MILTON AND HIS AGE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2892, 18 August 1909, Page 79

MILTON AND HIS AGE.

Mr G. K. Chesterton, in the mid- j summer number of the Oxford and i

Cambridge Review, contributes an article on "Milton and His Age" which is of interest to every 6tudent of those stirring times. He says that "all the mass of acute and valuable matter written or compiled about Milton leaves eternally an unanswered question ; a difficulty felt by all if expressed by few of his readers. That difficulty is a contrast between the man and his poems. There exists in the world a group of persons who perpetually try to prove that Shakespeare was a clown, and could not have written about princes, or that he was a drunkard and could not •toavo written about virtue. I think there is a slight fallacy in the argument. But I wonder they have not tried the much more tempting sport of separating the author of ' L' Allegro' from the author of ihe ' Defensus Populi Anglicani.' For the cootoast between the man Milton and the poet Milton is very much greater than is commonly realised. i fear tliat the shortest and clearest, way of stating it is that, when aD is said and dgta-a, he is a poet whom we cannot help liking, and a man whom w-e cannot like. I find it far easier to believe that an intoxicated Shakespeare wrote the marble parts of Shakespeare tiian that a marble Milton wrote the intoxicated, or, rather, , intoxicating, parts of Milton. Milton's. i character was cold; he was one of those 5 men who had every virtue except the one l virtue needful. While other poets .have 1 be-en polvgamists from passion, he was a jl,j 1 , polygamist on principle. While other 1 ( artists were merely selfish, he was egoi . istic. The public has a- very quick eye * for portraits, a very keen nose for personality ; and across two centuries the traditional pictur-e of Milton dictating to 'his daughters till they were nearly dead has kept the truth about Milton; it has not taken the chili off. But though the mass of men feel the poet Milton even after 200 years, they do not read the r.©3try of Milton at all. 'And so, because the man Milton was cold, they have got [ ' over the difficulty by saying that the ' poetry of Milton is cold tot>; cold, classical, marmoreal. But the poetry of Milton is not cold. He did in his later years, and in a fit of bad temper, write a classical drama, which is the only one of his works tha* is really difficult to read. But, taken as a whole, he is a particularly poetical poet, as fond of symbols land witchery as Coleridge, as fond ot coloured pleasures as Keats. He is soine- • times sufficiently amorous to be called , tender ; and he is frequently sufficiently ■ amorous to be called sensual. ! " Milton ,was not -a simple epic poet like J Homer, nor was he even a specially clear j epic poet like Virgil. If those two great j men "had studied his verse they would i have certainly acknowledged its power ; < but. they would have shrunk from its inI versions, its abrupt ellipses, its sentences 1 that sometimes come tail foremost. 1 might even say that Homer reading Milton might have much the same feelings as Milton reading Browning. " Nevertheless the tradition which puts Milton with Virgil and the large and lucid poets must possess, and does possess, some poetic signdficanoe. It lies, I think, in this — the startling contrast between Milton and the oentury in which i , he lived. He was not supremely classij cal ; but lie was classical in a. time when : classicism was almost forgotten. He was j j not specially lucid, but he was moderately j intelligible in an age when nearly all j poets were proud of being unintelligible — =ai? age of a hundred Brownings gone mad. The seventeenth century was a most extraordinary time, which still J awaits its adequate explanation. It was ' something coming after the Renaissance ! which developed and yet darkened and ! confused it, just as a tree might be more tangled for growing. The puns that had been Ha. Shakespeare few and bad be- ' came numberless and ingenious. The I schisms of thought which had under i | Wickliffe and Luther been hearty and yet falJ of a human hesitation became harsh, | ; incessant, exclusive ; every morning one | heard that a new mad sect had excom- i j municated humanity. The grammars oi ■ ; GTeek and Latin which the .young princes | of the R-enaissance had read as if they j were romances were now being compli- I eated by bald-headed pedants until no [ one on earth could read them. Theology, I i which had been an amusement with the J j Popes, was a disease with the Puritans. ( War, which had been the sport of gentle- i men, was now rapidly becoming that ill- : smelling science for engineers that it stili J remains. The air was full of anger ; and ! ; not a young sort of anger ; exasperation j on points of detail perpetually renewed. ; If the Renaissance was like a splendid wine, the seventeenth century might be | compared with the second fermentation ' into vinegar. • But whatever metaphor we use the main fact is certain ; the age was horribly complex ; it was learned, it was crabbed, and in nearly all its art and utterance it was crooked. Remember the wonderfully witty poets of Charles II ; those wonderfully witty poets who are , incomprehensible at the first reading and , dull even when one can comprehend them. < Think of the scurrilous wai of pamphlets, in which Milton himself engaged ; j pamphlets full of elaborate lo^ic which J no one can follow, and elaborate scandals ; which everybody has forgotten. Think- ot | the tortured legalities of Crown and Par- i liament, quoting against each other pre- i cedents cf an utterly different age ; tliitik j of the thick darkness of diplomacy that i covers the meaning (if it had any) of Ofe Thirty Years' war. The seventeenth cen- j tury was a labyrinth ; it was full oi j corners a-nd crotchets. And a^aiiust this i sort of background Milton stands up c£ simple and splendid ac Apollo. His ityle. j which must always have been splendid, i appeared more pure and translucent than ' it really was in contrast with all that . had mystification and darkness. | " A riddle itself, that time is full ot minor riddles ; and one of the most inexplicable of them involves the whole position of Milton. How far was there really j ' a connection bet-ween Calvinism and the < idea of liberty, or the idea of popular 1 government? There is much to be said:!

