John Milton

“ Ben Jonson, in his mask, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, played in 1619, presents a Comus as “the god of cheer, or the belly, riding in triumph, his head crowned with roses and other flowers, his hair curled.” The character and the name were the common property of mask-writers.
The great distinction of Comus is its beauty, maintained at height through a thousand lines of supremely perfect verse. Greatly dramatic it of course is not. It yields its meaning to the most cursory reading; it has no mystery. It is simply beautiful, with a sustained beauty elsewhere unparalleled. ”

“ The Fury cannot destroy the praise, which necessarily belongs to doing well. Praise here means the essential praise, which naturally inheres in excellence, and not the being talked about by men.
The speaker is now Phœbus, the august god Apollo, the pure one, who protects law and order, and promotes whatever is good and beautiful; who reveals the will of Zeus, and presides over prophecy.
Phœbus has now an admonition to give and he touches the poet’s ears; as in Virgil, Eclogue IV 3,—Cynthius aurem vellit et admonuit, “The Cynthian twitched my ear and warned me.” ”

“ Shakespeare had still eight years to live, and at least four of the great plays to write. Bacon’s fame was already great, but the events of eighteen years were to cloud his reputation and establish his renown. Jonson, great as a writer of masks, was to live till he might have seen, in Comus, how a young and scholarly puritan humanist thought that a mask should be conceived.
Born thus in the fifth year of the first of the Stuarts, Milton lived to witness all the vicissitudes of English politics in which that family was involved, except the very last. He did not see the Revolution of 1688. ”

“ What the young Milton desired was to lead a life devoted to literature, or, more specifically, to poetry. This meant that he wished still to study a long time, to fathom all learning in all tongues. In college he had, besides Latin, mastered Greek, French, Italian, and Hebrew. His conception of a poet was of a most profoundly learned man. He had become aware of the existence of vast areas of knowledge that he had not yet explored. Other young men turned aside without misgiving from the ambition to know everything, and eagerly entered into useful and lucrative professions. ”

“ By no means an ancient poet, he takes us, nevertheless, to a world different from our own, and in some sense helps us out of the modern time in which our lives have fallen, to show us how other ages conceived of God and Heaven. The mark of an educated man is respect for the past ”

“ The Milton lesson must be a serious one because it is given to the study of the serious work of the gravest and most high-minded of men; and it must be an enjoyable one because it deals with the verse of the most musical of poets, and because one mood of joy is the only mood in which literature can be profitably studied. ”

“ In reading Milton we find that all the vicissitudes of his [xviii] life reflect themselves in his works, so that the political and social events in which he is personally concerned usurp his attention, color his views, and often become his themes. Thus he is not, like Shakespeare, a critic of the whole of humanity, but is usually an advocate or an accuser of the leaders in church and state and of the principles which they profess. He is by nature a partisan. All the energy of his mind goes into denunciation or vindication. ”

“ Love of fame, according to the poet, is the motive that prompts the scholar to live as an ascetic and to persevere in toilsome labor. This love of fame is an infirmity, but not a debasing one: it leaves the mind noble. ”

“ In fact, the great secret of teaching poetry in school is to get rid of the commonplace manner of speech befitting a recitation in language or science, and to put in practice the obvious truth that verse has its own form, which is very different from the form of prose. But repetition may go too far. Over-familiarity may beget indifference. Other poems await the attention of the class.
The teacher who really means to interest his classes, and begins by being interested and interesting himself, will rarely fail to accomplish his purpose. ”

“ The average pupil will not at first read anything of Milton with perfect enjoyment. He will, with his wonted docility, commit passages to memory, and he will do his best to speak these passages with the elocution on which you insist. But the taste for this poetry is an acquired one, and in the acquisition usually costs efforts quite alien to the prevailing conceptions of reading as a pleasurable recreation.
The task of pedagogy at this point becomes delicate. ”

