John Cann Bailey

“ 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. ”

“ Each succeeding generation sees the peaks of humanity from a new point of view which cannot be exactly the same as that of its predecessor. Each age reshapes for itself its conception of art, of poetry, of religion, and of human life which includes them all. ”

“ Johnson and the rest were right in perceiving that pastoral elegy had very commonly been an insincere affectation, a mere exercise in writing; the age into which they were born denied them the ear that could hear the amazing music of Lycidas, or perceive the sensuous, imaginative, spiritual intensity which drowns its incongruities in a flood of poetic life. There is a still more important truth which that generation could not see. Prose aims at expressing facts directly, and sometimes succeeds. ”

“ The wise, as the world goes on, may differ more and more from some of Milton's opinions. They can never escape the greatness either of the poet or of the man. Men's appreciation of Milton is almost in proportion to their instinctive understanding of what greatness is. Other poets, perhaps, have things of greater beauty: none in English, none, perhaps, in any language, fills us with a more exalting conviction of the greatness of human life. No man rises from an hour with Milton without feeling ashamed of the triviality of his life and certain that he can, if he will, make it less trivial. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bitter as his life on earth had been, no man ever suffering more from evil days and evil tongues, no man ever more bitterly conscious of living in an evil and perverse generation, he had yet within him a perpetual fountain of peace in the thought of God's will, and the faith that he was daily advancing nearer to the light of heaven and the divine presence. ”

“ Taking the poem as a whole, the mighty music scarcely ceases: the majestic flight of the poet continues uninterrupted: no contrary winds disturb it, no weariness brings it flagging down to earth. There is nothing, not even theological disputes, out of which he cannot make fine verse, and occasionally great poetry. There is nothing, however great, that he cannot make his own. Just as Shakspeare took the noble prose of North's Plutarch, and hardly altering a word made noble poetry of it, so Milton can take the Bible. ”

“ The important thing about the sun is not its spots but its light and heat. No great poet in all history, with the possible exception of Dante, has so much heat as Milton. In prose and verse alike he burns and glows with fire. At its worst it is a fire of anger and pride, at {12} its best a fire of faith in liberty, justice, righteousness, God. Of the highest of all fires, the white flame of love, it has indeed little. Milton had no Beatrice to teach him how to show men the loveliness of the divine law, the beauty of holiness. ”

“ Tears are not very far from the eye that is passing over its page: tears in which sympathy plays a smaller part than joy at the discovery that human words can be so beautiful. But if Milton moves us more by his own personality than by that of any of his creations, it is still true that he is not so entirely without dramatic power as has sometimes been alleged. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was these two men who, more than any others, made the town recognize the greatness of Milton. Both were as unlike Milton as men could be, and Dryden had just committed himself to a strong championship of rhymed verse as against blank. There is nowhere a finer proof of the compelling power of great art upon those who know it when they see it than the unbounded praise with which Dryden at once saluted Milton. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such a man, in such a plight, with the added misery of knowing that he owed it to his own rash folly, may be pardoned for forgetting the true bearing of his own doctrine that laws are made for the "common lump of men." Cases like his are the real tragedies, the tragedies of life so much more bitter than the more visible ones of death; and no thinking or feeling man will lightly decide that they must remain unrelieved. But neither Milton nor any of his successors must look at the problem from his own point of view alone. ”

“ To live with Milton is necessarily to learn that the art of poetry is no triviality, no mere amusement, but a high and grave thing, a thing of the choicest discipline of phrase, the finest craftsmanship of structure, the most nobly ordered music of sound. ”

“ 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. ”