From Chaucer to Tennyson
the same stamp--graceful and easy, but shallow in feeling. Carew,
however, showed a nicer sense of form than most of the fantastic school.
Some of his love songs are written with delicate art. There are noble
lines in his elegy on Donne and in one passage of his masque _Coelum
Britannicum_. In his poem entitled _The Rapture_ great splendor of
language and imagery is devoted to the service of an unbridled
sensuality. Waller, who followed the court to Paris, was the author of
two songs, which are still favorites, _Go, Lovely Rose_, and _On a
Girdle_, and he first introduced the smooth, correct manner of writing
in couplets, which Dryden and Pope carried to perfection. Gallantly
rather than love was the inspiration of these courtly singers. In such
verses as Carew's _Encouragements to a Lover_, and George Wither's _The
Manly Heart_,
If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?--
we see the revolt against the high, passionate, Sidneian love of the
Elizabethan sonneteers, and the note of _persiflage_ that was to mark
the lyrical verse of the Restoration. But the poetry of the cavaliers
reached its high-water mark in one fiery-hearted song by the noble and
unfortunate James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, who invaded Scotland in
the interest of Charles II., and was taken prisoner and put to death at
Edinburgh in 1650.
My dear and only love, I pray
That little world of thee
Be governed by no other sway
Than purest monarchy.
In language borrowed from the politics of the time, he cautions his
mistress against _synods_ or _committees_ in her heart; swears to make
her glorious by his pen and famous by his sword; and, with that fine
recklessness which distinguished the dashing troopers of Prince Rupert,
he adds, in words that have been often quoted,
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.
John Milton, the greatest English poet except Shakspere, was born in
London in 1608. His father was a scrivener, an educated man, and a
musical composer of some merit. At his home Milton was surrounded with
all the inflences of a refined and well-ordered Puritan household of
the better class. He inherited his father's musical tastes, and during
the latter part of his life he spent a part of every afternoon in
playing the organ. No poet has written more beautifully of music than
Milton. One of his sonnets was addressed to Henry Lawes, the composer,
who wrote the airs to the songs in _Comus_. Milton's education was most
careful and thorough. He spent seven years at Cambridge, where, from his
personal beauty and fastidious habits, he was called "The lady of
Christ's." At Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a country
seat, he passed five years more, perfecting himself in his studies, and
then traveled for fifteen months, mainly in Italy, visiting Naples and
Rome, but residing at Florence. Here he saw Galileo, a prisoner of the
Inquisition "for thinking otherwise in astronomy than his Dominican and
Franciscan licensers thought." Milton was the most scholarly and the
most truly classical of English poets. His Latin verse, for elegance and
correctness, ranks with Addison's; and his Italian poems were the
admiration of the Tuscan scholars. But his learning appears in his
poetry only in the form of a fine and chastened result, and not in
laborious allusion and pedantic citation, as too often in Ben Jonson,
for instance. "My father," he wrote, "destined me, while yet a little
child, for the study of humane letters." He was also destined for the
ministry, but, "coming to some maturity of years and perceiving what
tyrany had invaded the Church,...I thought it better to prefer a
blameless silence, before the sacred office of speaking, bought and
begun with servitude and forswearing." Other hands than a bishop's were
laid upon his head. "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write
well hereafter," he says, "ought himself to be a true poem." And he adds
that his "natural haughtiness" saved him from all impurity of living.
Milton had a sublime self-respect. The dignity and earnestness of the
Puritan gentleman blended in his training with the culture of the
Renaissance. Born into an age of spiritual conflict, he dedicated his
gift to the service of Heaven, and he became, like Heine, a valiant
soldier in the war for liberation. He was the poet of a cause, and his
song was keyed to
the Dorian mood
Of flutes and soft recorders such as raised
To height of noblest temper, heroes old
Arming to battle.
On comparing Milton with Shakspere, with his universal sympathies and
receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in
intense personal conviction. He introduced a new note into English
poetry: the passion for truth and the feeling of religious sublimity.
Milton's was an heroic age, and its song must be lyric rather than
dramatic; its singer must be in the fight and of it.
Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge the most important was his
splendid ode _On the Morning of Christ's Nativity_. At Horton he wrote,
among other things, the companion pieces, _L'Allegro_ and _Il
Penseroso_, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an
expression in harmony with the two contrasted moods. _Comus_, which
belongs to the same period, was the perfection of the Elizabethan court
masque, and was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, on the occasion of
the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales.
Under the guise of a skillful addition to the Homeric allegory of Circe,
with her cup of enchantment, it was a Puritan song in praise of chastity
and temperance. _Lycidas_, in like manner, was the perfection of the
Elizabethan pastoral elegy. It was contributed to a volume of memorial
verses on the death of Edward King, a Cambridge friend of Milton's, who
was drowned in the Irish Channel in 1637. In one stern strain, which is
put into the mouth of St. Peter, the author "foretells the ruin of our
corrupted clergy, then at their height."
