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and have lost no opportunity of asserting simultaneity. No one can affirm that Mr. Wallace has shown the faintest inclination of the kind, while no one can deny that, if he had followed the clamorous path, his name would have been more widely known and more popularly associated with hatural selection than has been, in fact, the case.

It is a gratuitous assertion on the part of Professor Huxley to say I have suggested that Mr. Darwin's eminence is due to Mr. Wallace's modesty, in any other sense than what I have now explained— namely, that had Mr. Wallace put himself more prominently forward, he would have been seen more distinctly by the popular eye, an assertion no one can question.

As a fact, I believe that Mr. Wallace, in the passage quoted by Professor Huxley, allows his modesty to deceive him. From what I know of Mr. Wallace, I venture to affirm he underrates his powers, and I am convinced he could have written as good a defence of natural selection as even the "Origin of Species." There are not wanting those who, though they have carefully studied Mr. Darwin's work, only fully understood his theory when presented to their mind in the clear, lucid, and admirable writings of Mr. Wallace.

ST. GEORGE MIVART.

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THE critic who would find some single expression which resumes the tendency of each of an artist's works, or an expression which resumes the tendency of all his works taken together, is commonly engaged in falsifying the truth of criticism, and in all cases runs a risk of losing the faithfulness of sympathy, the disengagedness of intelligence, the capacity for assuming various spiritual attitudes which should belong to him. A man will not be comprehended in a formula, nor will the work of a man. But in the case of Milton, and those who resemble him in his method as an artist, this doctrinaire style of criticism is at least not illegitimate. No poem, of course, is reducible to an abstract statement or idea; yet the statement, the idea, may be the germ from which the poem has sprung. A tree glorious with all its leaves and blossoming is much more than the seed in which it lay concealed; yet from the seed, with favourable earth and skies, it grew. Milton never sang as the bird sings, with spontaneous pleasure, through an impulse unobserved and unmodified by the intellect. The intention of each poem is clearly conceived by himself; the form is elaborated with a conscious study of effects. There is in him none of the delicious imprévu of Shakspeare. Milton's nature never reacted simply and directly, finding utterance in a lyrical cry, when impressions from the world of nature or of society aroused the faculty of song. The reaction was

checked, and did not find expression until he had considered his own. feelings, and modified or altered them upon the suggestions of his intellect. Milton's passion is great, but deliberate, approved by his judgment, and he never repents, feeling that repentance would be a confession, not only of sin, but of extreme weakness and fatuity. He is not imaginative in the highest-in Shakspeare's-manner. Each character of his mask, his drama, his epics, is an ideal character-a Miltonic abstraction incarnated. He himself is, as much as may be, an ideal personage: his life does not grow in large, vital unconsciousness, but is modelled, sometimes laboriously, after an idea. And consequently his life, like his writings, lacks the imprévu. He resolves in early youth that it shall be a great life, and he carries out his resolution unfalteringly from first to last. He tends his own genius, and observes it. He waits for its maturity, and watches. He accepts his powers as trusts from God, and will neither go beyond nor fall short of them. He is noble, but we are sometimes painfully aware that it is a nobleness prepense. He loves to imagine himself in heroic attitudes-as defender of England and of liberty, as the afflicted champion of his people, fallen on evil days. His very recreation is pre-arranged-Mild heaven ordains a time for pleasure.*

In all this Milton was unlike Shakspeare; and as the men differed, so did the times. During the brighter years of the Elizabethan period, when life-life of the intellect, life of the imagination, religious life, life of the nation, and life of the individual-with one great bound bad broken through and over the medieval dykes and dams, and was rushing onwards, somewhat turbid, somewhat violent, yet gaining a law and a majestic order from the mere weight of the advancing mass of waters-at that fortunate time to live was the chief thing, not to adopt and adhere to a theory of living.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!"

At the time when Milton reached manhood, the unity of this new life of England was broken, and there were two conspicuous theories of life, to one of which each man was compelled to attach himself; two experiments of living, of which each person must assay one; two doctrines in religion, two tendencies in politics, two systems of social conduct and of manners. The large insouciance of the earlier fashion of living was gone; everyone could tell why be was what he was.

