vidual and half an abstract principle of Evil, or Adam, who stands now for generalized Mankind, now for the concrete first man, inevitably have their outlines blurred. Milton was not only the inheritor and perfector of the medieval morality tradition; he was also the gateway thru which the morality technique passed into later English literature. When in the eighteenth century Thomson, Collins, and Gray began to feel the magnetism of Milton's style, they responded by scattering thru their verses a profusion of Miltonic personifications, and thus filled their poetry with medieval terminology, without being aware of its ultimate medieval source. Seldom did they succeed in re-vitalizing this sounding Miltonic diction, for too often it was borrowed from Milton ready-made and not re-created in their own imaginations. And so, in spite of the fact that they got the trick mainly from the Minor Poems, the effect they achieved resembles rather that of the far less frequent personifications of Paradise Lost or Samson Agonistes. Wordsworth was entirely justified in condemning the "capital letter personifications" of his predecessors as "a mechanical device of style," tho he was ludicrously astray in declaring that "personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur" in his own volumes.26 In point of fact he was even more addicted to their use than Milton had ever been, and some of his finest lines re-echo the old medieval figures. The poet who wrote "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her," "The World is too much with us," and "Ghostly Shapes May meet at noontide: Fear and trembling Hope, And Time the Shadow" had no real quarrel with the personifications of the moralities when they were really made to live again as he could make them. In Wordsworth's case, as in Shelley's, the abstract personifications were the fruit of a genuine return of the spirit of Platonism. To adopt the useful distinction of Mr. Stewart, theirs are spontaneous, not deliberate personifications. They often coincide with 27 25 Cf. J. B. Fletcher, "The Painter of the Poets," Studies in Philology, April, 1917. 26 In the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads." " J. A. Stewart, "Platonism in English Poetry," English Literature and the Classics, Oxford, 1912. the personifications of medieval artists, not as a result of imitation or of conscious tradition, but because both ages shared alike in a genuine vision. Milton's use of personified abstractions was equally genuine and sincere, until he outgrew the philosophy that inspired them; and in proportion as they ceased to live for him he ceased' to use them. I have spoken of the progress in Milton's art from the abstract to the concrete type of symbolism. The term progress here does not necessarily imply any absolute advance either in truth or in literary art. A wider comparison with the development of thinkers and writers in other times will show the danger of such an assumption clearly enough. The direction of Milton's growth was an incident of his age and its changing cycles of philosophy. Had he lived in our day, he might very possibly have progressed in the reverse direction; for today we are returning to the standpoint of the Middle Ages, as in so many other things, so also in this matter of symbolism. The development of Ibsen, to mention a single example, was in this respect exactly opposite to Milton's. In earlier dramas such as The Pretenders and The Enemy of the People, he wrote parable plays, whereas during his last period he drew closer and closer to the morality in such plays as The Masterbuilder and Little Eyolf. The Ratwife, in the last named drama, is a thoroly medieval personification of Death.28 After all, perhaps neither method of conveying spiritual truth has, in the last analysis, anything to do with the artistic greatness of a piece of literature, apt as the individual critic is to be prejudiced in favor of one or the other. Whatever the vehicle which the poet chooses, whether Platonic or Aristotelian, Realist or Nominalist, what really matters is the imaginative power that he puts behind it. The more glowing his poetic fire, the more truth he will be able to take up and fuse in his poetry. The real test is not the method by which he does it, but the amount of unfused, insoluble stuff that he leaves behind. The observation of Samuel Butler is interesting in this connection: "Science is being daily more and more personified and anthropomorphised into a god. By and by they will say that science took our nature upon him, and sent down his only begotten son, Charles Darwin, or Huxley, into the world so that those who believe in him, etc.; and they will burn people for saying that science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance" (Notebooks, p. 339). The University of Missouri. MILTON'S OF EDUCATION BY ELBERT N. S. THOMPSON In the middle of the seventeenth century, when the intellectual world was teeming with new and disquieting pedagogical