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MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
MILTON'S 
 TERCENTENARY 
 
 An address delivered before the Modern 
 
 Language Club of Yale University 
 
 on Milton's Three Hundredth 
 
 Birthday. 
 
 By 
 HENRY A. BEERS 
 
 NEW HAVEN 
 
 YALE UKIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1910 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 IT is right that this anniversary 
 should be kept in all English- 
 speaking lands. Milton is as far 
 away from us in time as Dante was 
 from him; destructive criticism has 
 been busy with his great poem ; for- 
 midable rivals of his fame have 
 arisen Dryden and Pope, Words- 
 worth and Byron, Tennyson and 
 Browning, not to speak of lesser 
 names poets whom we read perhaps 
 oftener and with more pleasure. 
 Yet still his throne remains unshaken. 
 By general by well-nigh universal 
 consent, he is still the second poet of 
 our race, the greatest, save one, of 
 all who have used the English speech. 
 The high epics, the Iliad, the 
 Divine Comedy, do not appear to us 
 as they appeared to their contempo- 
 
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MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 raries, nor as they appeared to the 
 Middle Ages or to the men of the 
 Renaissance or of the eighteenth 
 century. These peaks of song we 
 see foreshortened or in changed per- 
 spective or from a different angle of 
 observation. Their parallax varies 
 from age to age, yet their stature 
 does not dwindle ; they tower forever, 
 "like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved. ' ' 
 Paradise Lost does not mean the 
 same thing to us that it meant to 
 Addison or Johnson or Macaulay, 
 and much that those critics said of it 
 now seems mistaken. Works of art, 
 as of nature, have perishable ele- 
 ments, and suffer a loss from time's 
 transhifting. Homer's gods are 
 childish, Dante's hell grotesque ; and 
 the mythology of the one and the 
 scholasticism of the other are scarcely 
 more obsolete to-day than Milton's 
 theology. Yet in the dryest parts 
 of Paradise Lost we feel the touch 
 
 [2] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 of the master. Two things in par- 
 ticular, the rhythm and the style, 
 go on victoriously as by their own 
 momentum. God the Father may 
 be a school divine and Adam a mem- 
 ber of Parliament, but the verse 
 never flags, the diction never fails. 
 The poem may grow heavy, but not 
 languid, thin or weak. I confess 
 that there are traits of Milton which 
 repel or irritate; that there are 
 poets with whom sympathy is easier. 
 And if I were speaking merely as an 
 impressionist, I might prefer them 
 to him. But this does not affect my 
 estimate of his absolute greatness. 
 
 All poets, then, and lovers of 
 poetry, all literary critics and stu- 
 dents of language must honor in 
 Milton the almost faultless artist, 
 the supreme master of his craft. But 
 there is a reason why, not alone the 
 literary class, but all men of English 
 stock should celebrate Milton's ter- 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 centenary. There have been poets 
 whose technique was exquisite, but 
 whose character was contemptible. 
 John Milton was not simply a great 
 poet, but a great man, a heroic soul ; 
 and his type was characteristically 
 English, both in its virtues and its 
 shortcomings. Of Shakspere, the 
 man, we know next to nothing. But 
 of Milton personally we know all 
 that we need to know, more than is 
 known of many a modern author. 
 There is abundance of biography and 
 autobiography. Milton had a noble 
 self-esteem, and he was engaged for 
 twenty years in hot controversies. 
 Hence those passages of apologetics 
 scattered through his prose works, 
 from which the lives of their author 
 have been largely compiled. More- 
 over he was a pamphleteer and 
 journalist, as well as a poet, uttering 
 himself freely on the questions of the 
 day. We know his opinions on 
 
 [4] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 government, education, religion, 
 marriage and divorce, the freedom 
 of the press and many other subjects. 
 We know what he thought of 
 eminent contemporaries, Charles I., 
 Cromwell, Vane, Desborough, Over- 
 ton, Fairfax. It was not then the 
 fashion to write critical essays, liter- 
 ary reviews and book notices. Yet, 
 aside from his own practice, his 
 writings are sown here and there 
 with incidental judgments of books 
 and authors, from which his literary 
 principles may be gathered. He has 
 spoken now and again of Shakspere 
 and Ben Jonson, of Spenser, Chaucer, 
 Euripides, Homer, the book of Job, 
 the psalms of David, the Song of 
 Solomon, the poems of Tasso and 
 Ariosto, the Arthur and Charlemagne 
 romances, of Bacon and Selden, the 
 dramatic unities, blank verse vs. 
 rhyme, and similar topics. 
 
