NOTES.

ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST’S NATIVITY.

From his sixteenth year Milton had been wont to write freely in Latin verse, on miscellaneous poetic themes, sometimes expressing his thoughts on events of the day, and sometimes addressing letters to his friends on purely personal matters. From these Latin poems, which therefore in some sense belong to English literature, we obtain valuable insight into his course of life and his way of thinking. What Milton wrote in foreign languages is indispensable for the information it gives us about himself—its content is important; but as poetry implies a fusing of content and form into an artistic unity, if one of these elements is foreign, the result is nondescript and cannot be ranged under the head of English literature in the strict sense of the term.

It is in one of Milton’s own Latin pieces that we find our best commentary on the Hymn on the Nativity. The sixth Latin Elegy is an epistle to his intimate college friend, “Charles Diodăti making a stay in the country,” the last twelve lines of which may be freely translated as follows:—

But if you shall wish to know what I am doing,—if indeed you think it worth your while to know whether I am doing anything at all,—we are singing the peace-bringing king born of heavenly seed, and the happy ages promised in the sacred books, and the crying of the infant God lying in a manger under a poor roof, who dwells with his father in the realms above; and the starry sky, and the squadrons singing on high, and the gods suddenly driven away to their own fanes. Those gifts we have indeed given to the birthday of Christ; that first light brought them to me at dawn. Thee also they await sung to our native pipes; thou shalt be to me in lieu of a judge for me to read them to.

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This means, of course, that the poet is composing a Christmas Hymn in his native language. We must note his age at this time,—twenty-one years: he is a student at Cambridge. The poem remains the great Christmas hymn in our literature. “The Ode on the Nativity,” says Professor Saintsbury, “is a test of the reader’s power to appreciate poetry.”

In four stanzas the poet speaks in his own person: he too must, with the wise men from the east, bring such gifts as he has, to offer to the Infant God. His offering is the humble ode which follows. We must take note of the change in the metric form which marks the transition from the introduction to the ode. In the stanzas of the former the lines all have five accents, except the last, which has six; while in the latter, four lines have three accents each, one has four, two have five, and one has six. Notice also the occasional hypermetric lines, such as line 47.

In connection with Milton’s Hymn, read Alfred Domett’s It was the calm and silent night.

We see, then, what we must understand by the oft-recurring spheres in Milton’s poetry. In the line, Down through the turning sphere, however, the singular sphere is obviously used to mean the whole aggregate of spheres composing the starry universe.

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ON SHAKESPEARE.

The first edition of the collected works of Shakespeare, known as the first folio, was published in 1623, when Milton was fifteen years old. The second Shakespeare folio appeared in 1632. Among the commendatory verses by various hands prefixed, after the fashion of the time, to the latter volume, was a little piece of eight couplets, in which some then unknown rhymer expressed his admiration of the great poet. Collecting his poems for publication in 1645, Milton included these couplets, gave them the date 1630, and the title On Shakespeare which they have since borne in his works. The fact that he wrote the verses two years before their publication in the Shakespeare folio shows that he did not produce them to order, for the special occasion. It is interesting to note that Milton at twenty-two was an appreciative reader of Shakespeare. The lines themselves give no hint of great poetic genius; they are a fair specimen of the conventional, labored eulogy in vogue at the time.

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L’ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO.

The year in which the poems were composed is uncertain. Masson regards 1632 as the probable date.

The exquisite poems to which Milton gave the Italian titles L’Allegro,—the mirthful, or jovial, man,—and Il Penseroso,—the melancholy, or saturnine, man,—should be regarded each as the pendant and complement of the other, and should be read as a single whole. The poet knew both moods, and takes both standpoints with equal grace and heartiness. The essential idea of thus contrasting the mirthful and the melancholy temperament he found ready to his hand. Robert Burton had prefaced his Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, with a series of not unpleasing, though by no means graceful, amœbean stanzas, in which two speakers alternately represent Melancholy, one as sweet and divine, and the other as harsh, sour, and damned. Undoubtedly Milton knew his Burton. But if he got his main idea from this source, he made his poems thoroughly Miltonic by his art of visualizing in delicious pictures the various phases of his abstract theme. The poems are wholly poetical, equally free from obscurity of thought and from obscurity of expression.

Each poem is prefaced with a vigorous exorcism of the spirit to [86] which it is hostile. This is couched in alternate three and five accent iambics, preparing a delicious rhythmic effect when the metre changes, in the invocation, to the octosyllable, with or without anacrusis.

In L’Allegro we accompany the mirthful man through an entire day of his pleasures, from early morning to late evening. The melancholy man moves through a programme less definitely and regularly planned. The scenes of his delights are mostly in the hours of the night: when the sun is up, he hides himself from day’s garish eye.

