Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/220

200 The wheel had come full circle, and the combat to which he sounded the first note of onset in Lycidas closed with this fierce cry of anger, and passionate prayer for vengeance. It was not the Stuarts alone who had failed to read aright the lesson of defeat. Puritanism needed, as Mr Trevelyan has said, to go to school with rationalism to reacquire some of the elements of Christianity.

Milton's poetry was the last great expression of two enthusiasms, which had passed away even while he wrote—the artistic enthusiasm of the Renaissance and the spiritual enthusiasm of the Reformation. No poet realised so completely the Renaissance ideal of poetry cast in classical moulds,—carried out so entirely and majestically the programme of the Pleiad. Tasso's poem had been a compromise between classical epic and mediæval romance. Jonson's attempts to reproduce classical forms in the drama appear pedantic and boyish beside Milton's. In general, Renaissance epic and tragedy are lifeless failures. French tragedy, as it finally took form, is a very different thing from Greek tragedy. Milton, and Milton only, succeeded in producing living and beautiful poems in correct classical forms. And into these classic forms he poured the intensest spirit of the Protestant movement. No one carried to bolder logical conclusions the first principle of Protestantism, the interpretation of Scripture by the unfettered individual reason and conscience. The completeness with which he accepted the right of individual interpretation separated him