spectacle of the great valley in which were their homes. So through sacrifice and pain England has come to the hill-tops of vision;"the great peaks of honour we had forgotten-duty and patriotism clad in glittering white. . . . We shall descend into the valleys again, but as long as the men and women of this generation last they will carry in their hearts the image of these great mountain peaks, whose foundations are unshaken though Europe rock and sway in the convulsions of a great war." He must have been thinking of Snowdon, sacred with memories of Arthur and of Welsh heroes, and of Harlech, or Mona which preserved that "spark of fire" that was to live again in Gloriana the Faerie Queene.

In the union of Britomart and Artegal, British might and British justice, Spenser found the strength that was to free England from the menace of Spanish tyranny and the mission that was to make her the champion of those who were oppressed. In the union of Prince Arthur and Gloriana the native race regained the realm from which it had long been dispossessed, such a return as the Welsh shepherds still dream of,-" Arthur and his men dozing away in a cave until the peal of destiny ring them forth to the field of battle." 33 England has many heroes, warriors, statesmen, poets, who would passionately desire to return from Avalon, or Mona, or some other of the Isles of the Dead to join their might with England's now that once more the peal of destiny has rung; but among them all none would respond more eagerly than he who looked through Merlin's magic glass upon the Britain of Elizabeth Tudor. For from the country of Arthur and Gloriana has come, to fulfil once more the ancient prophecy, a Welshman who wields a power far greater than theirs, but whose task is the same.

MORALITY THEMES IN MILTON'S POETRY

BY ROBERT L. RAMSAY

In the issue of Studies in Philology devoted last year to essays on the English Renaissance, Professor Hanford has shown in very persuasive fashion how Milton's sympathies with the Renaissance spirit deepened with advancing years, and how, contrary to the commonly received opinion, the inspiration that he derived from its moral, philosophical, and human phases became a steadily increasing factor in his work. With this judgment I find myself in complete agreement; and it is the purpose of this paper to deal with the other factor in Milton's work,-the factor that decreast as the Renaissance influence increast. This complementary influence is, I believe, the medieval. It is an influence that has been strangely little discust in proportion to its significence for Milton's genius. Professor Saintsbury has indeed declared,2 with rather too sweeping a generalization, that Milton, in comparison with Shakspere and Dante, is strangely unmodern, with little even of the Renaissance about him except certain external tricks and fashions of form; and that the great influences which shaped his work were essentially but three in number,-Biblical, classical, and medieval. And yet it has been the Biblical, the classical, and the Renaissance factors that have hitherto almost monopolized the field of Milton criticism. There are of course certain initial improbabilities, in Milton's date and in his exprest sympathies, which account for this neglect of the medieval side of his multifariously hospitable and catholic genius. But a man may be born with a medieval mind in any age; and just as Chaucer is the most Renaissance-minded of medieval writers, so must Milton be recognized as the most medieval of all the great writers of the Renaissance.

The special medieval connection that I have in mind is with the morality play. I shall try to show that Milton's work, when examined with the old morality plots and characters in mind, reveals a close kinship, closer not only than Shakspere's, but even than

1"The Dramatic Element in Paradise Lost," Studies in Philology, April, 1917.

2 Cambridge Hist. of Eng. Lit., vol. vII.

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Chaucer's, with that distinctively medieval form. A plausible recent attempt has been made to find in Chaucer a hitherto unsuspected use of one of the chief morality categories, that of the Seven Deadly Sins. The relation which Professor Tupper has discovered seems to me indubitable. But after all it signifies comparatively little for the understanding of Chaucer's art; for there is a conspicuous absence of any inner and vital kinship between the mind of the author of the Canterbury Tales and what may be called the morality way of thinking. So dominant in Chaucer's day was the typical medieval passion for viewing the world under abstract categories such as the seven deadly sins that he could not have escaped them, and wherever a plausible case is made out for their underlying presence in his work he is to be presumed guilty until he is proved innocent. But so far as they are present we must recognize in them the voice of the age and not of the man. With Milton the very opposite is true. In Chaucer's case the concepts and methods of the morality were merely part of the atmosphere he breathed. For Milton they were instead part of the very furniture of his mind.

