Chapter XII: Epilogue

In the meantime, while Dryden and Milton both had their schools, most of our seventeenth-century poetry fell into an almost complete oblivion. Dryden's satiric, and Milton's epic strains engrossed attention, and shaped the verses of an age. But the seventeenth century was extraordinarily wealthy in poetic kinds quite distinct from these: in metaphysic, and mysticism, in devotional ecstasy, and love-lyric, and romance. The English genius in poetry is essentially metaphysical and romantic. Milton was neither. He could not have excelled in any of these kinds; nor have come near to Suckling, or Crashaw, or Vaughan, or Herrick, or Marvell, in their proper realms. It is a permissible indulgence, therefore, in taking leave of Milton, to turn from the _Paradise Lost_ for a moment, and, escaping from the solid materialism of the heroic and epic strain, to find passion once more among the Court lyrists, and spiritual insight among the retired mystics, to find Religion and Love, and the humility that has access to both. A profound humility, impossible to Milton, inspired Vaughan when he wrote such a verse as this:--

There is in God, some say,
A deep but dazzling darkness; as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear.
O for that night! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim!

There is a natural vision, and there is a spiritual vision; the spiritual belongs to Vaughan, not to Milton. If Milton persuades us to a willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, Vaughan thrills us with a sense of vivid reality. His _Ascension Day_ is a thing seen, as if it were a memory of yesterday:--

The day-star smiles, and light, with thee deceast,
Now shines in all the chambers of the East.
What stirs, what posting intercourse and mirth
Of Saints and Angels glorifie the earth!
What sighs, what whispers, busie stops and stays;
Private and holy talk fill all the ways!
They pass as at the last great day, and run
In their white robes to seek the risen Sun;
I see them, hear them, mark their haste, and move
Amongst them, with them, wing'd with faith and love.

To the intensity of his aspiration and hushed expectance the world seems only a turbulent passing pageant, or a hard wayfaring, suffered in a dream:--

Who stays
Here long must passe
O'er dark hills, swift streames, and steep ways
As smooth as glasse.

Or a brief sickness:--

So for this night I linger here,
And, full of tossings to and fro,
Expect still when thou wilt appear,
That I may get me up and go.

His eyes are fixed on the shining lights that beckon him; the world is full of voices, but its sights and sounds appeal to him in vain; the beauties that surround him are things of naught--

Glorious deceptions, gilded mists,
False joyes, phantastick flights.

In the distance before him there shines

An air of glory
Whose light doth trample on my days;
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Meer glimmering and decays;

and he lifts up his voice in passionate desire for the ultimate deliverance:--

Ah! what time will it come? When shall that crie
_The Bridegroome's comming_! fill the sky?
Shall it in the evening run,
When our words and works are done?
Or will thy all-surprising light
Break at midnight?

He broods over it till nothing else is present to him in the night-watches:--

I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of calm and endless light.

The history of the struggles and corruption of mankind may close at any moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at a signal given:--

All's in deep sleep and night; thick darkness lyes
And hatcheth o'er thy people--
But hark! what trumpet's that, what angel cries
_Arise! Thrust in thy sickle!_

Here is a religious poet indeed, a visionary, a mystic, and a Christian; none of which names can be truly applied to Milton. And if we wish to find Love enjoying his just supremacy in poetry, we cannot do better than seek him among the lyrists of the Court of Charles II. Milton, self-sufficient and censorious, denies the name of love to these songs of the sons of Belial. Love, he says, reigns and revels in Eden, not

in court amours,
Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenate, which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.

Yet for the quick and fresh spirit of love in the poetry of that time we must go to the sons of Belial. There is a pathetic passage in one of Milton's divorce pamphlets, where, speaking of the unhappy choices in marriage to which "soberest and best governed men" are liable, he remarks:--"It is not strange though many, who have spent their youth chastely, are in some things not so quick-sighted while they haste too eagerly to light the nuptial torch; nor is it therefore that for a modest error a man should forfeit so great a happiness, and no charitable means to release him, since they who have lived most loosely, by reason of their bold accustoming, prove most successful in their matches, because their wild affections, unsettling at will, have been as so many divorces to teach them experience."

