Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/357

Rh MILTON 339 simply, whether such controversial work as Milton did plunge into, and persevere in for twenty years, was unworthy, after all, of him or his powers? Do not hundreds of men, accounted among the ablest in the world, spend their lives precisely in such work of controversy on contemporary questions ; and are not some of the men of noblest reputation in the world s history remembered for nothing else ? If Burke, whose whole public career consisted in a succession of speeches and pamphlets, is looked back upon as one of the greatest men of his century on their account, why should there be such regret over the fact that Milton, after having been the author of Comus and Lycidas, became for a time the prose orator of his earlier and more tumultuous generation ? The truth is that it is not his exchange of poetry for prose oratory that is objected to, so much as the nature of his prose oratory, the side he took, the opinions he advocated. English scholarship and English literary criticism have not j r et sufficiently recovered from that inherited sycophancy to the Restoration which has covered with a cloud the preceding twenty years of the &quot;Great Rebellion,&quot; voting that period of English history to be unrespectable, and all its phenomena of Presbyterianism, the Solemn League and Covenant, Independency, the sects, English republicanism, &c., to be matters of obsolete jargon, less worthy of attention than a Roman agrarian law or the mimes of Horace s mistresses. When this unscholarly state of temper has passed, there will be less disposition to distin guish between Milton as the poet and Milton as the prose writer. While some may recognize, with the avidity of assent and partisan ship, the fact that there are in Milton s prose writings notions of much value and consequence that have not yet been absorbed into the English political mind, there will be a general agreement at least ns to the importance of those pamphlets historically. It will be perceived that he was not only the greatest pamphleteer of his generation, head and shoulders above the rest, but also that there is no life of that time, not even Cromwell s, in which the history of the great Revolution in its successive phases, so far as the deep underlying ideas and speculations were concerned, may be more intimately and instructively studied than in Milton s. Then, on merely literary grounds, what an interest in those prose remains ! Not only of his Areopagitica, admired now so unreservedly because its main doctrine has become axiomatic, but of most of his other pamphlets, even those the doctrine of which is least popular, it may be said confidently that they answer to his own definition of &quot;a good bo&amp;gt;k,&quot; by containing somehow &quot;the precious life-blood of a master-spirit.&quot; From the entire series there might be a collection of specimens, unequalled anywhere else, of the capabilities of that older, grander, and more elaborate English prose of which the Elizabethans and their immediate successors were not ashamed, though it has fallen into disrepute now in comparison with the easier and nimbler prose which came in with Dryden. Nor will readers of Milton s pamphlets continue to accept the hackneyed observation that his genius was destitute of humour. Though his prevailing mood was the severely earnest, there are pages in his prose writings, both English and Latin, of the most laughable irony, reaching sometimes to outrageous farce, and some of them as worthy of the name of humour as anything in Swift. Here, however, we touch on what is the worst feature in some of the prose pamphlets, their measureless ferocity, their boundless licence in personal scurrility. With all allowance for the old custom of those days, when controversy was far more of a life- ami-death business than it is now, as well as for the intrinsic soundness of Milton s rule of always discerning the man behind the book, it is impossible for the most tolerant of modern readers to excuse Milton in this respect to the full extent of his delinquencies. While it is wrong to regard Milton s middle twenty years of prose polemics as a degradation of his genius, and while the fairer contention might be that the youthful poet of Comus ami Lycidas actually promoted himself, and became a more powerful agency in the world and a more interesting object in it for ever, by consent ing to lay aside his &quot;singing robes &quot; and spend a portion of his life in great prose oratory, who does not exult in the fact that such a life was rounded off so miraculously at the close by a final stage of compulsory calm, when the &quot; singing robes&quot; could be resumed, and Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes could issue in succession from the blind man s chamber? Of these three poems, and what they reveal of Milton, no need here to speak at length. Paradise Lost is one of the few monumental works of the world, with nothing in modern epic literature comparable to it except the great poem of Dante. This is best perceived by those who penetrate beneath the beauties of the merely terrestrial portion of the story, and who recognize the coherence and the splendour of that vast symbolic phantasmagory by which, through the wars in heaven and the subsequent revenge of the expelled archangel, it paints forth the connexion of the whole visible universe of human cognizance and history with the grander, pre-existing, and still environing world of the eternal and inconceivable. To this great epic Paradise Regained is a sequel, and it ought to be read as such. The legend that Milton preferred the shorter epic to the larger is quite incorrect. All that is authentic on the subject is the state ment by Edward Phillips that, when it was reported to his uride that the shorter epic was &quot; generally censured to be much inferior to the other,&quot; he &quot;could not hear with patience any such thing.