L’Allegro.

And at my window bid good-morrow.

It must be L’Allegro himself who comes to the window, and as he is outside, he comes to look in through the shrubbery and bid good morning to the cottage inmates, who are now up and about their work. The pertinency of the phrase, in spite of sorrow, is not intelligible.

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Warble his native wood-notes wild.

The couplet seems intended to convey the idea of a counterpart or contrast to the learned sock of Jonson. So considered, it is by no means an unhappy characterization.

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Il Penseroso.

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Il Penseroso’s aspiration is that as an astrologer he may learn the influence of every star and that he may come to know the virtue of every herb.

ARCADES.

The noble persons of the family of the Countess Dowager of Derby were fortunate enough to obtain the services of the poet John Milton to aid in the composition of a mask, which they presented to her ladyship at her residence in the country. Arcădes—the Arcadians—is Milton’s contribution to this performance. In date the poem precedes Comus, which is known to have been composed in 1634.

On the meaning of the term mask, as applied to a dramatic form, see introductory note on Comus.

AT A SOLEMN MUSIC.

The poet listens to what in the phrase of his time is a solemn music, but which we should name a sacred concert. The poem is [96] unalloyed lyric, expressing the rapture to which the music has lifted his soul. We must remember that Milton was himself an amateur musician, and in his days of darkness found habitual diversion at his organ. Indications of a susceptible and appreciative ear for musical harmony are frequent throughout the poems.

COMUS.

During the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I., the mask was one of the most popular forms of dramatic entertainment. Having a function and a character peculiar to itself, it flourished side by side with the regular plays of the theatrical stage, and gave large scope to the genius of poets, composers, and scenic artists.

The mask was usually designed to grace some important occasion, in which members of the upper classes of society, or even royal personages, were concerned. When the occasion called for particularly brilliant display, and had been long foreseen, the preparations for it would involve immense outlays for costumes, theatrical machinery, for new music, and for a libretto by a play-writer of the greatest note. When the mask was purely a private one, like Arcades and Comus, it was all the fashion for the gentle youths and maidens, for gentlemen and ladies of the highest rank, to take upon themselves the parts of the drama, to rehearse them assiduously, and finally to enact them on the private stage or on the lawn in the presence of a select audience.

The mask thus differentiated itself from the stage play in that it was not given for the pecuniary behoof of a company of actors, but represented rather expenditure for the simple purpose of producing grand effects. To act in a mask was an honor, when common players were social outcasts. The mask was got up for the occasion, and was not intended to keep the boards and attract a paying public. When the august ceremonial was over, the poet had his manuscript, to increase the bulk of his works, and the composer had his score, to furnish airs that might be played and sung in drawing-rooms if they had the good fortune to be popular.

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Such was the origin of the poem which Milton, in all the editions published during his lifetime, entitled simply “A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634,” but which editors since his day have agreed to name Comus.

The occasion of the poem was the coming of the Earl of Bridgewater to Ludlow Castle, to enter upon his official residence there as Lord President of Wales. The person chiefly concerned in the scenic, musical, and histrionic preparations of the mask was Milton’s esteemed friend, the most accomplished musical composer of the day, Henry Lawes. Lawes composed the music and arranged the stage business. He seems to have taken upon himself the part of the Attendant Spirit. Lawes knew to whom to apply for the all-important matter of the book, the words, or the poetry, of the piece, for he had learned to know Milton’s qualifications as a mask-poet in the fragment which we have under the name Arcades. With good music even for commonplace lyric verse, and with sprightly declamation even of conventional dialogue, the thing, as we know from modern instances, might have been carried off by gorgeous costumes and shrewdly devised scenic effects. Most of the masks of the time fell at once into oblivion. But Lawes had secured for his poet John Milton; and the consequence thereof is that the Earl of Bridgewater is now chiefly heard of because at Ludlow Castle there was enacted, in the form of a mask written by Milton, a drama which is still read and reread by every English-speaking person who reads any serious poetry, though Ludlow Castle has long been a venerable ruin.

For his plot, the poet feigned that the young children of the earl, two sons and a daughter, in coming to Ludlow, had to pass unattended through a forest, in which the boys became separated from the girl and she fell into the hands of the enchanter Comus. The Attendant Spirit appears to the youths with his magic herb, and with the further assistance of the water-nymph Sabrina, at last makes all right, and the children are restored to their parents in the midst of festive rejoicing.

