Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 February 1887 — The Young Milton. [ARTICLE]

The Young Milton.

Most people seem to experience an odd difficulty in realizing that the very greatest personages of the past ever were young. Yet this conception is necessary, if we wish to see them as they really were, and not according to the text-books and other sources of illusory tradition. Milton, for instance; who does not think of him habitually as the “blind old bard?” To test this, let any one arrange to have the name brought suddenly before the attention at an odd moment and see what kind of image presents itself to the imag nation in response to the word. Ten to one it will prove to be a venerable but sightless and piteous figure, a confused mixture of several superimposed images, of which the most prominent may be some dolorous frontispiece engraving of a stoop-shouldered bust, or the blind, pathetic form in Munkaesy’s vivid group. It needs but an instant’s reflection to see that this is a very inadequate and unfortunate conception of the actual Milton in his best days. True, he was both old and blind when the two Paradises were committed to paper, but not when they were first conceived in his creative brain. And what of that long period of his middle manhood, when he was not only poet but statesman, and diplomate, and terrible fighter for free thought and free government—an erect, active figure, as full of force and fire as any trooper of them all ? What of the still earlier days, when the beautiful young fellow charmed the hearts of man and maid, “cunning at fence,” of the literal sort as well as in all the elegant intricacies of Italian sonneteering and polished statecraft? For my part, I like best to remember the outward aspect of Milton as he appears in Yertue’s engraving from the Onslow portrait at the age of —a jo und youngster, with laughing, dark, gray, eyes, and fresh, manly face; full of the sap so soon to mature into the tough oak that helped—he more than almost any man, if we consider his having been both brain and pen to Cromwell, besides his own incessant prose polemics on the side of freedom—to wrestle out our modern liberties in that fierce tug of the great revolution. It was at just the time of this lovely boy-portrait that he was writing to his college-mate: “Festivity and poetry are not incompatible. Why should it be different with you? But, indeed, one sees the triple influence of Bacchus, Apollo, and Ceres in the verses you have sent me. And then, have you not music—the harp lightly touched by nimble hands, and the lute giving time to the fair ones as they dance in the old tapestried room ? Believe me, where the ivory keys leap and the accompanying dance goes round the perfumed hall, there will the song-god be.” The teachers of literature might well make some effort to rehabilitate these misimagined worthies of the past, to remove from them the disguises of age and senility that a too reverent tradition has thrown about them, and to present them in that bloom of manhood belonging to the period of their greater activity. If I were a professor of literature I should desire to hang my lecture-room with pictures— not of the old traditional and forbidding decrepitudes, but of Milton, for example, as the charming young swordsman, with velvet coat tossed on the ground, and rapier in hand; of Homer, no longer bi nd and prematurely agonized, as it were, with our modern perplexities in finding him a birthplace, but as the Splendid young Greek athlete, limbed and weaponed like his own youthful vision of Apollo.— Atlantic.