BOOKS.
MR. MARK PATTISON'S MILTON.* To write a satisfactory and, at the same time, a brief biography of John Milton, is a difficult task, and we question whether hitherto it has been successfully accomplished. Mr. Pattison's achievement is deserving of high praise. He has put new life into old facts, he has taken an impartial estimate of a groat man whose name is too often used for purposes of party, he has displayed the enthusiasm without which such a biography could not worthily be written, and the calmness of judgment which prevents admiration from degenerating into hero- worship. The writer knows the times and the man, and of both h., has written with singular force and discrimination. At the outset, Mr. Pattison pays due homage to Professor Masson, "in whose Life of Milton we have the most exhaustive biography that ever was compiled of any Englishman." That elaborate and conscientious work fills, as some of our readers may be painfully aware, from four to five thousand pages, and when we attain the longevity promised us by Dr. Richardson, every page of it will possibly be read with interest. At present, the curiosity of the general public, if not of students, will be satisfied with a less extensive memorial, and this Mr. Pattison has supplied. The book deserves to be placed by the side of Dean Church's Spenser, and we could not give it higher praise. The difficulty of saying anything new on so well-worn a subject must be obvious, and the author, we need hardly say, has no
• Enplish lien of Leiters. EdIted by John Morley.—MMon. 13y Mark rattlson, 33,1). London Macmillan aud Co. 187O.
new facts to tell. But his arrangement of the facts is lucid, and his view of Milton's, character and works thoughtful and suggestive. Few, if any readers, indeed, will put down this. little volume without gaining a more vivid impression of the great Puritan, and though written for those who run while they read, it may be hoped it will make this " mighty-mouth'd: inventor of hat-monies" more familiar to his countrymen.
Milton's life, as Mr. Pattison points out, divides itself into, three periods. The first and most joyous, comprises the years of youthful acquisition and poetry, of foreign travel and grow- ing confidence in his genius ; the second, which dates from 1640 to 1660, embraces the long period of ecclesiastical and' political contention, and the sorrows of his domestic life ; the third, and noblest of the three, comprehends the fourteen years during which, in blindness, obscurity, and comparative poverty, he fulfilled, and more than fulfilled, the promise made long be- fore, and gained imperishable renown. It is noteworthy, to begin at the earliest stage, how implicitly Milton's father. trusted the genius of his sou. He seems to have left the young man free to carry out his vast plan of study, without requiring him to direct it into a definite channel. Wisdom, and not wealth, was the goal set before the student; and both father and son could afford to wait for the reward. , We do not know that Milton inherited any intellectual gift from his mother, but from his father, the scrivener, he gained the love of music, and the knowledge of that art must have soothed many a weary hour of his Ztoubled life. The elder Milton "was not only an amateur in music, but a composer, whose tunes, songs, and airs found their way into the best collections of music."' Music was the poet's recreation ; poetry was the fixed and even solemn business of his life. He entered on it not without devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who " sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases." "No lawyer, physician, statesman," writes Mr. Pattison, "ever laboured to fit himself for his profession harder than Milton strove to qualify himself for his vocation of poet. Verse-making is to the wits a game of ingenuity ; to Milton it is a prophetic office, towards which the will of Heaven leads him ;" and quoting the well-known passage in which Milton says that a poet ought himself to be a true poem, the writer adds :—" Of the spontaneity, the abandon, whic% are supposed to be characteristic of the poetical nature, there is. nothing here ; all is moral purpose, precision, self-dedication- So he acquires all knowledge, not for knowledge' sake, from the instinct of learning, the necessity of completeness, but because he is to be a poet."
