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Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




The views of all of us, including Professor Masson, on such a question
are sure to be more or less idiosyncratic, and those of the present
biographer have not escaped the general liability. They seem, at least,
aptly to represent a mood prevalent just now among eminent men of the
literary class in England, particularly at the universities. These men
have been tossed on the waves of Ritualism, tossed on the waves of the
reaction from Ritualism; some of them have been personally battered in
both controversies; they have attained no certainty, but rather arrived
at the conclusion that no certainty is attainable; they are weary and
disgusted; such of them as have been enthusiasts in politics have been
stripped of their illusions in that line also, and have fallen back on
the conviction that everything must be left to evolve itself, and that
there is nothing to be done. They have withdrawn into the sanctuary of
critical learning and serene art, abjuring all theology and politics,
and, above all, abjuring controversy of all kinds as utterly vulgar and
degrading, though, as might be expected, they are sometimes
controversial and even rather tart in an indirect way, and without being
conscious of it themselves. Mr. Pattison's air when he comes into
contact with the politics or theology of Milton's days is like that of a
very seasick passenger at the sight of a pork chop. Nor does he fail to
reflect the Necessarianism of the circle. "That in selecting a
scriptural subject," he says, "Milton was not, in fact, exercising any
choice, but was determined by his circumstances, is only what must be
said of all choosing." Criticism fastidiously erudite, a study of art
religiously and almost mystically profound, are fruits of this
intellectual seclusion of chosen spirits from the coarse and ruffling
world for which that world has reason to be grateful. It is not likely
Milton would have chosen a writer of this school as his biographer, but
few men would choose their own biographers well.

Milton has at all events found in Mr. Pattison a biographer whose
narrative is throughout extremely pleasant, interesting and piquant, the
piquancy being enhanced for those who have the key to certain sly hits,
such as that at "the peculiar form of credulity which makes perverts (to
Roman Catholicism) think that everyone is about to follow their
example," which carries us back to the time when the head of
Tractarianism having gone over to Rome, was waiting anxiously, but in
vain, for the tail to join it. The facts had already been collected by
the diligence of Professor Masson, but Mr. Pattison uses them in a style
which places beyond a doubt his own familiarity with the subject.
Through the moral judgments there runs, as we think, and as we should
have expected, a somewhat lofty conception of the privileges of
intellect and of the value of literary objects compared with others, but
with this qualification the reflections will probably be deemed sensible
and sound. The unfortunate relations between Milton and his first wife
are treated as we think all readers will say, at once with delicacy and
justice. The literary criticisms are of a high order and such as only
comprehensive learning combined with trained taste could produce,
whether you entirely enter into all of them or not (and criticism has
not yet been reduced to a certain rule) you cannot fail to gain from
them increase of insight and enjoyment. They are often expressed in
language of great beauty:

"The rapid purification of Milton's taste will be best perceived by
comparing 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' of uncertain date but written
after 1632 with the 'Ode on the Nativity,' written 1629. The Ode,
notwithstanding its foretaste of Milton's grandeur, abounds in frigid
conceits, from which the two later pieces are free. The Ode is frosty,
as written in winter within the four walls of a college-chamber. The two
idyls breathe the free air of spring and summer and of the fields around
Horton. They are thoroughly naturalistic; the choicest expression our
language has yet found of the first charm of country life, not as that
life is lived by the peasant, but as it is felt by a young and lettered
student, issuing at early dawn or at sunset into the fields from his
chamber and his books. All rural sights and sounds and smells are here
blended in that ineffable combination which once or twice perhaps in our
lives has saluted our young senses, before their perceptions were
blunted by alcohol, by lust or ambition, or diluted by the social
distractions of great cities."

This will not be found to be a _purpureus pannus_. Nor does it much
detract from the grace of the work that of the "asyntactic disorder" of
which Mr. Pattison accuses Milton's prose, some examples may be found in
his own. Grammatical irregularities in a really good writer, as Mr.
Pattison undoubtedly is, often prove merely that his mind is more intent
on the matter than on the form.