The poem is dramatic, because it is acted and spoken or sung in character by its persons. It is allegorical, because it inculcates a moral, and more is meant than meets the ear. In parts it is pastoral, [98] both because the chief personage appears in the guise of a shepherd, and because its motive largely depends on the superstitions and traditions of simple, ignorant folk. In the longer speeches, where events are narrated with some fulness, it becomes epic. Lastly, in its songs, in the octosyllables of the magician, and in the adjuration and the thanking of Sabrina, it is lyric. With iambic pentameter as the basis of the dialogue, the poet varies his measures as Shakespeare does his, and with very similar ends in view.

The name Comus Milton found ready to his hand. As a common noun, the Greek word comus signifies carousal,—wassail. In the later classic period it had become a proper name, standing for a personification of nocturnal revelry, and a god Comus was frequently depicted on vases and in mural paintings. Philostratus, in his Ikŏnes,—or Pictures,—gives an interesting description of a painting of this god. See Encyclopædia Britannica, article Comus. Ben Jonson, in his mask, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, played in 1619, presents a Comus as “the god of cheer, or the belly, riding in triumph, his head crowned with roses and other flowers, his hair curled.” The character and the name were the common property of mask-writers.

The great distinction of Comus is its beauty, maintained at height through a thousand lines of supremely perfect verse. Greatly dramatic it of course is not. It yields its meaning to the most cursory reading; it has no mystery. It is simply beautiful, with a sustained beauty elsewhere unparalleled.

The following letter of Sir Henry Wotton to the Author deserves to be read both for its engaging style as a piece of English prose and for its exquisite characterization of Comus. Wotton was a versatile scholar, diplomat, and courtier, seventy years old at the time of this letter, with a reputation as a kindly and appreciative literary critic. He was now residing at Eton College, where he held the office of Provost. Milton, thirty years of age, the first edition of his Comus recently published anonymously, had good cause for elation over such a testimonial from such a source.

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“From the College, this 13 of April, 1638.

“Sir,

“It was a special favour when you lately bestowed upon me here the first taste of your acquaintance, though no longer than to make me know that I wanted more time to value it and to enjoy it rightly; and, in truth, if I could then have imagined your farther stay in these parts, which I understood afterwards by Mr. H., I would have been bold, in our vulgar phrase, to mend my draught (for you left me with an extreme thirst), and to have begged your conversation again, jointly with your said learned friend, over a poor meal or two, that we might have banded together some good Authors of the ancient time; among which I observed you to have been familiar.

“Since your going, you have charged me with new obligations, both for a very kind letter from you dated the 6th of this month, and for a dainty piece of entertainment which came therewith. Wherein I should much commend the tragical part, if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Doric delicacy in your Songs and Odes, whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language: Ipsa mollities. But I must not omit to tell you that I now only owe you thanks for intimating unto me (how modestly soever) the true artificer. For the work itself I had viewed some good while before with singular delight; having received it from our common friend Mr. R., in the very close of the late R.’s Poems, printed at Oxford: whereunto it was added (as I now suppose) that the accessory might help out the principal, according to the art of Stationers, and to leave the reader con la bocca dolce.

“Now, Sir, concerning your travels; wherein I may challenge a little more privilege of discourse with you. I suppose you will not blanch Paris in your way: therefore I have been bold to trouble you with a few lines to Mr. M. B., whom you shall easily find attending the young Lord S. as his governor; and you may surely receive from him good directions for the shaping of your farther journey into Italy where he did reside, by my choice, some time for the King, after mine own recess from Venice.

“I should think that your best line will be through the whole length of France to Marseilles, and thence by sea to Genoa; whence the passage into Tuscany is as diurnal as a Gravesend barge. I hasten, as you do, to Florence or Siena, the rather to tell you a short story, from the interest you have given me in your safety.

“At Siena I was tabled in the house of one Alberto Scipioni, an old Roman courtier in dangerous times; having been steward to the Duca di Pagliano, who with all his family were strangled, save this only man [100] that escaped by foresight of the tempest. With him I had often much chat of those affairs, into which he took pleasure to look back from his native harbour; and at my departure toward Rome (which had been the centre of his experience), I had won his confidence enough to beg his advice how I might carry myself there without offence of others or of mine own conscience. ‘Signor Arrigo mio,’ says he, ‘I pensieri stretti ed il viso sciolto will go safely over the whole world.’ Of which Delphian oracle (for so I have found it) your judgment doth need no commentary; and therefore, Sir, I will commit you, with it, to the best of all securities, God’s dear love, remaining

“Your friend, as much to command as any of longer date,

“Henry Wotton.”

Postscript.

