Comfort Found in Good Old Books

At the age of forty-five Milton was stricken with total blindness, but he did not give up any of his activities under this crushing affliction. In these dark days also he learned what it was to have a home without peace or comfort and to be vexed daily by ungrateful children. When the monarchy was restored Milton was forced into retirement, and narrowly escaped the gallows for his part in sending Charles I to the block.

Thus in his old age, beaten down by misfortune, galled by neglect, he turned to the development of that rich poetic faculty which had lain fallow for a score of years. And in three years of silent meditation he produced Paradise Lost, which ranks very close to the Bible in religious fervor and in splendor of genuine poetic inspiration. It is Biblical in its subject, for it includes the revolt of the rebellious angels, the splendid picture of the Garden of Eden and the noble conception of the creation of the world. It is Biblical, also, in a certain sustained sweep of the imagination, such as is seen in the great picture of the burning lake, in which Satan first awakes from the shock of his fall, and in the impressive speeches that mark his plan of campaign against the Lord who had thrown him and his cohorts into outer darkness.

Yet this poem is modeled on the great epics of antiquity, and much of the splendor of the style is due to allusions to Greek and Roman history and mythology, with which Milton's mind was saturated. In other men this constant reference to the classics would be called pedantry; in him it was simply the struggle of a great mind to find fitting expression for his thoughts, just as in a later age we see the same process repeated in the essays of Macaulay, which are equally rich in references to the writers of all ages, whose works had been made a permanent part of this scholar's mental possessions.

Some present-day critics of Milton's Paradise Lost have declared that his subject is obsolete and that his verse repels the modern reader. As well say that the average unlettered reader finds the Bible dull and commonplace. Even if you do not know the historical fact or the mythological legend to which Milton refers, you can enjoy the music of his verse; and if you take the trouble to look up these allusions you will find that each has a meaning, and that each helps out the thought which the poet tries to express. This work of looking up the references which Milton makes to history and mythology is not difficult, and it will reward the patient reader with much knowledge that would not come to him in any other way. Behind Milton's grand style, as behind the splendid garments of a great monarch, one may see at times the man who influenced his own age by his genius and whose power has gone on through the ages, stimulating the minds of poets and sages and men of action, girding up their loins for conflict, breathing into them the spirit which demands freedom of speech and conscience.

Milton's style in Paradise Lost is unrhymed heroic verse, which seems to move easily with the thought of the poet. The absence of rhyme permits the poet to carry over most of his lines and to save the verse from that monotony which marks the artificial verse of even great literary artists like Dryden and Pope. Here is a passage from the opening of the second book, which depicts Satan in power in the Court of Hades, and which may be taken as a specimen of Milton's fine style:

High on a throne of royal state, which farOutshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,Or where the gorgeous East with richest handShowers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,Satan exalted sat.

And here, in a short description of the adventures of a body of Satan's fallen angels in their quest for escape from the lower regions to which they had been condemned, may be found all the salient features of Milton's style at its best:

Through many a dark and dreary valeThey passed, and many a region dolorous,O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp,Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death —A universe of death, which God by curseCreated evil, for evil only good;Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,Abominable, inutterable and worseThan fables yet have feigned or fear conceived,Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimæras dire.

In contrast to this resounding verse, which enables the poet to soar to lofty heights of imagination, turn to some of Milton's early work, the two beautiful classical idyls, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, the fine Hymn to the Nativity, and the mournful cadences of Lycidas, the poet's lament over the death of a beloved young friend. But in parting with Milton one should not neglect his sonnets, which rank with Wordsworth's as among the finest in the language. This brief notice cannot be ended more appropriately than with Milton's memorable sonnet on his blindness:

When I consider how my light is spentEre half my days in this dark world and wide,And that one talent which is death to hideLodged with me useless, though my soul more bentTo serve therewith my Maker and presentMy true account, lest He returning chide,"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"I fondly ask. But Patience, to preventThat murmur, soon replies, "God doth not needEither man's work or his own gifts. Who bestBear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His stateIs kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,And post o'er land and ocean without rest;They also serve who only stand and wait."

Pilgrim'sProgress the Finest ofAll Allegories

Bunyan's Story Full of the Spirit of the Bible – The Simple Tale of Christian's Struggles and Triumph Appeals to Old and Young

No contrast could be greater than that between Milton and John Bunyan unless it be the contrast between their masterpieces, Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress. One was born in the purple and had all the advantages that flow from wealth and liberal education; the other was the son of a tinker, who had only a common school education and who from boyhood was forced to work for a living. Milton produced a poem nearly every line of which is rich in allusions to classical literature and mythology; Bunyan wrote an allegory, as simple in style as the English Bible, but which was destined to have a sale in English-speaking countries second only to the Bible itself, from which its inspiration was drawn.

