His indomitable personality and irrepressible originality have left their stamp

on all his work, and have moulded his treatment, his handling, his diction, his
style. We, who have been inured for centuries to Miltonic mouthings and manneris
ms, [173] are too likely to underestimate the degree of his originality. Colerid
ge was probably wrong when he said that "Shakespeare's poetry is characterless;
that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakespeare." But he was unquestiona
bly right when he added that "John Milton himself is in every line of Paradise L
ost." The more they are studied, the more do Milton's life and his art seem to c
ohere, and to express the pride and the power of his character.Consider first hi
s choice of subject. Ever since the Renaissance had swept modern poetry back to
the pagan world, some voices of protest had been raised, some swimmers, rather b
old than strong, had attempted to stem the tide. Among the earliest of these was
Thomas Sternhold, Groom of the Chamber to King Henry the Eighth. Inspired perha
ps by the example of a better poet, Clement Marot, Sternhold thrust some of the
Psalms of David into a carterly metre, "thinking thereby," says Anthony à Wood, in
his delightfully colloquial fashion, "that the courtiers would sing them instea
d of their sonnets, but did not, only some few excepted." In the reign of Elizab
eth, when the classical mythology reigned and revelled in pageant and masque, in
court and town, one Thomas Brice, a painful preacher, cried out against the pag
an fancies that had caught the English imagination captive:--
[174]
We are not Ethnickes, we forsoth at least professe not so;
Why range we then to Ethnickes' trade? Come back, where will ye go?
Tel me, is Christe or Cupide lord? Doth God or Venus reign?
But he cried to deaf ears, and the Elizabethan age produced no body of sacred po
etry worth a record. The beautiful metrical version of the Psalms, made by Sir P
hilip Sidney and his sister, remained in manuscript for centuries. Drayton's Har
monie of the Church was suppressed. Robert Southwell, whose lyrics on sacred sub
jects give him a unique place among the poets of his age, joins in the oft-repea
ted complaint:--
Stil finest wits are 'stilling Venus' rose,
In Paynim toyes the sweetest vaines are spent;
To Christian workes few have their talents lent.
It was left for George Herbert and his contemporaries to take up the attempt onc
e more--this time with better success--"to reprove the vanity of those many love
poems that are daily writ and consecrated to Venus, and to bewail that so few a
re writ that look towards God and heaven."
Cannot thy dove
Outstrip their Cupid easily in flight?
Or, since thy ways are deep, and still the same,
Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name?
But although Herbert and his successors, in their [175] devotional lyrics, gave
a whole new province to English poetry, they left the idolatrous government of t
he older provinces undisturbed. Dramatic and narrative poetry went on in the old
way, and drew their inspiration from the old founts. Year by year, as our nativ
e poetic wealth increased, it became more and more difficult to break with the p
ast, and to lead poetry back to Zion. Nature and precedent seemed allied against
the innovation. The worst of religious poetry, as Johnson more than once pointe
d out, is its poverty of subject, and its enforced chastity of treatment. You ca
nnot make a picture out of light alone; there must be something to break it on.
Then, too, there was Shakespeare to be reckoned with: he had written no hymns no
r spiritual songs; among the works of God, he had found man to be deserving of h
is unremitting attention; yet, while a certain monotony of manner afflicted the
singers of good and godly ballads, he had seemed never at a loss for a subject,
never at the end of the copious inspiration that he drew from his unsanctified t
hemes
His courage and originality are witnessed also by the metre that he chose for hi
s poem. To us blank verse seems the natural metre for a long serious poem. Befor
e Milton's day, except in the drama, it had only once been so employed--in an El
izabethan poem of no mark or likelihood, called A Tale of Two Swannes. While Mil
ton was writing Paradise Lost the critics of his time were discussing whether th
e rhymed couplet or some form of stanza was fitter for narrative poetry, and whe
ther the couplet or blank verse better suited the needs of drama. As no one, bef
ore Milton, had maintained in argument that blank verse was the best English mea
sure for narrative poetry dealing with lofty themes, so no critic had ever been
at the pains to refute that opinion. In the year of the publication of Paradise
Lost, Dryden delivered his judgment, that the rhymed couplet [180] was best suit
ed for tragic passages in the drama, and that blank verse should be employed chi
efly for the lighter and more colloquial purposes of comedy. Some echo of the co
urtly dispute then in progress between Dryden and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert
Howard, probably reached Milton's ear through his bookseller, Samuel Simmons; f
or it was at the request of his bookseller that he added the three Miltonic sent
ences on "The Verse," by way of preface. With his accustomed confidence and dire
ctness of attack he begs the question in his first words:--"The measure is Engli
sh heroic verse without rime"; and in his closing words he takes credit to himse
lf for his "example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to h
eroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming."
