Milton | Page 3

the loss of Paradise and even its recovery, but its eternal bliss, the bliss of those who live in the presence of
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle,
he could not describe. To do that required one who had seen the Vita Nuova before he saw the Inferno. In la sua volontade �� nostra pace. So Dante thought: but not altogether so Milton. It is not a difference of theological opinion: it is a difference of temper. For Dante the "will of God" at once suggested both the apostolic and the apocalyptic love, joy, peace, the supreme and ultimate beatific vision. Bitter as his life on earth had been, no man ever suffering more from evil days and evil tongues, no man ever more bitterly conscious of living in an evil and perverse generation, he had yet within him a perpetual fountain of peace in the thought of God's will, and the faith that he was daily advancing nearer to the light of heaven and the divine presence. Milton, a sincere believer in God {13} if man ever were, must also at times have had his moments of beatific vision in which the invisible peace of God became more real than the storms of earthly life and the vileness of men. Indeed, we see the traces of such moments in the opening of Comus, in the concluding lines of Lycidas, in the sustained ecstasy of At a Solemn Music. But they appear to have been only moments. Milton was a lifelong Crusader who scarcely set foot in the Holy Land. The will of God meant for him not so much peace as war. He is a prophet rather than a psalmist. "Woe is me, my Mother, that thou hast born me a man of strife and contention," he himself complains in the Reason of Church Government. He was not much over thirty when he wrote those words: and they remained true of him to the end. For twenty years the strife was active and public; ever, in appearance at least, more and more successful: then for the final fourteen it became the impotent wrath of a caged and wounded lion. Never for a moment did his soul bow to the triumph of the idolaters: but neither could it forget them, nor make any permanent escape into purer air. Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson, especially the last, are all plainly the works of a man conscious of {14} having been defeated by a world which he could defy but could not forget. Sublimely certain of the righteousness of his cause, he has no abiding certainty of its victory. He hears too plainly the insulting voices of the sons of Belial, and broods in proud and angry gloom over the ruin of all his hopes, personal, political and ecclesiastical. And as his religion was a thing of intellect and conscience, not a thing of spiritual vision, he cannot make for himself that mystical trans-valuation of all earthly doings in the light of which the struggles of political and ecclesiastical parties are seen as things temporary, trivial and of little account.
Such are the limitations of Milton. They are those of a man who lived in the time of a great national struggle, deliberately chose his own side in it, and from thenceforth saw nothing in the other but folly, obstinacy and crime. He has in him nothing whatever of the universal, and universally sympathetic, insight of Shakspeare. And he has paid the price of his narrowness in the open dislike, or at best grudging recognition, of that half of the world which is not Puritan and not Republican, and still looks upon history, custom, law and loyalty with very different eyes from his. But those who exact that {15} penalty do themselves at least as much injustice as they do Milton. To deprive ourselves of Milton because we are neither Puritan moralists nor Old Testament politicians is an act of intellectual suicide. The wise, as the world goes on, may differ more and more from some of Milton's opinions. They can never escape the greatness either of the poet or of the man. Men's appreciation of Milton is almost in proportion to their instinctive understanding of what greatness is. Other poets, perhaps, have things of greater beauty: none in English, none, perhaps, in any language, fills us with a more exalting conviction of the greatness of human life. No man rises from an hour with Milton without feeling ashamed of the triviality of his life and certain that he can, if he will, make it less trivial. It is impossible not to catch from him some sense of the high issues, immediate and eternal, on which human existence ought to be conscious that it hangs. The world will be very old before