THE MILTON TERCENTENARY

Otago Witness, Issue 2856, 9 December 1908, Page 66

THE MILTON TERCENTENARY

Milton ! Thou shouid'st be living at this hour :

1608—1908 : A CONTRAST.

England hath need of thee ; she ie a fen

Of stagnant water ; altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and

bower, Hay© forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men. Oh! raise us up, return to ue again, And give us manners, virtue, freedom,

PO,W<M\ Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart ; Thou had'st a voice whose sound was liko the sea; Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. So did'et thou travel on life\s common way In cheerful godliness, and yet thy heaTfc The lowliest duties on herself did lav.

Wordswobth (London, 18G2).

The discovery and publication nearly 100 years ago of Johr Mjlton's famous "Treatise on Christian Doctrine" had at least two notable results. It gave Lord Macaulay occasibn to pen the brilliant "Essay on Milton" which laid the foundation of a brilliant literary career, and it enabled the essayist to focuss public attention upon the almost forgotten genius of the author of "Paradise Lost." Air Trevelyan, in his " Life " of his uncle, describes with animation Macaulay's decisive first success, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1825. "The effect on the author's reputation was mstantaneuos. . . . Like Lord Byron, Macaulay awoke one morning and found himself famous. The beauties of the work were such as all men could recognise, and its veiy laults pleased."

Macaulay skilfully utilised the interest created by the discovery of the manuscript to make people think and talk about John Milton. In like manner, the fact that John Milton was born in London on December 9, 1608. and that advantage is being taken of this event to celebrate, where. er the English language is spoken, the tercentenary of the poet's birth, enables us "to repeat Macaulay's appeal in almost the very words of the essayist :—: — We wish to avail ourselves of the interest, transient as it may be, which the celebration of this tercentenary has

excited. The dexterous Capuchins choose to preach on the lives and miracles of a saint till they have awakened the devotional feelings of their auditors by exhibiting some relic of him — a thread of his garment, a lock of his hair, or a drop of his blood. On the same principle we intend to take advantage of the tercentenary celebrations in memory of a great and good 'man to say something of his moral and intellectual qualities. Nor, we are convinced, will the severest of our readers blame us if on an occasion like the present we turn for a short time from the topics of the day to commemorate in all Jove and reverence the genius and virtues of John Milton, the i)° ct > the statesman, the

philosopher, the glory of EnglisK literature, the champion and martyr of

English liberty. It was Matthew Arnold who objected that whoever comes to Macaulay " with the desire to get at the real truth about Milton, whether as a man or poet, will feel that the essay in nowise Kelps him. But a reader who only wants rhetoric, a reader who wants a panegyric on Milton, a panegyric on Jthe Puritans, will find what he -wants. A reader who wants criticism will be disappointed." Admitting the" justice of the objection, yet who can resist the appeal of Macaulay's concluding paragraph :—: — Nor do we envy the man who. can study either the life or the writings of the great poet and patriot without aspiring to emulate, not, indeed,^ the sublime works with which his / genius v has enriched ocv literature, but the zeal with which he laboured, for the public good, the fortitude with which he endured every private calamity, the lofty flisdain with which he looked down on temptations and dangers, the deadly hatred* which he bore to bigots and tyrants, and the faith which he so sternly kept with big- country and with - his fame. ■ ' •' *•

It was Matthew Arnold also who observed that a completely "| disinterested judgment about a man like Milton is easier to a foreign critic, than.' to an . Englishman, and this .apropos of John . Richard Green's highly .* controversial assertion that " Johji Milton is not only ' the highest but the completest type of - Puritanism." And Arnold proceeds to quote Mr Edmond Scherer — Only, however, to disagree with him — in support of the method of historical criticism as preferable to Macaulay's sheer laudation or Voltaire's sheer disparagement of Milton. . Such judgments, according to Mr Scherer, are not judgments at all, but merely the expression of personal sensations of like or dislike. In place of these " personal sensations" Mr Scherer prefers the method of historical criticism :—: —

This method, at once more conclusive and more equitable, which sets itself to understand things rather than to class them, to explain rather than to judge them ; which seeks to account for a work from the genius of its author, and for the turn which this genius has taken from the circumstance a'nidst which it was developed. . . , For thus out of two things, the analy- • sis of the writer's character and the , study of his age, there spontaneously • issues the right understanding of his • work. In place of an appreciation

thrown off by some chance comer, we have the work passing judgment, so to speak, upon itself, and assuming the rank .which belongs to it among the productions of the human mind. And although, as Matthew Arnold, with the real critic's Intuition,, at one© pointed out, this method of historical criticism is by no means infallible, be- ? cause probably biassed by the view of history taken, yet, all things considered, it is the most satisfactory and the most enlightening. And in the case of Milton it has been abundantly justified in "the late Professor Masson's monumental work upon the " Life of John Milton, Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time "—a work which, despite the cheap and tasteless witticisms of Lowell, is likely to remain for all £ime the authoritative storehouse for Milton students. But, as Mark Pattison has it, in his Monograph in the English Men of Letters series :—: —

In our own generation all that printed books or written documents have preserved about Milton has been laboriously brought together by Professor David Masson, in whose "Life of Milton" we have the most exhaustivebiography that ever was compiled of any Englishman. It is a noble and final monument erected to the poet's memory two centuries after his death. My excuse for attempting to write of Milton after Mr Masson is that his life is in six volumes octavo, with a total of some four to five thousand pages. The present outline is written fora different class of readers — namely, those who cannot afford to know more of Milton than can be told in som' 200 pages.