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.
This was Milton's last utterance in English verse before the outbreak
of the civil war, and it sounds the alarm of the impending struggle. In
technical quality _Lycidas_ is the most wonderful of all Milton's poems.
The cunningly intricate harmony of the verse, the pressed and packed
language, with its fullness of meaning and allusion, make it worthy of
the minutest study. In these early poems, Milton, merely as a poet, is
at his best. Something of the Elizabethan style still clings to them;
but their grave sweetness, their choice wording, their originality in
epithet, name, and phrase, were novelties of Milton's own. His English
masters were Spenser, Fletcher, and Sylvester, the translator of Du
Bartas's _La Semaine_, but nothing of Spenser's prolixity, or Fletcher's
effeminacy, or Sylvester's quaintness is found in Milton's pure,
energetic diction. He inherited their beauties, but his taste had been
tempered to a finer edge by his studies in Greek and Hebrew poetry. He
was the last of the Elizabethans, and his style was at once the crown of
the old and a departure into the new. In masque, elegy, and sonnet he
set the seal to the Elizabethan poetry, said the last word, and closed
one great literary era.
In 1639 the breach between Charles I. and his Parliament brought Milton
back from Italy. "I thought it base to be traveling at my ease for
amusement, while my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for
liberty." For the next twenty years he threw himself into the contest,
and poured forth a succession of tracts, in English and Latin, upon the
various public questions at issue. As a political thinker, Milton had
what Bacon calls "the humor of a scholar." In a country of endowed
grammar schools and universities hardly emerged from a mediaeval
discipline and curriculum, he wanted to set up Greek gymnasia and
philosophical schools, after the fashion of the Porch and the Academy.
He would have imposed an Athenian democracy upon a people trained in the
traditions of monarchy and episcopacy. At the very moment when England
had grown tired of the Protectorate and was preparing to welcome back
the Stuarts, he was writing _An Easy and Ready Way to Establish a Free
Commonwealth_. Milton acknowledged that in prose he had the use of his
left hand only. There are passages of fervid eloquence, where the style
swells into a kind of lofty chant, with a rhythmical rise and fall to
it, as in parts of the English Book of Common Prayer. But in general his
sentences are long and involved, full of inversions and latinized
constructions. Controversy at that day was conducted on scholastic
lines. Each disputant, instead of appealing at once to the arguments of
expediency and common sense, began with a formidable display of
learning, ransacking Greek and Latin authors and the Fathers of the
Church for opinions in support of his own position. These authorities he
deployed at tedious length, and followed them up with heavy scurrilities
and "excusations," by way of attack and defense. The dispute between
Milton and Salmasius over the execution of Charles I. was like a duel
between two knights in full armor striking at each other with ponderous
maces. The very titles of these pamphlets are enough to frighten off a
modern reader: _A Confutation of the Animadversions upon a Defense of a
Humble Remonstrance against a Treatise, entitled Of Reformation_. The
most interesting of Milton's prose tracts is his _Areopagitica: A Speech
for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing_, 1644. The arguments in this are
of permanent force; but if the reader will compare it, or Jeremy
Taylor's _Liberty of Prophesying_, with Locke's _Letters on Toleration_,
he will see how much clearer and more convincing is the modern method of
discussion, introduced by writers like Hobbes and Locke and Dryden.
Under the Protectorate Milton was appointed Latin Secretary to the
Council of State. In the diplomatic correspondence which was his
official duty, and in the composition of his tract, _Defensio pro
Popululo Anglicano_, he overtaxed his eyes, and in 1654 became totally
blind. The only poetry of Milton's belonging to the years 1640-1660 are
a few sonnets of the pure Italian form, mainly called forth by public
occasions. By the Elizabethans the sonnets had been used mainly in love
poetry. In Milton's hands, said Wordsworth, "the thing became a
trumpet." Some of his were addressed to political leaders, like Fairfax,
Cromwell, and Sir Henry Vane; and of these the best is, perhaps, the
sonnet written on the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants--"a collect in
verse," it has been called--which has the fire of a Hebrew prophet
invoking the divine wrath upon the oppressors of Israel. Two were on his
own blindness, and in these there is not one selfish repining, but only
a regret that the value of his service is impaired--
Will God exact day labor, light denied?
After the restoration of the Stuarts, in 1660, Milton was for a while in
peril, by reason of the part that he had taken against the king. But
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness and with dangers compassed round
And solitude,
he bated no jot of heart or hope. Henceforth he becomes the most heroic
and affecting figure in English literary history. Years before he had
planned an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur, and again a sacred
tragedy on man's fall and redemption. These experiments finally took
shape in _Paradise Lost_, which was given to the world in 1667. This is
the epic of English Puritanism and of Protestant Christianity. It was
Milton's purpose to