 In some aspects and relations, 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 harsh and unlovely, egotistical and 
 stubborn, the total impression of 
 Milton's personality is singularly im- 
 posing. His virtues were manly 
 virtues. Of the four cardinal moral 
 virtues the so-called Aristotelian 
 virtues temperance, justice, forti- 
 tude, prudence; which Dante sym- 
 bolizes by the group of stars 
 
 Non viste mai fuor ch' alia prima gente 
 
 Milton had a full share. He was not 
 always, though he was most com- 
 monly, just. Prudence, the only vir- 
 tue, says Carlyle, which gets its 
 reward on earth, prudence he had, 
 yet not a timid prudence. Of tem- 
 perance the Puritan virtue and all 
 that it includes, chastity, self-rever- 
 ence, self-control, Comus is the beau- 
 tiful hymn. But, above all, Milton 
 had the heroic virtue, fortitude ; not 
 only passively in the proud and sub- 
 lime endurance of the evil days and 
 [6] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 evil tongues on which he had fallen ; 
 of the darkness, dangers, solitude 
 that compassed him round; but 
 actively in "the unconquerable will 
 # # # and courage never to sub- 
 mit or yield"; the courage which 
 "bates no jot of heart or hope, but 
 still bears up and steers right on- 
 ward. ' ' 
 
 There is nothing more bracing in 
 English poetry than those passages 
 in the sonnets, in Paradise Lost and 
 in Samson Agonistes where Milton 
 speaks of his blindness. Yet here it 
 is observable that Milton, who is 
 never sentimental, is also never 
 pathetic but when he speaks of him- 
 self, in such lines, e.g., as Samson's 
 
 My race of glory run, and race of shame, 
 And I shall shortly be with them that rest. ' ' 
 
 Dante has this same touching dignity 
 in alluding to his own sorrows; but 
 his hard and rare pity is more often 
 
 [7] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 aroused by the sorrows of others : by 
 Ugolino's little starving children, or 
 by the doom of Francesca and her 
 lover. Milton is untender. Yet vir- 
 tue with him is not always forbid- 
 ding and austere. As he was a poet, 
 he felt the "beauty of holiness," 
 though in another sense than Arch- 
 bishop Laud's use of that famous 
 phrase. It was his "natural haughti- 
 ness," he tells us, that saved him 
 from sensuality and base descents of 
 mind. His virtue was a kind of 
 good taste, a delicacy almost wo- 
 manly. It is the "Lady of Christ's" 
 speaking with the lips of the lady in 
 Comus, who says 
 
 That which is not good is not delicious 
 To a well governed and wise appetite." 
 
 But there is a special fitness in 
 this commemoration at this place. 
 For Milton is the scholar poet. He 
 is the most learned, the most clas- 
 
 [8] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 sical, the most bookish I was about 
 to say the most academic of English 
 poets; but I remember that aca- 
 demic, through its use in certain con- 
 nections, might imply a timid con- 
 formity to rules and models, a lack 
 of vital originality which would not 
 be true of Milton. Still, Milton was 
 an academic man in a broad sense of 
 the word. A hard student of books, 
 he injured his eyes in boyhood by 
 too close application, working every 
 day till midnight. He spent seven 
 years at his university. He was a 
 teacher and a writer on education. I 
 need not give the catalog of his 
 acquirements further than to say that 
 he was the best educated English- 
 man of his generation. 
 
 Mark Pattison, indeed, who speaks 
 for Oxford, denies that Milton was a 
 regularly learned man, like Usher or 
 Selden. That is, I understand, he 
 had made no exhaustive studies in 
 [9] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 professional fields of knowledge such 
 as patristic theology or legal antiqui- 
 ties. Of course not: Milton was a 
 poet: he was studying for power, 
 for self- culture and inspiration, and 
 had little regard for a merely retro- 
 spective scholarship which would not 
 aid him in the work of creation. 
 
