Criticism
A poet at once so learned and so great as Milton inevitably invited criticism. The first and most generous of his critics was his great rival Dryden, who, in a few words of the preface to The State of Innocence, published the year after Milton’s death, led the note of praise, which has been echoed ever since by speaking of Paradise Lost as “one of the greatest, most noble and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced.” The next great name in the list is that of Addison, who contributed a series of papers on Milton to the Spectator in 1712. Like all criticism except the work of the supreme masters, they are written too exclusively from the point of view of their own day to retain more than a small fraction of their value after two hundred years have passed. But they are of considerable historical interest and may still be read with pleasure, like everything written by Addison. A less sympathetic but finer piece of work is the critical part of Johnson’s famous Life. It is full of crudities of every sort, such as the notorious remark that “no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure had he not known the author”; and perhaps nothing Johnson over wrote displayed more nakedly the narrow limits of his appreciation of poetry. But, in spite of all its defects, it exhibits its writer’s great gifts; and its absolute and unshrinking sincerity, its half-reluctant utterance of some of the truest praise ever spoken of Milton, its profound knowledge of the way in which the human mind approaches both literature and life, will always preserve it as one of the most interesting criticisms which Milton has provoked. Johnson’s friend, Thomas Warton, in his edition of the minor poems issued in 1785, led the way to an understanding of much in Milton to which Johnson and his school were entirely blind. This movement has continued ever since, and is seen in the immense influence Milton had upon the poets of the nineteenth century, especially upon Wordsworth and Keats; an influence of exactly the opposite sort to that which he exercised with such disastrous effect upon many poets of the century immediately succeeding his own. It is also seen in the finer intelligence of the critical studies of his work. These are far too many to mention here. Among the best are Hazlitt’s Lecture on Shakspeare and Milton in his Lectures on the English Poets; Matthew Arnold’s speech at the unveiling of a Milton memorial, printed in the second series of his Essays in Criticism; Sir Walter Raleigh’s volume, Milton, published in 1900, and The Epic, by Lascelles Abercrombie, 1914, which is full of fine and suggestive criticism of Milton. Milton’s Prosody by Robert Bridges, 1901, is the best study of the metre and scansion of Milton’s later poems, especially of Paradise Lost.