Milton assuredly was never led astray by sudden impulse or passion. In this respect, he is the antithesis of Burns.. He had the Puritan virtues,—fixedness of purpose, simplicity and purity of life, the power of sacrificing the present for the future. And he had, too, some of the vices so often conspicuous in the precisian,—rigidity, pride, incapacity for sympathy, the disdain for men from whom he differs, and the selfishness which exacts everything, and gives little in return. Professor Masson, who has laboured so zealously for the honour of Milton, has done him an ill turn by the apparent discovery that the poet "was occupying himself with the composition of a vehement and impassioned argument in favour of divorce for incompatia bility of temper during the honeymoon." On one supposition alluded to by Mr. Pattison, there might be some excuse for this', but Milton's treatment of his daughters admits, we think, of none. The eldest was never taught even to write, the three had scarcely any instruction, and yet their father "was at the paine to train them to read aloud in five or six languages, of none of which they understood one word." Is it to be wondered at that they rebelled, or that Mary, who was probably the most spirited, " first resisted, then neglected, and finally came to hate her father P" We are inclined to think that Mr. Pattisou treats Milton's. controversial writings too lightly. As far as argument goes,. they have long lost all weight, and their gigantic scurrility is a blot on the poet's fame. Truth was, no doubt, forgotten on both sides in the party warfare of the period, decency was for- gotten, and the greatest man of the age descended to the tricks. and iusolences of the smallest. Mr. Pattison characterises one of Milton's books as "rude, railing, and insolent swagger ;" of another, the Defence of the People of England, he writes, "He exhausts the Latin vocabulary of abuse, to pile up every epithet of contumely and execration on the head of his adversary, it but amounts to calling Salmasius fool and knave through a
couple of hundred pages, till the exaggeration of the style defeats the orator's purpose." Elsewhere, and more generally he observes :—
"On the coarse of affairs Milton's voice had no influence as he had no part in their transaction. Milton was the last man of whom a practical politician would have sought advice. Ho knew nothing of the temper of the nation, and treated all that opposed his own view with supreme disdain. On the other hand, idealist though he was, he does not move in the sphere of speculative politics, or count among those philosophic names, a few in each century, who have influenced not action, but thought."
Few controversies possess any vitality beyond the hour that called them forth, but it is difficult to believe that the immense force and power of Milton did not exercise, in his own day, the influence he desired. The extreme one-sidedness of his writings, their exaggeration, their prejudice, would have been in their favour at the time, however much such faults may detract from their argumentative value now. There are passages in the prose writings which are invaluable from the standing-point of the biographer, and there are passages so noble that they re- mind us of the utterances of the Hebrew prophets ; but the general impression left by these works on the mind of the modern reader is one of pain and regret. We scarcely know,
indeed, any greater contrast in literature than between the " Billingsgate " of the Eikonokla.stes, and the severe dignity and loftiness of tone which mark the Paradise Lost.
Mr. Pattison, by the way, while depreciating the political value of Milton's labours as a controversialist, does not omit to note the one redeeming characteristic that they are all written on the side of liberty, or fail to do justice to "the wealth of magnificent words which he flings with both hands carelessly upon the page :"—
" Putting Bacon aside," he writes, "the condensed force and poignant brevity of whose aphoristic wisdom has no parallel in English, there is no other prosaist who possesses anything like Milton's command over the resources of our language. Milton cannot match the musical harmony and exactly balanced periods of his predecessor Hooker. He is without the power of varied illus- tration and accumulation of ornamental circumstance possessed by his contemporary Jeremy Taylor, But neither of these great writers impresses the reader with a sense of unlimited power, such as we feel to reside in Milton His words are the words of one who made a study of the language, as a poet studies language, searching its capacities for the expression of surging emotion. Jeremy Taylor's prose is poetical prose, Milton's prose is not poetical prose, but a different thing, the prose of a poet ; not, like Taylor's, loaded with imagery on the outside, but coloured by imagination from within. Milton is the first English writer who, possessing in the ancient models a standard of the effect which could be produced by choice of words, set himself to the conscious study of our native tongue with a firm faith in its as yet undeveloped powers DA an tastrument of thought."
Mr. Pattiecee monograph contains a number of remarks which would suggest topics for discussion, were a reviewer's space unlimited. Ho observes that there was no humanity in Milton's literature, and hence it was not a bond of sympathy between him and other men. He had no intimate relations with any of the men of learning, wits, or poets of the day. This is assuredly not surprising. The wits of the Restoration would naturally shun the austere anti devout poet, the savants adhered mostly to loyalty and the Church, and the spirit of party, no doubt kept asunder men who, like Usher and Jeremy Taylor, had, amidst wide differences, much also in common with Milton :—
"Not with John Halos, Cudworth, Whichoote, Nicholas Bernard' Merle Casaubon, nor with any of the men of letters who were Church- men, do we find Milton in correspondence. The interest of religion -was more powerful than the interest of knowledge, and the author of Eikonoklastes must have been held in special abhorrence by the loyal clergy."
Mr. Pattison observes that Milton's piety oppresses his writings, as well as his life. To our thinking, it gives to both unity and elevation. It enabled him "to bear up and steer right onward," it gave him, in his old age, blindness, and com- parative loneliness, "the sweet peace that goodness bosoms over ;" it saved him from the sea of doubts which has wrecked many a strong man. Other points occur in the biography which call, perhaps, for question ; but whether the reader agree with the writer or differ from him, he will acknowledge that this small volume is worthy of its subject, and what more can Mr. Pattison desire ?
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