Books: Lives of the Poets: Waller, Milton, Cowley

S >> Samuel Johnson >> Lives of the Poets: Waller, Milton, Cowley

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So is his life described; but this even tenour appears attainable
only in colleges. He that lives in the world will sometimes have
the succession of his practice broken and confused. Visitors, of
whom Milton is represented to have had great numbers, will come and
stay unseasonably; business, of which every man has some, must be
done when others will do it.

When he did not care to rise early, he had something read to him by
his bedside; perhaps at this time his daughters were employed. He
composed much in the morning, and dictated in the day, sitting
obliquely in an elbow-chair, with his leg thrown over the arm.
Fortune appears not to have had much of his care. In the civil
wars, he lent his personal estate to the Parliament; but when, after
the contest was decided, he solicited repayment, he met not only
with neglect, but "sharp rebuke;" and, having tired both himself and
his friends, was given up to poverty and hopeless indignation, till
he showed how able he was to do greater service. He was then made
Latin Secretary, with two hundred pounds a year; and had a thousand
pounds for his "Defence of the People." His widow, who, after his
death, retired to Nantwich, in Cheshire, and died about 1729, is
said to have reported that he lost two thousand pounds by entrusting
it to a scrivener; and that, in the general depredation upon the
Church, he had grasped an estate of about sixty pounds a year
belonging to Westminster Abbey, which, like other sharers of the
plunder of rebellion, he was afterwards obliged to return. Two
thousand pounds which he had placed in the Excise Office were also
lost. There is yet no reason to believe that he was ever reduced to
indigence. His wants, being few, were competently supplied. He
sold his library before his death, and left his family fifteen
hundred pounds, on which his widow laid hold, and only gave one
hundred to each of his daughters.

His literature was unquestionably great. He read all the languages
which are considered either as learned or polite: Hebrew, with its
two dialects, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish. In Latin
his skill was such as places him in the first rank of writers and
critics; and he appears to have cultivated Italian with uncommon
diligence. The books in which his daughter, who used to read to
him, represented him as most delighting, after Homer, which he could
almost repeat, were Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and Euripides. His
Euripides is, by Mr. Cradock's kindness, now in my hands: the
margin is sometimes noted; but I have found nothing remarkable.

Of the English poets he set most value upon Spenser, Shakespeare,
and Cowley. Spenser was apparently his favourite; Shakespeare he
may easily be supposed to like, with every other skilful reader; but
I should not have expected that Cowley, whose ideas of excellence
were different from his own, would have had much of his approbation.
His character of Dryden, who sometimes visited him, was, that he was
a good rhymist, but no poet.

His theological opinions are said to have been first Calvinistical;
and afterwards, perhaps when he began to hate the Presbyterians, to
have tended towards Arminianism. In the mixed questions of theology
and government, he never thinks that he can recede far enough from
Popery, or Prelacy; but what Baudius says of Erasmus seems
applicable to him, "Magis habuit quod fugeret, quam quod
sequeretur." He had determined rather what to condemn, than what to
approve. He has not associated himself with any denomination of
Protestants: we know rather what he was not than what he was. He
was not of the Church of Rome; he was not of the Church of England.

To be of no Church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are
distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by
degrees out of the mind, unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by
external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary
influence of example. Milton, who appears to have had a full
conviction of the truth of Christianity, and to have regarded the
Holy Scriptures with the profoundest veneration, to have been
untainted by any heretical peculiarity of opinion, and to have lived
in a confirmed belief of the immediate and occasional agency of
Providence, yet grew old without any visible worship. In the
distribution of his hours, there was no hour of prayer, either
solitary or with his household; omitting public prayers, he omitted
all.

Of this omission the reason has been sought upon a supposition which
ought never to be made, that men live with their own approbation,
and justify their conduct to themselves. Prayer certainly was not
thought superfluous by him, who represents our first parents as
praying acceptably in the state of innocence, and efficaciously
after their fall. That he lived without prayer can hardly be
affirmed; his studies and meditations were an habitual prayer. The
neglect of it in his family was probably a fault for which he
condemned himself, and which he intended to correct; but that death,
as too often happens, intercepted his reformation.

