From the Fortnightly Review.

IT is the fashion of our day to look for the typical man or representative figure of the English commonwealth not so much in the poet who glorified as in the dictator who destroyed it. This is but natural and consistent in such historians as see nothing in the record of our short-lived republic worth admiration or regret but the triumph of a more harsh and earnest form of superstition over one somewhat less hellish in its cast of creed and greatly more graceful in its tone of life, accompanied by the substitution of a stern and steady system of dictatorial rule for the lax and trustless impulse of a treacherous and shifting tyranny; but those whose faith or feeling in the matter of historic patriotism lies deeper than a mere preference for competent over incompetent autocracy must perceive, or at least will believe, that the restoration which they admire as little as any military-minded Neo-Calvinist or Muscovitic imperialist of their time was not so much the doing of James Monk as the work of Oliver Cromwell: a consummation of catastrophe directly rather than indirectly due to the weakness and selfishness of the nominal and temporary protector, the actual and final destroyer of the commonwealth of England. For surely the dying hand which put into Richard Cromwell’s the sceptre of its sway put by that act the crown of England into Monk’s for delivery into Charles the Second’s. And this, if we never have learned it from the evidence of Milton himself, we may learn with equal confidence from Landor’s that Milton surely saw. “He had grown calmer at the close of life, and saw in Cromwell as a fault what he had seen before as a necessity or a virtue.” And therefore is it rather in the loftier, purer, more loyal and more liberal virtue of its poet, than in the dubious and double-faced majesty of its august and imperious dictator, that we should salute the highest and most perfect type of the English republic; dragged down into his own grave by the fatal dead hand of Cromwell, yet surviving after a sort in the figure of the blind man “left upright”—in the phrase of a poet as glorious and a republican as faithful as himself—on the verge and in the shadow of her sepulchre.

  In private matters, or such as belong to the range of ethics rather than of politics, the instinct of Milton seems to me as much truer and finer than the instinct of Dante as his judgment and his conscience were juster, sounder, purer than the conscience or the judgment of Cromwell. Only those disciples in whom congenital idolatry has passed into the stage of acute monomania can maintain that the quality of Dante’s great work is never in any considerable degree impaired by the incessant invasion of merely personal polemics; that the reader is never or but rarely, fatigued and nauseated by the obtrusion and obsession of “verminous fellows,” whom the higher muses at least should be content to leave in the native and natural shelter of that obscene obscurity which alone is proper to such animalcules as make the filth they feed on. There are others beside the “brothel lackeys” of a bastard empire who, as Victor Hugo said once, would desire us to shut our eyes, but compel us to stop our noses.

  No matter what manner of offense may naturally be given by creatures whose very nature is offensive, a man who is duly and soberly conscious of any reason for self-respect will ultimately, as Milton did and Dante did not, determine that personal insolence, whether masked as Caliban or manifest as Thersites, shall draw down no further notice from his hand or foot. There are things unmentionable save by a too faithful pupil or too literal imitator of Swift, which, only for our own sake, we are careful not to spurn as we step over them. Upon such Milton did not hesitate to set his heel, when duly guarded by the thick-soled boot of prose; but, unlike Dante, he never permitted the too fetid contact of their feculence to befoul the sandal of his muse. The reddening knots of his controversial scourge fell only in cadences of prose, or at least but very rarely in brief reverberation of rhythmic numbers, on the noisome nudity exposed as in provocation of its lash by Saumaise or Du Moulin, the literary lackey of a princeling or the cryptonymous railer for his bread.

  This high-souled and haughty respect for the dignity of his natural art should be duly borne in mind whenever we are tempted to dwell somewhat disapprovingly on Milton’s indefatigable and fierce delight in “double-thonging” such equivocal sons of a dubious kennel; though it will not be denied that he spent more strength of arm than he need have wasted on the resonant reiteration of stripes from a deserved but superfluous dog whip, too constantly sent curling about their currish flanks.

  It is certainly no very dignified amusement, no very profitable expenditure of energy or time, to indulge in the easy diversion of making such curs yelp, and watching them writhe under the chastisement which an insulted superior may condescend to inflict, till their foul mouths foam over in futile and furious response, reeking and rabid with virulent froth and exhalations of raging ribaldry. Yet when, like those that swarmed at the heels of Milton, the vermin venture on all possible extremes of personal insult and imputation to which dullness may give ear or malice may give tongue, a man cannot reasonably be held to derogate from the duty and the dignity of self-respect if he spurns or scourges them out of his way. To give these rascals rope is a needless waste of hemp; a spider’s thread, spun from the inner impurity of his own venomous vitals, will suffice for such a creature to hang himself.

  A ground more plausible may seem to exist for a graver charge against Milton than that of a ferocious condescension to take unmerciful notice of such leprous little malignants as these; for the charge of relentless and unmitigable savagery toward the dead, whose misdoings might seem—or to us may seem at this distance—to have been amply expiated by discomfiture and death. Cheap and not over-nice chivalry—the false Florimel who assumes and degrades the appearance of true knightliness of mind and sound nobility of spirit—is ever ready, when tyrants are fallen or when traitors are degraded, to remind us in the shrillest note of reproachful impertinence that “it is ill boasting over dead men.” Ill indeed, and worse than ill, it is when those who could see nothing to blame in Nero, nothing to loathe in Judas, till the moment of ruin which reduced them to suicide, begin to cast stones at the carrion which had been found worthy of their adoration when a pontiff, of their adulation when an emperor. But ill it would also be, abominable and absurd, if the “piteous and unpitied end” of either were to be held as expiation sufficient to reverse the branding judgment or silence the damning voice of history or of poetry; to bid those now be silent out of pitiable pity and hypocritical high-mindedness who did not hesitate, while some among the posthumous revilers, as well as the posthumous champions of these wretches, were prone before the vilest of all idols on their knees like the courtier or on their bellies like the serpent, to call Judas by his name of Iscariot and Nero by his name of Bonaparte.

  The self-confident and self-conscious majesty of Milton’s devotion and dedication to their natural work of all the faculties assigned to him by nature has foolishly enough been objected against him as evidence of his poetic inferiority to Shakespeare. With that unapproachable name no rational man will assert the equality of Milton’s; but if Shakespeare’s claim to superiority rested only on the evidence of his intellectual self-effacement, his modest unconsciousness and humble-minded abnegation or ignorance of his right to put forward any claim whatever, it would be but too easy a task to convict him out of his own mouth, and prove by the avowal of his own pretensions that he can pretend to the credit of no such imbecility. No sandier foundation was ever discovered for a fallacy more futile than this. No man ever lived who had less title than Shakespeare to whatever blessing may be reserved for the poor in spirit. Not even Milton, not even Dante, had less right to say in appeal to God or man, “I am not high-minded.” No man’s writings bear witness more unquestionable that he worked and waited with the haughty patience of self-assured expectation for the inevitable homage of mankind in centuries to come.