect is apt to exaggerate the merit of a building placed on a very awkward site, the artist to think a piece of very difficult foreshortening more beautiful than it really is. The public may not be so good a judge either of the building or of the drawing: but, knowing nothing of the technical difficulties, it at least forms its judgment on the true criterion which is, of course, the value of the product, not the surprisingness of its having been produced or the difficulties overcome in its production.

Something of this kind may account for the fact that _Paradise Regained_ has been more appreciated by the poets than by the public. {208} The public finds it rather bare and dry and judges accordingly. The poets know how infinitely hard a task it was that Milton set himself, and find no praise too great for the man who did not fail in it. They see a poem of two thousand lines whose single subject is the attempt of a devil who knows himself doomed to defeat to persuade a divine Person who knows Himself assured of victory to be false to the law of His being. And into this barren theme they see art and nature, ethics and politics, luxury and splendour and empire, cunningly interwoven and

"Eden raised in the waste Wilderness."

They see a style stripped of almost all ornament especially in the speeches of our Lord: the poet deliberately walking always on the very edge of the gulf of prose and yet always as one perfectly assured that into that gulf his feet can never fall. Here and there, as when we come upon such lines as

"I never liked thy talk, thy offers less,"

we are nervous as we watch: but the poet passes on his way serenely unconscious of our fears, and in the very next speech is on the heights of poetry with the great description {209} of Athens. Once only, perhaps, in the reply to Satan after the storm--

"Me worse than wet thou find'st not,"

we feel that the cunningly maintained balance has failed and that the limit has been passed which divides the severe from the grotesque.

The truth is that, if the narrowness of its subject and the austerity of its style be admitted, _Paradise Regained_ is a poetic achievement as great as it is surprising. It cannot be _Paradise Lost_, of course, and that is the fault for which it has not been forgiven. And its fine things are even less evident, much less evident, at a first reading than those of _Paradise Lost_. But Milton has left nothing more Miltonic. He did greater things but nothing in which he stands so entirely alone. There is no poem in English, perhaps none in any language of the world, which exhibits to the same degree the inherent power of style itself, in its naked essence, unassisted by any of its visible accessories. There are in it, of course, some passages of characteristic splendour, the banquet in the wilderness, the vision of Rome, and others; but a large part of the poem is as bare as the mountains and, to the luxurious and conventional, as bleak and forbidding. Its grave Dorian music, scarcely {210} heard by the sensual ear, is played by the mind to the spirit and by the spirit to the mind. Ever present as its art is, it is an art infinitely removed from that to which all the world at once responds and surrenders. It is not at first seen to be art at all. The verse which in truth dances so cunningly appears to the uninitiated to stumble and halt. The music, which the common ear is so slow to catch, makes us think of those Platonic mysteries of abstract number seen only in their perfection by some godlike mathematician who lives rapt above sense and matter in the contemplation of the Idea of Good.

But, if there is much in an art so consummate as Milton's which escapes analysis, there are also elements which can be measured and weighed. Here as in the _Paradise Lost_ students of metre can count and compare his stresses and pauses, and set out some finite portion of the infinite variety of rhythms which, even more needed here than in _Paradise Lost_, sustain the poem in its difficult flight over so apparently barren a country. The art of the poet as distinct from the musician is less difficult to trace. An avowed sequel has to recall its predecessor and yet not to recall it too much. _Paradise Regained_ recalls _Paradise Lost_ by its central action, a {211} temptation, by its council of devils, by its assembly of the heavenly host, by a hundred echoes of phrase and circumstance. But though the heavenly host is itself unchanged, though it is still the old "full frequence bright Of Angels" yet there is now no real council. The Son, the only spokesman who can address the Father, is no longer present, and even the hymn of the angels gets no more than a vague description. A greater change has come over the infernal council: scarcely any longer infernal, for their leader can now open his address to them with

"O ancient Powers of Air and this wide World,"

and the meeting is held in mid air and no longer in hell. Nor is any rivalry attempted with the great debate of _Paradise Lost_: only enough to awaken its memory in the reader and to enable the poet to find a place in the second meeting for the most obvious of temptations which yet reverence forbade him to introduce into the main action. And note how this contains at least one of those small dramatic touches for which, except from Mr. Mackail, Milton has got too little credit. Satan asks how he is to assail the new enemy: and Belial, who stands for the sensualist man of the world, at once offers his suggestion. {212} He is sure, as such men always are, that the lowest motive is invariably the true mainspring and explanation of all human actions: there is no beating about the bush with him: he is frank and cynical, and begins at once without shame, apology or preface--

"Set women in his eye and in his walk."

What could be more exactly in the downright manner affected by men of his type in the world of to-day and every day? And there are other similar touches. Then again the sequel recalls its predecessor when we hear Satan strike the very note he struck so often in _Paradise Lost_--

"'Tis true, I am that Spirit unfortunate,"

and when we see him fall in ruin at the awful end of the long debate--

"Now shew thy progeny; if not to stand Cast thyself down; safely, if Son of God; For it is written: 'He will give command Concerning thee to his Angels: in their hands They shall uplift thee, lest at any time Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.' To whom thus Jesus: Also it is written 'Tempt not the Lord thy God.' He said, and stood: But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell."

{213}

Nor must it be supposed by those who have not read the _Paradise Regained_ that the bareness of its style is invariable. Most conspicuous, for reasons of reverence no doubt, in the speeches of Christ, it is far less marked in those of Satan and disappears altogether in some of the descriptive passages. Take, for instance, the famous temptation of the banquet--

"He spake no dream; for, as his words had end, Our Saviour, lifting up his eyes, beheld In ample space under the broadest shade, A table richly spread in regal mode, With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort And savour; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, Grisamber-steamed; all fish from sea or shore Freshet or purling brook, of shell or fin, And exquisitest name, for which was drained Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast. Alas, how simple, to these cates compared, Was that crude apple that diverted Eve! And at a stately sideboard, by the wine, That fragrant smell diffused, in order stood Tall stripling youths rich-clad, of fairer hue Than Ganymed or Hylas; distant more, Under the trees now tripped, now solemn stood, Nymphs of Diana's train, and Naiades With fruits and flowers from Amalthea's horn, {214} And ladies of the Hesperides, that seemed Fairer than feigned of old, or fabled since Of faery damsels met in forest wide By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore."

_Paradise Lost_ itself contains no more intricately beautiful passage than this. It is one of those things that have been the delight and despair of poets ever since. For all his disdain of the follies of the Middle Age Milton can never touch the old romances, as Joseph Warton well noted, without immediately rising into the most exquisite poetry: and this reluctant homage of classical genius is the greatest tribute ever paid to their undying fascination.

But of course such a passage as this is not typical of the poem: it is one of its far-shining heights which cannot be altogether missed even by eyes quite blind to the beauties of the lower country through which _Paradise Regained_ takes the most part of its course. Ordinarily the poem is grave, plain and unadorned, engaged in the discussion of moral problems which give little opportunity for the more obvious graces of poetry. The interest of the speeches which constitute the bulk of it is threefold: technical, in the rhythmical or metrical skill by which Milton sustains an {215} abstract discourse expressed in unadorned language and keeps it at the level of high poetry; moral or intellectual, the interest of the subjects discussed; and, the greatest of all for many readers, autobiographical, the interest of the evidence they afford of the poet's own thoughts and character. All may be seen, for instance, in such a confession as that of Satan in the first book--

"Envy, they say, excites me, thus to gain Companions of my misery and woe! At first it may be; but, long since with woe Nearer acquainted, now I feel by proof That fellowship in pain divides not smart, Nor lightens aught each man's peculiar load."

