Milton | Page 5

they do not miss either the mind or the art of Milton. The unconquerable will, the high soaring soul, are everywhere audibly present: and so, even to those who have little reading and no knowledge at all of matters of rhythm or metre, are the grave Dorian music, the stately verses rolling in each after the other like great ocean waves in eternal difference, in eternal sameness. The ignorant ear hears and rejoices, with a delight that passes understanding, as the ignorant eye sees a fine drawing or a piece of Greek sculpture and without understanding enjoys, learns, and unconsciously grows in keenness of sight. To live with Milton is necessarily to learn that the art of poetry is no triviality, no mere amusement, but a high and grave thing, a thing of the choicest discipline of phrase, the finest craftsmanship of structure, the most nobly ordered music of sound. The ordinary reader may not be conscious of any such lessons: but he learns them nevertheless. And from no one else in English can he learn them so well as from Milton.
{20} For these reasons, these and others, we must cling to our great epic poet, Shelley's "third among the sons of light." He is not easy reading: the greatest seldom are: but as with all the greatest, each new reading is not only easier than the last but fuller of matter for thought, wonder and delight. At each new reading, too, the things in him that belonged to his own age, the Biblical literalism, the theological prepossessions, the political partisanship, recede more and more into the background and leave us freer to enjoy the things which belong to all time. And to all peoples. Milton is, indeed, intensely English and could not have been anything but an Englishman. His profound conviction of the greatness of moral issues, and his passionate love of liberty, have both been characteristic of the Englishmen of whom England is most proud. Till lately too, at any rate, we should have said that his fierce individualism, intellectual and political, was English too. But his mind and soul, stored with the gathered riches of many languages and of an inward experience far too intense to be confined by national limitations, reach out to a world wider altogether than this island, wider even than Europe. In Samson Agonistes it is hard to say who is more vividly present, the English {21} politician, the Greek tragedian, or the Hebrew prophet. And in one sense Paradise Lost is the most universal of all poems. Indeed, that word may be applied to it in its strictest meaning, for the field of Milton's action is not Greece, or Italy, or England, or even the whole earth; it is the universe itself. That is one of its difficulties: but it is also a source of the uplifting and enlarging quality which is peculiarly Miltonic. With him we are conscious of treading no petty scene. We have in some respects travelled far from Milton's way both of stating and of solving his problem, but nevertheless it is still with us to-day and always: the problem of man's origin and destiny, of the ways of God to men. And though Milton is more hampered by literal belief in a particular theological legend than the authors of the Book of Job and the Prometheus Vinctus, yet, like these, he shows that a great mind and soul will leave the imprint of power and truth on the most incredible primitive story. To read his great poem, or indeed any of his poems, is to live for a while in the presence of one of those royal souls, those natural kings of men, whom Plato felt to be born to rule and inspire their fellows: and the heroic temper of the man is in England less rare than the consummate {22} perfection of art which has eternalized its utterance. This is Milton: and, though we may be too weak to read him often, we shall never be able to do without him, never think of him without an added strength and exaltation of spirit.

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CHAPTER II
MILTON'S LIFE AND CHARACTER
We know far more about Milton than about any other English poet born so long ago. There are three reasons for this. One is that from his earliest years he was very much interested in himself, was quite aware that he was a man above the stature of ordinary men, and had the most deliberate intention and expectation of doing great things. Consequently he is not only, like most good poets, fond of bringing more or less concealed autobiography into his poetry, but still more in his prose works he inclines often to insert long passages about himself, his studies, travels, projects, friends and character. It is these more than