The wild affections, unsettling at will, wrote better love-songs than the steadfast principles of the sober and well-governed. Roystering libertines like Sir Charles Sedley were more edifying lovers than the austere husbands of Mary Powell and of Eve. Milton would have despised and detested the pleasure-seeking philosophy of Sedley:--

Let us then ply those joys we have,
'Tis vain to think beyond the grave;
Out of our reach the Gods have laid
Of Time to come th' event,
And laugh to see the Fools afraid
Of what the Knaves invent.

But the self-abandonment and the passion of two or three of Sedley's songs are out of Milton's reach:--

Not _Celia_ that I juster am,
Or better than the rest,
For I would change each hour like them,
Were not my heart at rest.

But I am ty'd to very thee
By every thought I have,
Thy face I only care to see,
Thy heart I only crave.

All that in woman is ador'd
In thy dear self I find,
For the whole sex can but afford
The handsome and the kind.

Why should I then seek further store,
And still make love anew;
When change itself can give no more,
'Tis easie to be true.

It is like a cup of cold water after the didactic endearments of Adam, and his repeated apostrophe:

Daughter of God and Man, immortal Eve--
For such thou art, from sin and blame entire.

Then there was John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. He was drunk for five years on end,--so his biographer, who had it from his own lips, alleges--and he died at the age of thirty-two. Like Sedley, he professes no virtues, and holds no far-reaching views. But what a delicate turn of personal affection he gives to the expression of his careless creed:--

The time that is to come is not,
How can it then be mine?
The present moment's all my lot,
And that, as fast as it is got,
Phyllis, is only thine.

Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows
If I by miracle can be
This live-long minute true to thee,
'Tis all that Heaven allows.

Rochester's best love-poetry reaches the topmost pinnacle of achievement in that kind. None has ever been written more movingly beautiful than this:--

When, wearied with a world of woe,
To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love and peace and truth does flow,
May I contented there expire!

Lest, once more wandering from that heaven,
I fall on some base heart unblest--
Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven--
And lose my everlasting rest!

Or than that other piece (too beautiful and too intense to be cited as a sudden illustration of a thesis) beginning--

Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why
Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny
The sunshine of the Sun's enlivening eye?

The wind bloweth where it listeth; the wandering fire of song touches the hearts and lips of whom it will. Milton built an altar in the name of the Lord, and he made a great trench about the altar, and he put the wood in order, and loaded the altar with rich exotic offerings, cassia and nard, odorous gums and balm, and fruit burnished with golden rind. But the fire from Heaven descended on the hastily piled altars of the sons of Belial, and left Milton's gorgeous altar cold.

His fame is now old-established and settled, so there is no place left for the eloquence of the memorialist, or the studied praises of the pleader. I have tried to understand Milton; and have already praised him as well as I know how, with no stinted admiration, I trust, and certainly with no merely superstitious reverence. If I must round my discourse by repeating something that I have already said or suggested, it shall be this--that as he stands far aloof from his contemporaries, so in the succession of great figures that mark for us the centuries of our literature he is seen once more singular and a stranger. We bred Shakespeare in our Midlands; he was nourished from the soil that still grows our daily bread. But Milton was an alien conqueror. The crowd of native-born Puritans, who sometimes (not without many searchings of heart and sharp misgivings) attempt to claim him for their leader, have no title in him. It is a proof of his dominating power, and no credit to their intelligence, that they accept him as their representative. His influence on the destinies and history of our literature might be compared to the achievement of Napoleon while he was winning the victories that changed the map of Europe. He could not change the character of a people, nor perpetuate his dynasty. But nothing is as it would have been without him. Our literature is as hospitable as the Hindoo pantheon; the great revolutionary has won a place even in our creed. And the writer has this advantage, at least, over the conqueror and legislator, that he has bequeathed to us not maps, nor laws, but poems, whose beauty, like the World's unwithered countenance, is bright as at the day of their creation.