In these two cardinal points, then--the matter and the form of his poem--Milton
was original. For the one there was no true precedent in English; for the other
there was no precedent that might not rather have been called a warning. His mat
ter was to be arranged and his verse handled by his own ingenuity and at his own
peril. He left a highroad behind him, along which many a tuneful pauper has sin
ce limped; but before him he found nothing but the jungle and false fires. In co
nsidering his style, therefore, it is well to treat the problem as it presented
itself to him, and to follow [181] his achievement as he won step by step out of
the void.
There were two great influences in English poetry, other than the drama, when Mi
lton began to write: the influence of Spenser and the influence of Donne. Only t
he very slightest traces of either can be discerned in Milton's early verse. The
re are some Spenserian cadences in the poem On the Death of a Fair Infant, writt
en in his seventeenth year:--
Or wert thou of the golden-wingèd host
Who, having clad thyself in human weed,
To earth from thy prefixed seat didst post,
And after short abode fly back with speed,
As if to show what creatures Heaven doth breed;
Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire
To scorn the sordid world, and unto Heaven aspire?
The later verses on The Passion, written in the same metre, are perhaps the last
in which Milton echoes Spenser, however faintly. Meanwhile, in the hymn On the
Morning of Christ's Nativity, he had struck a note that was his own, and it is n
ot surprising that he left the poem on the Passion unfinished, "nothing satisfie
d with what was begun."
As for the great Dean of St. Paul's, there is no evidence that Milton was touche
d by him, or, for that matter, that he had read any of his poems. In the verses
written At a Vacation Exercise, he expressly sets aside
[182]
Those new-fangled toys and trimming slight
Which takes our late fantastics with delight;
and he very early came to dislike the fashionable conceits that ran riot in cont
emporary English verse. A certain number of conceits, few and poor enough, is to
 be found scattered here and there in his early poems. Bleak Winter, for instanc
e, is represented in three cumbrous stanzas, as the slayer of the Fair Infant:--
For he, being amorous on that lovely dye
That did thy cheek envermeil, thought to kiss,
But killed, alas! and then bewailed his fatal bliss.
In the lines on Shakespeare the monument promised to the dead poet is a marvel o
f architecture and sculpture, made up of all his readers, frozen to statues by t
he wonder and astonishment that they feel when they read the plays. But perhaps
the nearest approach to a conceit of the metaphysical kind is to be found in tha
t passage of Comus, where the Lady accuses Night of having stolen her brothers:-
-
O thievish Night,
Why shouldst thou, but for some felonious end,
In thy dark lantern thus close up the stars
Which Nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps
With everlasting oil to give due light
To the misled and lonely traveller?
When Milton does fall into a vein of conceit, it is generally both trivial and o
bvious, with none of [183] the saving quality of Donne's remoter extravagances.
In Donne they are hardly extravagances; the vast overshadowing canopy of his ima
gination seems to bring the most wildly dissimilar things together with ease. To
his unfettered and questioning thought the real seems unreal, the unreal real;
he moves in a world of shadows, cast by the lurid light of his own emotions; the
y take grotesque shapes and beckon to him, or terrify him. All realities are imm
aterial and insubstantial; they shift their expressions, and lurk in many forms,
leaping forth from the most unlikely disguises, and vanishing as suddenly as th
ey came.
The dramatists were a much more potent influence than either Spenser or the meta
physical school. He learned his blank verse from the dramatists. Perhaps he took
the subject of Comus from the Old Wives' Tale of George Peele; and when he set
himself to write a masque he was doubtless well acquainted with the works of the
chief master in that kind, Ben Jonson. William Godwin, in his Lives of Edward a
nd John Phillips, expresses the opinion that Milton studied the works of Jonson
more assiduously than those of any other Elizabethan. The specific evidence that
he cites--a few passages of possible reminiscence--is not convincing. He has no
more striking coincidence to show than the resemblance between a phrase in Il P
enseroso:--
Come, but keep thy wonted state
and two lines of Jonson's Hymn to Cynthia:--
[186]
Seated in thy silver chair
State in wonted manner keep.
