Milton | Page 4

we can spare a man who can render us this service. We have no one in England who renders it so imperiously as Milton.
This part of his permanent claim upon our attention belongs to all that we know of him, to everything in his life so far as it is recorded, {16} even to his prose, where its appearances are occasional, as well as to his verse, where it is continuous and omnipresent. It is, of course, in connection with the last that we are most conscious of it and that it is most important. After all, the rest would have been unknown or forgotten if he had not been a great poet. But it is not merely by his force of mind and character, nor merely by the influence they have upon us through the poetry, that he claims our attention to-day. Altogether independently of that, the study of Milton is of immense and special value to Englishmen. Except in poetry our English contribution to the life of the arts in Europe has been comparatively small. That very Puritanism which had so much to do with the greatness of Milton has also had much to do with the general failure of Englishmen to produce fine art, or even to care about it, or so much as recognize it when they see it. Now Milton, Puritan as he was, was always, and not least in his final Puritan phase, a supreme artist. Poetry has been by far our greatest artistic achievement and he is by far our greatest poetic artist. No artist in any other field, no Inigo Jones or Wren, no Purcell, no Reynolds or Turner, holds such unquestioned eminence in any other art as he in his. If {17} the world asks us where to look for the genius of England, so far as it has ever been expressed on paper, we point, of course, unhesitatingly to Shakspeare. But Shakspeare is as inferior to Milton in art as he is superior in genius. His genius will often, indeed, supply the place of art; but the possession of powers that are above art is not the same thing as being continuously and consciously a great artist. We can all think of many places in his works where for hundreds of lines the most censorious criticism can scarcely wish a word changed; but we can also think of many in which the least watchful cannot fail to wish much changed and much omitted. "Would he had blotted a thousand" is still a true saying, and its truth known and felt by all but the blindest of the idolaters of Shakspeare. No one has ever uttered such a wish about the poetry of Milton. This is not the place to anticipate a discussion of it which must come later. But, in an introductory chapter which aims at insisting upon the present and permanent importance of Milton, it is in place to point out the immense value to the English race of acquaintance with work so conscientiously perfect as Milton's. English writers on the whole have had a tendency to be rather slipshod in {18} expression and rather indifferent to the finer harmonies of human speech, whether as a thing of pure sound or as a thing of sounds which have more than mere meaning, which have associations. Milton as both a lover of music and a scholar is never for a moment unconscious of either. It would scarcely be going too far to say that there is not a word in his verse which owes its place solely to the fact that it expresses his meaning. All the words accepted by his instinctive or deliberate choice were accepted because they provided him with the most he could obtain of three qualities which he desired: the exact expression of the meaning needed for the immediate purpose in hand, the associations fittest to enhance or enrich that meaning, the rhythmical or musical effect required for the verse. The study of his verse is one that never exhausts itself, so that the appreciation of it has been called the last reward of consummate scholarship. But the phrase does Milton some injustice. It is true that the scholar tastes again and again in Milton some flavour of association or suggestion which is not to be perceived by those who are not scholars, and it is also true that he consciously understands what he is enjoying more than they possibly can. But neither Milton's nor any other {19} great art makes its main appeal to learning. What does that is not art at all but pedantry. Those who have never read a line of the Greek and Latin poets certainly miss many pleasures in reading Milton, but, if they have any ear for poetry at all,