There is scarcely a word in it that prose cannot use even to-day. The thought is one that might come from any moralist; there is nothing daring or imaginative about it. Yet out of this what poetry Milton has made! The personal emotion of it, the note of confession and individual experience, has lifted it altogether above the level of the cold maxims of the preacher who gives no sign of having suffered, or sinned, or so much as lived, himself. Then the art of it: so entirely unperceived by the ordinary reader, so invincible in its effect upon him. The whole secret of it defies analysis: but a few ingredients can {216} be detected. There is comparatively little of Milton's favourite alliteration: the tone of the passage is too quiet for the free use of an artistic device so instantly visible. But note the beautiful line--

"Companions of my misery and woe"--

itself free flowing without a pause of any kind, so as to prepare the better for the full pause both of sense and of rhythm which separates it from what follows. Then there is the vivid conversational "At first it may be," and its pause, contrasting so finely with the next line where the pause is also after the fifth syllable, but with a totally different effect. Note again the variety of rhythm which distinguishes the last two lines. Neither has any strong pause in it: and they might so easily have been a monotonous repetition. Is it fanciful to think that, perhaps half unconsciously, Milton has suggested the quick stab of pain or sorrow in the swift movement of the first: and that the long-drawn rhythm of the second is meant to convey something of the dull years of misery which so often follow? Its first six syllables--

"Nor lightens aught each man's,"

if given their full effect of sound, take perhaps half as long again to read as the first six of the {217} preceding line. In any case, whatever was meant by it, the line is a most beautiful one in itself, as well as full of one of the most moving of human things, a strong man's confession that his strength does not always suffice him.

These obviously autobiographical passages are to be found all through the poem. There are the stately Roman embassies coming and going in all their pomp: in which it is surely Cromwell's Foreign Secretary who sees nothing but

"tedious waste of time, to sit and hear So many hollow compliments and lies, Outlandish flatteries."

There is the old contempt of war and those who in virtue of their victories

"swell with pride, and must be titled Gods,"

and of the mob who praise and admire

"they know not what, And know not whom, but as one leads the other; And what delight to be by such extolled, To live upon their tongues and be their talk? Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise, His lot who dares be singularly good."

There is the contempt of wealth--

"Extol not riches then, the toil of fools, The wise man's cumbrance, if not snare;"

{218} a contempt which Milton shares with nearly all saints and heroes and most philosophers; a little ungratefully, perhaps, as if forgetting that, compared with the mass of men, he had himself always been rich, and that what he owed to the toil of his father had not proved in his case a snare or a cumbrance, but the necessary condition of the learning and the leisure he had used so nobly. Finally, to give no more instances, there is the confession at once so personal and so representative of the feeling of all men who have ever made the smallest effort to live well--

"Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk, Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing to the ear, And tunable as sylvan pipe or song."

Who knows whether behind such words as these there lies the memory of some rapturous vision of the new world of love as St. Paul saw it, which had been cooled only too soon by humbling experience of the difficulty of "bearing all things" when all things included Salmasius, or an unthankful daughter?

This grave introspective note, present from the first in everything written by Milton and far more conspicuous in _Paradise Regained_ than in _Paradise Lost_, is felt still more in the {219} last of his works, the drama _Samson Agonistes_. It is in the Greek form with a Chorus: and is as broodingly full as Aeschylus or Sophocles of the folly of man and the uncertainty and sadness of human life; but Milton has added an angry sternness of judgment on the one hand, and on the other an assured faith in divine deliverance, both of which are rather Hebrew than Greek. Into this strange drama, so alien from all the literature of his day, Milton has poured all the thoughts and emotions with which the spectacle of his own life filled him. All through it we hear a faith that was strong but never blind battling with the spectacle of the wickedness of men and the dark uncertainty of the ways of God. The Philistines have triumphed, lords sit "lordly in their wine" at Whitehall, the Dagon of prelatism is once more enthroned throughout the land, the saints are dispersed and forsaken, and he himself, who had as he thought so signally borne his witness for God, sits blind and sad in his lonely house, "to visitants a gaze Or pitied object," with no hope left of high service to his country and no prospect but that of a "contemptible old age obscure." No doubt he did not always feel like that, for the evidence shows him cheerful and friendly in company: and, of {220} course, the picture has undergone the imaginative heightening of art besides being coloured by the story of Samson, so much sadder than Milton's own. But the lonely hours of a blind man of genius who has fought for a great cause and been utterly defeated must often be full of the hopeless half-resigned and half-rebellious broodings in which throughout _Samson_ we hear so plainly the voice of Milton himself.

"God of our fathers! what is Man, That thou towards him with hand so various-- Or might I say contrarious?-- Temper'st thy providence through his short course; Not evenly, as thou rulest The angelic orders and inferior creatures mute, Irrational and brute? Nor do I name of men the common rout, That wandering loose about Grow up and perish as the summer fly, Heads without name, no more remembered; But such as thou hast solemnly elected, With gifts and graces eminently adorned, To some great work, thy glory, And people's safety, which in part they effect: Yet toward these thus dignified thou oft, Amidst their highth of noon, Changest thy countenance and thy hand, with no regard Of highest favours past From thee on them, or them to thee of service."

{221} This is Milton undisguised speaking of and for himself. And so is the still sadder outburst in the very first speech of Samson--

"O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day! O first-created beam, and thou great Word, 'Let there be light, and light was over all'; Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree? The Sun to me is dark And silent as the Moon When she deserts the night, Hid in her vacant interlunar cave. Since light so necessary is to life, And almost life itself, if it be true That light is in the soul, She all in every part, why was the sight To such a tender ball as the eye confined, So obvious and so easy to be quenched, And not, as feeling, through all parts diffused, That she might look at will through every pore? Then had I not been thus exiled from light, As in the land of darkness, yet in light, To live a life half dead, a living death, And buried; but, O yet more miserable! Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave; Buried, yet not exempt, By privilege of death and burial, From worst of other evils, pains, and wrongs, But made hereby obnoxious more {222} To all the miseries of life, Life in captivity Among inhuman foes."