"Paradise Lost" is the subject of a learned, luminous, and to us very
instructive dissertation. It is truly said that of the adverse criticism
which we meet with on the poem "much resolves itself into a refusal on
the part of the critic to make that initial abandonment to the
conditions which the poet demands: a determination to insist that his
heaven, peopled with deities, dominations, principalities, and powers,
shall have the same material laws which govern our planetary system."
There is one criticism, however, which cannot be so resolved, and on
which, as it appears to us the most serious of all, we should have liked
very much to hear Mr. Pattison. It is said that Lord Thurlow and another
lawyer were crossing Hounslow Heath in a post-chaise when a tremendous
thunder-storm came on; that the other lawyer said that it reminded him
of the battle in "Paradise Lost" between the devil and the angels, and
that Thurlow roared, with a blasphemous oath, "Yes, and I wish the devil
had won." Persons desirous of sustaining the religious reputation of the
legal profession add that his companion jumped out of the chaise in the
rain and ran away over the heath. For our part, we have never found
nearly so much difficulty in any of the incongruities connected with the
relations between spirit and matter, or in any confusion of the
Copernican with the Ptolemaic system, as in the constant wrenching of
our moral sympathies, which the poet demands for the Powers of Good, but
which his own delineation of Satan, as a hero waging a Promethean war
against Omnipotence, compels us to give to the Powers of Evil. Perhaps a
word or two might have been said about the relations of "Paradise Lost"
to other "epics." It manifestly belongs not to the same class of poems
as the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," or even the "AEneid." Dobson's Latin
translation of it is about the greatest feat ever performed in modern
Latin verse, and it shows by a crucial experiment how little Milton
really has in common with Virgil. "Paradise Lost" seems to us far more
akin to the Greek tragedy than to the Homeric poems or the "AEneid." In
the form of a Greek drama it was first conceived. Its verse is the
counterpart of the Greek iambic, not of the Greek or Latin hexameter.
Had the laborious Dobson turned it into Greek iambics instead of turning
it into Latin hexameters, we suspect the real affinity would have
appeared.

Looking upon the life of Milton the politician merely as a sad and
ignominious interlude in the life of Milton the poet, Mr. Pattison
cannot be expected to entertain the idea that the poem is in any sense
the work of the politician. Yet we cannot help thinking that the tension
and elevation which Milton's nature had undergone in the mighty
struggle, together with the heroic dedication of his faculties to the
most serious objects, must have had not a little to do both with the
final choice of his subject and with the tone of his poem. "The great
Puritan epic" could hardly have been written by any one but a militant
Puritan. Had Milton abjured the service of his cause, as his biographer
would have had him do, he might have given us an Arthurian romance or
some other poem of amusement. We even think it not impossible that he
might have never produced a great poem at all, but have let life slip
away in elaborate preparation without being able to fix upon a theme or
brace himself to the effort of composition. If Milton's participation in
a political battle fought to save at once the political and spiritual
life of England was degrading, Dante's participation in the faction
fight between the Guelphs and Ghibellines must have been still more so;
yet if Dante had been a mere man of leisure would he have written the
"Divina Commedia"? Who are these sublime artists in poetry that are
pinnacled so high above the "frays" and "brawls" of vulgar humanity? The
best of them, we suppose (writers for the stage being out of the
question) is Goethe. Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron were all distinctly
poets of the Revolution, or of the Counter-Revolution, and if you could
remove from them the political element, you would rob them of half their
force and interest. The great growths of poetry have coincided with the
great bursts of national life, and the great bursts of national life
have hitherto been generally periods of controversy and struggle.

Art itself, in its highest forms, has been the expression of faith. We
have now people who profess to cultivate art as art for its own sake;
but they have hardly produced anything which the world accepts as great,
though they have supplied some subjects for _Punch_. "He that
loseth his life shall preserve it." Milton was ready to lose his
literary life by sacrificing the remains of his eyesight to a cause
which, upon the whole, humanity has accepted as its own; and it was
preserved to him in a work which will never die. Mr. Pattison points to
a short poem written by Milton when his pen was chiefly employed in
serving the Commonwealth as indication that Milton "did not inwardly
forfeit the peace which passeth all understanding." Why should a man
forfeit that peace when he is doing with his whole soul that which he
conscientiously believes to be his highest duty?