His political notions were those of an acrimonious and surly
Republican; for which it is not known that he gave any better reason
than that "a popular government was the most frugal; for the
trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth." It
is surely very shallow policy that supposes money to be the chief
good; and even this, without considering that the support and
expense of a court is, for the most part, only a particular kind of
traffic, for which money is circulated, without any national
impoverishment.

Milton's Republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious
hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of independence; in
petulance impatient of control, and pride disdainful of superiority.
He hated monarchs in the State, and prelates in the Church; for he
hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be suspected that
his predominant desire was to destroy rather than establish, and
that he felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to
authority.

It has been observed that they who most loudly clamour for liberty
do not most liberally grant it. What we know of Milton's character,
in domestic relations, is, that he was severe and arbitrary. His
family consisted of women; and there appears in his books something
like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior
beings. That his own daughters might not break the ranks, he
suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He
thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion.

Of his family some account may be expected. His sister, first
married to Mr. Philips, afterwards married Mr. Agar, a friend of her
first husband, who succeeded him in the Crown office. She had, by
her first husband, Edward and John, the two nephews whom Milton
educated; and by her second, two daughters.

His brother, Sir Christopher, had two daughters, Mary and Catharine,
and a son, Thomas, who succeeded Agar in the Crown office, and left
a daughter living in 1749 in Grosvenor Street.

Milton had children only by his first wife: Anne, Mary, and
Deborah. Anne, though deformed, married a master-builder, and died
of her first child. Mary died single. Deborah married Abraham
Clark, a weaver in Spitalfields, and lived seventy-six years, to
August, 1727. This is the daughter of whom public mention has been
made. She could repeat the first lines of Homer, the
"Metamorphoses," and some of Euripides, by having often read them.
Yet here incredulity is ready to make a stand. Many repetitions are
necessary to fix in memory lines not understood; and why should
Milton wish or want to hear them so often? These lines were at the
beginning of the poems. Of a book written in a language not
understood, the beginning raises no more attention than the end; and
as those that understand it know commonly the beginning best, its
rehearsal will seldom be necessary. It is not likely that Milton
required any passage to be so much repeated as that his daughter
could learn it; nor likely that he desired the initial lines to be
read at all; nor that the daughter, weary of the drudgery of
pronouncing unideal sounds, would voluntarily commit them to memory.

To this gentlewoman Addison made a present, and promised some
establishment, but died soon after. Queen Caroline sent her fifty
guineas. She had seven sons and three daughters; but none of them
had any children, except her son Caleb and her daughter Elizabeth.
Caleb went to Fort St. George, in the East Indies, and had two sons,
of whom nothing now is known. Elizabeth married Thomas Foster, a
weaver in Spitalfields, and had seven children, who all died. She
kept a petty grocer's or chandler's shop, first at Holloway, and
afterwards in Cock Lane, near Shoreditch Church. She knew little of
her grandfather, and that little was not good. She told of his
harshness to his daughters, and his refusal to have them taught to
write; and, in opposition to other accounts, represented him as
delicate, though temperate, in his diet.

In 1750, April 5th, Comus was played for her benefit. She had so
little acquaintance with diversion or gaiety, that she did not know
what was intended when a benefit was offered her. The profits of
the night were only one hundred and thirty pounds, though Dr. Newton
brought a large contribution; and twenty pounds were given by
Tonson, a man who is to be praised as often as he is named. Of this
sum one hundred pounds were placed in the stocks, after some debate
between her and her husband in whose name it should be entered; and
the rest augmented their little stock, with which they removed to
Islington. This was the greatest benefaction that "Paradise Lost"
ever procured the author's descendants; and to this he who has now
attempted to relate his Life, had the honour of contributing a
Prologue.