Milton knew many lands and peoples; he was one of the great scholars of all ages, and in literary craftsmanship has never been surpassed by any writer. Bunyan never traveled beyond the bounds of England; he knew only two books well, the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs, yet he produced one of the great literary masterpieces which profoundly influenced his own time and which has been the delight of thousands of readers in England and America, because of the simple human nature and the tremendous spiritual force that he put into the many trials and the ultimate victory of Christian.

John Bunyan was born in 1628 near Bedford, England, and he lived for sixty years. His father was a tinker, a calling that was held in some disrepute because of its association with wandering gypsies. The boy was a typical Saxon, large and strong, full of rude health; but by the time he was ten years old he began to show signs of an imagination that would have wrecked a weaker body. Bred in the rigid Calvinism of his day, he began to have visions of the consequences of sin; he began to see that he was perilously near to the consuming fire which the preachers declared was in store for all who did not repent and seek the Lord.

The stories of his early years remind one of the experiences of Rousseau. Between the man of supreme literary genius and the epileptic there is a very narrow line, and more than once Bunyan seemed about to overstep this danger line. At seventeen the youth joined the Parliamentary army and saw some service. The sudden death of the soldier next to him in the ranks made a profound impression upon his sensitive mind; he seemed to see in it the hand of the Lord which had been stretched out to protect him.

On his return from the wars he married a country girl, who brought him as a marriage portion a large number of pious books. These Bunyan devoured, and they served as fuel to his growing sense of the terrible results of sin. Of his spiritual wrestlings in those days he has given a very good account in Grace Abounding, a highly colored autobiography in which he is represented as the chief of sinners, driven to repentance by the power of God. The fact is that he was a very fine young Puritan and his only offense lay in his propensity to profane swearing.

Out of this mental and moral turmoil Bunyan emerged as a wayside preacher who finally came to address small country congregations. Soon he became known far and wide as a man who could move audiences to tears, so strong was the feeling that he put into his words, so convincing was the picture that he drew of his own evil life and the peace that came when he accepted the mercy of the Lord. He went up and down the countryside and he preached in London.

Finally, in 1660, he was arrested under the new law which forbade dissenters to preach and was thrown into Bedford jail. He had then a wife and three children, the youngest a blind girl whom he loved more than the others. To provide for them he learned to make lace. The authorities were anxious to free Bunyan because his life had been without reproach and he had made many friends, but he refused to take the oath that he would not preach. For twelve years he remained in Bedford jail, and it is in these years that he conceived the plot of Pilgrim's Progress and wrote most of the book, although it was three years after his release before the volume was finally in form for publication.

Bunyan in a rhymed introduction to the book apologizes for the story form, which he feared would injure the work in the eyes of his Puritan neighbors, but the allegory proved a great success from the outset. No less than ten editions were issued in fourteen years. It made Bunyan one of the best known men of his time and it added greatly to his influence as a preacher. He wrote a number of other works, including a fine allegory, The Holy War, but none of these approached the Pilgrim's Progress in popularity.

When one takes up the Pilgrim's Progress in these days it is always with something of the same feeling that the book inspired in childhood. Then it ranked with the Arabian Nights as a thrilling story, though there were many tedious passages in which Christian debated religious topics with his companions. Still, despite these drawbacks, the book was a great story, full of the keenest human interest, with Christian struggling through dangers on every hand; with Giant Despair and Apollyon as real as the terrible genii of Arabian story, and with Great-heart a champion who more than matched the mysterious Black Knight in Ivanhoe.

Bunyan, out of his spiritual wrestlings, imagined his conflict with the powers of evil as a journey which he made Christian take from his home town along the straight and narrow way to the Shining Gate. Reproduced from his own imaginative sufferings were the flounderings in the Slough of Despond and his experiences in the Vale of Humiliation, the Valley of the Shadow of Death and in Vanity Fair, where he lost the company of Faithful.

It is difficult, unless one is very familiar with the book, to separate the adventures in the first part from those in the second part, which deals with the experiences of Christiana and her children. It is in this second part that Great-heart, the knightly champion of the faith, appears, as well as the muck-raker, who has been given so much prominence in these last few years as the type of the magazine writers, who are eager to drag down into the dirt the reputations of prominent men. In fact, Bunyan's allegory has been a veritable mine to all literary people who have followed him. For a hundred years his book remained known only to the poor for whom it was written. Then its literary merits were perceived, and since then it has held its place as second only to the Bible in English-speaking lands.

