325

Milton. His work is full of phrases like these, which

strike and penetrate our minds:

While other animals inactive range,

And of their doings God takes no account.

Of her, who sees when thou art seen most weak.

Evil into the mind of God or man

May come and go.

Even today, man can use such splendid forms and moulds of thought as these, pour his mind into them, and obtain results. For Milton has not only constructed a cosmology: he has reached deeper; he has looked for ultimate reality within the heart of man, and placed the laws of destiny in man's soul and will.

The lesson that emerges from Milton's poems is the same as the lesson of the magnificent series of novels of that modern among the moderns, George Meredith: man's destiny is but the translation into outward events of his inner history; his weaknesses bring catastrophe; his qualities, victory; the God of this world is an internal God; He is the inevitable Force that expresses in outward facts the tendencies of our souls. Meredith said- and Milton might have said:

And:

Forgetful is green Earth, the Gods alone
Remember everlastingly: they strike
Remorselessly, and ever like for like.

By their great memories the Gods are known.

... the Fates are within us. Those which are the forces of the outer world are as shadows to the power we have created within us. . . . It is true that our destiny is of our own weaving."

• Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History: "France, December, 1870." 5 Vittoria, Chap. XLV.

Meredith's ideal of marriage, too, is the same as Milton's:

the senses running their live sap, and the minds companioned, and the spirits made one by the whole natured conjunction ... between the ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools."

Their conceptions of woman are not so different as might appear: Meredith's women, like Diana, generally find their leader in a man; and that is all Milton demands; and Milton admits them to all the privileges Meredith claims for them. It was Milton who said, and Meredith who might have wished to have said:

. . smiles from reason flow

. . and delight to reason joined:"

essential definitions of the Comic Spirit as Meredith conceives it in his Essay on Comedy: the Comic Spirit that flows from intellectual relationship between the sexes, since it is Adam who proposes this ideal to Eve.

Human thought has not left Milton behind, and has still to revere in him, as well as the marvellous poet, the profound thinker. His contact with Spinoza gives us the measure of his strength; his contact with Meredith, that of his lasting value. Those two great minds, so different one from the other, will serve as witnesses to the permanent worth of Milton the thinker.

6 Diana of the Crossways, Chap. XXXVII.
7 Paradise Lost, IX, 239, 243.

APPENDICES

W

APPENDIX A

MILTON'S BLINDNESS

E possess a considerable number of facts that throw light on Milton's health. Unfortunately, the science of Milton's time was not sufficiently advanced to permit of entirely conclusive inferences from the existing documents. We propose, however, to examine the various hypotheses which might explain the known facts, and by the elimination of theories contradicted by our texts to try to reach at least a reasonably probable conclusion.

Let us listen first to Milton himself.

On the 28th of September, 1654 - he had been blind since 1651 the poet addressed to his friend Leonard Philaras, an Athenian then in Paris, who had offered to lay his case before the celebrated Parisian oculist, Dr. Thévenot, a letter in which he described as follows the progress and symptoms of his disease:

It is now, I think, about ten years since I perceived my vision to grow weak and dull; and at the same time I was troubled with pain in my kidneys and bowels, accompanied with flatulency. In the morning, if I began to read, as was my custom, my eyes instantly ached intensely, but were refreshed after a little corporeal exercise. The candle which I looked at, seemed as it were encircled with a rainbow. Not long after the sight in the left part of the

1 This appendix represents the greater portion of an article entitled "Milton devant la médecine," published in collaboration with M. Camille Cabannes, Professor of Ophthalmology in the Faculty of Medicine of Bordeaux, in the Revue anglo-américaine, I (1923), 120-34. The translation has been revised, from the point of view of terminology, by Dr. Thomas J. Williams, of Chicago, Illinois, who, however, should not be held responsible for the opinions expressed.