CHAPTER IX

MILTON, TAYLOR, CLARENDON, BROWNE, HOBBES

DURING the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, or (to take literary rather than chronological dates) between the death of Bacon and the publication of Absalom and Achitophel, there existed in England a quintet of men of letters, of such extraordinary power and individuality, that it may be doubted whether any other period of our own literature can show a group equal to them; while it is certain that no other literature, except, perhaps, in the age of Pericles, can match them. They were all, except Hobbes (who belonged by birth, though not by date and character of writing, to an earlier generation than the rest), born, and they all died, within a very few years of each other. All were prose writers of the very highest merit; and though only one was a poet, yet he had poetry enough to spare for all the five. Of the others, Clarendon, in some of the greatest characteristics of the historian, has been equalled by no Englishman, and surpassed by few foreigners. Jeremy Taylor has been called the most eloquent of men; and if this is a bold saying, it is scarcely too bold. Hobbes stands with Bacon and Berkeley at the head of English-speaking philosophers, and is, if not in general grasp, in range of ideas, or in literary polish, yet in acuteness of thought and originality of expression, perhaps the superior of both his companions. If Browne is the least of the five, it is only because his excellence is more purely literary,—a matter of expression rather than of sub

stance,—and because he is more flawed than any of them by the fashionable vices of his time. Yet, as an artist, or rather architect, of words in the composite and florid style, it is vain to look anywhere for his superior.

John Milton-the greatest, no doubt, of the five, if only because of his mastery of either harmony-was born in London on 9th December 1608, was educated at Cambridge, studied at home with unusual intensity and control of his own time and bent; travelled to Italy, returned, and engaged in the somewhat unexpected task of school-keeping; was stimulated, by the outbreak of the disturbances between king and parliament, to take part with extraordinary bitterness in the strife of pamphlets on the republican and anti-prelatical side, defended the execution of the king in his capacity of Latin secretary to the Government (to which he had been appointed in 1649); was struck with blindness, lay hid at the Restoration for some time in order to escape the Royalist vengeance (which does not seem very seriously to have threatened him), composed and published in 1667 the great poem of Paradise Lost, followed it with that of Paradise Regained, did not a little other work in prose and poetry, and died on 8th November 1674. He had been thrice married, and his first wife had left him within a month of her marriage, thereby occasioning the singular series of pamphlets on divorce, the theories of which, had she not returned, he had, it is said, intended to put into practice on his own responsibility. The general abstinence from all but the barest biographical outline which the scale of this book imposes is perhaps nowhere a greater gain than in the case of Milton. His personal character was, owing to political motives, long treated with excessive rigour. The reaction to Liberal politics at the beginning of this century substituted for this rigour a somewhat excessive admiration, and even now the balance is hardly restored, as may be seen from the fact that a late biographer of his stigmatises his first wife, the unfortunate Mary Powell, as "a dull and common girl," without a tittle of evidence except the bare fact of her difference with her husband, and some innuendoes

(indirect in themselves, and clearly tainted as testimony) in Milton's own divorce tracts. On the whole, Milton's character was not an amiable one, nor even wholly estimable. It is prob

able that he never in the course of his whole life did anything that he considered wrong; but unfortunately, examples are not far to seek of the facility with which desire can be made to confound itself with deliberate approval. That he was an exacting, if not a tyrannical husband and father, that he held in the most peremptory and exaggerated fashion the doctrine of the superiority of man to woman, that his egotism in a man who had actually accomplished less would be half ludicrous and half disgusting, that his faculty of appreciation beyond his own immediate tastes and interests was small, that his intolerance surpassed that of an inquisitor, and that his controversial habits and manners outdid the license even of that period of controversial abuse,—these are propositions which I cannot conceive to be disputed by any competent critic aware of the facts. If they have ever been denied, it is merely from the amiable but uncritical point of view which blinks all a man's personal defects in consideration of his literary genius. That we cannot afford to do here, especially as Milton's personal defects had no small influence on his literary character. But having honestly set down his faults, let us now turn to the pleasanter side of the subject without fear of having to revert, except cursorily, to the uglier.

