Pattison's Milton

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Title:     Pattison's Milton
Author: Goldwin Smith [More Titles by Smith]

[Footnote: "English Men of Letters. Edited by John Morley Milton. By Mark Pattison B.D., Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford." London, Macmillan, New York: Harper & Bros., 1879]

John Bright once asked a friend who was the greatest of Englishmen and the friend hesitating answered his own question by saying, "Milton, because he above all others, combined the greatness of the writer with the greatness of the citizen." Professor Masson in his Life and Times of Milton, has embodied the conception of the character indicated by this remark, but he has run into the extreme of incorporating a complete narrative of the Revolution with the biography of Milton, so that the historical portion of the work overlays instead of illuminating the biographical, and the chapters devoted specially to the life seem to the reader interpolations, and not always welcome interpolations, in an intensely interesting history of the times. But now comes a biographer in whose eyes the life of Milton the citizen is a mere episode, and not only a mere episode but a lamentable and humiliating episode, in the life of Milton the poet. Milton's life, says Mr. Pattison "is a drama in three acts. The first discovers him in the calm and peaceful retirement of Horton, of which 'L'Allegro,' 'Il Penseroso,' and 'Lycidas' are the expression. In the second act he is breathing the foul and heated atmosphere of party passion and religious hate, generating the lurid fires which glare in the battailous canticles of his prose pamphlets. The three great poems--'Paradise Lost,' 'Paradise Regained,' and 'Samson Agonistes'--are the utterance of his final period of solitary and Promethean grandeur, when, blind, destitute, friendless, he testified of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, alone before a fallen world." As to the struggle to which Milton, with Cromwell, Vane Pym, Hampden, Selden, and Chillingworth, gave his life, it is in the eyes of his present biographer, an ignoble "fray," a "biblical brawl," and its fruits in the way of theological discussion are nothing but "garbage." To write his Defence of the English People Milton deliberately sacrificed his eyesight, his doctor having warned him that he would lose his one remaining eye if he persisted in using it for book work. "The choice lay before me," he says, "between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight. In such a case I could not listen to the physician, not if AEsculapius himself had spoken from his sanctuary; I could not but obey that inward monitor, I know not what, that spoke to me from Heaven. I considered with myself that many had purchased less good with worse ill, as they who gave their lives to reap only glory, and I thereupon concluded to employ the little remaining eyesight I was to enjoy in doing this, the greatest service to the common weal it was in my power to render." Mr. Pattison has quoted this passage, and no doubt he silently appreciates the heroism which breathes through it; but the "supreme duty" of which it speaks appears to him only a "prostitution of faculties" and a "poor delusion." Milton, he thinks, ought to have kept entirely aloof from the brawl and remained quiet either in the intellectual circles of Italy or in the delicious seclusion of his library at Horton, leaving liberty, truth, and righteousness to drown or to be saved from drowning by other hands than his. In "plunging into the fray" the poet miserably derogated from his superior position as a literary man, and the result was a dead loss to him and to the world. We are sure that we do not state Mr. Pattison's view more strongly than it is stated in his own pages.

The views of all of us, including Professor Masson, on such a question are sure to be more or less idiosyncratic, and those of the present biographer have not escaped the general liability. They seem, at least, aptly to represent a mood prevalent just now among eminent men of the literary class in England, particularly at the universities. These men have been tossed on the waves of Ritualism, tossed on the waves of the reaction from Ritualism; some of them have been personally battered in both controversies; they have attained no certainty, but rather arrived at the conclusion that no certainty is attainable; they are weary and disgusted; such of them as have been enthusiasts in politics have been stripped of their illusions in that line also, and have fallen back on the conviction that everything must be left to evolve itself, and that there is nothing to be done. They have withdrawn into the sanctuary of critical learning and serene art, abjuring all theology and politics, and, above all, abjuring controversy of all kinds as utterly vulgar and degrading, though, as might be expected, they are sometimes controversial and even rather tart in an indirect way, and without being conscious of it themselves. Mr. Pattison's air when he comes into contact with the politics or theology of Milton's days is like that of a very seasick passenger at the sight of a pork chop. Nor does he fail to reflect the Necessarianism of the circle. "That in selecting a scriptural subject," he says, "Milton was not, in fact, exercising any choice, but was determined by his circumstances, is only what must be said of all choosing." Criticism fastidiously erudite, a study of art religiously and almost mystically profound, are fruits of this intellectual seclusion of chosen spirits from the coarse and ruffling world for which that world has reason to be grateful. It is not likely Milton would have chosen a writer of this school as his biographer, but few men would choose their own biographers well.

