Milton | Page 4

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
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