tradition, from the days of Demosthenes, equally profuse of a
patriotism as lofty and of personalities as {11} base as Milton's, to
those of a whole line of the scholars of the Renaissance who lived with
the noblest literature of the world and wrote of each other in the
language of Billingsgate fishwives. So the sublimity of his life is
wholly that of an irresistible will, set from the first on achieving
great deeds and victoriously achieving them in defiance of adverse men
and fates. But this is quite compatible with qualities the reverse of
agreeable. It is the business of sublimity to compel amazed
admiration, not to be a pleasant companion. Milton rejoicing over the
tortures bishops will suffer in hell, Milton insulting Charles I,
Milton playing the tyrant to his daughters, none of these are pleasant
pictures. But such incidents, if perhaps unusually grim in the case of
Milton, are apt to happen with Olympians. Experience shows that it is
generally best to listen to their thunder from a certain distance.

Such limitations must not be ignored. But neither must they be unduly
pressed. The important thing about the sun is not its spots but its
light and heat. No great poet in all history, with the possible
exception of Dante, has so much heat as Milton. In prose and verse
alike he burns and glows with fire. At its worst it is a fire of anger
and pride, at {12} its best a fire of faith in liberty, justice,
righteousness, God. Of the highest of all fires, the white flame of
love, it has indeed little. Milton had no Beatrice to teach him how to
show men the loveliness of the divine law, the beauty of holiness. He
could describe the loss of Paradise and even its recovery, but its
eternal bliss, the bliss of those who live in the presence of

l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle,

he could not describe. To do that required one who had seen the Vita
Nuova before he saw the Inferno. _In la sua volontade e nostra pace_.
So Dante thought: but not altogether so Milton. It is not a difference
of theological opinion: it is a difference of temper. For Dante the
"will of God" at once suggested both the apostolic and the apocalyptic
love, joy, peace, the supreme and ultimate beatific vision. Bitter as
his life on earth had been, no man ever suffering more from evil days
and evil tongues, no man ever more bitterly conscious of living in an
evil and perverse generation, he had yet within him a perpetual
foun