Exc. C] ARMADA EPIC 335 Surely, then, when we consider not only the subjectmatter of the epic, so congenial to Milton's tastes, as being the triumph of his own countrymen against tyranny and superstition, but especially when we note the remarkable personifications and supernatural machinery which pervades the Armada epic from first to last, we shall not, I think, fail to recognise our illustrious poet's hand and style. Indeed, who else was there in England at that time. to treat such great themes in such way? If we unfold the scroll of contemporary fame, where shall we find the writer that we seek? However long the scroll may be, our selected authors must of necessity be few and far between. For mark how much our list is limited. The Great Unknown must be: (1) A Latinist of the first rank; (2) of sublime and lofty imagination; (3) of serious and religious mood, averse to literary quips and cranks; (4) who cares not for the fame of authorship, but keeps his precious MSS. locked in his desk for years; (5) who writes for public use and public profit; (6) who takes the Scriptures as his rule, and not the Fathers or the Church; (7) one who shows himself, again and again, in a higher sense than it was said of Spinoza," a God-intoxicated man," and one who claimed "the invisible things" as a poet's own province; and (8) a man of thoroughly independent mind, who had a religion of his own. Who is sufficient for all these things? Who can satisfy, these varied requirements? I think there is but one. Run through the following list of names, and try them by the eight-fold test above: James Duport, Bishop Hall (of the Mundus Alter et Idem, if, indeed, he wrote that), Thomas May, Francis Rous, Sir Henry Wotton, Thomas Selden, Bishop Usher, Archbishop Sancroft, Cowley, Marvell Edmund Waller, Phineas Fletcher, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (died 1648), Old Alexander Ross (a capable Latin poet, but qualification 4 cancels him), R. Crashawe, Thomas Farnabie. Of all these good Latinists (a sine quâ non, of course) Phineas Fletcher seems to me to stand the tests best. But he was a Royalist, an anagrammatist, a parish priest who signed his registers last in 1648, and was heard of no more, and we have no record that he took any special interest in education or the universities. Thomas May was an excellent Latin hexameter maker, and was equal to writing the Armada epic; but, alas! he was, as Wood tells us, "a débauché ad omnia" and a bit of an atheist to boot-this settles him. Crashawe, another fine Latin scholar and sacred epigrammatist, author of one of the neatest pentameters ever made— Lympha pudica Deum vidit et erubuit was capable enough, but he was a Roman Catholic-that settles him; and so on through the whole list. But some doubting reader may retort upon me with an unpleasant quid pro quo. I mean that somebody may presently discover something in our Romance which absolutely upsets the Miltonic authorship, and may say to me of Milton, "That settles him." I have often contemplated such a catastrophe. It is, of course, quite possible; no man's literary acumen is infallible—“ not even a Junior Fellow of Trinity." But as yet I cannot see from what quarter the blow is to come, and therefore I hopefully send forth my book to the discerning criticism of the Republic of Letters. I say hopefully advisedly-I do not say confidently, for there may be gross incongruities of thought and diction in our Romance which would put Milton "out of court" at once and palpably, and I may have overlooked them. There is no reason why some one should not treat Milton's claims as I treated Crashawe's and May's. Milton can be "settled," for I once settled him myself. It was in this way. 1 There was a book published in 1697, containing a new poem attributed to Milton. I looked up this poem one day, and had not read far before I came to a line beginning with these words: "Noah be d-d." "Ah!" said I, "that settles him." 1 Poems on the Affairs of State, written by the Greatest Wits of the Age (London, 1697). Exc. C] ARMADA EPIC 337 Finally, there is a good Miltonic proof in our epic-viz. an undesigned coincidence of a distinct character. In Milton's third elegy, written when he was only seventeen, we find this line: Flevit et amissos Belgia tota duces (ie. "All Belgium wept for leaders that were lost "). But instead of using Belgium, which was the right name of the country, and had been so from Julius Caesar's time and earlier, Milton uses Belgia. His great literary opponent Salmasius does not fail to attack him for this in his very rare Responsio ad Johannem Miltonum, which he never lived to publish, but which was sent forth by his son in 1660. "Who is this Milton?" says Salmasius; "no one heard of him till his Defensio pro populo Anglicano. He boasts to his father that he was born a poet; but he is as bad a poet as he is a citizen, for he breaks the laws of metre as well as the laws of his country, and defies correct Latinity. Why, he puts Belgia for Belgium; he might just as well put Gallium for Gallia," etc. Now, the remarkable coincidence is that in the Armada epic, i. 56, we have Mars telling King Philip of Spain that among the nations none can resist his might, with the one exception of Belgium : Una tuos excussit Belgia froenos and here again is that very word-that atrocious, peccant word-which raised the great scholar's scorn. Surely it is Milton who is the careless sinner, and no one else. Belgia is not to be found in the dictionary, but what matter that to Milton? He who had a religion of his own, a Pythagorean philosophy of his own, and a soul of his own (a "soul apart "), might well have a dictionary of his own too. And so he had, especially for proper names, whether of angels, devils, places, or countries. It was in this dictionary of his that he found the names for the four horses of Night-Melanchaetes, Siope, Acherontaeus, and Phrix. Cf. In Quintum Novembris, 71, and the plant "Haemony" in Comus. But more will be said in the Excursus O (Belgia). VOL. I. 22 Whether Milton wrote the Armada epic at college or at Horton it does not seem possible to show with any certainty. But what Mr. Edmund Gosse remarks in the Atlantic Monthly for May, 1900, is much to the point: "He [Milton] had become conscious of a mind made and set wholly on the accomplishment of greatest things. Nor was he much in doubt what form his work should take, 'in English or other tongue prosing or versing, but chiefly this later, the style by certain vital signs being likely to live.' In this solemn confidence, in this stately temper of self-consecration to the art of poetry, Milton left Cambridge toward the close of 1632." Now, the "other tongue" would of course be Latin for although Milton could write Italian sonnets, there are no signs of his meditating any prolonged work in that language. I hold, therefore, that this Armada epic and that pastoral drama of Divine love which ends the Romance are fragments preserved to us of his great idea in college and Horton days. Later on, in 1639, his visit to Italy dispelled the idea as far as any great Latin achievement was concerned, and he turned his thoughts to his native language, but kept his youthful hobby in his desk, till it was "drawn in 1648. EXCURSUS D TERROR'S LAUGH (ARMADA EPIC) THE imagery of this passage is so unusually grand and lofty that it will be worth while to consider it more closely, and to compare it with similar fine passages of other poets. This will require the original Latin. We must remember that the angelic messenger, sent by Christ, had summoned the Awful Form from his weird northern cave, and had delivered to him by word of mouth the high commands of Heaven against the Spanish fleet. Then comes the passage in question : Tali sermone ciebat Laetantem nimium tantos miscere tumultus : Pone premens, vasti sequitur super avia ponti, etc. This piece of compressed sublimity I have expanded thus: Than these no words could better please or move Of echoing laughter long and loud, far worse |