This sublime music in which the soul's emotion finds and obeys its own law was scarcely audible to the age which followed Milton's death, when poets had concentrated all their art on the effort to make both language and metre as instantaneously intelligible as possible. They succeeded much better in the second task than in the first: for the truth is that the exact meaning of a verse is much more often difficult to ascertain in the case of Pope than in the case of Milton. But no one has ever doubted how to read aloud a line of Pope or Dryden. And this has obvious advantages and was, of course, at first a great source of pleasure. It made Pope's poetry the most immediately popular we have ever had, as it still is the most effective for public quotation. Almost everybody, as Mr. Bridges has said, "has a natural liking for the common fundamental rhythms" and "it is only after long familiarity with them that the ear grows dissatisfied and wishes them to be broken." But in poetry as in music the more cultivated the ear the sooner it gets tired of being given too little to do: and as soon as every warbler had Pope's {223} tune by heart critical readers began to wish for something less obvious. The ultimate result of that dissatisfaction was the metrical experiments of Coleridge and the rich harvest of varied rhythms and melody with which Shelley and Tennyson and Swinburne enriched the nineteenth century. And all this movement had also, of course, a retrospective effect. It may be true that, as Mr. Bridges says, "there are very few persons indeed who take such a natural delight in rhythm for its own sake that they can follow with pleasure a learned rhythm which is very rich in variety, and the beauty of which is its perpetual freedom to obey the sense and diction;" but it could not fail to be the case that their number was increased by the comparative sensitiveness to the more intricate music of words which was inevitably produced in those who had learnt much Shelley or Tennyson by heart. And such people at once heard things in Milton which were absolutely inaudible to the ears of Dr. Johnson's generation. The comparative subtlety, both in imagination and in form, of the poetry of the nineteenth century made it impossible for poets to compete with journalists for the attention of the big public as Pope had done triumphantly; but as a set off against that loss it gave a far {224} richer delight to those who were capable of that interaction of the natural ear and the spiritual to which all great poetry makes its appeal. This led straight back to Milton who made that double appeal as only a very few poets in all the world have ever made it. And the more poetry is studied and loved as the greatest of the arts, as the medium through which that combination of the vision of genius with the slow trained cunning of the craftsman, which is what great art is, finds its most perfect expression, the more will men, or at least Englishmen, return to Milton. And especially, in some ways, to _Samson_, where his art is at its boldest and freest, and where it suffered longest from the indifference of dull ears.

A little book of this kind is not the place for a discussion of English metre, or even, in any detail, of Milton's. Those who wish to go into such studies will find much of what they want in the Poet Laureate's book on _Milton's Prosody_. It is possible to disagree with some of his proposed scansions of doubtful lines, but it is impossible not to learn a great deal from suggestions as to the rhythmical effects intended by Milton which come, as these do, from one who is himself a master of rhythm and has never concealed the fact {225} that Milton's was one of the schools in which he passed his apprenticeship. So his analysis, line by line, of the opening of the first chorus of _Samson_ will be a revelation to many of what they have, perhaps, never felt at all, or felt only unconsciously without understanding anything of what it was which they felt or why. But even without such help no one whose ear has had the smallest training can fail to notice some of the more daring of Milton's metrical effects. In the lines quoted above, for instance, who can miss the triple stab of passionate agony in the thrice repeated, strongly accented "dark, dark, dark"? The most careless reader cannot fail to be arrested by the line, though he may not realize the means employed by Milton to enforce attention, the rare six stresses in a ten-syllabled line, the still rarer effect of three strongly stressed syllables following immediately upon one another, the inversion of three out of the five stresses of the next line, "irrecoverably dark" suggesting the spasmodic disorder of violent grief. These are certainly devices deliberately chosen for producing the required effects. And so, probably, are the more regular rhythm of the words which express the calming aspiration up to the throne of God, and the quiet {226} mono-syllabic simplicity of the divine utterance, "Let there be light," which continues its softening influence over the return in the following lines to his own sad conditions. How smoothly the complaint now goes: "The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon." It is in comparison with the earlier abruptness as if he had gone through something like the process of the psalmist, "until I went into the sanctuary of God: then understood I" what had before been "too painful for me." Then there is the comparatively unmarked rhythm of the intellectual argumentative passage which follows: till emotion begins again to overwhelm reflection, and shows itself in the strong alliteration of "light," "land," "light," "live," "life," "living," and in the strong caesura after "buried," the more marked for coming so early in the verse.

Such poor noting of technicalities as this gives, of course, no more of the secret of Milton's wonderful poetry than anatomy gives of the power and beauty of the human body. But it has its interest and even its use: provided that too much importance is not attributed to it and that no one makes the mistake of the lady who, according to the story, hopefully asked the painter what he mixed {227} his paints with, and received the crushing reply, "With my brains, Madam."

_Samson Agonistes_ stands in marked contrast to its predecessor, _Paradise Regained_. And not only in being a drama. Its intense omnipresent emotion makes a still more important difference. In passing from one to the other we pass from the least to the most emotional of Milton's works. This would in any case have been a gain for most readers: but the gain is made more important by the extreme severity of Milton's final poetic manner. A style which excludes almost all ornament stands in especial need of the support of a visibly felt emotion. It has been said by a living writer that "when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means of expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose." This is roughly true, though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff. The special faculty of the poet, as Johnson well said, is that of joining music with reason. That is to say that the poet unites thought and feeling and gives them perfect expression. They are not distinct: they become in his hands a new single life, a unity. You cannot separate the emotion from the thought in any great line of poetry. When Wordsworth talks of the "unimaginable touch of time," there is {228} plainly emotion as well as thought and memory in his words: when Shelley cries in his despair--

"Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar, Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more--O never more!"

it is no mere cry of the heart: the mind is in it too: and neither in him nor in Wordsworth can you get the two apart again after the poet has joined them together.

Now, though in _Paradise Regained_ the intellect is not allowed, as in much eighteenth-century poetry, to become so dominant as to make us feel that prose and not verse was the proper medium for what the poet had to say, yet it does play a greater part than it can commonly play with safety, perhaps a greater part than it plays in any other English poem of the first rank. It is only Milton's unfailing gift of poetic style which saves the situation. He could do what Wordsworth could not: conduct long discussions on abstract questions without descending from the note of poetry to that of the lecture-room. The gallant explorer who fights his way through the _Prelude_ and the _Excursion_ wins, as he deserves, a great reward, and a greater still if he does it a second time and a third, {229} when he has learnt that they both have marshy valleys into which he need not twice descend. But he has paid a price for the lesson, paid it in the endurance of a great deal of solid and heavy prose. That is partly because Wordsworth often thinks without feeling or imagining: he gives us his thought as it is in itself, as a professor of moral philosophy gives it, without passing it through the transforming processes of the emotions and the imagination. These hardly fail Milton half a dozen times in all his poetry: and the result is the difference between such lines as--

"This is the genuine course, the aim, and end Of prescient reason; all conclusions else Are abject, vain, presumptuous, and perverse:"

and such as Milton writes when he is nearest to bare thinking--

"Who therefore seeks in these True wisdom, finds her not, or by delusion Far worse, her false resemblance only meets, An empty cloud."

The difference is also partly due to what, indeed, is another side of the same distinction; the fact that Wordsworth has not and Milton has a constant possession of the great or grand style. This is plain in such passages as those just quoted: it is plainer still where the poets come close to each other in {230} descriptive passages; as, for instance, in Wordsworth's--

"Negro ladies in white muslin gowns,"

and Milton's--

"Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed;"

between which yawns an obviously impassable gulf.

Milton is sometimes harsh, crabbed, grim in expression as in thought: but these things are not at all necessarily fatal to poetry as is the cool and contented obviousness of Wordsworth's weak moments. Milton is occasionally contented in his own lofty fashion, but he is never cool, and never less so than in _Samson_. All through it he is face to face with a tremendous issue in which he himself is supremely interested: he is "enacting hell," to use Goethe's curious phrase, which fits Milton so much better than it fits the serenity of Homer. Twenty years before he had written, in quite another connection, "No man knows hell like him who converses most in heaven": and now in his old age he embodies that tremendous truth in his last poem. All his poems are intensely emotional and personal: but none so much so as _Samson Agonistes_, where he is fixing all eyes on the {231} tragedy of his own life. The parallel between Samson and Milton does not extend, of course, to all the details. But even of them many correspond, such as the blindness, the disastrous marriage with "the daughter of an infidel," the old age of a broken and defeated champion of God become a gazing-stock to triumphant profanity. But more than any special circumstance it is the whole general position of Samson as a man dedicated from his birth to the service of God, and gladly accepting the dedication, yet failing in his task and apparently deserted by his God, which makes of him a type in which Milton can see himself and the Cromwellian saints who lie ground under the heels of the victorious Philistines of the Restoration. To him as to Samson the situation is one that makes questionings on the dark and doubtful ways of God unavoidable: darker to him even than to Samson: for he has no guilty memory of a supreme act of folly to explain the divine desertion.