Over Milton's pamphlets Mr. Pattison can of course only wring his hands.
He is at liberty to wring his hands as much as he pleases over the
personalities which sullied the controversy with Salmasius; but these
are a small part of the matter, particularly when they are viewed in
connection with the habits of a time which was at once much rougher in
phrase, though perhaps not more malicious, than ours, and given to
servile imitation of Greek and Latin oratory. To point his moral more
keenly, Mr. Pattison denies that Milton was ever effective as a
political writer. Yet the Council of State, who can have looked to
nothing but effectiveness, and were pretty good judges of it, specially
invited Milton to answer "Eikon Basilike" and to plead the cause of the
Regicide Republic against Salmasius in the court of European opinion.
Mr. Pattison himself (p. 135) allows that on the Continent Milton was
renowned as the answerer of Salmasius and the vindicator of liberty; and
he proceeds to quote the statement of Milton's nephew that learned
foreigners could not leave London without seeing his uncle. But the
biographer has evidently laid down beforehand in his own mind general
laws which are fatal to all pamphlets as pamphlets, without
consideration of their particular merits. "There are," he says,
"examples of thought having been influenced by books. But such books
have been scientific, not rhetorical." If it were not rude to
contradict, we should have said that the influence exercised in politics
by scientific treatises had been as nothing in the aggregate compared
with that exercised by pamphlets, speeches, and, in later times, by the
newspaper press. What does Mr. Pattison say to Burke's "Reflections on
the French Revolution," to Paine's "Common Sense," to the tracts written
by Halifax and Defoe at the time of the Revolution? Neither thought nor
action is his epigrammatic condemnation of Milton's political writings,
but an appeal which stirs men to action is surely both. Again of
"Eikonoklastes" we are told that "it is like _all answers_,
worthless as a book." Bentley's "Phalaris" is an answer, Demosthenes'
"De Corona" is an answer. As a rule no doubt the form is a bad one, but
an answer may embody principles and knowledge as well as show literary
skill, reasoning power, and courteous self-control, which after all are
not worthless though they are worth far less than some other things.
These discussions so odious and contemptible in Mr. Pattison's eyes,
what are they but the processes of thought through which a nation or
humanity works its way to political truth? Even books scientific in form
such as Hobbes's "Leviathan" or Harrington's "Oceana" are but registered
results of a long discussion. "Eikon Basilike" was doing infinite
mischief to the cause of the Commonwealth, and how could it have been
met except by a critical reply? "Eikonoklastes" was thought, though it
was not exact science, and so far as it told it was action, though it
was not a pike or a musket.

This portion of Mr. Pattison's work is thickly sown with aphorisms to
which no one who does not share his special mood can without
qualification assent. No good man can with impunity addict himself to
party, and the best men will suffer most because their conviction of the
goodness of their cause is deeper. But when one with the sensibility of
a poet throws himself into the excitements of a struggle he is certain
to lose his balance. The endowment of feeling and imagination which
qualifies him to be the ideal interpreter of life unfits him for
participation in that real life through the manoeuvres and compromises
of which reason is the only guide and where imagination is as much
misplaced as it would be in a game of chess. In this there is an element
of truth but there is also something to which we are inclined to demur.
If by party is meant mere faction, plainly no man can addict himself to
it with impunity. But when the English nation was struggling in the
grasp of a court and a prelacy which sought to reduce it to the level of
Spain, no Englishman as it seems to us could with impunity perch himself
aloft in a palace of art while peasants were shedding their blood to
make him free. Especially do we question the soundness of the sentiment
expressed in the last clause. Why is real life to be abandoned by every
man of feeling and imagination and given over to the men of manoeuvre and
compromise? Is not this the sentiment of the monkish ascetic coming back
to us in another form and enjoining us to make ourselves eunuchs for the
Kingdom of Art's sake? Cromwell, Vane, Hampden, and Pym were not men of
manoeuvre and compromise, they had plenty of feeling and imagination,
though in them these qualities gave birth not to poetry, but to high
political or religious aspirations and grand social ideals. The theory
of Milton's biographer is that an active interest in public affairs is
fatal to excellence in literature or in art; and this theory seems to be
confuted as signally as possible by the facts of Milton's life.