In the examination of Milton's poetical works, I shall pay so much
regard to time as to begin with his juvenile productions. For his
early pieces he seems to have had a degree of fondness not very
laudable; what he has once written he resolves to preserve, and
gives to the public an unfinished poem which he broke off because he
was "nothing satisfied with what he had done," supposing his readers
less nice than himself. These preludes to his future labours are in
Italian, Latin, and English. Of the Italian I cannot pretend to
speak as a critic; but I have heard them commended by a man well
qualified to decide their merit. The Latin pieces are lusciously
elegant: but the delight which they afford is rather by the
exquisite imitation of the ancient writers, by the purity of the
diction, and the harmony of the numbers, than by any power of
invention or vigour of sentiment. They are not all of equal value;
the elegies excel the odes; and some of the exercises on Gunpowder
Treason might have been spared.

The English poems, though they make no promises of "Paradise Lost,"
have this evidence of genius--that they have a cast original and
unborrowed. But their peculiarity is not excellence; if they differ
from the verses of others, they differ for the worse; for they are
too often distinguished by repulsive harshness; the combinations of
words are new, but they are not pleasing; the rhymes and epithets
seem to be laboriously sought, and violently applied.

That in the early parts of his life he wrote with much care appears
from his manuscripts, happily preserved at Cambridge, in which many
of his smaller works are found as they were first written, with the
subsequent corrections. Such relics show how excellence is
acquired; what we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to
do with diligence.

Those who admire the beauties of this great poet sometimes force
their own judgment into false approbation of his little pieces, and
prevail upon themselves to think that admirable which is only
singular. All that short compositions can commonly attain is
neatness and elegance. Milton never learned the art of doing little
things with grace; he overlooked the milder excellence of suavity
and softness; he was a "Lion" that had no skill in "dandling the
Kid."

One of the poems on which much praise has been bestowed is
"Lycidas;" of which the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and
the numbers unpleasing. What beauty there is we must therefore seek
in the sentiments and images. It is not to be considered as the
effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote
allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the
myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of
rough "satyrs" and "fauns with cloven heel." Where there is leisure
for fiction, there is little grief.

In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no
art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral;
easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting; whatever images it can
supply are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability always
forces dissatisfaction on the mind. When Cowley tells of Hervey,
that they studied together, it is easy to suppose how much he must
miss the companion of his labours, and the partner of his
discoveries; but what image of tenderness can be excited by these
lines? -

We drove afield, and both together heard
What time the grey fly winds her sultry horn,
Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night.

We know that they never drove afield, and that they had no flocks to
batten; and though it be allowed that the representation may be
allegorical, the true meaning is so uncertain and remote, that it is
never sought, because it cannot be known when it is found.

Among the flocks, and copses, and flowers, appear the heathen
deities; Jove and Phoebus, Neptune and AEolus, with a long train of
mythological imagery, such as a college easily supplies. Nothing
can less display knowledge, or less exercise invention, than to tell
how a shepherd has lost his companion, and must now feed his flocks
alone, without any judge of his skill in piping; and how one god
asks another god what is become of Lycidas, and how neither god can
tell. He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy; he who thus
praises will confer no honour.

This poem has yet a grosser fault. With these trifling fictions are
mingled the most awful and sacred truths, such as ought never to be
polluted with such irreverent combinations. The shepherd likewise
is now a feeder of sheep, and afterwards an ecclesiastical pastor, a
superintendent of a Christian flock. Such equivocations are always
unskilful; but here they are indecent, and at least approach to
impiety, of which, however, I believe the writer not to have been
conscious.

Such is the power of reputation justly acquired, that its blaze
drives away the eye from nice examination. Surely no man could have
fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure, had he not known the
author.

Of the two pieces, "L'Allegro" and "il Penseroso," I believe,
opinion is uniform; every man that reads them, reads them with
pleasure. The author's design is not, what Theobald has remarked,
merely to show how objects derive their colours from the mind, by
representing the operation of the same things upon the gay and the
melancholy temper, or upon the same man as he is differently
disposed; but rather how, among the successive variety of
appearances, every disposition of mind takes hold on those by which
it may be gratified.

