Lives of the English Poets : Waller, Milton, Cowley

Milton has the reputation of having been in his youth eminently beautiful, so as to have been called the lady of his college.  His hair, which was of a light brown, parted at the fore-top, and hung down upon his shoulders, according to the picture which he has given of Adam.  He was, however, not of the heroic stature, but rather below the middle size, according to Mr. Richardson, who mentions him as having narrowly escaped from being “short and thick.”  He was vigorous and active, and delighted in the exercise of the sword, in which he is related to have been eminently skilful.  His weapon was, I believe, not the rapier, but the back-sword, of which he recommends the use in his book on education.

His eyes are said never to have been bright; but, if he was a dexterous fencer, they must have been once quick.

His domestic habits, so far as they are known, were those of a severe student.  He drank little strong drink of any kind, and fed without excess in quantity, and in his earlier years without delicacy of choice.  In his youth he studied late at night; but afterwards changed his hours, and rested in bed from nine to four in the summer and five in the winter.  The course of his day was best known after he was blind.  When he first rose, he heard a chapter in the Hebrew Bible, and then studied till twelve; then took some exercise for an hour; then dined, then played on the organ, and sang, or heard another sing, then studied till six; then entertained his visitors till eight; then supped, and, after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water, went to bed.

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 heardWhat 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 Phœbus, Neptune and Æolus, 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 aërial 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.