The same prejudice and partisanship, however, which have coloured the estimate of Milton's personal character have a little injured the literary estimate of him. It is agreed on all hands that Johnson's acute but unjust criticism was directed as much by political and religious prejudice as by the incapacity of the eighteenth century to appreciate the highest poetry; and all these causes worked together to produce that extraordinary verdict on Lycidas, which is now almost unintelligible. But it would be idle to contend that there is not nearly as much bias on the other side in the most glowing of his modern panegyrists-Macaulay and Landor. It is, no doubt, in regard to a champion so formidable,

both as ally and as enemy, difficult to write without fear or favour, but it must be attempted.

Milton's periods of literary production were three. In each of them he produced work of the highest literary merit, but at the same time singularly different in kind. In the first, covering the first thirty years of his life, he wrote no prose worth speaking of, but after juvenile efforts, and besides much Latin poetry of merit, produced the exquisite poems of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, the Hymn on the Nativity, the incomparable Lycidas, the Comus (which I have the audacity to think his greatest work, if scale and merit are considered), and the delicious fragments of the Arcades. Then his style abruptly changed, and for another twenty years he devoted himself chiefly to polemical pamphlets, relieved only by a few sonnets, whose strong originality and intensely personal savour are uniform, while their poetical merit varies greatly. The third period of fifteen years saw the composition of the great epics of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and of the tragedy of Samson Agonistes, together with at least the completion of a good deal of prose, including a curious History of England, wherein Milton expatiates with a singular gusto over details which he must have known, and indeed allows that he knew, to be fabulous. The production of each of these periods may be advantageously dealt with separately and in order.

Milton's Latin compositions both in prose and verse lie rather outside of our scope, though they afford a very interesting subject. It is perhaps sufficient to say that critics of such different times, tempers, and attitude towards their subject as Johnson and the late Rector of Lincoln,-critics who agree in nothing except literary competence,-are practically at one as to the remarkable excellence of Milton's Latin verse at its best. It is little read now, but it is a pity that any one who can read Latin should allow himself to be ignorant of at least the beautiful Epitaphium Damonis on the poet's friend, Charles Diodati.

The dates of the few but exquisite poems of the first period are known with some but not complete exactness.

Milton was

not an extremely precocious poet, and such early exercises as he has preserved deserve the description of being rather meritorious than remarkable. But in 1629, his year of discretion, he struck his own note first and firmly with the hymn on the " Nativity." Two years later the beautiful sonnet on his three-and-twentieth year followed. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso date not before, but probably not much after, 1632; Comus dating from 1634, and Lycidas from 1637. All these were written either in the later years at Cambridge, or in the period of independent study at Horton in Buckinghamshire -- chiefly in the latter. Almost: every line and word of these poems has been commented on and fought over, and I cannot undertake to summarise the criticism. of others. Among the greater memorabilia of the subject is that wonderful Johnsonism, the description of Lycidas as "harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing;" among the minor, the fact that critics have gravely quarrelled among themselves over the epithet "monumental" applied to the oak in Il Penseroso, when Spenser's "Builder Oak" (Milton was a passionate student of Spenser) would have given them the key at once, even if the same phrase had not occurred, as I believe it does, in Chaucer, also a favourite of Milton's. We have only space here for first-hand criticism.

This body of work, then, is marked by two qualities: an extraordinary degree of poetic merit, and a still more extraordinary originality of poetic kind. Although Milton is always Milton, it would be difficult to find in another writer five poems, or (taking the Allegro and its companion together) four, so different from each other and yet of such high merit. And it would be still more difficult to find poems so independent in their excellence. Neither the influence of Jonson nor the influence of Donne-the two poetical influences in the air at the time, and the latter especially strong at Cambridge-produced even the faintest effect on Milton. We know from his own words, and should have known even if he had not mentioned it, that Shakespere and Spenser were his favourite studies in English; yet, save in mere scattered phrases,