 Be that as it may, all Milton's 
 writings in prose and verse are so 
 saturated with learning as greatly to 
 limit the range of their appeal. A 
 poem like Lycidas, loaded with allu- 
 sions, can be fully enjoyed only by 
 the classical scholar who is in the 
 tradition of the Greek pastoralists, 
 who "knows the Dorian water's 
 gush divine. ' ' I have heard women 
 and young people and unlettered 
 readers who have a natural taste for 
 poetry, and enjoy Burns and Long- 
 fellow, object to this classical stiffness 
 in Milton as pedantry. Now pedantry 
 is an ostentation of learning for its 
 
 [10] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 own sake, and none has said harder 
 things of it than Milton. 
 
 Who reads 
 
 Incessantly, and to his reading brings not 
 A spirit and judgment equal or superior * * 
 Uncertain and unsettled still remains, 
 Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself. ' ' 
 
 Cowley was the true pedant: his 
 erudition was crabbed and encum- 
 bered the free movement of his mind, 
 while Milton made his the grace and 
 ornament of his verse. 
 
 How charming is divine philosophy ! 
 
 Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, 
 
 But musical as is Apollo's lute." 
 
 I think we may attribute Milton's 
 apparent pedantry, not to a wish for 
 display, but to an imagination famil- 
 iarized with a somewhat special 
 range of associations. This is a note 
 of the Renaissance, and Milton's 
 culture was Renaissance culture. 
 That his mind derived its impetus 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 more directly from books than from 
 life ; that his pages swarm with the 
 figures of mythology and the imagery 
 of the ancient poets is true. In his 
 youthful poems he accepted and per- 
 fected Elizabethan, that is, Renais- 
 sance, forms : the court masque, the 
 Italian sonnet, the artificial pastoral. 
 But as he advanced in art and life, 
 he became classical in a severer sense, 
 discarding the Italianate conceits of 
 his early verse, rejecting rhyme and 
 romance, replacing decoration with 
 construction ; and finally, in his epic 
 and tragedy modeled on the pure 
 antique, applying Hellenic form to 
 Hebraic material. His political and 
 social, no less than his literary, ideals 
 were classical. The English church 
 ritual, with its Catholic ceremonies ; 
 the universities, with their scholastic 
 curricula; the feudal monarchy, the 
 medieval court and peerage of all 
 these barbarous survivals of the Mid- 
 
 [12] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 die Ages he would have made a 
 clean sweep, to set up in their stead 
 a commonwealth modeled on the 
 democracies of Greece and Rome, 
 schools of philosophy like the Acad- 
 emy and the Porch, and voluntary 
 congregations of Protestant worship- 
 ers without priest, liturgy or sym- 
 bol, practicing a purely rational and 
 spiritual religion. He says to the 
 Parliament: "How much better I 
 find ye esteem it to imitate the old 
 and elegant humanity of Greece than 
 the barbaric pride of a Hunnish and 
 Norwegian stateliness. ' ' And else- 
 where : ' 'Those ages to whose polite 
 wisdom and letters we owe that we 
 are not yet Goths and Jutlanders. ' ' 
 So in his treatment of public 
 questions Milton had what Bacon 
 calls "the humor of a scholar." He 
 was an idealist and a doctrinaire, 
 with little historic sense and small 
 notion of what is practicable here and 
 
 [13] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 now. England is still a monarchy ; 
 the English church is still prelatical 
 and has its hireling clergy; Parlia- 
 ment keeps its two chambers, and the 
 bishops sit and vote in the house of 
 peers; ritualism and tractarianism 
 gain apace upon low church and 
 evangelical; the Areopagitica had no 
 effect whatever in hastening the 
 freedom of the press ; and, ironically 
 enough, Milton himself, under the 
 protectorate, became an official book 
 licenser. 
 