The CHEERFUL man hears the lark in the morning; the PENSIVE man
hears the nightingale in the evening. The CHEERFUL man sees the
cock strut, and hears the horn and hounds echo in the wood; then
walks, NOT UNSEEN, to observe the glory of the rising sun, or listen
to the singing milkmaid, and view the labours of the ploughman and
the mower; then casts his eyes about him over scenes of smiling
plenty, and looks up to the distant tower, the residence of some
fair inhabitant; thus he pursues real gaiety through a day of labour
or of play, and delights himself at night with the fanciful
narratives of superstitious ignorance.

The PENSIVE man at one time walks UNSEEN to muse at midnight, and at
another hears the sullen curfew. If the weather drives him home, he
sits in a room lighted only by "glowing embers;" or by a lonely lamp
outwatches the North Star, to discover the habitation of separate
souls, and varies the Shades of meditation by contemplating the
magnificent or pathetic scenes of tragic and epic poetry. When the
morning comes--a morning gloomy with rain and wind--he walks into
the dark, trackless woods, falls asleep by some murmuring water, and
with melancholy enthusiasm expects some dream of prognostication, or
some music played by aerial performers.

Both mirth and melancholy are solitary, silent inhabitants of the
breast, that neither receive nor transmit communication; no mention
is therefore made of a philosophical friend, or a pleasant
companion. The seriousness does not arise from any participation of
calamity, nor the gaiety from the pleasures of the bottle.

The man of CHEERFULNESS, having exhausted the country, tries what
"towered cities" will afford, and mingles with scenes of splendour,
gay assemblies, and nuptial festivities; but he mingles a mere
spectator, as, when the learned comedies of Jonson, or the wild
dramas of Shakespeare, are exhibited, he attends the theatre.

The PENSIVE man never loses himself in crowds, but walks the
cloister, or frequents the cathedral. Milton probably had not yet
forsaken the Church.

Both his characters delight in music; but he seems to think that
cheerful notes would have obtained from Pluto a complete dismission
of Eurydice, of whom solemn sounds procured only a conditional
release.

For the old age of Cheerfulness he makes no provision: but
Melancholy he conducts with great dignity to the close of life. His
Cheerfulness is without levity, and his Pensiveness without
asperity.

Through these two poems the images are properly selected and nicely
distinguished; but the colours of the diction seem not sufficiently
discriminated. I know not whether the characters are kept
sufficiently apart. No mirth can, indeed, be found in his
melancholy; but I am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in
his mirth. They are two noble efforts of imagination.

The greatest of his juvenile performances is the "Mask of Comus," in
which may very plainly be discovered the dawn or twilight of
"Paradise Lost." Milton appears to have formed very early that
system of diction, and mode of verse, which his maturer judgment
approved, and from which he never endeavoured nor desired to
deviate.

Nor does Comus afford only a specimen of his language; it exhibits
likewise his power of description and his vigour of sentiment,
employed in the praise and defence of virtue. A work more truly
poetical is rarely found; allusions, images, and descriptive
epithets, embellish almost every period with lavish decoration. As
a series of lines, therefore, it may be considered as worthy of all
the admiration with which the votaries have received it.

As a drama it is deficient. The action is not probable. A mask, in
those parts where supernatural intervention is admitted, must indeed
be given up to all the freaks of imagination, but so far as the
action is merely human, it ought to be reasonable, which can hardly
be said of the conduct of the two brothers; who, when their sister
sinks with fatigue in a pathless wilderness, wander both away
together in search of berries too far to find their way back, and
leave a helpless lady to all the sadness and danger of solitude.
This, however, is a defect over-balanced by its convenience.

What deserves more reprehension is, that the prologue spoken in the
wild wood by the attendant Spirit is addressed to the audience; a
mode of communication so contrary to the nature of dramatic
representation, that no precedents can support it.