The action of the drama is extremely simple. Samson is found enjoying a brief respite from his punishment. The day is a feast of Dagon, and the Philistine "superstition" allows no work to be done on it. Accordingly an attendant who is a mute person is leading {232} him to a bank where he is accustomed to take what rest he is allowed and enjoy

"The breath of heaven fresh blowing, pure and sweet With day-spring born;"

that sensation of delicate scents and cool breezes which, as Milton knew only too well, mean so much more to the blind than to those who can see. Then his restless thoughts begin to crowd upon him--

"Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed As of a person separate to God, Designed for great exploits?"

The whole passage belongs naturally enough to Samson: but obviously here, as well as in the blindness, the poet is already thinking of himself. So again, when Samson proceeds to speak of being

"exposed To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,"

one can scarcely miss a reference to the daughters who purloined and sold the blind father's books. When the soliloquy draws to an end the Chorus, men of his tribe, come to visit Samson. Not even Milton ever made the arrangement and sound of words do more to enforce their meaning than he does in this wonderful opening chorus--

{233}

"This, this is he; softly a while; Let us not break in upon him. O change beyond report, thought, or belief!"

They chant their inevitable wonder at the contrast between what Samson was and what he is.

"O mirror of our fickle state, Since man on earth, unparalleled! The rarer thy example stands, By how much from the top of wondrous glory, Strongest of mortal men, To lowest pitch of abject fortune thou art fallen."

No reader of Greek can fail to be reminded of more than one chorus in the _Oedipus_ of Sophocles--

_io geneai broton_ _hôs hymas isa chai to mêden zôsas enarithmô--_

"Alas, ye generations of men, how utterly a thing of nought I count the life ye have to live! For what man is there who wins more of happiness than just the seeming and after the semblance a falling away. With thy fate before mine eyes, unhappy Oedipus, I can call no earthly creature blest." Here and there, as in this passage, the parallel is very close. But Milton's genius is too great and self-reliant for mere imitation. He sometimes recalls the very words of Greek poets as he {234} does those of the Bible: but that is not because he is artificially imitating either, but because he has assimilated the spirit of both and made them a part of himself.

The Chorus express their sympathy with Samson and he replies, bitterly reproaching his own folly and that of the rulers of Judah who gave him up to their enemies. But human blindness will not ultimately defeat the ways of God: and the Chorus sing their song of faith, in which rhyme is called in to give its touch of impatient contempt at the folly of the atheist.

"Just are the ways of God, And justifiable to men; Unless there be who think not God at all. If any be, they walk obscure; For of such doctrine never was there school, But the heart of the fool, And no man therein doctor but himself."

So ends the first act or episode of the drama. The second is the visit of Samson's father Manoah, whose cry is--

"Who would be now a father in my stead?"

He is trying to negotiate for his son's ransom: but Samson refuses, not desiring life, desiring rather to pay the full penalty of his sin. He cannot share his father's hopes that God will give him back the sight he so misused--

{235}

"All otherwise to me my thoughts portend, That these dark orbs no more shall treat with light, Nor the other light of life continue long, But yield to double darkness nigh at hand: So much I feel my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat; Nature within me seems In all her functions weary of herself; My race of glory run, and race of shame, And I shall shortly be with them that rest."

So Manoah leaves him, and in a noble lyric he laments over his greatest sufferings, which are not those of the body but those of the mind--

"which no cooling herb Or med'cinal liquor can assuage, Nor breath of vernal air from snowy Alp."

A choral song on the mysterious dealings of God closes this episode which is followed by the most dramatically effective in the poem, that of the visit of Dalila. The moment the blind man is told that it is "Dalila, thy wife," he cries--

"My wife! my traitress! let her not come near me:"

and his reply to her offer of penitence, affection and help, begins with the daringly expressive line--

"Out, out, hyaena! these are thy wonted arts."

A long and telling debate follows, in which {236} Dalila makes very good points, one of them recalling the scene in which Eve reproaches Adam for indulging her instead of exercising his right to command and control the weakness of her sex. To this argument Dalila receives the stern, characteristically Miltonic reply--

"All wickedness is weakness: that plea, therefore With God or man will gain thee no remission,"

He refuses her intercession with the Philistine lords, forbids her even to touch his hand;

"Not for thy life, lest fierce remembrance wake My sudden rage to tear thee joint by joint,"

and drives her to remind him defiantly that, whatever he and his Hebrews may say of her, she appeals to another tribunal of fame--

"In Ecron, Gaza, Asdod, and in Gath, I shall be named among the famousest Of women, sung at solemn festivals, Living and dead recorded."

So she goes out, and the Chorus make Miltonic meditations on the unhappiness of marriage and the divinely appointed subjection of women.

The next visitor is Harapha, the Philistine giant, who comes to taunt Samson, and is defied by him to mortal combat. This {237} episode is perhaps the least interesting, but it advances the action by exhibiting Samson's returning sense that God is still with him and will yet do some great work through him. It fitly leads to the chorus--

"O, how comely it is, and how reviving To the spirits of just men long oppressed, When God into the hands of their deliverer Puts invincible might, To quell the mighty of the earth, the oppressor, The brute and boisterous force of violent men, Hardy and industrious to support Tyrannic power, but raging to pursue The righteous and all such as honour truth!"

In the next scene an officer comes to demand Samson's presence at the feast of Dagon that he may entertain the Philistine lords with feats of strength. He at first dismisses the messenger with a contemptuous refusal: but, with a premonition of the end which recalls Oedipus at Colonus, he suddenly changes his mind--

"I begin to feel Some rousing motions in me, which dispose To something extraordinary my thoughts. If there be aught of presage in the mind, This day will be remarkable in my life By some great act, or of my days the last."

{238}

"Go, and the Holy One Of Israel be thy guide,"

sing the Chorus: and he leaves the scene, like Oedipus, to return no more, but to be more felt in his absence than in his presence. Manoah re-enters to utter his further hopes of ransom, in which there is a note of Sophoclean irony recalling the ignorant optimism of Oedipus in the _Tyrannus_; and as he and the Chorus talk they hear at first a loud shouting, apparently of triumph, and then another louder and more terrible--

_Manoah._

"O what noise! Mercy of Heaven! what hideous noise was that? Horribly loud, unlike the former shout."

_Chorus._

"Noise call you it, or universal groan, As if the whole inhabitation perished?"