 England was not ripe for a repub- 
 lic ; she was returning to her idols, 
 "choosing herself a captain back to 
 Egypt." It took a century and a 
 half for English liberty to recover 
 the ground lost at the Restoration. 
 Nevertheless that little group of re- 
 publican idealists, Vane, Bradshaw, 
 Lambert and the rest, with Milton 
 their literary spokesman, must always 
 interest us as Americans and repub- 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 licans. Let us, however, not mis- 
 take. Milton was no democrat. / 
 His political principles were repub- 
 lican, or democratic if you please, 
 but his personal feelings were in- 
 tensely aristocratic. Even that free 
 commonwealth which he thought he 
 saw so easy and ready a way to es- 
 tablish, and the constitution of which 
 he sketched on the eve of the Resto- 
 ration, was no democracy, but an 
 aristocratic, senatorial republic like 
 Venice, a government of the opti- 
 mates, not of the populace. For the 
 trappings of royalty, the pomp and 
 pageantry, the servility and flunkey- 
 ism of a court, Milton had the con- 
 tempt of a plain republican : 
 
 How poor their outworn coronets 
 Beside one leaf of that plain civic wreath !" 
 
 But for the people, as a whole, he ^ 
 had an almost equal contempt. 
 They were "the ungrateful multi- 
 
 [15] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 tude," "the inconsiderate multi- 
 tude," the profanum vulgus, "the 
 throng and noises of vulgar and irra- 
 tional men. ' ' There was not a popu- 
 lar drop of blood in him. He had no 
 faith in universal suffrage or majority 
 rule. "More just it is," he wrote, 
 6 'that a less number compel a greater 
 to retain their liberty, than that a 
 greater number compel a less to be 
 their fellow slaves," i.e. to bring 
 back the king by a plebescite. And 
 again: "The best affected and best 
 principled of the people stood not 
 numbering or computing on which 
 side were most voices in Parliament, 
 but on which side appeared to them 
 most reason. ' ' 
 
 Milton was a Puritan; and the 
 Puritans, though socially belonging, 
 for the most part, among the plain 
 people, and though made by acci- 
 dent the champions of popular rights 
 against privilege, were yet a kind of 
 [16] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 spiritual aristocrats. Calvinistic doc- 
 trine made of the elect a chosen few, 
 a congregation of saints, set apart 
 from the world. To this feeling of 
 religious exclusiveness Milton's pride 
 of intellect added a personal inten- 
 sity. He respects distinction and is 
 always rather scornful of the average 
 man, the pecus ignavum silentum, 
 the herd of the obscure and unfamed. 
 
 "Nor do I name of men the common rout 
 That, wandering loose about, 
 Grow up and perish like the summer fly, 
 Heads without names, no more remembered. " 
 
 Hazlitt insisted that Shakspere's 
 principles were aristocratic, chiefly, I 
 believe, because of his handling of 
 the tribunes and the plebs in 
 Coriolanus. Shakspere does treat 
 his mobs with a kindly and amused 
 contempt. They are fickle, ignorant, 
 illogical, thick-headed, easily im- 
 posed upon. Still he makes you feel 
 that they are composed of good fel- 
 [17] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 lows at bottofn, quickly placated and 
 disposed to do the fair thing. I think 
 that Shakspere's is the more demo- 
 cratic nature ; that his distrust of the 
 people is much less radical than Mil- 
 ton's. Walt Whitman's obstreper- 
 ous democracy, his all-embracing 
 camaraderie, his liking for the warm, 
 gregarious pressure of the crowd, 
 was a spirit quite alien from his 
 whose "soul was like a star and 
 dwelt apart." Anything vulgar was 
 outside or below the sympathies of 
 this Puritan gentleman. Falstaff 
 must have been merely disgusting to 
 him; and fancy him reading Mark 
 Twain! In Milton's references to 
 popular pastimes there is always a 
 mixture of disapproval, the air of the 
 superior person. "The people on 
 their holidays," says Samson, are 
 "impetuous, insolent, unquencha- 
 ble. " " Methought, ' ' says the lady 
 in Comus, 
 
 [18] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 " it was the sound 
 Of riot and ill managed merriment, 
 Such as the jocund flute or gamesome pipe 
 Stirs up among the loose, unlettered hinds 
 When, for their teeming flocks and granges full, 
 In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan 
 And thank the gods amiss." 
 