&quot; The best critical judgment now confirms Milton s own, and pro nounces Paradise Regained to be not only, within the possibilities of its briefer theme, a worthy sequel to Paradise Lost, but also one of the most edifying and artistically perfect poems in any language. Finally, the poem in which Milton bade farewell to the Muse, and in which he reverted to the dramatic form, proves that to the very end his right hand had lost none of its power or cunning. Samson Agonistes is the most powerful drama in our language after the severe Greek model, and it has the additional interest of being so contrived that, without strain at any one point, or in any one par ticular, of the strictly objective incidents of the Biblical story which it enshrines, it is yet the poet s own epitaph and his con densed autobiography. All in all, now that those three great poems of Milton s later life have drawn permanently into their company the beautiful and more simple performances of his youth and early manhood, so that we have all his English poetry under view at once, the result has been that this man, who would have had to be remembered independently as the type of English magna nimity and political courage, is laurelled also as the supreme poet of his nation, with the single exception of Shakespeare. Much light is thrown upon Milton s mind in his later life, and even upon the poems of that period, by his posthumous Latin Treatise of Christian Doctrine. It differs from all his other prose writings of any importance in being cool, abstract, and didactic. Professing to be a system of divinity derived directly from the Bible, it is really an exposition of Milton s metaphysics and of his reasoned opinions on all questions of philosophy, ethics, and politics. The general effect is to show that, though he is rightly regarded as the very genius of English Puritanism, its representative poet and idealist, yet he was not a Puritan of what may be called the first wave, or that wave of Calvinistic orthodoxy which broke in upon the absolutism of Charles and Laud, and set the English Revolu tion agoing. He belonged distinctly to that larger and more per sistent wave of Puritanism which, passing on through Inde pendency, included at length an endless variety of sects, many of them rationalistic and free-thinking in the extreme, till, checked by the straits of the Restoration, it had to contract its volume for a while, and to reappear, so far as it could reappear at all, in the new and milder guise of what has ever since been known as English Liberalism. For example, the treatise shows that Milton in his later life was not an orthodox Trinitarian, but an anti-Trinitarian of that high Arian order, counting Sir Isaac Newton among its subsequent English adherents, which denied the coesseutiality or coequality of Christ with absolute Deity, but regarded him as clothed with a certain derivative divinity of a high and unfathomable kind. It shows him also to have been Arminian, rather than Calvinistic, in his views of free will and predestination. It shows him to have been no Sabbatarian, like the Puritans of the first wave, but most strenuously anti-Sabbatarian. Indeed one of its doctrines is that the Decalogue is no longer the standard of human morality, and that Christian liberty is not to be bounded by its prohibitions or by any sacerdotal code of ethics founded on these. Hence, in the treatise, not only a repetition of Milton s views on the mar riage subject and of other peculiar tenets of his that had been set forth in his pamphlets, but some curious and minute novelties of opinion besides. By far the most important revelation of the treatise, however, consists in the very definite statement it makes of Milton s metaphysical creed and of the connexion of that creed in his mind with the revealed theology of Christianity. While, ontologically, he starts from a pure spiritualistic theism, or from the notion of one infinite and eternal Spirit as the self-subsisting God and author of all being, cosmologically his system is that of a pantheistic materialism, which conceives all the present uni verse, all that we call creation, as consisting of diverse modifications, inanimate or animate, of one primal matter, which was originally nothing else than an efflux or emanation from the very substance of God. Angels and men, no less than the brute world and thu things we call lifeless, are formations from this one original matter, only in higher degrees and endowed with soul and free will. Hence any radical distinction between matter and spirit, body and soul, is, Milton holds, fallacious. The soul of man, he holds, is not something distinct from the body of man and capable of existing apart, but is actually bound up with the bodily organism. There fore, when the body dies, the soul dies also, and the whole man ceases to exist. The immortality revealed in Scripture is, therefore, not a continued existence of the soul in an immaterial condition immediately after death, but a miraculous revival of the whole man, soul and body together, at the resurrection, after an intermediate sleep. In such a resurrection, with a final judgment, a reign of Christ, and a glorification of the saints in a new heaven and a new earth, Milton declares his absolute belief. But, indeed, throughout the treatise, with all its differences from the orthodox interpreta tions of the Bible, nothing is more remarkable than the profound ness of the reverence avowed for the Bible itself. The very initial