INDEX

[For the following Index I am indebted to the kindness of three of my pupils, Miss F. Marston, Miss E. L. Morice, and Miss D. E. Yates.]

Abdiel, 72, 138-39, 156, 211 Abstract terms, Milton's use of, 227-31 Adam, 32, 35, 54, 64, 82-4, 87, 92, 95-6, 105, 112, 115, 122, 141-45, 148-50, 154-57, 160, 207, 222, 237, 248-50, 261 _Adamo_, 95 Addison, Joseph, 157-58, 206, 218, 242 _AEneid_, Virgil's, 158 Akenside, Mark, 243 Allegorical figures, Milton's, 237-38 _Amyntor and Theodora_, Mallet's, 243 Andreini, 95-7, 104, 106 Angelo, Michael, 88 _Animadversions on the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuus_, 217 _Apology for Smectymnuus_, 16, 69, 71, 74 Arbuthnot, John, 218 _Areopagitica_, 43, 46, 48, 49, 52, 56-7, 65, 76, 180 Arianism, 86 Ariosto, 171 Armstrong, John, 242 _Art of English Poetry_, Bysshe's, 241 _Art of Preserving Health, The_, Armstrong's, 242 Arthurian Legend, 23, 60, 89-90 _Ascension Day_, Vaughan's, 257 Athanasian Creed, 86 _Athenian Mercury_, 240 Augustine, Saint, 112

Bacon, Francis, 1, 198 Barclay, John, 57 Baxter, Richard, 20-21 Beaumont, Francis, 218 Beaumont, Joseph, 176 Beelzebub, 140 Belial, 140, 211-12, 239, 259 Bembo, Pietro, 46 Bentley, Richard, 157-58 _Biron, Tragedy of_, Chapman's, 204 Blair, Robert, 243 _Blenheim_, Lyttelton's, 243 _Blenheim_, Philips's, 242 Blount, Sir Thomas Pope, 241 Bodley, Sir Thomas, 17 Boileau, Nicolas, 178 _Book of Sports_, 25 Bossu, Charles, 158 Boyd, Zachary, 175 Brice, Thomas, 173 Broome, William, 242 Bunyan, John, 147, 155 Burke, Edmund, 40, 47, 77, 134 Burnet, Dr. Thomas, 84 Butler, Samuel, 44, 72, 246 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 233 Bysshe, 241

Caedmon, 106 Cambridge, Milton at, 13 Camden, William, 61 Carew, Thomas, 197 Catalogues, Milton's Epic, 236 Catullus, 206 Chapman, George, 204, 218 Charlemagne, 60 Charles I., 23 Charles II., Court of, 26, 259 _Chase, The_, Somerville's, 242 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 145, 236, 255 Chesterfield, Lord, 133 _Christian Doctrine, Treatise of_, 43, 113, 140 Church of England, 17, 19-21, 24, 34 _City Match, The_, Mayne's, 189 Classic School, 220, 226 Cleveland, John, 72 _Clovis_, Saint-Sorlin's, 178-79, 205 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 127, 151, 173, 214, 238, 251 _Comus_, 28, 93, 162-63, 182, 184, 191, 199, 235, 245 Congreve, William, 147, 225 Cooper, John Gilbert, 243 _Coriolanus_, Shakespeare's, 122 Court lyrists, 259-63 Cowley, Abraham, 72, 177, 206, 219, 231, 242 Crabbe, George, 223 Crashaw, Richard, 106, 256 Cromwell, Oliver, 62-3, 65, 135 _Cyder_, Philips's, 242 _Cynthia, Hymn to_, Jonson's, 185 Dalila, 51, 149, 209-10 Daniel, Samuel, 218 Davenant, William, 177, 180, 206, 219 _Davideis_, Cowley's, 177-78, 231 _De Re Poetica_, Blount's, 241 _Death of a Fair Infant, On the_, 181-82 _Defence of the People of England_, 47, 74, 131 _Defence of the People of England, Second_, 34, 47, 63 Dekker, John, 218 Denham, John, 206, 219 De Quincey, Thomas, 82, 103, 120, 192 _Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure_, Marvell's, 162 _Discourse of Satire_, Dryden's, 202, 205 _Divine Institutes_ of Lactantius, 101 _Divine Weekes and Workes_, Du Bartas's, 18 _Divorce Pamphlets_, 16, 19, 48, 52, 54, 69, 75, 248, 259 Donne, John, 181, 183 Dramatists, influence of, on Milton, 15-16, 185-87 Drayton, Michael, 27, 174, 218 Dryden, John, 10, 17, 133, 180, 202, 203, 206-208, 219, 240-41, 246-47, 256 Du Bartas, Guillaume, 18, 237 _Dunciad_, Pope's, 251 Dyer, John, 242, 245

