Milton | Page 2

to all time and so to itself. It cannot be satisfied, therefore, with what its predecessors have said about them. It needs to see them again freshly for itself, and put into words so far as it can its own attitude towards them.
That is the excuse for the new books which will always be written every few years about Hebrew Religion, or Greek Art, or the French Revolution, or about such men as Plato, {9} St. Paul, Shakspeare, Napoleon. It is the excuse even for a much humbler thing, for the addition of a volume on Milton to the Home University Library. The object of this Library is not, indeed, to say anything startlingly new about the great men with whom it deals. Rather the contrary, in fact: for to say anything startlingly new about Shakspeare or Plato would probably be merely to say what is absurd or false. The main outlines of these great figures have long been settled, and the man who writes a book to prove that Shakspeare was not a great dramatist, or was an exact and lucid writer, is wasting his own time and that of his readers. The mountain may change its aspect from hour to hour, but when once we have ascertained that it is composed of granite, that matter is settled, and there is no use in arguing that it is sandstone or basalt. The object of such volumes as those of this Library is no vain assault on the secure judgment-seat of the world, no hopeless appeal against the recorded and accepted decrees of time. It is rather to re-state those decrees in modern language and from the point of view of our own day: to show, for instance, how Plato, though no longer for us what he was for the Neo-Platonists, is {10} still for us the most moving mind of the race that more than all others has moved the mind of the world; how Milton, though no longer for us a convincing justifier of the ways of God to men, is still a figure of transcendent interest, the most lion-hearted, the loftiest-souled, of Englishmen, the one consummate artist our race has produced, the only English man of letters who in all that is known about him, his life, his character, his poetry, shows something for which the only fit word is sublime.
There was much else beside, of course. The sublime is very near the terrible, and the terrible is often not very far removed from the hateful. Dante giving his "daily dreadful line" to the private and public enemies with whom he grimly populates his hell is not exactly an amiable or attractive figure. Still less so is Milton in those prose pamphlets in which he passes so rapidly, and to us so strangely, from the heights of heaven to the gutter mud of scurrilous personalities. This is a disease from which our more amiable age seems at last to have delivered the world. But Milton has at least the excuse of a long and august tradition, from the days of Demosthenes, equally profuse of a patriotism as lofty and of personalities as {11} base as Milton's, to those of a whole line of the scholars of the Renaissance who lived with the noblest literature of the world and wrote of each other in the language of Billingsgate fishwives. So the sublimity of his life is wholly that of an irresistible will, set from the first on achieving great deeds and victoriously achieving them in defiance of adverse men and fates. But this is quite compatible with qualities the reverse of agreeable. It is the business of sublimity to compel amazed admiration, not to be a pleasant companion. Milton rejoicing over the tortures bishops will suffer in hell, Milton insulting Charles I, Milton playing the tyrant to his daughters, none of these are pleasant pictures. But such incidents, if perhaps unusually grim in the case of Milton, are apt to happen with Olympians. Experience shows that it is generally best to listen to their thunder from a certain distance.
Such limitations must not be ignored. But neither must they be unduly pressed. The important thing about the sun is not its spots but its light and heat. No great poet in all history, with the possible exception of Dante, has so much heat as Milton. In prose and verse alike he burns and glows with fire. At its worst it is a fire of anger and pride, at {12} its best a fire of faith in liberty, justice, righteousness, God. Of the highest of all fires, the white flame of love, it has indeed little. Milton had no Beatrice to teach him how to show men the loveliness of the divine law, the beauty of holiness. He could describe