Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/98

 POEMS WRITTEN AT HORTON

��Much misprision of Lycidas, from Dr. Johnson down, has resulted from a failure to accept the first of these premises. We do not, it is true, know exactly what the personal relations of young King and his future elegist were, during their common term of residence within the walls of Christ's College. King was Milton's junior, however, and so far as we can judge from his preserved writings, not of a type of mind to attract an isolated and haughty personality. Milton was not a man to con- tract those easy miscellaneous friendships open to a less exigent nature, nor was he a man to let a genuine friendship, once contracted, go unchronicled, as his letters and poems to Charles Diodati testify.

But no such a priori argument to prove the case is needed. Lycidas itself bears convincing testimony that it grew not out of a poignant personal grief, such as in- spired three years later the elegy upon Diodati, but out of a passion no less intense for being more generalized and imagina- tive. King was, everything goes to show, one of those men upon whom there rests in youth an indefinable light of promise, the same in kind if not in degree as two centuries later touched the imaginations of another group of young Cantabrigians gath- ered about Arthur Hallam. His death could stand, therefore, before the eye of the poet, as a type of touching unfulfill- ment. No one who has studied the psy- chology of the poetic mind will doubt the kindling power of such an abstraction. But if this pathos of mortality had not been enough (and for a spirit of Milton's martial cast it might not have been) King's death had another symbolic significance. He had been in preparation for the minis- try; he was a type of the " good shepherd " who should enter the sheep-folds of the church and save the flock from hirelings and thieves. Already in Comus Milton had given a hint of his growing indigna- tion over the corruptions of the church, and during the three years of silence which

��followed the writing of that poem he had been brooding angrily upon the laxity and worldliness of the Episcopal establishment. Here was his chance to speak out. He seized upon the symbol without much re- gard to King's actual worth or power, broadening and dignifying the individual instance to fit the might of his denuncia- tion.

The symbolic bearing of his theme, as has been said, naturally pointed Milton to the pastoral form, which by its ideal re- moteness lent itself with peculiar readi-- ness to symbolism. It will not do, how- ever, to press this point too far, since the fact must be borne in mind that for the expression of what was unquestionably deep personal grief, he chose, in the Epi- taphium Damonis, the same general form. But between the Epitaphium Damonis and Lycidas there is this notable difference : the first is in the pure style of the early Sicilian pastoralists, and belongs, therefore, to a simple personal type of elegy ; Lycidas is in the mixed rococo style of the pasto- ralists of the late Renaissance, and belongs to a type which had long been put to ulte- rior uses and overlaid with deposit upon deposit of literary second-thought. We can see, indeed, in this last particular, an additional reason why the form should have recommended itself to Milton, as well as one prime source of the wonderful beauty which gathered about the theme under his hand. For his mind was of the kind which delights to draw together into one sub- stance the thought-material of all climes and times. Into this magic vessel of the Renaissance pastoral he gathered the my- thologies of Greece and Rome, the mongrel divinities of the academic myth-makers, dim old druidical traditions, the miracles of Palestine, the symbolism of the Catholic church, the angelic hierarchies of mediaeval theologians, and the mystical ecstasies of the redeemed in Paradise, all set in a frame-work of English landscape, in the midst of which a Sicilian shepherd sat

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