] on both sides — indeed, there is no more | perplexing question than whereaboute at I the Reformation, and just after the Reformation, lay the real seed of modern self-government and freedom, or, to speak more strictly, of the modern belief in them, for we rather praise these things ' than possess them." Mr Chesterton says : " Two facts especially are illustrated in the figure and career of Milton. When we have clearly S3en that Calvinism always favours aristocracy in theory, and often favoured it in practice, the two great facts remain to be explained or explained away: first, that the Puritans did favour a deliberative or synodical method of church government, a government by debate; and, second, that most of the abstract Republicans of the seventeenth" century were either Puritans or upon the Puritan side. I am not, of course, discussing the Synod as a mode of church government, nor the Republic as a mode of national government. I only say that the clamour for ■ these things must have corresponded to | somra kind of enthusiasm for liberty and j equality, alien to the more obvious lessons of Calvinism. But the Republicanism was of , a peculiar and - frigid kind ; there was very little human fraternity about it. Fletcher of Saltown .was the : author of some epigrams about the public good that ring like tho^e of some great pagan ; but he was also the author of a proposal to reduce all the poorer inhabitants of Scotland to a condition of personal slavery. There was a flavour of Fletcher of Saltown about Milton. Shakespeare , puts into the mouth of some character (generally a silly character) some contemptuous talk about the greasy rabble, i talk which is common in all literary work, J but especially- common in work which, like Shakespeare's, was intended entirely to ; please the greasy rabble. Whenever this happens critics point to it and say, ' Look ' lat the Tory prejudices of the royalist I Shakespeare! Observe- tihe Jaoobita servility of the follower of James I ! ' But as a mater of fact Milton despised the populace much more than Shakespeare ; and Milton put his contempt for common men not into the mouths of silly characters, but "into that of one wise character, the Chorus, who -s supposed to express the moral of a play: Nor ■So I name of men the common rout But such as thou hast solemnly elected. "I cannot help thinking that Milton was £o successful with Satan because he Was rather like Satan himself. 1 mean,liis own Satan ; I will not be so infcemparato as to say that he resembled the j genuine article. The kind of strength I that supported Milton in blindness and j outlawry was very like the , kind ot ! j strength that- supported -Satan- on - the flaming marl ; it is the same quality,, and. for merely literaxy purposes we need not ; quarrel about whether it should be called spiritual nobility or spiritual pride. It j was ' almost wholly intellectual ; it was unsmiling and it was empty of affections. And iv justice to the genial if somewhat vague people who made up the Iralk ot the Royalist party, and probably the bulk of the English j>eople, we must remember that there was about the High Republican type, the- type of Vane, or Sydney, and ' of Milton, something of this austerity j ! whioh chilled and even alarmed. TJiere . was something in the Republican that was not brotherly ; there was something in the Republican that was not democratic. j The comoound of the new Puritan and the old pagab citizen produced none of those hearty or homely drinkers, soldiers or ruffians, men like Dan ton or Dumouriez, I wiio lent laughter* to the terrors of the 1 French Revolution. The deepest dislike j which the Cavaliers felt for the Puritans, i and no unjust dislike either, hod reference tc this nameless feeling. 'Our soldiers,' said an old royalist when reproached with the licence of the royal camp, 'had the sins of men, wine, and wenching^; yours had the sins of devils, spiritual pride, and rebellion.' "It is possible, I fancy, to frame a fair statement that shall admit this element of the pride of the elect while doing justice to the democratic ,germ of Puritanism. It was the misfortune of that age that the synodic or debating club idea was applied not to the whole people as among the pagans, but to email group® or sections among the people. Equality appeared in the form of one great national temple. Thus the Puritan movement encouraged the sense of the equality of members without encouraging the sense of the equality of men. Each little sect was a democracy internally considered, but an oligarchy externally considered. For an aiLstocraey is none the lese aristocratic ■ because its members are all on a level ; ; indeed, this is rather a mark of aristo- ' cdacy ; in this sense most aristocrats have been levellers. Eyen the House of Lords is called the Houee of Equals — the House of . Peers. Th-us arose a spirit which had the ; plainness and much of the harshness of ] democracy without any of its sympathy 1 or abandon. Thus arose the great race i of the aristocratic republicans, half pagan and half Puritan, the greatest of whom \va« Milton. ' "The effect of this great type has been 3 immense ; but it has been largely a nega- * tive effect. If the English people have J remained somewhat inaccessible to the more ideal aspect of the republican idea, * and they certainly have ; if, through fail- * ing to understand it, they have done * gross injustice to th© heroisms qnd even f to the crimes of the French Revolution, it is in no small degree due to this ungenial element in the only great school of '.. EnglL«h republicans. The ultimate vietory of Shakespeare over Milton has been ± very largely due to the primary victory of 'II Penseroso' over 'L' Allegro.' The re- r turn of Charies II was the return of a certain snobbish compromise which we have never since shaken off, and which j, is certainly far lese lieroic than the dreadful patriotism of the great regicides • but j the balance and excuse of that English jsnobbishness was that it was also the re- t turn of English humour and good nature, t So we see it in Milton, in the oae great a

Elizabethan who became ft Puritan. His earlier poems are the dying cries of Merry, England. England, like Milton's own Samson, lost its strength when it lost its long hair Milton was one of the slayers ; but he was also one of the slain. The mystery of his strange mind confronts us for ever ; we do not know what- h« saw with his sightless eyes ; we do not know of what god or demon or destiny h« had really caught sight afar off. We only know that it turned Mm to stone."