is best in civil life advances with all that is most pure and fine in the arts is a commonplace. As we shall see, whatever interest he took, or failed to take, in the graphic or the plastic arts, whatever he knew of music, or thought of poetry, he was convinced that in the right performance of their function these all serve to beautify and purify the social organism. Their evolution is bound up with the evolution of the State; upon its strength and order they rely for support; to its freedom and vitality they steadily contribute. Therefore to betray the arts by misuse, by a lowering of standards, a confusion of aims, an indifference to their higher propriety, or an ignorance of their far-reaching power, is simultaneously to betray mankind in a worse disaster than could arise from negligence in any other field of action.

CHAPTER IV

MILTON AND THE DRAMA

At the close of the 'sunshine holiday' and rural merrymaking in L'Allegro, young Milton turns for more thoughtful diversion to the 'learned sock' of Jonson and the 'woodnotes wild' of Shakespeare. In Il Penseroso, he forsakes the 'deluding joys' of the comic stage for the melancholy delights of 'gorgeous Tragedy'; and in the first Elegy, he divides his attention between Roman comedy and Attic and English tragedy. Thus the dramatic allusions in his later works' were the reminiscences, and the dramatic preferences of his later life were the outgrowth, of an early catholic enjoyment of dramatic literature. On the whole, his interest in the drama seems always to have been more literary than histrionic, but Arcades and Comus were, of course, intended to be shown, and in his writings are what one of his biographers called ‘a serious and just apology for frequenting playhouses,' and a number of direct references to the theatre. A few lines in the first Elegy seemingly refer

'E.g., Works 3.261; 8.11.

John Toland, The Life of John Milton, p. 32. For the 'apology' alluded to see An Apology, Works 3.266.

to the playhouses on the Bankside in London; and certain remarks in the prose about mute persons on the stage,1 creaking doors in the scenery,2 and hissing in the audience,3 reflect an acquaintance with the practices and conditions of contemporary theatrical representation. Moreover, Milton, while still a Cambridge undergraduate, upheld an exacting standard for actors, and sat among ‘the judicious.' 'While they acted, and overacted,' he writes, 'among other young scholars I was a spectator; they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and to make up the Atticism, they were out, and I hissed.' Also he betrays an interest in the still cruder exhibitions of mimetic art in popular shows, pantomimes, and May-Day revels-whether a puppet Adam hitched through the simple action of a motion, an antic Hobnail capered in a morris," or the "hey pass' of some jugglers at a town fair attracted an astonished audience, the gaping crowd and gaudy costume, 'the inexplicable dumb-shows and noise,' alone imparting to the latter performance any kinship with the art of mimicry.

Trans. by Cowper:

Here too I visit, or to smile or weep,
The winding theatre's majestic sweep;
The grave or gay colloquial scene recruits
My spirits, spent in learning's long pursuits;

I gaze, and grieve, still cherishing my grief. At times, e'en bitter tears yield sweet relief. 1Hist. Brit. (Bk. 4), Works 5.177.

1 Defence (Preface), Works 8.6. Eikonoclastes (1), Works 3.339. See below, p. 142, n. 1 An Apology, Works 3.268. Areopagitica, Works 4.418. 7 Colasterion, Works 4.365. Animadversions, Works 3.210.

On the allusions to genuine drama in L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and the first Elegy, we simply give the gist of various commentaries. The comic characters enumerated in the Elegy1 are identified as largely Terentian. The patronus (line 31), translated by Cowper as,

Some coifed brooder o'er a ten years' cause,

is referred to a Latin play by Ruggles, called Ignoramus.2 The youth (line 45), dying‘hapless on his bridal day,' suggests both Sophocles' Haemon and Shakespeare's Romeo; the ghost in the next lines may call to mind the Senecan drama, or Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Richard III; and the Greek tragedies are the sources of the final references. The following passage from Il Penseroso limits tragedy to royal themes, and primarily refers to the Greek classics:

Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy

In sceptred pall come sweeping by,
Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line,
Or the tale of Troy divine,

Or what (though rare) of later age
Ennobled hath the buskined stage.3

L'Allegro, we have seen, refers to the‘learned sock' of Jonson. The epithet needs no comment and has aroused no protest. But as people often take for precise verdicts the chance-allusions of one great man to another, the two lines devoted to Shakespeare have not been so quietly received. When Milton, in words suited to the capricious tone of his lyric, calls Shakespeare 'Fancy's child,' and

'Cf. Cowper's translation, lines 31-38.

The play probably was not produced in London, and the date of composition is unknown, but there was a translation by one R. C., printed at London in 1662.

Il Pens. 97-102.

Shakespeare's romantic comedy 'wild' and native 'woodnotes,' not all readers are pleased. Many, their enthusiasm half-met, think the praise so faint as to be damning. Others understand the word 'fancy," and consider Shakespeare's display of that quality his greatest charm; these are satisfied by Milton's tribute, and find it wholly discriminating. Warton, in editing Milton's juvenile poems, finds a way, through the words of the poet's nephew, to amplify the two lines: 'There is good reason,' he writes, 'to suppose that Milton threw many additions and corrections into the Theatrum Poetarum, a book published by his nephew, Edward Phillips, in 1675. It contains criticisms far above the taste of that period. Among these is the following judgment of Shakespeare, which was not then, I believe, the general opinion, and which perfectly coincided both with the sentiments and with the words of the text [in L'Allegro]." This 'judgment' Warton condenses; I give it in full:

William Shakespeare, the glory of the English stage, whose nativity at Stratford upon Avon is the highest honor that town can boast of. From an actor of tragedies and comedies, he became a maker; and such a maker that, though some others may perhaps pretend to a more

In the notes to R. C. Brown's English Poems by John Milton, Archbishop Trench is quoted as follows: "Fancy's Child" may pass, seeing that "fancy" and imagination were not effectually desynonymized when Milton wrote; nay "fancy" was to him the greater name.' A discussion of the meaning of 'fancy' in the seventeenth century does not properly belong to the theme of this essay, but we may note that the word, besides its literary signification, had a technical value in the vocabulary of Elizabethan psychology. See P. L. 4.802-803; 5.113; 8.188, 460-461, etc.; and compare Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy 1.1.2.7. See also Dowden, Elizabethan Psychology, in Essays Modern and Elizabethan, pp. 320 ff.

2 Poems upon Several Occasions, English, Italian, and Latin, ed. by Warton, p. 60.