It is curious to see how completely at variance Milton's own sentiment
is with that of his biographer and how little he foresaw what Mr.
Pattison would say about him. In the _Defensio Secunda_ he defends
himself against the charge not of over activity but of inaction. "I can
easily repel," he says, "any imputation of want of courage or of want of
zeal. For though I did not share the toils or perils of the war I was
engaged in a service not less hazardous to myself and more beneficial to
my fellow citizens; nor in the adverse turns of our affairs, did I ever
betray any symptoms of pusillanimity and dejection; or show myself more
afraid than became me of malice or of death: For since from my youth I
was devoted to the pursuits of literature, and my mind has always been
stronger than my body, I did not court the labours of a camp, in which
any common person would have been of more service than myself, but
resorted to that employment in which my exertions were likely to be of
most avail. Thus, with the better part of my frame I contributed as much
as possible to the good of my country, and to the success of the
glorious cause in which we were engaged; and I thought that if God
willed the success of such glorious achievements, it was equally
agreeable to his will that there should be others by whom those
achievements should be recorded with dignity and elegance; and that the
truth, which had been defended by arms, should also be defended by
reason; which is the best and only legitimate means of defending it.
Hence, while I applaud those who were victorious in the field, I will
not complain of the province which was assigned me; but rather
congratulate myself upon it, and thank the author of all good for having
placed me in a station, which may be an object of envy to others rather
than of regret to myself." Here is a culprit who entirely mistakes the
nature of his offence and instead of apologizing for what he has done
apologizes for not having done more. Nor so far as we are aware is there
in Milton's writings the slightest trace of sorrow for the misemployment
of his best years or consciousness of the ruin which it had wrought in
his genius as a poet.

In the same spirit Mr. Pattison continually represents the end of
Milton's public life as "the irretrievable discomfiture of all his
hopes, aims, and aspirations," his labour as "being swept away without a
trace of it being left," and the latter part of his life as utter
"wretchedness." The failure of selfish schemes often makes men wretched.
The failure of unselfish aspirations may make a man sad, but can never
make him wretched, and Milton was not wretched when he was writing
"Paradise Lost." He would not have been wretched even if the
discomfiture of his hopes for the Commonwealth had been as final and as
irretrievable as his biographer supposes. But Milton knew that though
disastrous it was not final or irretrievable. He had implicit confidence
in the indestructibility of moral force, and he "bated no jot of heart
or hope." He could see the limits of the reaction and he knew that,
though great and calamitous in proportion to the errors of the
Republican party, it had not changed in a day the character and
fundamental tendencies of the nation. He would note that the Star
Chamber, the Court of High Commission, the Council of the North, the
legislative functions once usurped by the Privy Council, were not
restored, and that no attempt was made to govern without a parliament.
He found himself the defender of regicide, not free from peril, indeed,
yet protected by public opinion, while, in general, narrow bounds were
set to the bloodthirsty vengeance of the Cavaliers. He lived to witness
the actual turn of the tide. Six years before his death the Triple
Alliance was formed, and in the year of his death the Cabal Ministry
fell. At worst, his case would have been that of a soldier killed in an
unfortunate crisis of a battle which in the end was won, but he fell, if
not with the shout of victory in his ears, with the inspiring signs of a
general advance around him. If we take remoter ages into our view, the
triumph of Milton is still more manifest. The cause to which he gave his
life and his genius is forever exalted and dignified by his name. The
notion that the Cavaliers were the men of culture and that the Puritans
were the uncultivated has been a hundred times confuted, though it
reappears in the discourses of Mr. Matthew Arnold, and, what is much
more astonishing, in this work of Mr. Pattison. But in a party of action
great defect of culture would be amply redeemed by the possession of a
Milton.




COLERIDGE'S LIFE OF KEBLE.

[Footnote: A Memoir of the Rev. J. Keble, M.A., late Vicar of Hursley,
by the Right Hon. Sir J.T. Coleridge, D.C.L., Oxford and London: James
Parker & Co., 1869.]