“ Moreover, he uses the ancient freedom in assigning mythical pedigrees, not only adopting no authority as a canon, but allowing his own fancy to invent origins as suits his purpose. He knew the Greek and Latin poets, and assumed for himself the privilege which they exercised of shaping the myths as they pleased. We are not therefore to seek in Milton a reproduction of any system of mythology. ”

“ Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven’s joy,
Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse,
Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ,
Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce; ”

“ The only way not to be disappointed in the performance of the class is to expect nothing. It will be well at first, except where the test is quite simple, for the teacher to read it himself, making comment, in the way of explanation, as he goes on. Now and then he will stop and have a little quiz to hold attention. When classical allusions come up requiring research, the teacher will tell in what books the matter may be looked up, and will show how other poets, or Milton elsewhere, have played with the same piece of history or mythology. Thus a poem may be dealt with for a number of days. ”

“ His Tract on Education is a document of importance in the history of pedagogy, and is, besides, one of those memorable pieces of English prose which every student of literature, whatever his professional aims, must include in his reading. He kept his school in his own [xvii] house, where he boarded some of his pupils. We could not imagine John Milton going into a great public school, like St. Paul’s, to serve as under-teacher to one of the tyrannical head-masters of the day. The only school befitting his absolutely convinced and masterful spirit is one in which he reigns supreme. ”

“ Four times the pastoral note is rudely interrupted by the intervention of majestic beings who speak in awful tones from another world, and whose voices instantly check all familiar rustic speech, compelling it to wait till they have announced their messages from above. The supernal powers who thus descend to take their parts in the office of mourning are Phœbus, Apollo, Hippotades, god of the winds, Camus, god of the river Cam, and St. Peter. This mingling of classic, Hebrew, and Christian conceptions is a marked characteristic of all Milton’s poetry. ”

“ Beauty is Nature’s coin; must not be hoarded,
But must be current; and the good thereof 740
Consists in mutual and partaken bliss,
Unsavory in the enjoyment of itself.
If you let slip time, like a neglected rose
It withers on the stalk with languished head.
Beauty is Nature’s brag, and must be shown 745
In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities,
Where most may wonder at the workmanship.
It is for homely features to keep home;
They had their name thence: coarse complexions
And cheeks of sorry grain will serve to ply 750
The sampler, and to tease the huswife’s wool. ”

“ The prose pamphlets of the secretary for foreign tongues were, at least by a small class of observant persons, known to be the work of the author of Comus and Lycidas. There were not wanting men to take a sympathetic interest in the fate of the poet in his retirement, and to note the appearance of Paradise Lost as a literary event.
Thus it was that Milton lived to have some slight foretaste of the honor which two centuries have bestowed on his memory. Visitors came to see him in his modest dwelling in an unfashionable quarter of London. Foreigners occasionally came to satisfy their curiosity. ”

“ The people of the city had reason to fear the entrance of the cavalier troops and the sacking of the houses of citizens obnoxious to the party of the king. Milton would have been an object of special animosity to victorious royalists, and for a short time he had grounds for the acutest anxiety. It is not easy to see how, in case of actual pillage of the city, he could have made use of such an appeal as this. The sonnet is probably to be regarded as a work of art constructed when the vicissitudes which it pictures were happily past, and when the poet’s mind had regained its tranquillity. ”

“ For poetical purposes Milton everywhere adopts the popular astronomy of his day, which was based on the ancient, i.e. the Ptolemaic, or geocentric system of the universe. Copernicus had already taught the modern, heliocentric theory of the [81] solar system, and his innovations were not unknown to Milton, who, however, consistently adheres to the old conceptions. In Milton, therefore, we find the earth the centre of the visible universe, while the sun, the planets, and the fixed stars revolve about it in their several spheres. ”

“ With his removal to London in 1639 a distinct period in Milton’s life comes to an end. He has hitherto been uninterruptedly acquiring knowledge both by studious devotion to books and by observation of human life in foreign lands. He has read all the great literatures in ancient and modern languages. He has felt the poetic impulse and has proved to himself that he has at command creative power. His purpose still is to produce a poem. ”