If the original genius of a poet is to be sworn away at this rate, there will so
on come a time when no man is secure. Both words are common in Elizabethan Engli
sh; if their occurrence in a single line is to warrant a charge of plagiarism, t
he next step will be to make them Jonson's property, and to forbid the use of ei
ther to all but the tribe of Ben. Milton doubtless studied Jonson's works; and,
if specific resemblances are both weighed and counted, a good case can be made o
ut for the influence of Jonson's prose on the author of the Areopagitica. But th
e fact is that criticism finds itself here in a region where this minute matchin
g of phrase with phrase is useless or misleading. Milton's early poems grew on E
lizabethan soil, and drank Elizabethan air. It matters little that there are few
verbal coincidences; the influence is omnipresent, easy to feel, impossible to
describe in detail. From whom but the Elizabethans could he have learned to writ
e thus?--
Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race:
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace;
And glut thyself with what thy womb devours.
The Elizabethan style is not to be mistaken, the high-figured phrases, loosely w
elded together, [187] lulling the imagination into acquiescence by the flow of t
he melody. Lines like these might well occur in Richard II. The same Shakespeari
an note is clearly audible in such a passage as this, where Comus describes the
two brothers:--
Their port was more than human, as they stood.
I took it for a faery vision
Of some gay creatures of the element,
That in the colours of the rainbow live,
And play i' the plighted clouds. I was awe-strook,
And, as I passed, I worshipped. If those you seek,
It were a journey like the path to Heaven
To help you find them.
This has all the technical marks of late Elizabethan dramatic blank verse: "visi
on" as a trisyllable; the redundant syllable in the middle of the line; the coll
oquial abbreviation of "in the"; not to mention the fanciful vein of the whole p
assage, which might lead any one unacquainted with Milton to look for this quota
tion among the dramas of the prime. The great hyperbolical strain of the Elizabe
thans, which so often broke into rant, is caught and nobly echoed in praise of v
irtue:--
If this fail,
The pillared firmament is rottenness
And earth's base built on stubble.
Or, to take a last example of Milton's earlier style, this description of the La
dy's singing is in marked contrast to the later matured manner:--
[188]
At last a soft and solemn-breathing sound
Rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,
And stole upon the air, that even Silence
Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might
Deny her nature, and be never more
Still to be so displaced. I was all ear,
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of Death.
This has the happy audacity of Shakespeare, and his delight in playing with logi
c; it is almost witty. The Miltonic audacity of the later poems is far less diff
use and playful. When the nightingale sings, in Paradise Lost, "Silence was plea
sed." When Adam begs the Angel to tell the story of the Creation, he adds, "Slee
p, listening to thee, will watch." Either of these paradoxes would have been tor
mented and elaborated into a puzzle by a true Elizabethan.
Milton, then, began as a pupil of the dramatists. But his tendencies and ambitio
ns were not dramatic, so he escaped the diseases that afflicted the drama in its
decadence. When he began to write blank verse, the blank verse of the dramatist
s, his contemporaries, was fast degenerating into more or less rhythmical prose.
Suckling and Davenant and their fellows not only used the utmost license of red
undant syllables at the end of the line, but hustled and slurred the syllables i
n the middle till the line was a mere gabble, and interspersed broken lines so p
lentifully that it became impossible [189] even for the most attentive ear to fo
llow the metre. A brief description of a Puritan waiting-woman may be taken as a
n illustration from Jasper Mayne's comedy of The City Match (1639). As a sample
of blank verse it is perhaps somewhat smoother and more regular than the average
 workmanship of
At the time when blank verse was yielding to decay, Milton took it up, and used
it neither for conversational nor for rhetorical purposes. In the interests of p
ure poetry and melody he tightened its joints, stiffened its texture, and one by
one gave up almost all the licenses that the dramatists had used. From the firs
t he makes a sparing use of the double ending. The redundant syllable in the mid
dle of the line, which he sometimes allows himself in Comus, does not occur in P
aradise Lost. In the later poem he adopts strict practices with regard to elisio
n, which, with some trifling exceptions, he permits only in the case of contiguo
us open vowels, and of short unstressed vowels separated by a liquid consonant,
in such words, for instance, as "dissolute," or "amorous." By a variety of small
observances, which, when fully stated, make up a formidable code, he mended the
shambling gait of the loose dramatic blank verse, and made of it a worthy epic
metre.
Milton seldom allows his verse to play in eddies; he taxes every line to its ful
lest capacity, and wrings the last drop of value from each word. A signal charac
teristic of his diction has its origin in this hard dealing. He is often not sat
isfied with one meaning from a word, but will make it do double duty. Here the L
atin element in our language gave him his opportunity. Words borrowed from the L
atin always change their usage and value in English air. To the ordinary [209] i
ntelligence they convey one meaning; to a scholar's memory they suggest also ano
ther. It became the habit of Milton to make use of both values, to assess his wo
rds in both capacities. Any page of his work furnishes examples of his delicate
care for the original meaning of Latin words, such as intend--"intend at home ..