_Ecclesiastical Pamphlets_, 49 _Ecclesiastical Polity_, Hooker's, 103 _Economy_, Shenstone's, 243 _Economy of Love, The_, Armstrong's, 242 _Education, Of_, 48-9 Eighteenth-century poetry, 233; influence of Milton on, 241 _seq._ _Eikonoklastes_, 16, 67 Elizabethan Poetry, 116, 173-75, 186-87; Milton's relation to, 15, 16, 218-20 Ellwood, Thomas, 161, 163 _English Dramatick Poets, Account of the_, Langbaine's, 241 Epic catalogues, Milton's, 236 Etherege, George, 190 Eve,27, 54, 83, 87, 92, 96, 112, 121-22, 142-50, 154-59, 160, 204, 206-207, 222, 249-50, 260 _Excursion, The_, Mallet's, 243

_Faerie Queene_, Spenser's, 199-200 Fenton, Elijah, 242 _Fleece, The_, Dyer's, 242 Fletcher, Giles, 106 Fletcher, Phineas, 106 Ford, John, 117

Gabriel, 72, 129, 135, 154, 239 Galileo, 100 Gay, John, 242 Gibbon, Edward, 138 Glover, Richard, 243 Godwin, William, 185 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 133 _Gondibert_, Davenant's, 177 _Gorboduc_, Sackville's, 196 Grainger, James, 242, 244 _Grave, The_, Blair's, 243 Gray, Thomas, 238, 253-55 _Grongar Hill_, Dyer's, 245

Hall, John, 71 _Hamlet_, Shakespeare's, 142 Hampton Court Conference, 17 Handel, 239 _Harmonie of the Church_, Drayton's, 174 Hazlitt, William, 198 Herbert, George, 174 Herodotus, 100 Herrick, Robert, 21, 256 Hervey, Lord, 203 _History of Britain_, 60, 143 Hobbes, Thomas, 58, 219 Homer, 171, 206, 220, 234 _Homer_, Pope's, 251 _Hop Garden, The_, Smart's, 242 Horace, 202 Horton, 22 Howard, Sir Robert, 180 Hume, Patrick, 240 _Hyperion_, Keats's, 227

_Idylls of the King_, Tennyson's, 193 _Iliad, The_, 242 _Il Penseroso_, 22, 62, 184-85, 195, 245

Johnson, Samuel, 22, 31, 35, 57-8, 127, 149, 175, 216, 224-25, 229-30, 239, 246-47, 251 Jonson, Ben, 18, 27, 185-86, 198, 218-19 Juvenal, 202