Milton has at all events found in Mr. Pattison a biographer whose narrative is throughout extremely pleasant, interesting and piquant, the piquancy being enhanced for those who have the key to certain sly hits, such as that at "the peculiar form of credulity which makes perverts (to Roman Catholicism) think that everyone is about to follow their example," which carries us back to the time when the head of Tractarianism having gone over to Rome, was waiting anxiously, but in vain, for the tail to join it. The facts had already been collected by the diligence of Professor Masson, but Mr. Pattison uses them in a style which places beyond a doubt his own familiarity with the subject. Through the moral judgments there runs, as we think, and as we should have expected, a somewhat lofty conception of the privileges of intellect and of the value of literary objects compared with others, but with this qualification the reflections will probably be deemed sensible and sound. The unfortunate relations between Milton and his first wife are treated as we think all readers will say, at once with delicacy and justice. The literary criticisms are of a high order and such as only comprehensive learning combined with trained taste could produce, whether you entirely enter into all of them or not (and criticism has not yet been reduced to a certain rule) you cannot fail to gain from them increase of insight and enjoyment. They are often expressed in language of great beauty:

"The rapid purification of Milton's taste will be best perceived by comparing 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' of uncertain date but written after 1632 with the 'Ode on the Nativity,' written 1629. The Ode, notwithstanding its foretaste of Milton's grandeur, abounds in frigid conceits, from which the two later pieces are free. The Ode is frosty, as written in winter within the four walls of a college-chamber. The two idyls breathe the free air of spring and summer and of the fields around Horton. They are thoroughly naturalistic; the choicest expression our language has yet found of the first charm of country life, not as that life is lived by the peasant, but as it is felt by a young and lettered student, issuing at early dawn or at sunset into the fields from his chamber and his books. All rural sights and sounds and smells are here blended in that ineffable combination which once or twice perhaps in our lives has saluted our young senses, before their perceptions were blunted by alcohol, by lust or ambition, or diluted by the social distractions of great cities."

This will not be found to be a _purpureus pannus_. Nor does it much detract from the grace of the work that of the "asyntactic disorder" of which Mr. Pattison accuses Milton's prose, some examples may be found in his own. Grammatical irregularities in a really good writer, as Mr. Pattison undoubtedly is, often prove merely that his mind is more intent on the matter than on the form.

"Paradise Lost" is the subject of a learned, luminous, and to us very instructive dissertation. It is truly said that of the adverse criticism which we meet with on the poem "much resolves itself into a refusal on the part of the critic to make that initial abandonment to the conditions which the poet demands: a determination to insist that his heaven, peopled with deities, dominations, principalities, and powers, shall have the same material laws which govern our planetary system." There is one criticism, however, which cannot be so resolved, and on which, as it appears to us the most serious of all, we should have liked very much to hear Mr. Pattison. It is said that Lord Thurlow and another lawyer were crossing Hounslow Heath in a post-chaise when a tremendous thunder-storm came on; that the other lawyer said that it reminded him of the battle in "Paradise Lost" between the devil and the angels, and that Thurlow roared, with a blasphemous oath, "Yes, and I wish the devil had won." Persons desirous of sustaining the religious reputation of the legal profession add that his companion jumped out of the chaise in the rain and ran away over the heath. For our part, we have never found nearly so much difficulty in any of the incongruities connected with the relations between spirit and matter, or in any confusion of the Copernican with the Ptolemaic system, as in the constant wrenching of our moral sympathies, which the poet demands for the Powers of Good, but which his own delineation of Satan, as a hero waging a Promethean war against Omnipotence, compels us to give to the Powers of Evil. Perhaps a word or two might have been said about the relations of "Paradise Lost" to other "epics." It manifestly belongs not to the same class of poems as the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," or even the "AEneid." Dobson's Latin translation of it is about the greatest feat ever performed in modern Latin verse, and it shows by a crucial experiment how little Milton really has in common with Virgil. "Paradise Lost" seems to us far more akin to the Greek tragedy than to the Homeric poems or the "AEneid." In the form of a Greek drama it was first conceived. Its verse is the counterpart of the Greek iambic, not of the Greek or Latin hexameter. Had the laborious Dobson turned it into Greek iambics instead of turning it into Latin hexameters, we suspect the real affinity would have appeared.