“ Perfectly useless is it to set forth for the pupil the interesting echoes from ancient poets which generations of delving scholars have accumulated in their notes to Milton, pleasing as these are to mature readers. ”

“ Difficulties that lurk in an involved syntax the pupil may usually be expected to solve by study. But such a peculiar construction as that in Sonnet X 9 will probably have to be explained to him.
In the puritan theology and its implications he cannot take much interest, and will of course not be asked to do so. But high school students of Milton will ordinarily, in their historical courses, have come down to the times in which the poet lived, will understand his relation to public events, and will appreciate his feeling toward the English ecclesiastical system. ”

“ Lycidas is Milton’s contribution to a volume of elegiac verses, in Greek, Latin, and English, composed by many college friends of Edward King, who was drowned in the wreck of the vessel in which he was crossing the Irish Channel.
In its main intention, Lycidas is an elegy, because it professes to mourn one who is dead and extols his virtues. In its form it is almost wholly pastoral, because it feigns an environment of shepherds, allegorizing college life as the life of men tending flocks, and the occupations of earnest students as the careless diversions of rustic swains. ”

“ The poetic waiting-time which Milton, now in full vigor of manhood, prescribes for himself, he is constrained, both by inner conviction and by external necessity, to fill with hard and earnest work. Henceforth, for a score of years, he ceases almost entirely to write verse, and he earns his living. He becomes a householder in London, where, as the father had gained his livelihood by drawing up contracts and mortgages for his fellow-citizens, the son proceeds to gain his by teaching their boys Latin. ”

“ In many cases our only course is to postpone exposition and to trust that the learner will grow up to the insight which he as yet does not possess and which we cannot possibly give him. A learned writer, like Milton, who has read all antiquity, and who has no purpose of writing for children, [ix] inevitably contemplates a public of men approximately his equals in culture, and expects to find “fit audience, though few.”
But many of the difficulties that confront the beginner in Milton ask only to be explained at once by some one who has had more experience in the older literature. ”

“ They are the only form of verse in which he indulges during that middle period of his life which was abandoned to political partisanship on the side of the Parliament in the Civil War, and to the service of the government during the Commonwealth and the Protectorate. If, as is now widely believed, Shakespeare’s sonnets are artificial and tell us little or nothing about their author, those of Milton are purely natural and subjective and tell us nothing else but what their writer was thinking and feeling. Their themes are his veritable moods and passions. ”

“ Lawes knew to whom to apply for the all-important matter of the book, the words, or the poetry, of the piece, for he had learned to know Milton’s qualifications as a mask-poet in the fragment which we have under the name Arcades. With good music even for commonplace lyric verse, and with sprightly declamation even of conventional dialogue, the thing, as we know from modern instances, might have been carried off by gorgeous costumes and shrewdly devised scenic effects. Most of the masks of the time fell at once into oblivion. But Lawes had secured for his poet John Milton ”

“ This means, of course, that the poet is composing a Christmas Hymn in his native language. We must note his age at this time,—twenty-one years: he is a student at Cambridge. The poem remains the great Christmas hymn in our literature. “The Ode on the Nativity,” says Professor Saintsbury, “is a test of the reader’s power to appreciate poetry.”
In four stanzas the poet speaks in his own person: he too must, with the wise men from the east, bring such gifts as he has, to offer to the Infant God. ”

“ Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans 5
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. ”

“ From the fact that the poet puts the earth in the centre of the universe, that he adopts, in fact, the Ptolemaic system, though he knew the Copernican, we are not entitled to infer that he held a fixed conviction in the matter, and that, on direct examination as to his views, he would have absolutely professed one theory and rejected the other. The poet has all rights of choice, and may be said to know best where to stand to take his view of the world.
Milton remained abroad some sixteen months, and was home again in August, 1639. ”

“ This the student must read with the full understanding that it is a work of fiction.
It is right to warn young readers against the natural tendency to give their time to critical and expository books and articles before they make acquaintance with originals. Almost every essayist of note has written on Milton. There is danger lest we accept opinions at second hand. The only opinions on Milton to which we have any right are those we form from our own reading of his works. ”