An Utopia Attributed to Milton

IN 1648 when the reverberations of civil strife were still rolling through England, and literature and learning were cloistered in the halls of universities and remote rectories, there fell quietly from a London press an octavo volume of Latin verse and prose with the simple title-page, Novæ Solymæ Libri Sex. Now, after two centuries of Stygian obscurity, it has been piously translated and edited in two dignified, parchment-backed volumes, and attributed by its present sponsor, the Rev. Walter Begley, to no less a person than John Milton.¹ Of course the urgent question is Did Milton write it? It bears no external mark of authorship save an “autocriticon ” at the end, wherein the writer deposes that, like Apelles, he would work darkling, the better to note the effectiveness of his art. It must be confessed that Mr. Begley holds a strikingly efficient brief for his theory of Miltonic authorship. One begins to read in a mood of skepticism, case-hardened by memories of Phalaris and Ossian ; one’s mind boggles and balks at many a piece of sophistical argument or excessive protestation; yet when one comes to the last excursus, after the diligent perusal of Introduction, text, and notes, the cumulative inference — chronological, analogical, psychological — is almost quite inevitable.

Unless strong external evidence is forthcoming, we can never be wholly justified in shelving Nova Solyma beside Paradise Lost, yet the case is so probable that the book must hereafter be reckoned with by all thorough-going students of Milton; and — pace the occupant of the Easy Chair — we believe there are still such. Certain it is, that in that age of complex fertility and large orders in literature there was no man known to fame, or to Anthony à Wood, who was conspicuously capable of composing a book revealing such varied and opulent power. There were scores of men in that age who were, like Joseph Beaumont, Henry More, or Sir Kenelm Digby, ripe for any extravagant bookish adventure. Externally, or even intellectually considered, the first two named might conceivably have written Nova Solyma. Yet when we look deeper into the qualities of taste and imagination there displayed, we can but conclude that the book was the work, either of Milton in his youth, or of some otherwise mute and inglorious contemporary of his, some FitzGerald of the seventeenth century, who, retired among his books, lived in a world of romance and Platonic reverie, and wrote prose and verse whose mellow, harmonious music has been equaled by few neoLatinists, and is not unworthy of the great Buchanan himself.

The representative interest of Nova Solyma, as well as its Miltonic bearing, will perhaps appear most clearly through an account of its contents. If in this a tincture of Latinity is in evidence, it must be forgiven; for admirable as are Mr. Begley’s versions, both in prose and metre, it is in the copious specimens of the Latin original that the Miltonic flavor is most clearly discernible.

The scheme of Nova Solyma shows the tracing of that tool of ripened and humane classicism, the ultimus calamus or “last pen, ” which is supposed to turn all literary types and traditions to its own end and use. Nova Solyma is at once a romance of love and adventure, and an ideal Utopia. It contains episodes and diversions of multifarious sorts. “ Exemplary novels ” in the manner of Cervantes are relieved by lyrics, both mildly Anacreontic and sacred; there are Platonic discourses on education and poetry, and rather Puritanical expositions of theology; lastly, there is a “divine pastoral drama,” and a series of extended fragments of an epic on the turning back of the Armada.

The poetry of these volumes leads in interest, but passing notice must be given to its prose. The edifying discourses which Joseph and his father deliver to their two English guests in the rehabilitated Jerusalem are full of soaring philosophy and shrewd remark, yet they are likely to be less attractive to most readers than the love passages. These, though of a general type that was almost endemic in late Renaissance romance, are informed and set apart by a Spenserian exaltation of beauty. There is a fervor in them that seems to prove that if they are from the pen of Milton, it was not the Milton who was Latin secretary to the Commonwealth, whose soul was soon to be pinnacled afar, but that younger Milton who was not ignorant that there were tangles in Neæra’s hair, who, as he tells us, awoke one May morning to

“ Mirth, and youth, and warm desire.” Whoever was the author of the episodic tale of Philander and Antonia, it is not out of place to observe that it betrays a distrust of the temperament of widows, which is quite in accord with Milton’s remarks on that subject in the tractate on Divorce, as well as with his familiar practice in marrying three wives from the virgin state. And, finally, in the writer’s keen delight in bringing the loves of the young Cantabrigians to happy fruition, there is, at least to an analogically minded person, an adumbration of that idyllic affair which passed in the bowery loneliness of Eden.

It is in the passage to which reference has just been made that we find the divine pastoral drama in the manner of the Song of Solomon, though somewhat less frankly amorous. Despite the complicated structure of this piece, which Mr. Begley has cleverly disentangled, it is full of simple, sensuous, and passionate poetry. There is a chorus of maidens in the rippling measure of the Pervigilium Veneris, — known to many by its refrain breathing the light loves of Old-World Mays,

which is pretty near the high water mark of neo-Latinity. No one who has not “lost his ear by laying it down on the low and swampy places ” of modern metrification can fail to delight in this deep-mouthed music. From the beautiful opening line, —

down to the last sonorous cadence,

it is a masterpiece of harmony.

Still more interesting than this bridal song, or than any of the varied lyrics, are the fragments of the Armada epic. It has long been known that at one time Milton contemplated an English epic other than the Arthurian story mentioned in his Epitaphium Damonis. Whether the few hundred rolling hexameters here preserved are flotsam from that venture, or not, they are of very considerable intrinsic importance. The advantages of the Armada as an epical subject are obvious. There has seldom been a better opportunity for a poet to trace the large plan of Providence beneath the crisis of a nation’s history; and it is certain that our poet, whoever he was, was perfectly clear-sighted as to the possibilities of his theme. The supernatural forces so essential to epic poetry are handled with unusual discretion and effectiveness. There is one particularly striking passage describing the assenting laugh of the King of Terrors when invoked to disperse the Spanish fleet, which is equal to the best in its kind. In Mr. Begley’s vigorous, but rather artificially Miltonic, English it runs thus: —

There is still another quality, equally noticeable in these epic fragments, which makes for Milton’s authorship. It is mentioned here for what it is worth and presented to Mr. Begley with the subscriber’s compliments. In epics of the first rank, with all their sublimity and massiveness of structure, there goes a lyrical beauty of phrase which never appears at all in your Henriads, and but faintly in your Lusiads and Messiahs. In Homer the dark splendor of the sea and the pathos of Achaian wives widowed of their joy take us more than the wrath of Achilles. In Virgil it is “the sense of tears in mortal things ” which makes his mighty measure sometimes tremble with romantic tenderness; in Tasso it is his “io non so che ” of wistful beauty; and among readers of Paradise Lost there are many who remember Eden-bower, or the brooks of Vallombrosa, or the revels which

longer than the justification of the ways of God to man. So here in the Latin of the Armada epic there are an opulence of imagination and a vigor and vibrancy of phrase which seem utterly to forsake all but poets of the very first order when they address themselves to epical composition. One has but to peruse the Davideis of Cowley, an excellent poet in his way, to feel the force of such an argument.

Whether in the last account Nova Solyma shall be held to he the work of Milton or of another, Mr. Begley deserves well of the Commonwealth of Letters for the genial enthusiasm and close scholarship which he has brought to an arduous and trying task. Should it prove after all that he has not given us the chief product of Milton’s quiet years in his father’s house at Horton, he has at any rate made accessible to English readers a remarkable book, of unique historic interest and value. The man who wrote Nova Solyma was an idealist living in a contentious and centrifugal age; it was the principle of his nature to seek truth in every byway of literature ; yet he was never ready to rest content in the relativities of scholarship or of human experience; his quest was ever for the absolute verity, even though it lead him, as in his Ecstasy of Joseph, beyond the flaming ramparts of the World.

F. G.