They dare not enter the city: and, as they speculate on what this great event can be, a Hebrew spectator of the catastrophe comes up and, after some brief exchange of question and answer exactly in the manner of the Greek tragedians, tells the whole story at length. The end has come. Samson is dead, but death is swallowed up in victory: what has happened is the last and most tremendous {239} triumph of the divinely chosen hero whose death is more fatal to his country's enemies than even his life had been. There is nothing left to do but to close the drama, as most Greek tragedies close, with a brief choral song of submission to the divine governance of the world:

"All is best, though we oft doubt What the unsearchable dispose Of Highest Wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close. Oft He seems to hide his face, But unexpectedly returns, And to his faithful champion hath in place Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns, And all that band them to resist His uncontrollable intent. His servants He, with new acquist Of true experience from this great event, With peace and consolation hath dismissed, And calm of mind, all passion spent."

Such is Milton's drama: a thing worth dwelling on as entirely unique in any modern language. Some good judges have thought it the finest of his works. That will not be admitted if poetry is to be judged either by universality of appeal or by extent and variety of range. _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ will always have far more readers: and _Paradise Lost_ embraces an immeasurably {240} greater span of human life. But, if not the greatest, _Samson_ is probably for its own audience the most moving of Milton's works. It is not everybody who has in him the grave emotions to which it appeals: but whoever has will find them stirred by Samson as few other books in all the literature of the world can stir them.

It is curious to think of Milton composing such a drama in the midst of the theatrical revival of the Restoration. Did ever poet set himself in such opposition to the literary current of his day? Dryden's unbounded admiration for him is well known: but he understood the genius of _Paradise Lost_ so little as to make an opera out of it, and he must have understood even less of Samson. The drama was then so much the most fashionable form of literature that he may have felt that in writing _The State of Innocence_ and its preface he was taking the best means of directing public attention to _Paradise Lost_. But he would scarcely have tried to do the same for _Samson_. He had wished, perhaps, as Mr. Verrall has suggested, to write an epic and had failed to do so: hence his profound reverence for the man who had not failed. But he had written many dramas and here he had succeeded: he had pleased both his {241} contemporaries and himself. He would feel no need there to take lessons from Milton. Nor is he to be blamed. He and his fellow dramatists are justly criticized for many things, but there is nothing to complain of in their unlikeness to Milton. They wrote for the stage. He avowedly did not. They wrote in the spirit of the theatre of their day, with the object of providing themselves with a little money and "the town" with a few hours of more or less intellectual amusement. He wrote out of his own mind and soul, not for the entertainment of the idle folk of his own or any other day, but for men who in all times and countries should prove capable of knowing a great work when they saw it. Besides, his contemporary dramatists followed, quite legitimately, the theatrical traditions of England or France: he the very different dramatic system of the Greeks. His drama is what Greek tragedies were, an act of religion. It could take its place quite naturally, as they did, as part of a great national religious festival performed on a holy day. It is like them in the solemn music of its utterance: in its deep sense of the gravity of the issues on which human life hangs. It is like them also in technical points such as the use of a Chorus to give expression to the {242} spectator's emotions, the paucity of actors present on the stage at any moment, the curious imitation, to be seen also in _Comus_, of the Greek _stichomuthia_, in which a verbal passage of arms is conducted on the principle of giving each speaker one line for his attack or retort.

There are, indeed, some fundamental differences. They are important enough to have led so great a critic as Professor Jebb to argue that Milton's drama is too Hebrew to be Hellenic at all. His point is that Greek tragedy aims at producing an imaginative pleasure by arousing a "sense, on the one hand, of the heroic in man; on the other hand, of a superhuman controlling power"; and he asserts that this is not the method adopted by Milton in _Samson_. Samson is throughout a free man; his misfortunes are the fruit of his own folly. God is still on his side and his death is a patriotic triumph, not, like the death of Heracles, who resembles him in so many ways, merely the final proof of the all-powerful malignity of fate.

No one will venture to differ from Jebb on such a question without a sense of great temerity. But perhaps the truth is that one who had lived all his life, as Jebb had, in the closest intimacy with the Greek drama, would be apt to feel small differences from {243} it too much and broad resemblances too little. To the shepherd all his sheep differ from each other: the danger for him is to forget, what the ignorant stranger sees, that they are also all very much alike. So Jebb is no doubt perfectly right in the distinction he makes: but he is surely blinded by his own knowledge when he argues from it that _Samson Agonistes_ "is a great poem and a noble drama; but neither as poem nor as drama is it Hellenic." Of that question comparative ignorance is perhaps a better judge. For it can still see that the broad division which separates the world's drama into two kinds is a real thing, and that Milton's drama belongs in spite of differences unquestionably to the Greek kind and not to the other, both by its method and by its spirit. There can be no real doubt that it is far more like the _Prometheus_ or the _Oedipus_ than it is like _Hamlet_ or _All for Love_. Probably no great tragedy of any sort can be made without that sense of the contrast between man's will and the "superhuman controlling power" of which Jebb speaks as peculiarly Greek. Certainly it is present in the greatest of Shakspeare's tragedies, and not seldom finds open expression. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends."

{244}

But the point is that in _Samson_, the note of which is always the classical, never the mystical or romantic, this sense is present, not in Shakspeare's way, but substantially in the Greek way. The fact that Samson is free and that his God is his friend does not prevent his feeling just in the Greek way that God's ways are dark and inscrutable, past man's finding out, and far above out of the reach of his control. It does not prevent his being helpless as well as heroic, fully conscious that all his strength leaves him still a weak child at the absolute disposal of incomprehensible Omnipotence. So the whole atmosphere of the play, as well as its formal mould, will always recall the Greek tragedies. And rightly: the likenesses of every kind are far greater than the differences. The distinctions which led Jebb to declare it was not Hellenic at all are far less important than the kinship which made a still greater critic, the poet Goethe, declare that it had "more of the antique spirit than any production of any other modern poet."

A more obvious and perhaps more important difference than that on which Jebb lays such stress is, of course, the fundamental one that the Greek plays were written for performance and that many of them have {245} elaborately contrived "plots." No one supposes that _Samson_ would be effective on the stage; but the modern dramatist who could make his play as exciting to the spectator as the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ or _Electra_ of Sophocles, or the _Hippolytus_ or _Medea_ of Euripides, would assuredly be no ordinary playwright. This Milton did not attempt. His drama resembles rather the earlier Greek tragedies where the lyrical element is still the principal thing while the "plot" and the persons who act its story play a comparatively subordinate part. It is, at any rate in form, more like Aeschylus than Sophocles, and more like the _Persae_ and the _Prometheus_ than the Oresteian Trilogy. To the _Prometheus_, indeed, it bears particularly close and obvious resemblances; for instance, both have a heroic and defiant prisoner as their principal figure, and as their minor figures a succession of friends and enemies who visit him.

However, literary parallels and precedents of this kind are perhaps rather interesting than important. Milton's greatness is his own. Only the fact remains that, as it was of an order that need not fear to measure itself with the Greeks and as he happened to put its dramatic expression into a Greek form, he has given us something which comes far {246} nearer to producing on us the particular impression of sublimity made by the greatest Greek dramas than anything else in English or perhaps in any modern language. In English nothing worth mentioning of the kind has been attempted, till in our own day the present Poet Laureate wrote his _Prometheus the Fire-Giver_ and _Achilles in Scyros_. But, interesting and beautiful as these are, they make no pretence to rival _Samson Agonistes_. They are altogether on a smaller scale of art, of thought, of emotion.