Bunyan, in his years in prison, studied the Bible so that his mind was saturated with its phraseology, and he knew it almost by heart. Every page of Pilgrim's Progress bears witness to this close and loving study. The language of the Bible is often used, but it blends so perfectly with the simple, direct speech of Bunyan's characters that it reads like his own work. The only thing that betrays it is the reference to book and verse. A specimen of Bunyan's close reading of the Bible may be found in this list of curiosities in the museum of the House Beautiful on the Delectable Mountains:

"They showed him Moses' rod; the hammer and nail with which Jael slew Sisera; the pitcher, trumpets and lamps, too, with which Gideon put to flight the armies of Midian. Then they showed him the ox's goad wherewith Shambar slew six hundred men. They showed him also the jaw-bone with which Samson did such mighty feats. They showed him, moreover, the sling and stone with which David slew Goliath of Gath; and the sword, also, with which their Lord will kill the Man of Sin, in the day that he shall rise up to prey."

And here is a part of Bunyan's description of the fight between Apollyon and Christian in the Valley of Humiliation:

"Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said: 'I am void of fear in this matter; prepare thyself to die, for I swear by my infernal den that thou shalt go no further; here will I spill thy soul.' * * * In this combat no man can imagine, unless he had seen and heard as I did, what yelling and hideous roaring Apollyon made, nor what sighs and groans burst from Christian's heart. I never saw him all the while give so much as one pleasant look, till he perceived he had wounded Apollyon with his two-edged sword; then, indeed, he did smile, and look upward; but it was the dreadfulest sight that I ever saw."

The miracle of this book is that it should have been written by a man who had little education and small knowledge of the great world, yet that it should be a literary masterpiece in the simple perfection of its form, and that it should be so filled with wisdom that the wisest man may gain something from its pages. Literary genius has never been shown in greater measure than in this immortal allegory by the poor tinker of Bedfordshire.

OldDr. Johnson andHis Boswell

His Great Fame Due to His Admirer's Biography – Boswell's Work Makes the Doctor the Best Known Literary Man of His Age

The last of the worthies of old English literature is Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose monumental figure casts a long shadow over most of his contemporaries. The man whom Boswell immortalized and made as real to us today as though he actually lived and worked and browbeat his associates in our own time, is really the last of the great eighteenth century writers in style, in ways of thought and in feeling. Gibbon, who was his contemporary, appears far more modern than Johnson because, in his religious views and in his way of appraising historical characters, the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a hundred years in advance of his time. Dr. Johnson therefore may be regarded as the last of the worthies who have made English literature memorable in the eighteenth century, and his work may fittingly conclude this series of articles on the good old books.

Yet in considering Dr. Johnson's work we have the curious anomaly of a man who is not only far greater than anything he ever wrote, but who depends for his fame upon a biographer much inferior to himself in scholarship and in literary ability. The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell Esquire is the title of the book that has preserved for us one of the most interesting figures in all literature. Commonly it is known as Boswell's Johnson. Though written over a hundred years ago, it still stands unrivaled among the world's great biographies.

Boswell had in him the makings of a great reporter, for no detail of Johnson's life, appearance, talk or manner escaped his keen eye, and for years it was his custom to set down every night in notebooks all the table talk and other conversation of the great man whom he worshiped. In this way Boswell gathered little by little a mass of material which he afterward recast into his great work. Jotted down when every word was fresh in his memory, these conversations by the old doctor are full of meat.

If Johnson was ever worsted in the wit combats that took place at his favorite club, then Boswell fails to record it; but hundreds of instances are given of the doughty old Englishman's rough usage of an adversary when he found himself hard pressed. As Goldsmith aptly put it: "If his pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt end."

Samuel Johnson was the son of a book-seller of Litchfield. He was born in 1709 and died in 1784. His early education was confined to a grammar school of his native town. The boy was big of figure, but he early showed traces of a scrofulous taint, which not only disfigured his face but made him morose and inclined to depression. But his mind was very keen and he read very widely. When nineteen years of age he went up to Oxford and surprised his tutors by the extent of his miscellaneous reading.

His college life was wretched because of his poverty, and the historical incident of the youth's scornful rejection of a new pair of shoes, left outside his chamber door, is probably true. Certain it is that he could not have fitted into the elegant life of most of the undergraduates of Pembroke College, although today his name stands among the most distinguished of its scholars. In 1731 he left Oxford without a degree, and, after an unhappy experience as a school usher, he married a widow old enough to be his mother and established a school to prepare young men for college. Among his pupils was David Garrick, who became the famous actor. In 1737 Johnson, in company with Garrick, tramped to London. In the great city which he came to love he had a very hard time for years. He served as a publisher's hack and he knew from personal experience the woes of Grub-street writers.