 Milton liked to be in the minority, 
 to bear up against the pressure of 
 hostile opinion. "God intended to 
 prove me," he wrote, "whether I 
 durst take up alone a rightful cause 
 against a world of disesteem, and 
 found I durst. ' ' The seraph Abdiel 
 is a piece of self- portraiture ; there is 
 no more characteristic passage in all 
 his works : 
 
 " The Seraph Abdiel, faithful found 
 Among the faithless, faithful only he * * * 
 Nor number nor example with him wrought 
 To swerve from truth or change his constant 
 
 mind, 
 Though single. From amidst them forth he 
 
 past 
 Long way through hostile scorn which he 
 
 sustained 
 
 [19] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 Superior, nor of violence feared aught ; 
 And with retorted scorn his back he turned 
 On those proud towers to swift destruction 
 doomed." 
 
 Milton was na democrat ; equality 
 and fraternity were not his trade, 
 though liberty was his passion. Lib- 
 erty he defended against the tyranny 
 of the mob, as of the king. He pre- 
 ferred a republic to a monarchy, 
 since he thought it less likely to 
 interfere with the independence of 
 the private citizen. Political liberty, 
 liberty of worship and belief, freedom 
 of the press, freedom of divorce, he 
 asserted them all in turn with unsur- 
 passed eloquence. He proposed a 
 scheme of education reformed from 
 the clogs of precedent and authority. 
 Even his choice of blank verse for 
 Paradise Lost he vindicated as a case 
 ' of "ancient liberty recovered to 
 heroic song from this troublesome 
 and modern bondage of riming. ' ' 
 
 [20] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 There is yet one reason more why 
 we at Yale should keep this anniver- 
 sary. Milton was the poet of Eng- 
 lish Puritanism, and therefore he is 
 our poet. This colony and this col- 
 lege were founded by English Puri- 
 tans; and here the special faith and 
 manners of the Puritans survived 
 later than at the other great Univer- 
 sity of New England survived al- 
 most in their integrity down to a 
 time within the memory of living 
 men. When Milton left Cambridge 
 in 1632, "church-outed by the prel- 
 ates," it was among the possibili- 
 ties that, instead of settling down at 
 his father's country-house at Horton, 
 he might have come to New Eng- 
 land. Winthrop had sailed, with his 
 company, two years before. In 1635 
 three thousand Puritans emigrated 
 to Massachusetts, among them Sir 
 Henry Vane, the younger, the 
 "Vane, young in years, but in sage 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 counsels old," of Milton's sonnet 
 who was made governor of the colony 
 in the following year. Or in 1638, 
 the year of the settlement of New 
 Haven, when Milton went to Italy 
 for culture, it would not have been 
 miraculous had he come instead to 
 America for freedom. It was in that 
 same year that, according to a story 
 long believed though now discredited, 
 Cromwell, Pym, Hampden and 
 Hazelrig, despairing of any improve- 
 ment in conditions at home, were 
 about to embark for New England 
 when they were stopped by orders 
 in council. Is it too wild a dream 
 that Paradise Lost might have been 
 written in Boston or in New Haven? 
 But it was not upon the cards. The 
 literary class does not willingly emi- 
 grate to raw lands, or separate itself 
 from the thick and ripe environment 
 of an old civilization. However, we 
 know that Vane and Roger Williams 
 
 [22] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 were friends of Milton ; and he must 
 have known and been known to 
 Cromwell's chaplain, Hugh Peters, 
 who had been in New England ; and 
 doubtless to others among the colon- 
 ists. It is, at first sight, therefore 
 rather strange that there is no men- 
 tion of Milton, so far as I have ob- 
 served, in any of our earlier colonial 
 writers. It is said, I know not on 
 what authority, that there was not a 
 single copy of Shakspere's plays in 
 New England in the seventeenth 
 century. That is not so strange, 
 considering the Puritan horror of the 
 stage. But one might have expect- 
 ed to meet with mention of Milton, 
 as a controversialist if not as a poet. 
 The French Huguenot poet DuBar- 
 tas, whose poem La Semaine contrib- 
 uted some items to the account of 
 the creation in Paradise Lost, was a 
 favorite author in New England I 
 take it, in Sylvester's translation, 
 
 [23] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 The Divine Weeks and Works. It is 
 also said that the Emblems of Milton's 
 contemporary, Francis Quarles, were 
 much read in New England. But 
 Tyler supposes that Nathaniel Ames, 
 in his Almanac for 1725, "pro- 
 nounced there for the first time the 
 name of Milton, together with chosen 
 passages from his poems. ' ' And he 
 thinks it worth noting that Lewis 
 Morris, of Morrisania, ordered an 
 edition of Milton from a London 
 bookseller in 1739^ 
 