“Sir: I have expressly sent this my footboy to prevent your departure without some acknowledgment from me of the receipt of your obliging letter; having myself through some business, I know not how, neglected the ordinary conveyance. In any part where I shall understand you fixed, I shall be glad and diligent to entertain you with home-novelties, even for some fomentation of our friendship, too soon interrupted in the cradle.”

The Latin phrase, ipsa mollities, may be translated,—it is the very perfection of delicacy. The Italian words below mean,—My dear Henry, thoughts close, face open.

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And her son that rules the strands.

Ino, after she had slain herself and her son Melicertes, by leaping with him into the sea, became a protecting deity of mariners under the name Leucothea, or the white goddess. So she came to the aid of Ulysses when he was passing on his raft from Calypso’s isle to Phæacia. She there appears “with fair ankles,” and when she receives back from him her veil, which she had lent him, she does it with “lovely hands.”

Melicertes becomes a protecting deity of shores, under the name Palæmon. The Romans identified him with their god Portunus.

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LYCIDAS.

Lycidas is Milton’s contribution to a volume of elegiac verses, in Greek, Latin, and English, composed by many college friends of Edward King, who was drowned in the wreck of the vessel in which he was crossing the Irish Channel.

In its main intention, Lycidas is an elegy, because it professes to mourn one who is dead and extols his virtues. In its form it is almost wholly pastoral, because it feigns an environment of shepherds, allegorizing college life as the life of men tending flocks, and the occupations of earnest students as the careless diversions of rustic swains.

Four times the pastoral note is rudely interrupted by the intervention of majestic beings who speak in awful tones from another world, and whose voices instantly check all familiar rustic speech, compelling it to wait till they have announced their messages from above. The supernal powers who thus descend to take their parts in the office of mourning are Phœbus, Apollo, Hippotades, god of the winds, Camus, god of the river Cam, and St. Peter. This mingling of classic, Hebrew, and Christian conceptions is a marked characteristic of all Milton’s poetry.

Thus Lycidas is neither wholly elegiac nor wholly pastoral. From the lips of St. Peter, typifying the church, comes a speech of violent denunciation, in the true later Miltonic manner. In strange contrast to this grim invective is the famous flower-passage, the sweetest and loveliest thing of its kind in our literature.

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A querulous thought comes to the poet’s mind. Our lives are obscure and laborious, sustained only by the hope of future fame; [118] but before we attain our reward, comes death, and our ambition is brought to naught.

The speaker is now Phœbus, the august god Apollo, the pure one, who protects law and order, and promotes whatever is good and beautiful; who reveals the will of Zeus, and presides over prophecy.

Phœbus has now an admonition to give and he touches the poet’s ears; as in Virgil, Eclogue IV 3,—Cynthius aurem vellit et admonuit, “The Cynthian twitched my ear and warned me.”

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Evidently Milton can cull words of extreme disparagement and vilification as well as words of unapproachable poetic beauty.

The pastoral tone of lightness and simplicity could not be maintained while St. Peter spoke. But now the Sicilian Muse returns, all the more lovely for the contrast with the stern malediction that has gone before.

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The poet seems to feign that he spent a day in the composition of Lycidas.

SONNETS.

Of poems in strict sonnet form, that is, containing neither more nor less than fourteen decasyllable iambic lines, interlocked by some scheme of symmetrical rhyme, not in couplets, Milton left twenty-three, of which five are in Italian. Of the three sonnets in English omitted from this edition, two have reference to the violent controversy occasioned by Milton’s publications in advocacy of greater freedom of divorce, and are rough and polemic in style; the third is omitted on account of its unimportance and lack of distinction.

In their dates the twenty-three sonnets range from the poet’s twenty-third to his fiftieth year. They are the only form of verse in which he indulges during that middle period of his life which was abandoned to political partisanship on the side of the Parliament in the Civil War, and to the service of the government during the Commonwealth and the Protectorate. If, as is now widely believed, Shakespeare’s sonnets are artificial and tell us little or nothing about their author, those of Milton are purely natural and subjective and tell us nothing else but what their writer was thinking and feeling. Their themes are his veritable moods and passions. The mood is now friendly, amiable, and serene, now bitter, strenuous, indignant, vindictive.

Wordsworth, in his sonnet, Scorn not the Sonnet, thus refers to Milton’s sparing use of this poetic form:—

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The Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains followed by a couplet,—the usual English form up to the seventeenth century. Milton adopted the Italian, or Petrarchian model, which has continued to be the standard sonnet form in our modern poetry. In the Miltonic, or Italian, sonnet a group of eight lines, linked by two rhymes each occurring four times, is followed by a group of six lines linked by three rhymes each occurring twice. The octave and the sextet are severed from each other by the non-continuance of the rhymes of the former into the latter. At the end of the octave, or near it, is usually a pause, marking the culmination of the thought, and the sextet makes an inference or rounds out the sense to an artistic whole.