His first literary hit was made with a poem, London, and this was followed by the Life of Richard Savage, in which he told of the miseries of the writer without regular employment. Next followed his finest poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes. Then Johnson started a weekly paper, The Rambler, in imitation of The Spectator, and ran it regularly for about two years. For some time Johnson had been considering the publication of a dictionary of the English language. He issued his prospectus in 1747 and inscribed the work to Lord Chesterfield. He did not secure any help from the noble lord, and when Chesterfield showed some interest in the work seven years after, Johnson wrote an open letter to the nobleman, which is one of the masterpieces of English satire. In 1762 Johnson accepted a Government pension of £300 a year, and after that he lived in comparative comfort. The best literary work of his later years was his Lives of the Poets, which extended to ten volumes.

Johnson was not an accurate scholar, nor was he a graceful writer, like Goldsmith; but he had a force of mind and a vigor of language that made him the greatest talker of his day. He was one of the founders of a literary club in 1764 which numbered among its members Gibbon, Burke, Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds and other famous men of genius. Though he was unpolished in manners, ill dressed and uncouth, Johnson was easily the leader in the debates of this club, and he remained its dominating force until the day of his death.

The best idea of Dr. Johnson's verse may be gained from London and The Vanity of Human Wishes. These are not great poetry. The verse is of the style which Pope produced, but which the modern taste rejects because of its artificial form. Yet there are many good lines in these two poems and they reflect the author's wide reading as well as his knowledge of human life. The Lives of the Poets are far better written than Johnson's early work, and they contain many interesting incidents and much keen criticism. These, with some of Johnson's prayers and his letter to Lord Chesterfield, include about all that the modern reader will care to go through.

The Chesterfield letter is a little masterpiece of satire. Johnson, it must be borne in mind, had dedicated the prospectus of his Dictionary to Chesterfield, but he had been virtually turned away from this patron's door with the beggarly gift of £10. For seven years he wrought at his desk, often hungry, ragged and exposed to the weather, without any assistance; but when the end was in sight and the great work was passing through the press, the noble lord deigned to write two review articles, praising the work. And here is a bit of Dr. Johnson's incisive sarcasm in the famous letter to the selfish nobleman:

"Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it."

Of Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson only a few words can be said. To treat it properly one should have an entire article like this, for it is one of the great books of the world. A good preparation for taking it up is the reading of the reviews of it by Macaulay and Carlyle. These two essays, among the most brilliant of their authors' work, give striking pictures of Boswell and of the man who was the dictator of English literature for thirty years. Then take up Boswell himself in such a handy edition as that in Everyman's Library, in two volumes. Read the book in spare half hours, when you are not hurried, and you will get from it much pleasure as well as profit. It is packed with amusement and information, and it is very modern in spirit, in spite of its old-fashioned style.

Through its pages you get a very strong impression of old Dr. Johnson. You laugh at the man's gross superstitions, at his vanity, his greediness at table, his absurd judgments of many of his contemporaries, his abuse of pensioners and his own quick acceptance of a pension. At all these foibles and weaknesses you smile, yet underneath them was a genuine man, like Milton, full of simplicity, honesty, reverence and humility – a man greater than any literary work that he produced or spoken word that he left behind him. You laugh at his groanings, his gluttony, his capacity for unlimited cups of hot tea; but you recall with tears in your eyes his pathetic prayers, his kindness to the old and crippled pensioners whom he fed and clothed, and his pilgrimage to Uttoxeter to stand bare-headed in the street, as penance for harsh words spoken to his father in a fit of boyish petulance years before.

RobinsonCrusoe and Gulliver'sTravels

Masterpieces of Defoe and Swift Widely Read – Two Writers of Genius Whose Stories Have Delighted Readers for Hundreds of Years

Two famous books that seem to follow naturally after Pilgrim's Progress are Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Not to be familiar with these two English masterpieces is to miss allusions which occur in everyday reading even of newspapers and magazines. Probably not one American boy in one thousand is ignorant of Robinson Crusoe. It is the greatest book of adventure for boys that has ever been written, because it relates the novel and exciting experiences of a castaway sailor on a solitary island in a style so simple that a child of six is able to understand it. Yet the mature reader who takes up Robinson Crusoe will find it full of charm, because he can see the art of the novelist, revealed in that passion for minute detail to which we have come to give the name of realism, and that spiritual quality which makes the reader a sharer in the fears, the loneliness and the simple faith of the sailor who lived alone for so many years on Juan Fernandez Island.

In all English literature there is nothing finer than the descriptions of Robinson Crusoe's solitary life, his delight in his pets, and his care and training of Friday. Swift's work, on the other hand, is not for children, although young readers may enjoy the ludicrous features of Gulliver's adventures. Back of these is the bitter satire on all human traits which no one can appreciate who has not had hard experience in the ways of the world. These two books are the masterpieces of their authors, but if any one has time to read others of their works he will be repaid, for both made noteworthy contributions to the literature that endures.