Looking upon the life of Milton the politician merely as a sad and ignominious interlude in the life of Milton the poet, Mr. Pattison cannot be expected to entertain the idea that the poem is in any sense the work of the politician. Yet we cannot help thinking that the tension and elevation which Milton's nature had undergone in the mighty struggle, together with the heroic dedication of his faculties to the most serious objects, must have had not a little to do both with the final choice of his subject and with the tone of his poem. "The great Puritan epic" could hardly have been written by any one but a militant Puritan. Had Milton abjured the service of his cause, as his biographer would have had him do, he might have given us an Arthurian romance or some other poem of amusement. We even think it not impossible that he might have never produced a great poem at all, but have let life slip away in elaborate preparation without being able to fix upon a theme or brace himself to the effort of composition. If Milton's participation in a political battle fought to save at once the political and spiritual life of England was degrading, Dante's participation in the faction fight between the Guelphs and Ghibellines must have been still more so; yet if Dante had been a mere man of leisure would he have written the "Divina Commedia"? Who are these sublime artists in poetry that are pinnacled so high above the "frays" and "brawls" of vulgar humanity? The best of them, we suppose (writers for the stage being out of the question) is Goethe. Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron were all distinctly poets of the Revolution, or of the Counter-Revolution, and if you could remove from them the political element, you would rob them of half their force and interest. The great growths of poetry have coincided with the great bursts of national life, and the great bursts of national life have hitherto been generally periods of controversy and struggle.

Art itself, in its highest forms, has been the expression of faith. We have now people who profess to cultivate art as art for its own sake; but they have hardly produced anything which the world accepts as great, though they have supplied some subjects for _Punch_. "He that loseth his life shall preserve it." Milton was ready to lose his literary life by sacrificing the remains of his eyesight to a cause which, upon the whole, humanity has accepted as its own; and it was preserved to him in a work which will never die. Mr. Pattison points to a short poem written by Milton when his pen was chiefly employed in serving the Commonwealth as indication that Milton "did not inwardly forfeit the peace which passeth all understanding." Why should a man forfeit that peace when he is doing with his whole soul that which he conscientiously believes to be his highest duty?

Over Milton's pamphlets Mr. Pattison can of course only wring his hands. He is at liberty to wring his hands as much as he pleases over the personalities which sullied the controversy with Salmasius; but these are a small part of the matter, particularly when they are viewed in connection with the habits of a time which was at once much rougher in phrase, though perhaps not more malicious, than ours, and given to servile imitation of Greek and Latin oratory. To point his moral more keenly, Mr. Pattison denies that Milton was ever effective as a political writer. Yet the Council of State, who can have looked to nothing but effectiveness, and were pretty good judges of it, specially invited Milton to answer "Eikon Basilike" and to plead the cause of the Regicide Republic against Salmasius in the court of European opinion. Mr. Pattison himself (p. 135) allows that on the Continent Milton was renowned as the answerer of Salmasius and the vindicator of liberty; and he proceeds to quote the statement of Milton's nephew that learned foreigners could not leave London without seeing his uncle. But the biographer has evidently laid down beforehand in his own mind general laws which are fatal to all pamphlets as pamphlets, without consideration of their particular merits. "There are," he says, "examples of thought having been influenced by books. But such books have been scientific, not rhetorical." If it were not rude to contradict, we should have said that the influence exercised in politics by scientific treatises had been as nothing in the aggregate compared with that exercised by pamphlets, speeches, and, in later times, by the newspaper press. What does Mr. Pattison say to Burke's "Reflections on the French Revolution," to Paine's "Common Sense," to the tracts written by Halifax and Defoe at the time of the Revolution? Neither thought nor action is his epigrammatic condemnation of Milton's political writings, but an appeal which stirs men to action is surely both. Again of "Eikonoklastes" we are told that "it is like _all answers_, worthless as a book." Bentley's "Phalaris" is an answer, Demosthenes' "De Corona" is an answer. As a rule no doubt the form is a bad one, but an answer may embody principles and knowledge as well as show literary skill, reasoning power, and courteous self-control, which after all are not worthless though they are worth far less than some other things. These discussions so odious and contemptible in Mr. Pattison's eyes, what are they but the processes of thought through which a nation or humanity works its way to political truth? Even books scientific in form such as Hobbes's "Leviathan" or Harrington's "Oceana" are but registered results of a long discussion. "Eikon Basilike" was doing infinite mischief to the cause of the Commonwealth, and how could it have been met except by a critical reply? "Eikonoklastes" was thought, though it was not exact science, and so far as it told it was action, though it was not a pike or a musket.

