IT MACAULAY'S ESSAYS MILTON AUGUST, 1825 NOTE ON THE ESSAY T would be unfair to a great writer to take this essay too seriously when he has himself told us that it contains scarcely a paragraph such as his mature judgment approved. The essay on Milton is the work of a clever, eager, combative youth, full of enthusiasm for literature and liberty, but hardly yet comprehending that there are such excellences as measure and discrimination. "A reader," Arnold observes, "who only wants rhetoric, a reader who wants a panegyric on Milton, a panegyric on the Puritans, will find what he wants. A reader who wants criticism will be disappointed." Macaulay's curious want of subtlety is nowhere more fully exemplified than in his discussion of the influence of advancing civilisation..upon poetic genius. His crude assertion that as civilisation progresses poetry almost necessarily declines would imply that the finest poetry can only be produced in a state of the lowest barbarism. This is certainly not the case. The people among whom the Homeric poems took shape were by no means savages. The Attic dramas were produced for the most civilised community of the ancient world. Lucretius and Virgil wrote in the capital of civilised Europe. The dark ages were comparatively unfruitful of poetry, which only bloomed again in the reviving civilisation of the eleventh and succeeding centuries. Dante's contemporaries were not barbarians. Shakespeare's contemporaries were almost as civilised as Milton's. We need not multiply later instances to prove that a great deal of exquisite poetry may be produced in periods of the highest civilisation. If we turn from the mere enumeration of instances to reasoning upon the nature of poetry we see that the problem is far more complex than Macaulay imagined. A national legend, indeed, can only be evolved in the youth of a nation. But the fulness of thought and feeling manifested by the greatest epic and tragic poets must be the outcome of a long experience requiring the lapse of many generations. Language is usually more direct and sensuous among semi-civilised than among civilised men. But the faultless elegance of Virgil, or the amazing compass and flexibility of VOL. 1-1 Shakespeare, could never be attained in the speech of genuine barbarians. Macaulay thinks the credulity of the child or the savage more favourable to poetry than the scepticism of the adult or of civilised people. But then it may be urged that implicit belief is altogether distinct from imaginative enjoyment, that we really enjoy poetry because we know that it is not a record of fact. To take all these objections is not to deny the possibility that civilisation may in some respects weaken, or in some cases destroy, the faculty of poetic creation; it only implies that Macaulay did not see how intricate the problem is, and therefore has left it unsolved. Macaulay, we have said, had generally a true sense of what is great in literature. His wide classical reading and powerful memory enabled him to measure Milton's wonderful power of assimilation. His remarks upon the early poems and the sonnets contain much that is true and happily expressed. Perhaps the best critical remarks in the essay are those upon the singular suggestive power of Milton's language and rhythm. It is harder to follow Macaulay where he praises Milton's treatment of spiritual beings. Many will think that the frequent introduction of Omnipotence among the personages of an epic throws all inferior beings out of scale and paralyses action. In this respect we may feel that Milton was misled by his respect for the classical epics in which deities of very finite power and wisdom are such constant actors, and by the theological disposition to strip all mystery from Divine Providence. Satan, as at first introduced, is a grand conception, but the poet could not, or would not, keep him at the same altitude throughout. He begins as the heroic rebel against absolute power, with whom the poet unconsciously sympathises; he ends as the commonplace fiend, sufficiently employed in perverting weak and foolish mortals. Macaulay might have been more sensitive to these imperfections had he not been reared himself in a Puritan atmosphere. But for that circumstance he might have realised the most comprehensive objection to Paradise Lost, that notwithstanding its finished art throughout and the incomparable splendour of many passages, it is as a whole difficult and almost repellent to the majority even of those readers who have cultivated an appreciation of poetry. What Macaulay says of Milton's prose writings is true so far as it goes, but it is only a portion of the truth. They do contain passages compared with which the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance, but