SIR JOHN COLERIDGE, the writer of this "Life of Keble," was for many
years one of the Judges of the Court of Queen's Bench, is now a Privy
Councillor, and may be regarded almost as the lay head of the High
Church party in England. Sharing Keble's opinions, and entering into all
his feelings, he is at the same time himself always a man of the world
and a man of sense. Add to these qualifications his intimate and
lifelong friendship with the subject of his work, and we have reason to
expect a biography at once appreciative and judicial. Such a biography,
in fact, we have; one full of sympathy, yet free from exaggeration, and
a good lesson to biographers in general. The intimacy of the friendship
between the writer and his subject might have interfered with his
impartiality and repelled our confidence if the case had been more
complex and had made greater demands on the inflexibility of the judge.
But in the case of a character and a life so perfectly simple, pure, and
transparent as the character and the life of Keble, there was but one
thing to be said.

The author of "The Christian Year" was the son of a country clergyman of
the Church of England, and was educated at home by his father, so that
he missed, or, as he would probably have said himself, escaped, the
knowledge of minds differently trained from his own which a boy cannot
help picking up at an English public school. At a very early age he
became a scholar of Corpus Christi, a very small and secluded college of
the High Church and High Tory University of Oxford. As the scholarships
led to fellowships--the holders of which were required to be in holy
orders--and to church preferment, almost all the scholars were destined
for the clerical profession. Of Keble's student friendships one only
seems to have been formed outside the walls of his own college, and this
was with Miller, a student of Worcester College, who afterwards became a
High Church clergyman. Among the students destined for the Anglican
priesthood in the Junior Common Room of Corpus Christi College, there
was indeed one whose presence strikes us like the apparition of Turnus
in the camp of AEneas--Thomas Arnold. Arnold was already Arnold, and he
succeeded in drawing the young champions of the divine right of kings
and priests into a struggle against the divine right of tutors which
'secured the liberty of the subject' at Corpus--the question at issue
between the subject and the ruler being by which of two clocks, one of
which was always five minutes before the other, the recitations should
begin. The friendship between Arnold and Keble, however, was merely
personal, Arnold evidently never exercised the slightest influence over
Keble's mind, and even in this 'great rebellion'--the only rebellion,
great or small, of his life--Keble was induced to take part, as he has
expressly recorded, at the instigation of Coleridge, a middle term
between Arnold and himself. The college teachers were all clergymen and
the university curriculum in their days was regulated and limited by
clerical ascendancy, and consisted of the Aristotelian and Butlerian
philosophy, classics, and pure mathematics, without modern history or
physical science. The remarkable precocity of Keble's intellect enabled
him to graduate with the highest honours both in classics and
mathematics at an age almost miraculously early even when allowance is
made for the comparative youthfulness of students in general in those
days. He was at once elected a Fellow of Oriel, and translated to the
Senior Common Room of the College--another clerical society consisting
of men for the most part considerably his seniors, among whom, in spite
of the presence of Whately, High Church principles probably predominated
already, and were destined soon to predominate in the most extreme
sense, for the college presently became the focus of the Ritualistic and
Romanizing movement. Thus, up to twenty-three, Keble's life had been
that of a sort of acolyte, and though not ascetic (for his nature
appears to have been always genial and mirthful), entirely clerical in
its environments and its aspirations. At twenty-three he took orders,
and put round his neck, with the white tie of Anglican priesthood, the
Thirty-nine Articles, the whole contents of the Anglican Prayer Book and
all the contradictions between those two standards of belief. For some
time he held a tutorship in his college then he went down to a country
living in the neighbourhood of a cathedral city, where he spent the rest
of his days. His character was so sweet and gentle that he could not
fail to be naturally disposed to toleration. He even goes the length of
saying that some profane libellers whom his friend Coleridge was going
to prosecute, were not half so dangerous enemies to religion as some
wicked worldly-minded Christians. But it is no wonder, and implies no
derogation from his charity, that he should have regarded the progress
of opinions different from his own as a mediaeval monk would have
regarded the progress of an army of Saracens or a horde of Avars. His
poetic sympathies could not hinder him from disliking the rebel and
Puritan Milton.