Milton | Page 3

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 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 é 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