This portion of Mr. Pattison's work is thickly sown with aphorisms to which no one who does not share his special mood can without qualification assent. No good man can with impunity addict himself to party, and the best men will suffer most because their conviction of the goodness of their cause is deeper. But when one with the sensibility of a poet throws himself into the excitements of a struggle he is certain to lose his balance. The endowment of feeling and imagination which qualifies him to be the ideal interpreter of life unfits him for participation in that real life through the manoeuvres and compromises of which reason is the only guide and where imagination is as much misplaced as it would be in a game of chess. In this there is an element of truth but there is also something to which we are inclined to demur. If by party is meant mere faction, plainly no man can addict himself to it with impunity. But when the English nation was struggling in the grasp of a court and a prelacy which sought to reduce it to the level of Spain, no Englishman as it seems to us could with impunity perch himself aloft in a palace of art while peasants were shedding their blood to make him free. Especially do we question the soundness of the sentiment expressed in the last clause. Why is real life to be abandoned by every man of feeling and imagination and given over to the men of manoeuvre and compromise? Is not this the sentiment of the monkish ascetic coming back to us in another form and enjoining us to make ourselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Art's sake? Cromwell, Vane, Hampden, and Pym were not men of manoeuvre and compromise, they had plenty of feeling and imagination, though in them these qualities gave birth not to poetry, but to high political or religious aspirations and grand social ideals. The theory of Milton's biographer is that an active interest in public affairs is fatal to excellence in literature or in art; and this theory seems to be confuted as signally as possible by the facts of Milton's life.

It is curious to see how completely at variance Milton's own sentiment is with that of his biographer and how little he foresaw what Mr. Pattison would say about him. In the _Defensio Secunda_ he defends himself against the charge not of over activity but of inaction. "I can easily repel," he says, "any imputation of want of courage or of want of zeal. For though I did not share the toils or perils of the war I was engaged in a service not less hazardous to myself and more beneficial to my fellow citizens; nor in the adverse turns of our affairs, did I ever betray any symptoms of pusillanimity and dejection; or show myself more afraid than became me of malice or of death: For since from my youth I was devoted to the pursuits of literature, and my mind has always been stronger than my body, I did not court the labours of a camp, in which any common person would have been of more service than myself, but resorted to that employment in which my exertions were likely to be of most avail. Thus, with the better part of my frame I contributed as much as possible to the good of my country, and to the success of the glorious cause in which we were engaged; and I thought that if God willed the success of such glorious achievements, it was equally agreeable to his will that there should be others by whom those achievements should be recorded with dignity and elegance; and that the truth, which had been defended by arms, should also be defended by reason; which is the best and only legitimate means of defending it. Hence, while I applaud those who were victorious in the field, I will not complain of the province which was assigned me; but rather congratulate myself upon it, and thank the author of all good for having placed me in a station, which may be an object of envy to others rather than of regret to myself." Here is a culprit who entirely mistakes the nature of his offence and instead of apologizing for what he has done apologizes for not having done more. Nor so far as we are aware is there in Milton's writings the slightest trace of sorrow for the misemployment of his best years or consciousness of the ruin which it had wrought in his genius as a poet.

In the same spirit Mr. Pattison continually represents the end of Milton's public life as "the irretrievable discomfiture of all his hopes, aims, and aspirations," his labour as "being swept away without a trace of it being left," and the latter part of his life as utter "wretchedness." The failure of selfish schemes often makes men wretched. The failure of unselfish aspirations may make a man sad, but can never make him wretched, and Milton was not wretched when he was writing "Paradise Lost." He would not have been wretched even if the discomfiture of his hopes for the Commonwealth had been as final and as irretrievable as his biographer supposes. But Milton knew that though disastrous it was not final or irretrievable. He had implicit confidence in the indestructibility of moral force, and he "bated no jot of heart or hope." He could see the limits of the reaction and he knew that, though great and calamitous in proportion to the errors of the Republican party, it had not changed in a day the character and fundamental tendencies of the nation. He would note that the Star Chamber, the Court of High Commission, the Council of the North, the legislative functions once usurped by the Privy Council, were not restored, and that no attempt was made to govern without a parliament. He found himself the defender of regicide, not free from peril, indeed, yet protected by public opinion, while, in general, narrow bounds were set to the bloodthirsty vengeance of the Cavaliers. He lived to witness the actual turn of the tide. Six years before his death the Triple Alliance was formed, and in the year of his death the Cabal Ministry fell. At worst, his case would have been that of a soldier killed in an unfortunate crisis of a battle which in the end was won, but he fell, if not with the shout of victory in his ears, with the inspiring signs of a general advance around him. If we take remoter ages into our view, the triumph of Milton is still more manifest. The cause to which he gave his life and his genius is forever exalted and dignified by his name. The notion that the Cavaliers were the men of culture and that the Puritans were the uncultivated has been a hundred times confuted, though it reappears in the discourses of Mr. Matthew Arnold, and, what is much more astonishing, in this work of Mr. Pattison. But in a party of action great defect of culture would be amply redeemed by the possession of a Milton.

[The end]
Goldwin Smith's Essay: Pattison's Milton

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