these passages are usually outbreaks of the poetic soul, little connected with their context, which is too often wearisome and unprofitable. Milton's pamphlets display neither the lucid method and close argument of Swift nor the ample knowledge and varied reflection of Burke. Milton's zeal was pure, but his knowledge of the world was small, and his acquaintance with politics almost nothing. His learning, although less than Macaulay suggests, was far greater than a pamphleteer needs to make an impression, but it was sterilised by use in controversy. His fiery temper and the unseemly fashion of the learned world often misled him into an abusive style which disgusts the modern reader, For these reasons the simple-minded person who turns from Macaulay's essay to Milton's pamphlets is likely to sustain some rude shocks of disappointment which may hinder his recognising the lofty purpose which redeems their faults and the superb genius which ever and anon breaking through common argument or invective, raises them into classics and renders them immortal. As the political and historical opinions expressed in this essay are similar to those much better expressed in some of the later essays, we need not pause to discuss them here. If we turn from the matter to the language of this essay we note that Macaulay had already formed his style. Although he himself described the essay on Milton as overloaded with gaudy and ungraceful ornament, the structure of the sentences and the choice of words are already such as we find them in the essay on Addison or in the History of England. Certainly the style is that of a young man, but Macaulay, for better or worse, remained a young man all his life. A certain unskilfulness in transitions from one topic to another and a disproportionate length in digressions are very noticeable here, but are sometimes found even in his latest essays. In Professor Masson's monumental Life all that can be known concerning Milton has been collected and set forth with the utmost industry. Mark Pattison's volume in English Men of Letters is eminently acute and sympathetic in criticism. Among recent studies of Milton Professor Raleigh's is perhaps the most brilliant and attractive. MILTON Joannis Miltoni, Angli, de Doctrinâ Christianâ libri duo posthumi. A Treatise on Christian Doctrine, compiled from the Holy Scriptures alone. By JOHN MILTON, translated from the Original by Charles R. Sumner, M.A. &c. &c. 1825. Tow OWARDS the close of the year 1823, Mr. Lemon,1 deputy keeper of the state papers, in the course of his researches among the presses of his office, met with a large Latin manuscript. With it were found corrected copies of the foreign despatches written by Milton while he filled the office of Secretary, and several papers relating to the Popish Trials and the Rye-house Plot. The whole was wrapped up in an envelope, superscribed To Mr. Skinner, Merchant, On examination, the large manuscript proved to be the long lost Essay on the Doctrines of Christianity, which, according to Wood 5 and Toland, 1 Robert Lemon, 1779-1835, became a clerk in the State Paper Office in 1795, and Deputy Keeper in the same office in 1818. Besides discovering the De Doctrinâ Christiana, he did much in arranging the national records and preparing them for publication. 2 In March, 1649, Milton was appointed Latin Secretary to the Council of State, the supreme executive authority of the Commonwealth. He continued to hold this office till within some months of the Restoration, his latest Latin letter being dated the 16th May, 1659. 3 These trials followed upon the information given in 1678 by Titus Oates and others of a Roman Catholic plot to murder the King and overturn the constitution in Church and State. Although the information was false, it terrified the public, and many persons were executed as conspirators. 4 When the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament (see below) and the reaction against the excesses of the Whigs had freed Charles II. from restraint, many of the Whigs, despairing of constitutional resistance, began to conspire. Richard Rumbold, an old Parliamentary soldier, and some others laid a plan to capture or kill the King on his way to London from Newmarket. The spot chosen for the attack was close by Rumbold's dwelling, known as the Rye House, which has given its name to the plot. 5 Anthony Wood, 1632-1695, the celebrated Oxford antiquary and diarist. The passage to which Macaulay refers will be found in his Fasti Oxonienses, part i., col. 486 (ed. 1817). 6 John Toland, 1670-1722, who is now remembered chiefly as the first exponent of the deism of the eighteenth century, wrote a Life of Milton which was prefixed to the edition of Milton's prose writings, published in 1698. |