Milton is a man's poet. It would be a strange thing if women loved him. Modern criticism is a half-tipsy Hermaphrodite, in love only with what is on the point of turning into something else. Milton is always himself. His works of art are always themselves. He and they are made of the same marble, of the same metal. They are never likely to change into anything else! Milton is, like all the greatest artists, a man of action. He, so learned in words, in their history, in their weight, in their origin, in their evocations; he, the scholar of scholars, is a man, not of words, but of deeds. That is why the style of Milton is a thing that you can touch with your outstretched fingers. It has been hammered into shape by a hand that could grasp a sword; it has been moulded into form by a brain that could dominate a council-chamber. No wonder we word-maniacs fear to approach him. He repels us; he holds us back; he hides his work-shop from us; and his art smites us into silent hatred.
For Milton himself, though he is the artist of artists, art is not the first thing. It is only the first thing with us because we are life's slaves, and not its masters. Art is what we protect ourselves with--from life. For us it is a religion and a drug. To Milton it was a weapon and a plaything.
Milton was more interested in the struggle of ideas, in the struggle of races, in the struggle of immortal principles, in the struggle of gods, in the great creative struggle of life and death, than he was interested in the exquisite cadences of words or their laborious arrangement. A modern artist's heart's desire is to escape from the world to some "happy valley" and there, sitting cross-legged, like a Chinese Idol, between the myrtle-bushes and the Lotus, to make beautiful things in detachment forever, one by one, with no pause or pain. Milton's desire was to take the whole round world between his hands, with all the races and nations who dwell upon it, and mould _that,_ and nothing less, into the likeness of what he believed. And in what did he believe, this Lord of Time and Space, this accomplice of Jehovah? He believed in Himself. He had the unquestioning, unphilosophical belief in himself which great men of action have; which the Caesars, Alexanders and Napoleons have, and which Shakespeare seems to have lacked.