United States or Senegal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If the several dioceses fail to discover their own "inglorious Miltons," and will not send them up to General Convention, General Convention may, and doubtless does, lament the blindness of the constituencies, but it cannot correct their blunder.
Perhaps we might say that it was nothing more than the faculty of combining the separate, and therefore ineffectual, conceptions of others, and making them into living thought by the breath of its own organizing spirit. A great man without a past, if he be not an impossibility, will certainly have no future. He would be like those conjectural Miltons and Cromwells of Gray's imaginary Hamlet.
But the Miltons owned their home; were rich, influential, eminently respectable; attended Saint Giles' Church, and really didn't care to cultivate the society of play-actors who kept bad hours, slept in the theater, and had meal-tickets at half a dozen taverns. There were six children born into the Milton family, three of whom died in infancy.
Cromwell, the Maccabeus of Puritanism, is no longer among men; Charles the Second sits in his place; profane and licentious cavaliers have thrust aside the sleek-haired, painful-faced Independents, who used to groan approval to the Scriptural illustrations of Harrison and Fleetwood; men easy of virtue, without sincerity, either in religion or politics, occupying the places made honorable by the Miltons, Whitlocks, and Vanes of the Commonwealth.
John Milton was eight years old when William Shakespeare died. The Miltons lived in Bread Street, and out of the back garret-window of their house could catch a glimpse of the Globe Theater.
Male editors were far away folks, but the Visiter would sympathize with family hopes. Ah, the crop of Miltons, Shakespeares, and Drydens which was growing up in this land, full forty years ago. What has ever become of them?
Nearer, the two church spires of the little village, striving to lift the sordid minds of the natives from earthly clods to the clouds, and where beckoning hands strove vainly to inspire them with heavenly hopes; around them, glistening in the sunlight, the marble slabs where sleep the rude forefathers of the hamlet, some mute inglorious Miltons who came from England in the early sixties, whose tombstones are pierced by rifle bullets fired at the maraudering red skins.
It will perhaps be deemed presumptuous, after naming those illustrious characters those "demigods of fame" to allude to Augustus Merton, who, although he obtained the distinction of first wrangler at Brazennose, Oxford, and carried off a multitude of prizes from that seat of learning, may yet be thought an inadequate testimony of the fact with which we set out, more especially when placed in juxtaposition with the Miltons, the Shakespeares, the Raphaels, and the Tassos of the world.
Different temperaments thrive in different atmospheres. How many mute, inglorious Miltons, Raphaels, and Mozarts may not have lost heart and gone under in the savage insecurity of the dark ages?
His technique would destroy his creation. And take it in the matter of writing. I believe in correctness, but it is a fact that when a writer becomes a purist he conforms but does not create. After all, I believe that what's within a man will come out regardless of his training. There may be mute, inglorious Miltons, but Art struggles for expression.
Word Of The Day