The discourse of the Spirit is too long; an objection that may be
made to almost all the following speeches; they have not the
sprightliness of a dialogue animated by reciprocal contention, but
seem rather declamations deliberately composed, and formally
repeated, on a moral question. The auditor therefore listens as to
a lecture, without passion, without anxiety.

The song of Comus has airiness and jollity; but, what may recommend
Milton's morals as well as his poetry, the invitations to pleasure
are so general, that they excite no distinct images of corrupt
enjoyment, and take no dangerous hold on the fancy.

The following soliloquies of Comus and the Lady are elegant but
tedious. The song must owe much to the voice if it ever can
delight. At last the Brothers enter with too much tranquillity;
and, when they have feared lest their Sister should be in danger,
and hoped that she is not in danger, the elder makes a speech in
praise of chastity, and the younger finds how fine it is to be a
philosopher.

Then descends the Spirit in form of a shepherd; and the Brother,
instead of being in haste to ask his help, praises his singing, and
inquires his business in that place. It is remarkable, that at this
interview the Brother is taken with a short fit of rhyming, The
Spirit relates that the Lady is in the power of Comus; the Brother
moralises again; and the Spirit makes a long narration, of no use
because it is false, and therefore unsuitable to a good being.

In all these parts the language is poetical, and the sentiments are
generous; but there is something wanting to allure attention.

The dispute between the Lady and Comus is the most animated and
affecting scene of the drama, and wants nothing but a brisker
reciprocation of objections and replies to invite attention, and
detain it.

The songs are vigorous and full of imagery; but they are harsh in
their diction, and not very musical in their numbers.

Throughout the whole the figures are too bold, and the language too
luxuriant for dialogue. It is a drama in the epic style,
inelegantly splendid, and tediously instructive.

The sonnets were written in different parts of Milton's life, upon
different occasions. They deserve not any particular criticism; for
of the best it can only be said, that they are not bad; and perhaps
only the eighth and twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender
commendation. The fabric of a sonnet, however adapted to the
Italian language, has never succeeded in ours, which, having greater
variety of termination, requires the rhymes to be often changed.

Those little pieces may be despatched without much anxiety; a
greater work calls for greater care. I am now to examine "Paradise
Lost;" a poem which, considered with respect to design, may claim
the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among
the productions of the human mind.

By the general consent of critics the first praise of genius is due
to the writer of an epic poem, as it requires an assemblage of all
the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions.
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling
imagination to the help of reason. Epic poetry undertakes to teach
the most important truths by the most pleasing precepts, and
therefore relates some great event in the most affecting manner.
History must supply the writer with the rudiments of narration,
which he must improve and exalt by a nobler art, must animate by
dramatic energy, and diversify by retrospection and anticipation;
morality must teach him the exact bounds, and different shades, of
vice and virtue; from policy, and the practice of life, he has to
learn the discriminations of character, and the tendency of the
passions, either single or combined; and physiology must supply him
with illustrations and images. To put those materials to poetical
use, is required an imagination capable of painting nature and
realising fiction. Nor is he yet a poet till he has attained the
whole extension of his language, distinguished all the delicacies of
phrase, and all the colours of words, and learned to adjust their
different sounds to all the varieties of metrical modulation.

Bossu is of opinion, that the poet's first work is to find a MORAL,
which his fable is afterwards to illustrate and establish. This
seems to have been the process only of Milton; the moral of other
poems is incidental and consequent; in Milton's only it is essential
and intrinsic. His purpose was the most useful and the most
arduous: "to vindicate the ways of God to man;" to show the
reasonableness of religion, and the necessity of obedience to the
Divine Law.

To convey this moral there must be a FABLE, a narration artfully
constructed, so as to excite curiosity and surprise expectation. In
this part of his work Milton must be confessed to have equalled
every other poet. He has involved in his account of the Fall of Man
the events which preceded and those that were to follow it: he has
interwoven the whole system of theology with such propriety, that
every part appears to be necessary; and scarcely any recital is
wished shorter for the sake of quickening the progress of the main
action.

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