INTRODUCTION..

The full range of Milton's genius cannot, of course, appear in any volume that excludes Paradise Lost, but the poems here given show not inadequately the two strains of feeling that make up the quality we call Miltonic. These two strains,-not often found together, and rarely found in full measure, proceed from Milton's exquisite sense of beauty and from his sense of the sublime and morally lofty. The feeling for beauty is usually a thing of delicacy and refinement, but may be austere as well,-a passion for severe and perfect outline and form. In Milton, not merely the austerity of beauty is evident, but the softer grace is present, too; a rare union indeed in English verse. And these two recognitions of beauty, together with the sense of the sublime, form a rarer union still. Frequent enough is the spontaneous instinct for simple and sensuous beauty, unaccompanied by the stern sense of artistic form or by the craving for self-control that means ultimately a guiding mastery of life: this instinct Keats, for example, showed in his earlier work; in his later verse, Keats, too, attained impassioned expression of beauty, under perfect control of form, and now and then one finds

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in him a note of lofty vision that suggests the enduring quality of all of Milton's poetry.

To be more specific, Milton has the instinct for perfect speech as keenly as has a precisian: yet the right word to him is not merely the word which gives the exact meaning,* but the word whose connotation, through beauty of sound and dignity of association, is the richest. He has the carefulness that distinguished Coleridge, and also as great a love of melodious language as one may find in Marlowe or Swinburne or Edgar Poe. The intellectual Puritan in him, however, saves him from the temptation to become a voluptuary of fragrant language, and let beauty run riot'in his verse. Beauty is the joyous ornament of his poetry, never the sum and substance of his thought. But not merely the beautiful word, the well-rounded verse, are part of Milton's style; graceful images and vivid illustrations are part of it as well. It is a style possessing wealth of beauty, and yet, with all its richness, coming nearer a perfect balance than perhaps any man's since Sophocles. If the style is not quite perfect, it is because in the matter of imagery Milton at times nears the danger mark: more than once he is perilously near the mere conceit. This fault in taste (for that is what it really is) might be attributed to the fashion of the time; but this expla

* Milton shows occasionally in his verse itself a real philological instinct. Cf. Comus 325, 748–9; Sam. Agon. 1418,

Cf. Comus 251-2, for example.

nation would not excuse the poet's yielding to the tasteless fashion. Obviously it is safer to admit the fact that Milton was not perfect, and to regard the fault as one of his imperfections; recognizing, too, that usually Milton's images are as sound as they are vivid. In grace, in euphony, in certainty of ▸ touch, in clearness of conception, then, Milton reveals his love of beauty, a feeling far higher than a merely sensuous delight in loveliness can be.*

* One may hardly speak of Milton and sensuousness in the same sentence without sending the reader's thoughts to Milton's obiter dictum regarding poetry, as something 'simple, sensuous, and passionate.' This point it will be well to consider briefly. The words were not meant to be an absolute description of poetry; they indicate a contrast between poetry and logic or rhetoric. Compared with these, poetry is indeed simple (not subtile), sensuous (not abstract), and passionate (not unemotional). The words as generally taken, however,—provided they be not regarded as exhaustive,—are by no means unsatisfactory as a comment on the real nature of poetry itself. Simple, in the sense of clear; sensuous, because possessing a lively appeal to sense-experience; and passionate, in the sense of having the great movement of powerful feeling: these qualities belong to poetry. But applying the words, in their familiar sense, to Milton, we find him not as simple as is, for instance, Longfellow; not sensuous to the degree that Keats is; not passionate, after the fashion of Burns and Byron : and yet meriting all these adjectives. Obviously, when so much depends on the definition we attach to the words, the words themselves should not be carelessly used as if completely expressing Milton's theory of poetry. The brief paragraph from Milton's treatise on Education is as follows:

'And now, lastly, will be the time to read with them those organic arts, which enable men to discourse and write perspicu

The Puritan imperviousness to beauty (a fact so frequently commented upon) has no place in Milton's make-up. The Puritan in him obviously sustains him in his effort toward righteousness; but not less, I believe, the Puritan in him makes him hold fast to his sense of perfect form. Granted the feeling for beauty to begin with, Milton could hold to it steadfastly; not, indeed, because he was a Puritan, but because the qualities that made him a Puritan made him loyal to the ideal things of life, to poetry and music as well as to ideals of personal conduct. (Herein lies the secret of his belief that true poetry can be written only by one whose life is A mere moralist could not have thought of the idea under that image; but Milton thus finely and nobly indicates his sense of the kinship between right living and noble thinking,— a kinship which by no mere verbal process gives us our phrase, the art of living.' His puritanism, then, is not antagonistic to his sense of beauty, but is ultimately derivable from a common source, his aspiration for the ideal in life,-beauty no less than conduct.

a true poem. JA

ously, elegantly, and according to the fittest style, of lofty, mean, or lowly. Logic, therefore, so much as is useful, is to be referred to this due place with all her well-couched heads and topics, until it be time to open her contracted palm into a graceful and ornate rhetoric, taught out of the rule of Plato, Aristotle, Phalereus, Cicero, Hermagenes, Longinus. To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subțile and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.'

And this leads us directly to the other element of the Miltonic quality, the sense of loftiness. Here no qualifying words are needed: Milton apprehends high things; his thought moves on a high level. This alone does not make a poet great: as much may be said of Emerson, who is not a great poet. It is because Milton thinks of higher things imaginatively, is stirred to deep emotion over them, and expresses his lofty conceptions in noble language, that we count him great in poetry. To have a high ideal, this is a part of morality; to be profoundly moved by it, this is passion; but to have in addition the gift of bringing home to others the moving power of the concrete ideal, this is to create literature of a large and enduring kind. Milton never loses faith in his vision of sublimity, and never speaks of it inadequately; therefore his readers are impelled to share his faith, and to accept his vision with inspiring delight. For, and thus we return to our starting point, in his lofty flights Milton's sense of beauty does not desert him; in his vision of the beautiful his sense of moral grandeur never fails. But it is not in a hackneyed identifying of beauty and truth that I would state Milton's poetic virtue; rather in his far-reaching aspiration, in his prophetic vision, and in his knowledge of the value of beautiful images and harmonious speech, do I find the strains that unite in Milton.

Limitations are not difficult to find: a genial humor, a kindly view of the daily life of men and