It is right that this anniversary should be kept in allEnglish-speaking lands. Milton is as far away from us in time as Dantewas from him; destructive criticism has been busy with his great poem;formidable rivals of his fame have arisen—Dryden and Pope, Wordsworthand Byron, Tennyson and Browning, not to speak of lesser names—poetswhom we read perhaps oftener and with more pleasure. Yet still histhrone remains unshaken. By general—by well-nigh universal—consent,he is still the second poet of our race, the greatest, save one, of allwho have used the English speech.
The high epics, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, do not appear to us asthey appeared to their contemporaries, nor as they appeared to theMiddle Ages or to the men of the Renaissance or of the eighteenthcentury. These peaks of song we see foreshortened or in changedperspective or from a different angle of observation. Their parallaxvaries from age to age, yet their stature does not dwindle; they towerforever, "like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved." Paradise Lost does notmean the same thing to us that it meant to Addison or Johnson orMacaulay, and much that those critics said of it now seems mistaken.Works of art, as of nature, have perishable elements, and suffer a lossfrom time's transhifting. Homer's gods are childish, Dante's hellgrotesque; and the mythology of the one and the scholasticism of theother are scarcely more obsolete to-day than Milton's theology. Yet inthe dryest parts of Paradise Lost we feel the touch of the master.Two things in particular, the rhythm and the style, go on victoriouslyas by their own momentum. God the Father may be a school divine andAdam a member of Parliament, but the verse never flags, the dictionnever fails. The poem may grow heavy, but not languid, thin or weak.I confess that there are traits of Milton which repel or irritate; thatthere are poets with whom sympathy is easier. And if I were speakingmerely as an impressionist, I might prefer them to him. But this doesnot affect my estimate of his absolute greatness.
All poets, then, and lovers of poetry, all literary critics andstudents of language must honor in Milton the almost faultless artist,the supreme master of his craft. But there is a reason why, not alonethe literary class, but all men of English stock should celebrateMilton's tercentenary. There have been poets whose technique wasexquisite, but whose character was contemptible. John Milton was notsimply a great poet, but a great man, a heroic soul; and his type wascharacteristically English, both in its virtues and its shortcomings.Of Shakspere, the man, we know next to nothing. But of Miltonpersonally we know all that we need to know, more than is known of manya modern author. There is abundance of biography and autobiography.Milton had a noble self-esteem, and he was engaged for twenty years inhot controversies. Hence those passages of apologetics scatteredthrough his prose works, from which the lives of their author have beenlargely compiled. Moreover he was a pamphleteer and journalist, aswell as a poet, uttering himsel