. what best may ease the present misery"; arrive--"ere he arrive the happy Isle"
; obnoxious--"obnoxious more to all the miseries of life"; punctual--"this opaco
us Earth, this punctual spot"; sagacious--"sagacious of his quarry from so far";
explode--"the applause they meant turned to exploding hiss"; retort--"with reto
rted scorn his back he turned"; infest--"find some occasion to infest our foes."
The Speaker of the House of Commons had to determine, some years ago, whether i
t is in order to allude to the Members as "infesting" the House. Had Milton been
called upon for such a decision he would doubtless have ruled that the word is
applicable only to Members whose deliberate intention is to maim or destroy the
constitution of Parliament.
But he was not content to revive the exact classical meaning in place of the vag
ue or weak English acceptation; he often kept both senses, and loaded the word w
ith two meanings at once. When Samson speaks of Dalila as
That specious monster, my accomplished snare--
[210]
something of this double sense resides in both epithets. In two words we are tol
d that Dalila was both beautiful and deceitful, that she was skilled in the blan
dishments of art, and successful in the work of her husband's undoing. With a li
ke double reference Samson calls the secret of his strength "my capital secret."
Where light, again, is called the "prime work of God," or where we are told tha
t Hell saw "Heaven ruining from Heaven," the original and derivative senses of t
he words "prime" and "ruin" are united in the conception. These words, and many
others similarly employed, are of Latin origin; but Milton carried his practice
over into the Saxon part of our vocabulary. The word "uncouth" is used in a doub
le-barrelled sense in the Second Book of Paradise Lost--
Who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark, unbottomed, infinite Abyss,
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way?
And when Satan's eyes are called "baleful," the word, besides indicating the "hu
ge affliction and dismay" that he feels, gives a hint of the woes that are in st
ore for the victims on whom those eyes have not yet lit.
It was this habit of "verbal curiosity" and condensation which seduced Milton in
to punning. Some of his puns are very bad. There is a [211] modern idea that a p
un is a thing to laugh at. Milton's puns, like Shakespeare's, give no smallest c
ountenance to this theory. Sometimes he plays with what is merely a chance ident
ity of sound, as where Satan, entering Paradise--
At one slight bound high overleapt all bound.
But in most of these cases it seems likely that he believed in an etymological r
elation between the two words, and so fancied that he was drawing attention to a
n original unity of meaning. Some such hypothesis is needful to mitigate the atr
ocity of his worst pun, in Paradise Regained, where he describes
The ravens with their horny beaks
Food to Elijah bringing even and morn--
Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought.
Milton was no philologist, and we may be permitted in charity to suppose that he
derived "raven" and "ravenous" from the same root.
Some of his puns are to be justified for another reason--that they are made the
weapons of mockery. So when Satan rails against Abdiel he says--
Thou shalt behold
Whether by supplication we intend
Address, and to begirt the Almighty Throne
Beseeching or besieging.
The long punning-bout between Satan and Belial [212] in the Sixth Book exemplifi
es the more usual form of the Miltonic pun. When he introduces the newly-invente
d artillery, Satan makes a speech, "scoffing in ambiguous words"--
Ye, who appointed stand,
Do as you have in charge, and briefly touch
What we propound, and loud that all may hear.
And again, when it has taken effect, scattering the heavenly host in unseemly di
sorder, he says--
If our proposals once again were heard,
We should compel them to a quick result.
Belial, "in like gamesome mood," replies to the jests of his leader, until, by t
he providence of Heaven, his wit and his artillery are buried under a weight hea
vier than themselves. On this whole scene Landor remarks that "the first overt c
rime of the refractory angels was punning"; and adds, with true Miltonic concise
ness, "they fell rapidly after that."
Some minor flaws, which may be found in Milton by those who give a close examina
tion to his works, are to be attributed to the same cause--his love of condensed
statement. Mixture of metaphors in poetry is often caused merely by the speed o
f thought, which presents a subject in a new aspect without care taken to adjust
or alter the figure. In these cases the obscurity or violence of expression ari
ses not from defect, but [213] from excess of thought. Some few instances occur
in Milton, who, in Lycidas, writes thus--
But now my oat proceeds,
And listens to the Herald of the Sea.
The syntax of the thought is sufficiently lucid and orderly, but it is compresse
d into too few words. In the Fifth Book of Paradise Lost is described how--
The Eternal Eye, whose sight discerns
Abtrusest thoughts, from forth his holy mount,
And from within the golden lamps that burn
Nightly before him, saw without their light
Rebellion rising--saw in whom, how spread
Among the Sons of Morn, what multitudes
Were banded to oppose his high decree;
And, smiling, to his only Son thus said.