Keats, John, 227 King, Edward, 34 Knox, John, 142

Lactantius, 101-102 _L'Allegro_, 22, 24-5, 27, 195, 245 Lamb, Charles, 198 Landor, Walter Savage, 137, 212-13, 239 Langbaine, Gerard, 241 Latinisms, Milton's, 208-10 Laud, Archbishop, 21, 23 Laudian movement, 91 Lawrence, Henry, 8 _Lear, King_, Shakespeare's, 223-24 _Leonidas_, Glover's, 243 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 224 Lestrange, Sir Roger, 246 Licensing Act, 6 _Lives of the Most Famous English Poets_, Winstanley's, 241 _Lives of the Poets_, Johnson's, 247 _Love and Honour_, Shenstone's, 243 Lucretius, 238 _Lycidas_, 23-4, 33, 57, 63, 213, 235, 246 Lydgate, John, 255 Lyttelton, Lord, 243

_Macbeth_, Shakespeare's, 16, 118, 122, 229 Mackenzie, Sir George, 206 Malherbe, Chretien Guillaume de, 205 Mallet, David, 243 Mammon, 140, 172 Manoa, 51 Manso, 88 Marlowe, Christopher, 190 Marot, Clement, 173 Marvell, Andrew, 67, 73, 162, 256 Masson, Professor David, 133 Meredith, George, 118 Metaphors, Milton's use of, 13-14, 213, 234 Michael, 97, 129, 135, 156-57, 167, 253 "Miltonics," the, 245 Miracle plays, 101 Moloch, 140, 254 _Monstrous Regiment of Women_, Knox's, 142 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 57 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de, 62 More, Henry, 227 More, Sir Thomas, 57, 69 Morus, Alexander, 70 Moryson, Fynes, 15

_Nativity, Ode on the Morning of Christ's_, 181, 199 Nicodemus, Apocryphal Gospel of, 164 _Night Thoughts_, Young's, 243 _Nightingale, Sonnet to the_, 30

Occleve, Thomas, 255 _Odes_, Gray's, 238 _Olaus Magnus_, 100 _Old Wives' Tale_, Peele's, 185 _Original Poems_, Dr. Joseph Beaumont's, 176 Ovid, 206, 208

_Paradise Lost_, 28, 32, 45, 52, 58, 72-3, 79, 81 _seq._, 122-24, 127, 133, 140, 143, 150, 153, 158-64, 168, 176, 179, 188, 191, 195, 206, 208, 210, 213-14, 217, 223-24, 235, 237, 239-42, 245, 252, 254, 256 Characters of, 132-69 Chronology of, 110-11 Cosmography of, 107-10 Criticisms of, by Addison, 157-58 Bentley, 157 Coleridge, 127, 151, 173 De Quincey, 82, 103, 120, 192 Dryden, 240 Johnson, 127, 149, 175 Landor, 137, 212-13, 239 Pattison, 83, 101 Pope, 141 Voltaire, 84 Descriptive scenes in, 120-22, 155-58, 225-26 Sources of, 18, 95, 106 Theme of, 81-9, 91-4, 97-106, 127-28 Theology of, 85-7, 126-27, 128-32 Verse of, 179 _seq._, 191-98 _Paradise Regained_, 86, 120, 146-47, 158-59, 161, 163, 211, 228 Parker, Samuel, 67 Parliament, the Long, 56, 140 _Passion, The_, 181 Pattison, Mark, 54, 83, 101 Peele, George, 185, 190 Philips, John, 242, 244 Phillips, Edward, 160 _Phillips, Lives of Edward and John_, Godwin's, 185 Philosophical poetry, 227 _Pilgrim's Progress_, Bunyan's, 156 Pitt, Christopher, 242 _Platonick Song of the Soul_, More's, 227 _Pleasures of the Imagination_, Akenside's, 243 _Pleasures of Melancholy, The_, Warton's, 243, 245 Plutarch, 59 _Poetics_, Boileau's, 178 Pope, Alexander, 141, 203, 242, 247, 251-52, 254 Powell, Mary, 7, 54, 142, 260 _Power of Harmony, The_, Cooper's, 243 Prelatical controversy, 70 Proper names, poetical use of, by Milton, 235-36 Prynne, William, 147 _Psyche_, Beaumont's, 176 Puns, Milton's, 210-12 Puritanism, Milton's, 28-31, 92, 145, 162, 263