Thus the character of the period fell in with Milton's natural tendency towards the conscious modelling of his life as a man, and

*Sonnet to Cyriac Skinner.

of his works as an artist after certain ideals, types, abstractions. It is not a little remarkable that we have the authority and example of Milton himself for applying to his writings that criticism which looks for an intention or express purpose as the germinal centre of each, and which attempts to discover an unity in them all, resulting from the constant presence of one dominant idea. In the "Defensio Secunda" Milton looks back over his more important prose works, and he finds that they all move in a harmonious system around a central conception of liberty. An ideal of liberty was that which presided over his public life, his life in the world of action, and the books which were meant to bear upon the world of action refer to that ideal. There are three forms or species of liberty, Milton tells us, which are essential to the happiness of man as a member of societyreligious liberty, domestic, civil. From an early period the first of these had occupied his thoughts. "What he had in view when he hesitated to become a clergyman," Professor Masson remarks, "was, in all probability, less the letter of the articles to be subscribed, and of the oaths to be taken, than the general condition of the Church at that particular time." Prelatical tyranny, and the theories by which it was justified, inspired the indignant pamphlets to write which Milton resolutely put poetry aside. Domestic liberty "involves three material questions-the conditions of the conjugal tie, the education of children, and the free publication of one's thoughts." Each of these was made a subject of distinct consideration-in "Tetrachordon" and other writings on the question of divorce, in the Letter addressed to Samuel Hartlib on education, and in the Speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing. Were it one of Milton's critics, and not Milton himself, who had thus classed the Areopagitica" amongst the treatises in defence of domestic liberty, or who had represented the letter to Hartlib as concerned with liberty in any of its forms, should we not be ready to declare that he had departed from the sincerity of criticism, and was forcing the author's works at any cost to accord with a theory of his own? Yet there is no forcing here; there is only the compulsion put upon Milton himself by his dominant idea. Civil liberty occupied him last. Не thought at an earlier season that it might be left to the magistrates. It was not until events had proved that his pen might be wielded as a powerful weapon in its defence, that the "Iconoclastes," the " Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio," and the "Defensio Secunda' were produced.

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Thus we are directed by Milton himself to observe how the great cycle of his prose works revolves around this controlling idea of liberty. One is tempted to go on, and endeavour to apply this

"Defensio Secunda."

Would it be

authorized kind of criticism to Milton's poetry. surprising, or not rather a thing to be expected, if a certain unity of idea became apparent in the work of the poet as in that of the pamphleteer? Milton being what he was, a man governed by ideas, and those ideas being persistent and few-Milton's poetry at the same time dealing with moral truth, and the abiding meanings of things might we not naturally look for a single chief tendency, a permanent presence of one dominant conception in all his poetical self-utterance, epic and dramatic?

Milton's inner life, of which his poetry is an expression, as his prose is an expression of his outer, public life, was an unceasing tending from evil to good, from base or common to noble, a perpetual aspiration to moral greatness. Not less than Goethe he studied self-culture. But while Goethe, with his deliberate Hellenism, made man an end to himself, Milton, over whom the Hebrew spirit kept jealous guard, considered man at his highest as the creature of God. And in the hierarchy of human faculties Milton assigned the place of supreme authority, as Goethe never did, to those powers which lie upon the Godward side of our humanity, to those perceptions and volitions which are concerned with moral good and evil. The impartiality of Goethe's self-culture was undisturbed by any vivid sense of sin. No part of his being seemed to him in extreme peril from spiritual foes, no part appeared the object of a fierce assault; it was easy for him to transfer his attention serenely from this side of his nature to that, while with resolute and calm persistence he strove to attain completeness of self-development. To Goethe the world was a gymnasium or academy, and life a period of higher education. The peculiarity of Milton's view was, that before him the world lay as a battle-field, life was a warfare against principalities and powers, and the good man a champion of God. The sense of sin never forsook him, nor that of a glorious possibility of virtue. To Goethe nature presented itself as a harmonious group of influences favourable, upon the whole, towards man; what he chiefly feared was a mistake in his plan of culture, the substituting in his lifelong education of a subordinate power or faculty of his nature for the master power. What Milton feared before all else was disloyalty to God, and a consequent hell; and to him nature, in its most significant aspect, was but the scene of an indefatigable antagonism between good and evil. In other words, Milton was essentially a Puritan. In spite of his classical culture, and his Renaissance sense of beauty, he not less than Bunyan saw, as the prime fact of the world, Diabolus at odds with Immanuel. He, as well as Bunyan, beheld a Celestial City and a City of Destruction, standing remote from one another, with hostile rulers. Milton added, as Bunyan also added, that final

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