Milton's Tercentenary

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 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 province. 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 better 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 contemporaries. Which side would you have been on, if you had lived during the English civil war of the seventeenth 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 accidents. We think that we choose, but really choices are made for us. We inherit our politics and our religion. 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 discipline – and the prayer meetings. I am afraid that Rupert's troopers plundered, gambled, drank and swore most shockingly. There was good fighting on both sides, but the New Model had the right end of the quarrel 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 fellows were.

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 notoriously 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 provoked by public occasions!

The fact is, there were all kinds of Puritans. There were dismal precisians, 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 gentlemen and scholars, like Fairfax, Marvell, Colonel Hutchinson, Vane, whose Puritanism was consistent with all elegant tastes and accomplishments. Was Milton's Puritanism 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, selectness, elevation to his picture of the world. But it would be uncritical to deny that it also gave a certain narrowness and rigidity to his view of human life.

It is curious how Milton's early poems have changed places in favor with Paradise Lost. They were neglected 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 Lycidas 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. Paradise 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 Paradise Lost has not – charm. Milton's epic astonishes, moves, delights, but it does not fascinate. The youthful Milton was sensitive to many attractions which he afterwards came to look upon with stern disapproval. He went to the theatre and praised the comedies of Shakspere and Jonson; 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 architecture 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 closet. In his treatise Of Reformation 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 Paradise Lost. A chorus commends Samson the Nazarene for drinking nothing but water. Modern tragedies 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