Here, it is true, "the Eternal Eye" smiles and speaks to his only Son. But Milto
n has really discarded the figure after the words "his high decree," which bring
in a new order of thoughts. He trusts the reader to follow his thought without
grammatical readjustment--to drop the symbol and remember only the thing symboli
sed. His trust was warranted, until Landor detected the solecism. The clearest c
ase of mixed metaphor ever charged against Milton occurs in the Eleventh Book, w
here the lazar-house is described--
Sight so deform what heart of rock could long
Dry-eyed behold?
[214]
Rogers pointed this out to Coleridge, who told Wordsworth that he could not slee
p all the next night for thinking of it. What months of insomnia must he not hav
e suffered from the perusal of Shakespeare's works!
The close-wrought style of Milton makes the reading of Paradise Lost a hard task
in this sense, that it is a severe intellectual exercise, without relaxation. T
he attention that it demands, word by word, and line by line, could not profitab
ly be given to most books; so that many readers, trained by a long course of nov
el-reading to nibble and browse through the pastures of literature, find that Mi
lton yields little or no delight under their treatment, and abandon him in despa
ir.
And yet, with however great reluctance, it must be admitted that the close study
and admiring imitation of Milton bring in their train some lesser evils. Meanin
g may be arranged too compactly in a sentence; for perfect and ready assimilatio
n some bulk and distention are necessary in language as in diet. Now the study o
f Milton, if it teaches anything, teaches to discard and abhor all superfluity.
He who models himself upon this master will never "go a-begging for some meaning
, and labour to be delivered of the great burden of nothing." But he may easily
fall into the opposite error of putting "riddles of [215] wit, by being too scar
ce of words." He will be so intent upon the final and perfect expression of his
thought, that his life may pass before he finds it, and even if, in the end, he
should say a thing well, he is little likely to say it in due season. "Brevity i
s attained in matter," says a master of English prose, "by avoiding idle complim
ents, prefaces, protestations, parentheses, superfluous circuit of figures and d
igressions: in the composition, by omitting conjunctions--not only ... but also,
both the one and the other, whereby it cometh to pass, and such like idle parti
cles." Either sort of brevity may be learned from Milton. But any one who has be
en compelled to make efforts of unprompted eloquence, and to choose his expressi
ons while he is on his feet, knows well how necessary is the function performed
by these same prefaces, protestations, parentheses, and idle particles. Suavely
uttered, they keep expectation alive in the audience, and give the orator time t
o think. Whether in speaking or in writing, no fluent and popular style can well
be without them. I should be inclined to say--If I may be permitted to use the
expression--Speaking for myself and for those who agree with me--It is no great
rashness to assert-- a hundred phrases like these are an indispensable part of a
n easy writer's, as of an easy speaker's, equipment. To forego all these swollen
and diluted forms of speech is to run the risk of [216] the opposite danger, co
ngestion of the thought and paralysis of the pen--the scholar's melancholy. To g
ive long days and nights to the study of Milton is to cultivate the critical fac
ulty to so high a pitch that it may possibly become tyrannical, and learn to dis
taste all free writing. Accustomed to control and punish wanton activity, it wil
l anticipate its judicial duties, and, not content with inflicting death, will d
evote its malign energy to preventing birth.
It is good, therefore, to remember that Milton himself took a holiday sometimes,
and gave a loose to his pen and to his thought. Some parts of his prose writing
s run in a full torrent of unchastened eloquence. An open playground for exubera
nt activity is of the first importance for a writer. Johnson found such a playgr
ound in talk. There he could take the curb off his prejudices, give the rein to
his whimsical fancy, and better his expression as he talked. But where men must
talk, as well as write, upon oath, paralysis is not easily avoided. In the littl
e mincing societies addicted to intellectual and moral culture the creative zest
is lost. The painful inhibition of a continual rigorous choice, if it is never
relaxed, cripples the activity of the mind. Those who can talk the best and most
compact sense have often found irresponsible paradox and nonsense a useful and
pleasant [217] recreation ground. It was Milton's misfortune, not the least of t
hose put upon him by the bad age in which he lived, that what Shakespeare found
in the tavern he had to seek in the Church. Denied the wild wit-combats of the M
ermaid, he disported himself in a pamphlet-war on bishops and divorce. But he fo
und health and exercise for his faculties there; and the moral (for all things h
ave a moral) is this: that when, in a mood of self-indulgence, we can write habi
tually with the gust, the licentious force, the flow, and the careless wealthy i
nsolence of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuu
s, we need not then repine or be ill-content if we find that we can rise only oc
casionally to the chastity, the severity, and the girded majesty of Paradise Los
t.