theories, no taint of radicalism could have been detected in the opening paragraphs of Milton's modest, eight-page pamphlet, Of Education. Turning contemptuously from the "many modern Januas and Didactics" to the sounder works of "old, renowned authors," Milton defines the aim of education in the time-worn phrases of the church. "The end then of learning," he explains, "is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection." Surprisingly orthodox this must have sounded after his bitter denunciation of the bishops and his heterodox theories on divorce. Doubtless, the definition would seem less arid then than now, to a people still apt to express its deepest feelings in the language of theologians. It would be just as suggestive of the needs of Puritan England as another statement on education: "nothing can be more necessary to principle the minds of men in virtue, the only genuine source of political and individual liberty, the only true safeguard of states, the bulwark of their prosperity and renown." But even here, where the glow of Milton's personal convictions is more evident, there still is nothing subversive of the accepted teachings of Plato and Aristotle. Was the arch radical, then, of the Puritan Revolution a conservative thinker on problems of education? 1 Milton's interest in pedagogy was probably first aroused by his own experiences in St. Paul's School and at Cambridge, and by his reading there in "old, renowned authors," among them Plato and Xenophon, to whose "divine volumes" he had been led by "riper years and the ceaseless round of study and reading." 2 The classics were for him a source of knowledge and a stimulant to 1 Second Defence, P. W., 1, p. 259. 1654. 'Apology, P. W., 3, p. 119. 3 independent thought. But current events, also, attracted Milton's thoughts to England's schools. The Short Parliament had proposed the establishment of an academy in London "for the breeding and training up of young Noblemen and Gentlemen," and the Long Parliament, as early as 1641, listened favorably to the proposals of Comenius. Among the busy reformers of the schools Samuel Hartlib, Milton's personal friend, was the most zealous. He drew Comenius to England; he showed an interest in each idea of reform as it was advanced; and, in "those incidental discourses" alluded to by Milton, he prompted the poet-teacher to write the little tract Of Education. So Milton's life-long interest in education was the outgrowth both of his love of ancient civilization and of his contact with the men and affairs of his own day. The model school that he planned was to be "likest to those ancient and famous schools"; but it was to meet also the needs of the modern world. He sought the authority of classical authors, as he did for even the most radical of his doctrines, but he would interpret that authority in the light of modern experience. Milton's Tractate starts with purely destructive criticism of " the many mistakes which have made learning generally so unpleasing and so unsuccessful." Provoked by the interruptions of the frequent saints' days, which were especially obnoxious to Puritan reformers, Milton objected to the "too oft idle vacancies" in the life of the schools. Faulty methods, too, rendered much of both teachers' and pupils' efforts futile; seven or eight years, it is said, were spent "in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek, as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year." Equally profitless was the study of the universities, with its prime stress on logic and dialectic-" an asinine feast of sowthistles and brambles." The Tractate on Education, however, was neither the first nor the last of Milton's pronouncements on the subject. In one of the rhetorical essays delivered by Milton at Cambridge, he directed his criticism against the dominant scholastic philosophy. It seemed to him dull and uninstructive compared with the inspiring pursuit of poetry, history, and oratory, and altogether fruitless compared with the useful learning gathered from the study of natural science. 'Adamson, Pioneers of Modern Education, pp. 182, 97 ff. 3 To the enthusiastic eulogy of these more delightful and profitable Milton never wavered in his belief that the orthodox discipline in grammar must yield place in the modern curriculum to the study of realities." Language," he asserts, "is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only." Hence, true education, even in the university, must begin with sense experience "with arts most easy, and those be such as are most obvious to the sense." And finally, "because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching." No sense-realist of modern times could speak more positively. For this doctrine Milton found ample support in the theories, if. not always in the practice, of past times. Plato believed that edu "Prolusiones Oratoriae, 3, 7. See Masson, Life of Milton, 1, pp. 281 ff., 297 ff. Education, P. W., 3, p. 464. 'Ibid., pp. 466, 464. 2 |