In order to justify this contention, it is desirable, first of all, to define as clearly as we can wherein lies the distinctive character of the medieval morality. The morality is, of course, the dramatic presentation of an allegory. But allegory is far too general a term to differentiate the form. The use of allegory as a dramatic method is almost equally common in all the literary periods, Middle Ages and Renaissance alike. Lyly's Endimion, Buckingham's Rehearsal, and Hauptmann's Sunken Bell are all three allegorical plays, yet they are in no sense moralities. The essence of the morality lies rather in the special kind of allegory that it employs. An allegory, as the term is commonly used, is the expansion of a trope or figure into an extended narrative. The result of the expansion, however, varies substantially with the precise kind of figure that constitutes its starting point. We may usefully classify allegories into expanded metaphors, expanded personifications, and expanded metonymies. The metaphor expanded gives rise to the parable; the personification expanded produces either the fable or the morality; the metonymy expanded results in the emblematic or symbolic narrative. With the last-named we are little con

F. Tupper," Chaucer and the Seven Deadly Sins," PMLA. 22. 93 (1914.)

cerned for our present purposes, altho it has become of increasing significance for our later literature. It is, for example, the form pieferied by Hawthorne. In the Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, Rappacini's Daughter, or The Artist of the Beautiful, we have human, concrete stories, literally true, into each of which there enters some concrete object, the scarlet A, the birthmark, the poison plant, the mechanical butterfly,-which stands for the central abstract idea of the story and carries in itself the moral meaning of the whole. The connection is clearly one of association rather than resemblance, and hence the underlying trope must be considered a metonymy.

Earlier users of allegory, however, have in general preferred the methods either of the metaphor or of the personification. The two are essentially distinct figures of speech. It is a misleading custom to regard the personification as merely one variety of metaphor. They differ in the vital point of reality. The metaphor compares two objects equally actual, both of which exist independently, altho the mind for the moment confuses or imaginatively blends them; but the personification is concerned with but one object, with which, naively or deliberately, is combined an abstract attribute that does not belong to it, namely, the concept of life or human personality. Whence comes this notion of personality added by the imagination is not necessarily or commonly in the mind at all. Usually, perhaps, it is anthropomorphic, borrowed, that is, from the speaker's own consciousness, which is shared for the moment with the objects. he is discussing. But there are never, in simple and unmixt forms of personification, the two distinct objects which are characteristic of metaphor. When the animals speak in a fable they are not identified imaginatively with men. They remain animals which somehow possess the alien attribute of human personality. Of course the process of abstraction is not deliberate; the concept of life or personality is not first consciously extracted and then united with the personified object; but such a process is implicit, and it is radically different from that which is revealed by analysis in a metaphor. The latter is fundamentally real and concrete, the former unreal and abstract in its essence. Now the object personified may itself be real and concrete, e. g., an animal, plant, or element. In this case the result of adding the abstract notion of personality is material for a fable; and the essential fable (altho

in actual literary history other things have occasionally used the name) is an expanded concrete personification. When, on the other hand, the object personified is itself an abstraction, the result is material for a morality play, or an expanded abstract personification in dramatic form. The morality is thus in its nature doubly abstract; it is as it were the square of an abstraction.

It follows as a natural result of this essential difference between the figures that it is never possible to state a personification in a way that is literally true, as can always be done with the genuine metaphor. To illustrate from proverbs, which are so often little condenst allegories: when we say "A burnt child dreads the fire," or Rome was not built in a day," we have uttered statements of literal truth, but at the same time exprest thru them a second truth. These are metaphors, which might be expanded into parables. But when we say, "Experience is the best teacher," or "Procrastination is the thief of Time," we have made statements with no literal meaning at all, statements with but one meaning, and that the figurative one. These proverbs are personifications, which might be expanded into morality plays.

In the contrast between these two types of allegory is to be found, to no inconsiderable extent, the contrast between the medieval and the Renaissance spirit, as it is reflected in the literature of the two periods. The type of allegory that dominated the Middle Ages was persistently of the unreal and abstract sort,-the fable, the symbol or emblem, and especially the personified abstraction both in dramatic and epic form. The new age brought with it a great impulse toward the concrete; and once more the parable, based on real life, on history, or on nature came to the front. A single example of the contrast may suffice here. In medieval religious drama the Bible parables are strangely neglected. The miracle cycles and the moralities, which between them use up so large a proportion of the Scripture text, omitted these little stories which to modern eyes would seem to offer almost ideal plots for the dramatist. With a few scattering exceptions, even the well-nigh perfect plot of the Prodigal Son is unutilized by medieval playwrights. When they wisht to present that doctrine which, to our minds at least, receives its finest embodiment in the story of the prodigal, the doctrine of the triumph of God's mercy over his justice, they went instead to an obscure verse of the Psalms: "Mercy and Truth