Quakerism, 29, 61 Quarles, Francis, 147

_Rape of the Lock, The_, Pope's, 232 Raphael, 97, 111, 115, 130, 144, 146, 202, 208, 228, 237, 248-49 _Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty_, 50 _Reformation in England, Of_, 42, 62, 91 _Rehearsal Transposed, The_, Marvell's, 67 Religious poetry, 173-77 Renaissance, the, 19, 59, 74, 173 Republicanism, 66 Restoration, the, 26, 35-8, 68 _Richard II._, Shakespeare's, 187 _Richard III._, Shakespeare's, 16 Rogers, Samuel, 214 Romanticism, 55, 220, 226, 229, 233, 245 _Romaunt of the Rose_, 238 Rowe, Nicholas, 240 _Ruined Abbey, The_, Shenstone's, 243 Rymer, Thomas, 241

Salmasius, 49, 69, 70, 71 _Samson Agonistes_, 26, 29, 37, 50-1, 79, 143, 146, 158-59, 162, 167, 168, 195-96, 203, 208-10, 241 Satan, 28, 60, 72, 85, 94, 102, 105, 109, 110-11, 129, 130, 132-39, 146, 152, 158, 160, 167, 211-12, 228, 239, 253 _Seasons, The_, Thomson's, 243, 248, 252 Sedley, Sir Charles, 260 _Sejanus_, Ben Jonson's, 220 Selden, Thomas, 56 Seneca, 189 Seventeenth-century poetry, 175-77, 256-62; Milton's relation to, 218-20 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 203 _Shakespeare, Lines on_, Milton's, 182 Shakespeare, William, 3, 4, 5, 7, 15, 18, 19, 22, 25, 116, 118, 171, 175, 190, 198, 214, 217, 218, 220, 223, 225, 230, 231, 240, 243, 263 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 233 Shenstone, William, 243 Shirley, James, 219 _Short View of the Stage_, Collier's, 147 Sidney, Sir Philip, 174 Simile, Milton's use of, 234 Simmons, Samuel, 180 Smart, Christopher, 242 Somerville, William, 242 Sophocles, 70 Southwell, Robert, 174 _Spectator, The_, Addison's, 241 Spenser, Edmund, 17, 18, 106, 181, 200, 206, 236 _Splendid Shilling, The_, Philips's, 242 Spratt, Thomas, 219 Steele, Richard, 206, 218 Sternhold, Thomas, 173 Stoicism, 29, 145, 163 Strafford, Earl of, 23 Suckling, Sir John, 147, 188, 256 _Sugar Cane, The_, Grainger's, 242 Swift, Jonathan, 218 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 93 Sylvester, Thomas, 18, 106 Synod of Dort, 17

_Tale of Two Swannes, A_, 179 _Talmud, The_, 87 _Tatler, The_, Steele's, 206 _Tears of Peace_, Chapman's, 204 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 193 _Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_, 41 Thomson, James, 243, 248, 252-53 Tillotson, John, 219 _Translation of the Eleventh Odyssey_, Broome's, 242 _Translation of a Story out of the Third AEneid_, Addison's, 242 Tudor state system, the, 57

_Vacation Exercise, At a_, 181 Vaughan, Henry, 256-60 _Venus and Adonis_, Shakespeare's, 148 Virgil, 171, 202-203, 206-207 Voiture, 205 Voltaire, 84 Vondel, Joost van den, 106

Waller, Edmund, 206, 219, 240-41 Warton, Thomas, 243, 245 _West, Sonnet on the Death of Richard_, Gray's, 254 Westminster Assembly of Divines, 140 Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, 261-62 _Wine, a Poem_, Gay's, 242 Winstanley, William, 241 _Winter's Tale_, Shakespeare's, 25, 144 Wither, George, 195 Wood, Anthony a, 173 Wordsworth, William, 214, 246, 249, 251 Wotton, Sir Henry, 199

Young, Thomas, 12, 243