_Samson Agonistes_ is Milton's last word and on the whole his saddest. Yet the final effect of great art is never sad. The sense of greatness transcends all pain. In the preface of _Samson_ Milton alludes to Aristotle's remark that it is the function of tragedy to effect through pity and fear a proper purgation of these emotions. Whatever be the precise meaning of that famous and disputed sentence, there is no doubt that Milton gives part of its general import truly enough when he paraphrases it "to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated." And its application extends far beyond the mere field of tragedy. So far as other kinds of poetry, or indeed any of the arts, deal with {247} subjects that arouse any of the deeper human emotions, the law of purification by a kind of delight is one by which they stand or fall. A crucifixion which is merely painful, as many primitive crucifixions are, or merely disgusting, as many later ones are, is so far a failure. It has not done the work art has to do. Shakspeare knew this well enough, though he very likely never thought about it. The final word of his great tragedies is one of sorrow overpassed and transformed. "The rest is silence;" "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep?" "I have almost forgot the taste of fears;" "My heart doth joy that yet in all my life I found no man but he was true to me!" This is the note always struck before the very end comes. And Milton, so unlike Shakspeare both as man and as artist, is no less conspicuous than he in the strict observance of this practice. All his poems, without exception, end in quietness and confidence. The beauty of the last lines of _Paradise Lost_, to which early critics were so strangely blind, is now universally celebrated--

"Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose {248} Their place of rest, and Providence their guide. They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way."

The storm and stress of day are over and are followed by the passionless quiet of evening. So in _Paradise Regained_. A modern poet would have been tempted to end at line 635, with a kind of dramatic fall of the curtain--

"on thy glorious work Now enter, and begin to save Mankind."

Not so Milton. As after the most aweinspiring death known to literature the _Oedipus Coloneus_ closes on the note of acquiescent peace--

"Come, cease lamentation, lift it up no more; for verily these things stand fast;"

so Milton ends the long debate of his poem, not with victory, but with silence--

"He, unobserved, Home to his mother's house private returned."

It is indeed just the opposite in one way of the conclusion of _Paradise Lost_. The man and woman who had fallen before the Tempter had no home to return to: they must seek a new "place of rest" elsewhere in the new world that was before them. The Man who {249} had vanquished him could go back quietly to the home of his childhood. But the contrast is external, the likeness essential. For the first man as well as the second there is an appointed place of rest and a Providence to guide: the two poems can both end on the same note of that peace which follows upon the right understanding of all great experiences.

This, which is only implied in his earlier poems, is almost expressly set forth in the last of all Milton's words, the already quoted conclusion of Samson--

"His servants He, with new acquist Of true experience from this great event, With peace and consolation hath dismissed, And calm of mind, all passion spent."

Milton was a passionate man who lived in passionate times. Neither his passions nor those of the men of his day are of very much matter to us now. But the art in which he "spent" them, in which, that is to say, he embodied, transcended and glorified them, till through it he and we alike attain to consolation and calm, is an eternal possession not only of the English race but of the whole world.

{250}

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The literature that in one way or another deals with Milton is, of course, immense. His name fills more than half of one of the volumes of the great British Museum Catalogue, more than sixteen pages being devoted to the single item of _Paradise Lost_. They afford perhaps the most striking of all proofs of the universality of his genius; for they include translations into no fewer than eighteen languages, many of which possess a large choice of versions. Into more than a very small fraction of such a vast field it is obviously impossible to enter here. Only a few notes can be given, under the four headings of Poetry, Prose, Biography and Criticism.

POETRY

Of the poetry, it may be worth saying, though MSS. hardly come within the scope of a brief bibliography of this sort, that a manuscript, mainly in the handwriting of Milton himself and containing many of his early poems, is preserved in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The printed copies, of course, begin with those published in his own lifetime. They contain practically the whole of his poetry. The most important are the volume containing his early poems issued in 1645, _Paradise Lost_ which first appeared in 1667, _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_ which followed in 1671, and a re-issue in 1673, with additions, of the volume of his minor poems already printed in 1646. The first complete edition was _The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton_, issued by Jacob Tonson in 1695.

So much for the bare text. Annotation naturally soon followed. The earliest commentator was Patrick Hume who published an edition of the poems with notes on _Paradise Lost_ in 1695. But the most famous, though also least important, of Milton's early critics was the greatest of English scholars, Richard Bentley, who in 1732 issued an edition of _Paradise Lost_ in which whole passages were relegated to the margin as the spurious interpolations of an imaginary editor. Such a book is, of course, merely a curiosity connecting two {251} great names. The real beginning in the work of editing Milton as a classic should be edited was made by Thomas Newton, afterwards Bishop of Bristol, who in 1749 brought out an edition of _Paradise Lost_, "with Notes of Various Authors," and followed it in 1752 with a similar volume including _Paradise Regained_ and the minor poems. Newton's work was often reprinted, and remained the standard edition till it was superseded by that of the Rev. H. J. Todd which first appeared in 1801. The final issue of Todd is that of 1826 in six volumes which, in spite of many notes which are defective, many which are antiquated and some which are superfluous, may still claim to be the best library edition of Milton. Among the best of those which have appeared since are Thomas Keightley's, published in 1859, which contains excellent notes, and Prof. David Masson's, which is the work of the most learned and devoted of all Milton's editors. Both of these have the advantage of Todd in some respects; Keightley in acuteness and penetration, Masson in completeness of knowledge. But no single editor's work can be a perfect substitute for a _variorum_ edition like that of Todd, giving the comments and suggestions of many different minds. The most complete edition of Masson's work is the final library one in three volumes, 1890; there is also a convenient smaller issue, based on this, but omitting some of its editorial matter. It was last printed in three volumes 1893. It contains a Memoir, rather elaborate Introductions to all the poems, an Essay on Milton's English and Versification, and reduced Notes.

A text with Critical Notes by W. Aldis Wright was issued by the Cambridge University Press in one volume, 1903. The text of the earliest printed editions of the several poems was reprinted in 1900 in an edition prepared for the Clarendon Press by the Rev. H. C. Beeching.

It may be worth while adding that Milton's Latin and Italian poems were translated by the poet Cowper and printed in 1808 by his biographer, Hayley, in a beautiful quarto volume with designs by Flaxman. These translations are reprinted in the "Aldine" edition of Milton, 1826. Masson has also given translations of most of them in his _Life of Milton_ and in his 1890 library edition of the Poems.

PROSE

The Prose works were, of course, mostly issued as books or pamphlets in Milton's lifetime. They were collected by Toland in three volumes _folio_, 1698. There are several more modern editions; as that published in 1806 in seven volumes {252} with a _Life_ by Charles Symmons; that of Pickering, who included them in his fine eight-volume edition. _The Works of John Milton in Verse and Prose, Edited by John Mitford, 1851_; and that in Bohn's Standard Library, in six volumes, edited, with some notes of a somewhat controversial character, by J. A. St. John, 1848. The first volume of a new edition edited by Sir Sidney Lee appeared in 1905. One of the most curious of the prose works, the _De Doctrina Christiana_ or _Treatise of Christian Doctrine_, was not known till 1823, when it was discovered in the State Paper Office. It was edited, with an English translation, by the Rev. C. R. Sumner in 1825 and is included in Bohn's edition.

