An Introduction to the Prose and Poetical Works of John Milton. Джон Мильтон
had a fulness of life, intellectual and spiritual, and an easy command of all his faculties, to which but few of the sons of men have ever attained; and he lived in an age the most favorable in human history for the exercise of dramatic genius, and an age, on the whole, more civilized than any that had ever preceded it.
No true poet could live in any age without imbibing and reflecting its spirit, and that to a much greater degree than other men. For the poetic nature is distinguished from ordinary natures by its greater impressibility and its keener, more penetrating insight, and to suppose that a poet can keep apart from the spirit of his age and the state of society around him is to lose sight of the very differentia of the poetic nature, and implicitly to admit its feebleness. In one respect he may be said to keep apart from his age, in the sense of rejecting, in having no affinities for, what in it is ephemeral, while appropriating what of vital and eternal is in it. His affinities, by virtue of his poetic nature, are for what is enduring in the transient. And every age must have the vital and eternal in it, as the vital and eternal are omnipresent at all times and in all places.
The great poet is great because he is intensely individual, and there can be no intense individuality, paradoxical as it may appear, that is not subject, in a more than ordinary degree, to impressions of time and place. An individual in the fullest sense of the word, one who legitimates, as it were, in the eyes of his country or his age, his decisive influence over its destiny, is generally characterized, not so much by his rejecting power, though he will always, and necessarily, have this in a high degree, as by his appropriating power. He brings to the special unity of his nature all that that nature, in its healthiest activity, can assimilate, and throws off only the to him non-assimilable dross of things. The more complete his life becomes, the more it is bound up with what surrounds it, and he is susceptible of impressions the more numerous and the more profound.
The greater impressibility (spiritual sensitiveness) and its resultant, the keener, more penetrating insight ('the vision and the faculty divine'), which preëminently distinguish poetic genius from ordinary natures, render great poets the truest historians of their times and the truest prophets. The poetic and dramatic literature of a people is a mirror in which is most clearly reflected their real and essential life. History gives rather their phenomenal life. It is the essential spirit only of an age, the permanent, the absolute, in it, as assimilated and 'married to immortal verse' by a great poet, that can retain a hold upon the interests and sympathies of future generations.
Milton was most emphatically a man of his age, and its clearest reflector, sustaining to it the most intimate and sympathetic and intensely active relationship; and, of all that was enduring in it, his works, both prose and poetical, are the best existing exponent. His intimate relationship with his age has been set forth in Dr. Masson's exhaustive and grandly monumental work, in six large octavo volumes, 'The Life of John Milton: narrated in connexion with the political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of his time.' No other poet in universal literature, unless Dante be an exception, ever sustained such a relationship to the great movements of his time and country that an exhaustive biography of him would need to be, to the same extent, 'narrated in connexion with the political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of his time.'
Milton might justly and proudly have said of himself, with reference to the fierce political and ecclesiastical conflicts of his time, 'quorum pars magna fui.' And who can doubt that by these conflicts, and even, also, by his loss of sight therein, he was tempered to write the 'Paradise Lost,' the 'Paradise Regained,' and the 'Samson Agonistes'? He might have written some other great work, if he had kept himself apart from these conflicts, as Pattison thinks he ought to have done, but he certainly could not have written the 'Paradise Lost.' Of the principles involved in the great contest for civil and religious liberty his prose works are the fullest exponent. In the 'Paradise Lost' can be seen the influence of his classical and Italian studies. Homer and Virgil and Dante are in it, but its essential, vitalizing, controlling spirit is that of a refined exalted Puritanism, freed from all that was in it of the contingent and the accidental; and thus that spirit will be preserved for ever in the pure amber of the poem.
It was not within the scope of this little book, as a primary introduction to the study of Milton, to include any extended presentation of the 'Paradise Lost.' But two grand features may be alluded to here. It is, in some respects, one of the most educating of English poems. The grand feature of the poem, that feature which distinguishes it from all other works of genius, both ancient and modern, is its essential, constitutional sublimity. So universally has this feature been recognized as peculiar to the poem, that the word Miltonic has become synonymous with the sublime. The loftiness of the diction, which is without all touch of bombast, every sympathetic reader must feel to be an emanation from the august personality of the poet. There is no perceptible strain anywhere, as there is no perceptible lapse of power, on the part of the poet. He keeps ever up to the height of his great argument. To come into the fullest possible sympathetic relationship with the poem's constitutional sublimity, to be impressed by its loftiness of diction, by the contriving spirit of its eloquence, are educating experiences of the highest order—experiences which imply an exercise, most vitalizing and uplifting, of the reader's higher organs of apprehension and discernment. The theology of the poem need not obstruct for any one these educating influences. They are quite independent of the theology, as are the educating influences of the 'Divina Commedia' independent of its mediæval Catholicism. The absolute man was in the ascendent in both Dante and Milton; and by virtue of that ascendency, they are, and ever will continue to be, great educating personalities, whatever false science and false opinions on various subjects are embodied in their works, and however much the world's faith in things which they most vitally believed may decline and entirely cease to be. Their personalities and their works are consubstantial. This fact—an immortal fact—was, perhaps, not taken sufficient account of by Mark Pattison when he wrote in his 'Life of Milton' that 'the demonology of the poem has already, with educated readers, passed from the region of fact into that of fiction. Not so universally, but with a large number of readers, the angelology can be no more than what the critics call machinery. And it requires a violent effort from any of our day to accommodate our conceptions to the anthropomorphic theology of "Paradise Lost." Were the sapping process to continue at the same rate for two more centuries, the possibility of epic illusion would be lost to the whole scheme and economy of the poem.' But there is a power in 'Paradise Lost' which is, and ever will be, independent of all manner of obsolete beliefs.
Both the 'Paradise Lost' and the 'Divina Commedia' belong, in a supereminent degree, to what Thomas De Quincey calls, in his 'Essay on Pope,' the literature of power, as distinguished from the literature of knowledge; and, as a consequence, the statement of Mark Pattison that 'there is an element of decay and death in poems which we vainly style immortal,' is not applicable to them. By the literature of power is meant that which is, in whatever form, an adequate embodiment of eternal verities—verities of the human soul and of the divine constitution of things, and their mutual adaptation, however much the former may be estranged from the latter. Such embodiment will maintain its individual existence.
'In that great social order, which collectively we call literature,' says De Quincey, 'there may be distinguished two separate offices that may blend and often do so, but capable severally of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion. There is, first, the literature of knowledge, and, secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move. … The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy. … Whenever we talk in ordinary language of seeking information or gaining knowledge, we understand the words as connected with something of absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests, that it is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds: it exists eternally by way of germ or latent principle in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed, but never to be planted. To be capable of transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth that ranges on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth, namely, power or deep sympathy with truth.'
By the truth which 'is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds,' De Quincey means absolute,