 The failure of our forefathers to 
 recognize the great poet of their 
 cause may be explained partly by 
 the slowness of the growth of 
 Milton's fame in England. His 
 
 *Mr. Charles Francis Adams informs me that a 
 letter of inquiry sent by him to the Evening Post 
 has brought out three or four references to Milton in 
 the Magnolia, besides other allusions to him in the 
 publications of the period. Mr. Adams adds, how- 
 ever, that there is nothing to show that Paradise 
 Lost was much read in New England prior to 1750. 
 The Magnolia was published in 1702. 
 
 [24] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 minor poems, issued in 1645, did not 
 reach a second edition till 1673. 
 Paradise Lost, printed in 1667, 
 found its fit audience, though few, 
 almost immediately. But the latest 
 literature traveled slowly in those 
 days into a remote and rude prov- 
 ince. Moreover the educated class 
 in New England, the ministers, 
 though a learned, were not a literary 
 set, as is abundantly shown by their 
 own experiments in verse. It is not 
 unlikely that Cotton Mather or 
 Michael Wigglesworth would have 
 thought DuBartas and Quarles bet- 
 ter poets than Milton if they had 
 read the latter 's works. 
 
 We are proud of being the 
 descendants of the Puritans ; perhaps 
 we are glad that we are their 
 descendants only, and not their con- 
 temporaries. Which side would you 
 have been on, if you had lived during 
 the English civil war of the seven- 
 
 [25] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 teenth century? Doubtless it would 
 have depended largely on whether 
 you lived in Middlesex or in Devon, 
 whether your parents were gentry or 
 tradespeople, and on similar acci- 
 dents. We think that we choose, 
 but really choices are made for us. 
 We inherit our politics and our reli- 
 gion. But if free to choose, I know 
 in which camp I would have been, 
 and it would not have been that in 
 which Milton's friends were found. 
 The New Model army had the disci- 
 pline and the prayer meetings. I 
 am afraid that Rupert's troopers plun- 
 dered, gambled, drank and swore 
 most shockingly. There was good 
 fighting on both sides, but the New 
 Model had the right end of the quar- 
 rel and had the victory, and I am 
 glad that it was so. Still there was 
 more fun in the king's army, and it 
 was there that most of the good fel- 
 lows were. 
 
 [26] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 The influence of Milton's religion 
 upon his art has been much discussed. 
 It was owing to his Puritanism that 
 he was the kind of poet that he was, 
 but it was in spite of his Puritanism 
 that he was a poet at all. He was 
 the poet of a cause, a party, a sect 
 whose attitude toward the graces of 
 life and the beautiful arts was noto- 
 riously one of distrust and hostility. 
 He was the poet, not only of that 
 Puritanism which is a permanent 
 element in English character, but of 
 much that was merely temporary 
 and local. How sensitive then must 
 his mind have been to all forms of 
 loveliness, how powerful the creative 
 instinct in him, when his genius 
 emerged without a scar from the 
 long struggle of twenty years, during 
 which he had written pamphlet after 
 pamphlet on the angry questions of 
 the day, and nothing at all in verse 
 but a handful of sonnets mostly pro- 
 voked by public occasions ! 
 [27] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 / The fact is, there were all kinds 
 of Puritans. There were dismal pre- 
 cisians, like William Prynne, illiberal 
 and vulgar fanatics, the Tribulation 
 Wholesomes, Hope-on- high Bombys, 
 and Zeal-of-the-land Busys, whose 
 absurdities were the stock in trade of 
 contemporary satirists from Jonson 
 to Butler. But there were also gen- 
 tlemen and scholars, like Fairfax, 
 Marvell, Colonel Hutchinson, Vane, 
 whose Puritanism was consistent 
 with all elegant tastes and accom- 
 plishments. Was Milton's Puritan- 
 ism hurtful to his art? No and yes. 
 It was in many ways an inspiration ; 
 it gave him zeal, a Puritan word 
 much ridiculed by the Royalists ; it 
 gave refinement, distinction, select- 
 ness, elevation to his picture of the 
 world. But it would be uncritical to 
 deny that it also gave a certain nar- 
 rowness and rigidity to his view of 
 human life. 
 