BIOGRAPHY

The earliest sources for the biography of Milton, outside his own works, are the account given in the _Fasti Oxonienses_ of Anthony à Wood, 1691, the _Brief Lives of John Aubrey_, and the Life prefixed by the poet's nephew, Edward Phillips, to an edition of the _Letters of State_, printed in 1694. A very large number of _Lives of Milton_ have been written since, based on these materials and those collected from a few other sources. The most famous and in some ways the best, in spite of its unfairness, is that of Johnson, to be found in his _Lives of the Poets_. The best short modern Life is Mark Pattison's masterly, though occasionally wilful, little book in the English Men of letters Series. For the library and for students all other biographies have been superseded by the great work of David Masson, who spared no labours to investigate every smallest detail of the life of Milton and to place the whole in the setting of an elaborate history of England in Milton's day. The value of the book is somewhat impaired by the very strong Puritan and anti-Cavalier partisanship of the writer; and its style suffers from an imitation of Carlyle. But nothing can seriously detract from the immense debt every student of Milton owes to the author of this monumental biography which appeared in seven volumes, 1859-1894.

An interesting critical discussion of the various portraits representing or alleged to represent Milton is prefixed to the Catalogue of the Exhibition held at Christ's College Cambridge during the Milton Tercentenary in 1908. It is by Dr. G. C. Williamson.

CRITICISM

A poet at once so learned and so great as Milton inevitably invited criticism. The first and most generous of his critics {253} was his great rival Dryden, who, in a few words of the preface to _The State of Innocence_, published the year after Milton's death, led the note of praise, which has been echoed ever since by speaking of _Paradise Lost_ as "one of the greatest, most noble and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." The next great name in the list is that of Addison, who contributed a series of papers on Milton to the _Spectator_ in 1712. Like all criticism except the work of the supreme masters, they are written too exclusively from the point of view of their own day to retain more than a small fraction of their value after two hundred years have passed. But they are of considerable historical interest and may still be read with pleasure, like everything written by Addison. A less sympathetic but finer piece of work is the critical part of Johnson's famous _Life_. It is full of crudities of every sort, such as the notorious remark that "no man could have fancied that he read _Lycidas_ with pleasure had he not known the author"; and perhaps nothing Johnson over wrote displayed more nakedly the narrow limits of his appreciation of poetry. But, in spite of all its defects, it exhibits its writer's great gifts; and its absolute and unshrinking sincerity, its half-reluctant utterance of some of the truest praise ever spoken of Milton, its profound knowledge of the way in which the human mind approaches both literature and life, will always preserve it as one of the most interesting criticisms which Milton has provoked. Johnson's friend, Thomas Warton, in his edition of the minor poems issued in 1785, led the way to an understanding of much in Milton to which Johnson and his school were entirely blind. This movement has continued ever since, and is seen in the immense influence Milton had upon the poets of the nineteenth century, especially upon Wordsworth and Keats; an influence of exactly the opposite sort to that which he exercised with such disastrous effect upon many poets of the century immediately succeeding his own. It is also seen in the finer intelligence of the critical studies of his work. These are far too many to mention here. Among the best are Hazlitt's Lecture on Shakspeare and Milton in his _Lectures on the English Poets_; Matthew Arnold's speech at the unveiling of a Milton memorial, printed in the second series of his _Essays in Criticism_; Sir Walter Raleigh's volume, _Milton_, published in 1900, and _The Epic_, by Lascelles Abercrombie, 1914, which is full of fine and suggestive criticism of Milton. _Milton's Prosody by Robert Bridges, 1901_, is the best study of the metre and scansion of Milton's later poems, especially of _Paradise Lost_.

{254}

INDEX TO PRINCIPAL PERSONS, PLACES, AND WORKS MENTIONED

Abercrombie, L., 136-7, 253 _Absalom and Achitophel_, 105 _Achilles in Scyros_, 246 Addison, Joseph, 77, 253 _Adonais_, 125 _Ad Patrem_, 39-40. _Aeneid, The_, 150, 175, 196 Aeschylus, 245 À Kempis, Thomas, 147 Aldersgate Street, 46 _All for Love_, 243 _Allegro, L'_, 41, 70, 93, 99, 106 _et sqq._, 123, 239 Anglesey, Earl of, 72, 82 Annesley, Arthur, 72 Aquinas, Thomas, 157 _Arbuthnot, Epistle to_, 105 _Arcades_, 41, 42 _Arcadia_, 58 _Areopagitica_, 44, 49, 64 Arianism, 204 Ariosto, 153 Aristotle, 86, 200 Arnold Matthew, 164, 253 Arthurian Epic (planned), 45, 148-9 _At a Solemn Music_, 13, 42, 97, 100, 103, 147 Athens, 205-6, 209 Aubrey, John, 29, 252

Barbican, the, 54 Baroni, Leonora, 44-5 Barrow, Samuel, 82 Beeching, Rev. H. C., 251 Bentley, Richard, 250 Bibliography, 250-3 Blake, Admiral, 57 Bohn's Standard Library, 252 Bow Church, 25 Bread Street, 24, 75 Bridges, Robert, 26, 108, 222, 223, 246, 253 _Brief Lives_, 252 Buckingham, Duke of, 58 Byron, Lord, 90

Cambridge, 28, 29, 30, 31-7, 39, 42, 85, 120, 121, 124, 250, 252 Carlyle, Thomas, 262 Caroline, Queen, 77 Charles I, 11, 28, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72, 86 Charles II, 47, 60, 65, 71, 73, 82, 86 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 90, 111 Christina, Queen of Sweden, 60 Christ's College, Cambridge, 28, 29, 120, 121, 124, 252 Clarendon, Earl of, 73 Clarges, Sir Thomas, 72 Coleridge, S. T., 206 _Comus_, 13, 41, 42, 95, 100, 110, 112-13 _et sqq._, 128, 242 Constable, 135 Coriolanus, 85 Cowper, William, 69, 251 Criticisms, 252-3 Cromwell, Oliver, 55, 57, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 133, 139, 176

Dante, 10, 11-12, 33, 120, 153-7 _Daphnaïda_, 125 Davenant, William, 72 _Defensio Regia_, 60, 61 _Defensio Secunda_, 61 De Quincey, Thomas, 96 Diodati, Charles, 42, 124, 125 _Divina Commedia, La_, 120, 157 Divorce pamphlets, 50 _et sqq._ _Doctrina Christiana, De_, 252 Dorset, Earl of, 81 Dowland, Robert, 28 Drayton, Michael, 124 Drummond, William, 124, 135 Dryden, John, 80-2, 90, 103, 104-5, 117, 241, 253

_Eikon Basilike_, the, 57-8 _Eikonoklastes_, 58, 61 _Electra, The_, 245 Elizabeth, Queen, 85 _English Men of Letters Series_, 252 _Epic, The_, 253 Epigrams, Latin, on La Baroni, 45 _Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester_, 36, 37, 97, 103 _Epitaphium Damonis_, 124 _Essays in Criticism_, 253 Euripides, 77, 82, 245 _Excursion, The_, 136, 228-9

_Faerie Queen, The_, 115 Fairfax, General, 139, 171 _Faithful Shepherdess, The_, 115 _Fasti Oxonienses_, 252 _Faust_, 196 Fire of London, 75 Flaxman, John, 251 Fletcher, John, 107, 115 Florence, 43, 44, 46 France, 43, 46, 59

Galileo, 44, 45 _Gerusalemme Conquistata_ (Tasso), 45 Gibbons, Orlando, 28 Goethe, J. W. von, 230, 244 Gorges, Mrs., 125 Grotius, Hugo, 43