Read Wordsworth’s sonnets, Happy the feeling from the bosom thrown, and Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.

I.

The date of this sonnet is unknown. From the fact that it comes first in the series as arranged by the poet, it is inferred that it is the earliest sonnet he chose to publish.

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Look up other nightingale and cuckoo songs; for example, Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, and Wordsworth’s The Cuckoo at Laverna.

II (1631).

This sonnet Milton appears to have sent with a prose letter to a friend who had remonstrated with him on the life of desultory study which he was so long continuing to lead. In this letter he professes the principle of “not taking thought of being late, so it gave advantage to be more fit.” He adds, “That you may see that I am something suspicious of myself, and do take notice of a certain belatedness in me, I am the bolder to send you some of my nightward thoughts some little while ago, because they come in not altogether unfitly, made up in a Petrarchian stanza, which I told you of.”

VIII (1642).

The occasion of this sonnet was the near approach of the royalist army to London, early in the Civil War. The people of the city had reason to fear the entrance of the cavalier troops and the sacking of the houses of citizens obnoxious to the party of the king. Milton would have been an object of special animosity to victorious royalists, and for a short time he had grounds for the acutest anxiety. It is not easy to see how, in case of actual pillage of the city, he could have made use of such an appeal as this. The sonnet is probably to be regarded as a work of art constructed when the vicissitudes which it pictures were happily past, and when the poet’s mind had regained its tranquillity.

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they were all melted with compassion, and it seemed to be a cruel deed to destroy and pull down a city which had been so famous, and produced such men.”

IX (1644).

Who the virtuous young lady was is not known.

X (1644 or 1645).

Lady Margaret’s father was the Earl of Marlborough, who had been President of the Council under Charles I. Milton attributes his death to political anxiety caused by the dissolution of Charles’s third Parliament in 1629.

XIII (1646).

“In these lines, Milton, with a musical perception not common amongst poets, exactly indicates the great merit of Lawes, which distinguishes his compositions from those of many of his contemporaries and successors. His careful attention to the words of the poet, the manner in which his music seems to grow from those words, the perfect coincidence of the musical with the metrical accent, all put Lawes’s songs on a level with those of Schumann or Liszt.”—Encyclopædia Britannica.

See introductory notes to Comus and Arcades.

XV (1648).

The taking of Colchester by the parliamentary army under Fairfax, Aug. 28, 1648, was one of the most important events of the Civil War.

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XVI.

As Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State of the Commonwealth, Milton saw much of Cromwell, and came under the influence of his voice and manner. Whether the great general had ever taken note of the poems written by the secretary who turned his despatches into Latin, or whether he gave any special heed to the man himself, with whom he must have come into some sort of personal relation, we have no means of knowing. We know, however, perfectly well what the poet thought of the victorious general. Though by no means always approving his state policy, Milton retained to the end the warm personal admiration for Cromwell which he expresses in this sonnet.

XVII (1652).

Sir Henry Vane was member of a committee of the Council of State appointed in 1649 to consider alliances and relations with the European powers. Milton, as Secretary of the Council, had abundant opportunity to observe Vane’s skill in diplomacy, his ability to “unfold the drift of hollow states hard to be spelled.” Both Vane and Milton held to the doctrine, preëminently associated with the name of Roger Williams, of universal toleration, based on [128] the refusal to the civil magistrate of any authority in spiritual matters.

XVIII (1655).

The historical event which furnishes the occasion of this sonnet is the persecution of the Protestant Waldenses by the Piedmontese and French governments, at the time of Cromwell’s Protectorate. Cromwell’s vigorous and successful intervention was the means of staying this horror, and gives evidence of the respect entertained for his government among the states of Europe.

XIX.

The sonnet, says Masson, may have been written any time between 1652 and 1655.

XX.

Probable date, 1655. Of the Mr. Lawrence to whom the sonnet is addressed nothing is certainly known.

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XXI.

The second sonnet to Cyriac Skinner determines its own date as 1655, and this one is probably to be assigned to the same year.

But little is known of the person to whom this sonnet and the next one are addressed, except what we learn from the sonnets themselves,—that he was an intimate and esteemed friend of Milton. He may have been one of Milton’s pupils; and he may, when his old teacher had become blind, have rendered him important services as amanuensis or as reader.

XXII (1655).

XXIII.

Milton’s second wife died in February, 1658; her child lived but a short time. At the time of his second marriage Milton had been blind several years. Notice the reference in the sonnet to the sense of sight: in his dream he saw.