 [28] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 It is curious how Milton's early 
 poems have changed places in favor 
 with Paradise Lost. They were neg- 
 lected for over a century. Joseph 
 Warton testifies in 1756 that they 
 had only "very lately met with a 
 suitable regard" ; had lain "in a sort 
 of obscurity, the private enjoyment 
 of a few curious readers. ' ' And Dr. 
 Johnson exclaims : "Surely no man 
 could have fancied that he read 
 Lyddas with pleasure, had he not 
 known its author." There can be 
 little doubt that now-a-days Milton's 
 juvenilia are more read than Paradise 
 Lost, and by many perhaps by a 
 majority of readers rated higher. 
 In this opinion I do not share. Para- 
 dise Lost seems to me not only 
 greater work, more important, than 
 the minor pieces, but better poetry, 
 richer and perfecter. Yet one quality 
 these early poems have which Para- 
 dise Lost has not charm. Milton's 
 [29] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 epic astonishes, moves, delights, but 
 it does not fascinate. The youthful 
 Milton was sensitive to many attrac- 
 tions which he afterwards came to 
 look upon with stern disapproval. 
 He went to the theatre and praised 
 the comedies of Shakspere and Jon- 
 son; he loved the romances of 
 chivalry and fairy tales; he had no 
 objection to dancing, ale drinking, 
 the music of the fiddle and rural 
 sports; he writes to Diodati of the 
 pretty girls on the London streets ; 
 he celebrates the Catholic and Gothic 
 elegancies of English church archi- 
 tecture and ritual, the cloister's pale, 
 the organ music and full voiced choir, 
 the high embowed roof, and the 
 storied windows which his military 
 friends were soon to smash at Ely, 
 Salisbury, Canterbury, Lichfield, as 
 popish idolatries. But in Iconoclastes 
 we find him sneering at the king for 
 keeping a copy of Shakspere in his 
 
 [30] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 closet. In his treatise Of Reforma- 
 tion he denounces the prelates for 
 "embezzling the treasury of the 
 church on painted and gilded walls of 
 temples, wherein God hath testified 
 to have no delight. ' ' Evidently the 
 Anglican service was one of those 
 "gay religions, rich with pomp and 
 gold" to which he alludes in Para- 
 dise Lost. A chorus commends 
 Samson the Nazarene for drinking 
 nothing but water. Modern trage- 
 dies are condemned for "mixing 
 comic stuff with tragic sadness and 
 gravity, or introducing trivial and 
 vulgar persons" as Shakspere does. 
 In Paradise Lost the poet speaks 
 with contempt of the romances 
 whose "chief mastery" it was 
 
 " to dissect, 
 
 With long and tedious havoc, fabled knights 
 In battles feigned." 
 
 And in Paradise Regained he even 
 disparages his beloved classics, pre- 
 
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MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 ferring the psalms of David, the 
 Hebrew prophecies and the Mosaic 
 law, to the poets, philosophers and 
 orators of Athens. 
 
 The Puritans were Old Testa- 
 ment men. Their God was the 
 Hebrew Jehovah, their imaginations 
 were filled with the wars of Israel 
 and the militant theocracy of the 
 Jews. In Milton's somewhat patron- 
 izing attitude toward women, there 
 is something Mosaic something al- 
 most Oriental. He always remained 
 susceptible to beauty in women, but 
 he treated it as a weakness, a temp- 
 tation. The bitterness of his own 
 marriage experience mingles with 
 his words. I need not cite the well- 
 known passages about Dalilah and 
 Eve, where he who reads between 
 the lines can always detect the figure 
 of Mary Powell. There is no gallan- 
 try in Milton, but a deal of common 
 sense. The love of the court poets, 
 
 [32] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 cavaliers and sonneteers, their hy- 
 perboles of passion, their abasement 
 before their ladies he doubtless 
 scorned as the fopperies of chivalry, 
 fantastic and unnatural .exaggera- 
 tions, the insincerities of 'Vulgar 
 amourists," the fume of 
 
 court amour, 
 
 Mixt dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, 
 Or serenate which the starved lover sings 
 To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain." 
 
