Milton | Page 2

of poetry, of religion, and of human life which
includes them all. Of some of the masters in each of these worlds it
feels that they belong not to their own generation only but 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