_Hamlet_, 24, 243 Hampden, John, 171 Hayley, William, 251 Hazlitt, William, 253 _Hippolytus_, 245 _History of Britain_, 78 Homer, 77, 82, 84, 89, 152, 153, 155, 171, 230 Horace, 69 Horton, 37, 40, 41, 42, 111 Hume, Patrick, 250

_Iliad, The_, 154, 155, 157, 162 _Imitation, The, of Christ_, 147-8 Indemnity, Act of, 72, 73, 74 Independent Army, The, 55, 56 Italian travels, 43-6

James I, 58 Jebb, Prof., 242-3, 244 _Job, Book of_, 21, 82 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 125, 126, 160, 162, 175, 194, 196, 206, 207, 227, 252, 253 Jones, Inigo, 16, 114 Jonson, Ben, 114, 115

Keats, John, 79, 90, 102, 110, 125, 253 Keightley, Thomas, 251 King, Edward, 42, 91, 124, 125, 127, 128-31

Landor, Walter Savage, 132 Lawes, Henry, 41, 82, 91, 116, 119 Lawrence, Henry, 69-70, 133 _Lectures on the English Poets_, 253 Lee, Sir Sidney, 252 _Letters of State_, 252 Lives of Milton, 251, 252, 253 _Lives of the Poets_, 252 London, 25, 49; fire of, 75 Long Parliament, 47, 63, 64, 171 _Lycidas_, 13, 41, 42, 90, 91, 100, 106, 123 _et sqq._

Mackail, J. W., 94-5, 206, 211 Manso, Giovanni, 45 Marini, 45 Marlowe, Christopher, 107 Marvell, Andrew, 69, 73 Massacres in Piedmont, sonnets on, 68, 133, 139, 140-1 Masson, D., 24, 52, 68, 73, 75, 251 _Medea, The_, 245 Meredith, George, 134 _Milton_, 253 _Milton's Prosody_, 224, 253 Milton's relations:-- Daughters, 11, 54, 69, 75-77, 218 Deborah, 77-8 Father, 27, 29, 37, 38-40, 42, 43, 49, 54, 75 Infant son, 76 Mother, 40 Nephews, 46, 54, 61, 70, 252 Wives-- First, _see_ Powell, Mary. Second, 54, 69, 71 Third, 54 Mitford, John, 252 Monk, General, 72 Morley, Thomas, 28 Morrice, --, 72 Morus, 69

Napoleon, 9, 139 Newbolt, Henry, 120 Newton, Thomas, 251

_Ode on the Nativity_, 35-6, 37, 91, 93-4, 97, 98-103 _Odyssey, The_, 162, 196 _Oedipus Coloneus_, 237, 248 _Oedipus Tyrannus_, 233, 238, 243 _On Attaining the Age of Twenty-three_, sonnet, 91, 133 _On His Blindness_, sonnet, 62-3, 133 _On the Death of a Fair Infant_, 35, 97-9 _Orations_, 34-5 _Othello_, 150 Ovid, 33, 77, 124

Pamphlets, 49, 56, 69, 71 _Paradise Lost_, 13, 24, 25, 28, 44, 47, 55, 71, 78, 79, 80, 82, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 101, 104, 106, 112, 113, 118, 120, 123, 125, 137, 142 _et sqq._, 196, 197 _et sqq._, 239, 240, 247, 248, 250, 251, 253 _Paradise Regained_, 13, 24, 44, 78, 167, 196 _et sqq._, 227, 248, 250, 251 _Passion, The_, 103 Pattison, Mark, 131, 132, 197, 252 _Penseroso, Il_, 41, 70, 93, 100, 106 _et sqq._, 239 _Persae, The_, 245 Petrarch, 33, 134, 135 Phillips, Edward, 252 Pickering, William, 252 Pindar, 117 Plato, 8, 9-10, 21, 111, 156 _Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue_, 115 _Poems, editions of_, 250-1, 252 _Poetical Works, The, of Mr. John Milton_, 250 Pope, A., 85, 90, 91, 105, 222, 223 Portraits, 252 Powell family, 50, 53 Powell, Mary, 50-4, 69, 71 _Prelude, The_, 136, 228-9 _Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio_, 60, 61 _Prometheus the Fire-Giver_, 246 _Prometheus Unbound_, 102 _Prometheus Vinctus_, 21, 243, 245 Prose Works, 47 _et sqq._, 251-2 Psalms, the, 139-40; paraphrases of, 95 Purcell, Henry, 16 Pym, John, 171

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 198, 253 Ranelagh, Lady, 69 _Ready and Easy Way A, to Establish a Free Commonwealth_, 65 _Reason, The, of Church Government_, 13, 37 Regicides, the, 55, 63, 71, 74 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 16 Rome, 44, 209 Rossetti, Dante G., 133, 135

St. Brides', Fleet Street, 46 St. Giles' Church, Cripplegate, 79 St. John, J. A., 252 St. Paul, 9, 144, 218 St. Paul's Cathedral, 89, 193 Salmasius, 59-62, 69, 218 _Samson Agonistes_, 13, 20, 24, 78, 83, 99, 199, 219 _et sqq._, 250 Sansovino's Library, Venice, 193 Saumaise, _see_ Salmasius. Scudamore, Lord, 43 Shakspeare, W., 9, 14, 17, 32, 35, 36, 80, 85, 90, 103, 114, 118, 145, 166, 247; sonnets, 133-5, 253 Shelley, P. B., 20, 29, 50, 79, 90, 99, 102, 111, 125, 228 Shelley, Mrs. P. B., 50 Sidney, Sir Philip, 58, 98, 124, 135 Skinner, Cyriack, 62, 133 Smithfield, 72 _Song on May Morning_, 36, 107 _Sonnets_, 47, 54, 62-3, 68, 69, 91, 106, 131 _et sqq._ Sophocles, 82, 233, 245 _Spectator, The_, 253 Spenser, Edmund, 93, 97, 98, 111, 115, 116, 124, 125, 153 _State, The, of Innocence_, 240, 253 Statius, 157 Strafford, Earl of, 171 Sumner, Rev. C. R., 252 Symmons, Charles, 252

Tasso, Torquato, 45, 82, 153, 164 Tennyson, Alfred, 69, 90, 197 _Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_, 56, 58, 75 Theocritus, 124 Todd, Rev. H. J., 251 Toland, John, 251 Tonson, Jacob, 250 _Treatise of Christian Doctrine_, 252 Trinity College Library, 89, 250 Turner, J. W. M., 16 Tyburn, 71, 90

Verrall, A. W., 240 Virgil, 82, 84, 89, 91, 124, 139, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 163, 175 _Vita Nuova, La_, 120

Waller, Edmund, 104 Warton, Joseph, 118, 126, 214 Warton, Thomas, 253 Whitehall, 58, 70, 74, 219 Williamson, Dr. G. C., 252 Winchester, Marchioness of, 36 Windsor, 37 Windsor Castle, 40 Wood, Anthony à, 31, 35, 252 Wordsworth, W., 26, 34, 79, 90, 131, 133, 135, 137, 140, 141, 206, 227-30; sonnets, 137-41, 253 _Works, The, of John Milton, in Prose and Verse_, 252 Wren, Sir Christopher, 16, 89 Wright, W. Aldis, 251

Young, Thomas, 27