 To the Puritan, woman was at 
 best the helpmate and handmaid of 
 man. Too often she was a snare, or 
 a household foe, ' 'a cleaving mischief 
 far within defensive arms." L* Al- 
 legro and // Penseroso are the only 
 poems of Milton in which he surren- 
 ders himself spontaneously to the 
 joy of living, to "unreproved pleas- 
 ures free," with no arriere pensee, 
 or intrusion of the conscience. Even 
 in those pleasant Horatian lines to 
 Lawrence, inviting him to spend a 
 
 [33] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 winter day by the fire, drink wine 
 and hear music, he ends with a fine 
 Puritan touch : 
 
 He who of these delights can judge, yet 
 
 spare 
 To interpose them oft, is truly wise." 
 
 "Dost thou think, because thou 
 art virtuous, there shall be no more 
 cakes and ale ?" inquires Sir Toby of 
 Shakspere's only Puritan. 
 
 "Yes," adds the clown, "and 
 ginger shall be hot in the mouth, 
 too." And "wives may be merry 
 and yet honest," asserts Mistress 
 Page. 
 
 It is not without astonishment 
 that one finds Emerson writing : "To 
 this antique heroism Milton added 
 the genius of the Christian sanctity 
 * # * laying its chief stress on hu- 
 mility." Milton had a zeal for 
 righteousness, a noble purity and 
 noble pride. But if you look for 
 
 [34] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 saintly humility, for the spirit of the 
 meek and lowly Jesus, the spirit of 
 charity and forgiveness, look for 
 them in the Anglican Herbert, not 
 in the Puritan Milton. Humility 
 was no fruit of the system which 
 Calvin begot and which begot John 
 Knox. The Puritans? were great in- 
 vokers of the sword of the Lord and 
 of Gideon the sword of Gideon and 
 the dagger of Ehud. There went a 
 sword out of Milton's mouth against 
 the enemies of Israel, a sword of 
 threatenings, the wrath of God upon 
 the ungodly. The temper of his 
 controversial writings is little short 
 of ferocious. There was not much in 
 him of that "sweet reasonableness" 
 which Matthew Arnold thought the 
 distinctive mark of Christian ethics. 
 He was devout, but not with the 
 Christian devoutness. I would not 
 call him a Christian at all, except, 
 of course, in his formal adherence to 
 
 [35] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 the creed of Christianity. Very sig- 
 nificant is the inferiority of Paradise 
 Regained to Paradise Lost. And in 
 Paradise Lost itself, how weak and 
 faint is the character of the Savior ! 
 You feel that he is superfluous, that 
 the poet did not need him. He is 
 simply the second person of the 
 Trinity, the executive arm of the 
 Godhead ; and Milton is at pains to 
 invent things for him to do to drive 
 the rebellious angels out of heaven, 
 to preside over the six days' work of 
 creation, etc. I believe it was 
 Thomas Davidson who said that in 
 Paradise Lost "Christ is God's good 
 boy." 
 
 We are therefore not unprepared 
 to discover, from Milton's Treatise 
 of Christian Doctrine, that he had 
 laid aside the dogma of vicarious 
 sacrifice and was, in his last years, a 
 Unitarian. It was this Latin trea- 
 tise, translated and published in 1824, 
 [36] 
 
MILTON'S TERCENTENARY 
 
 which called out Macaulay's essay, 
 so urbanely demolished by Matthew 
 Arnold, and which was triumphant- 
 ly reviewed by Dr. Channing in the 
 North American. It was lucky for 
 Dr. Channing, by the way, that he 
 lived in the nineteenth century and 
 not in the seventeenth. Two So- 
 cinians, Leggatt and Wightman, 
 were burned at the stake as late as 
 James the First's reign, one at Lich- 
 field and the other at Smithfield. 
 
 Milton, then, does not belong 
 with those broadly human, all toler- 
 ant, impartial artists, who reflect, 
 with equal sympathy and infinite 
 curiosity, every phase of life : with 
 Shakspere and Goethe or, on a 
 lower level, with Chaucer and Mon- 
 taigne ; but with the intense, austere 
 and lofty souls whose narrowness is 
 likewise their strength. His place is 
 beside Dante, the Catholic Puritan. 
 
 [37] 
 
OVERDUE. 
 
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 APR 21 
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY