o 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.

Milton, though people have been misled into thinking of him as very
different from that, was, in reality, the incarnation of the
Nietzschean ideal. He was hard, he was cold, he was contemptuous,
he was "magnanimous," he "remembered his whip" when he went
with women, he loved war for its own sake, and he dwelt alone on
the top of the mountains. To Milton the world presented itself as a
place where the dominant power, and the dominant interest, was the
wrestling of will with will. Why need we always fuss ourselves
about logical _names_? Milton, in reality--in his temperament and
his mood--was just as convinced of _Will_ being the ultimate secret
as Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Bergson or the modern Pragmatist.
Nothing seemed to him noble, or dramatic, or "true," that did not
imply the struggle to the death of opposing _wills_.

Milton, in reality, is less of a Christian than any European writer,
since the Gospel appeared. In his heart, like Nietzsche, he regarded
the binding into one volume of those "Two Testaments" an insult to
"the great style." He does, indeed, in a manner find a place for Christ,
but it is the place of one demigod among many other demi-gods; the
conqueror's place possibly, but still the place of one in a hierarchy,
not of one alone. It is absurd to quarrel with Milton's deification of
the Judaic Jehovah. Every man has his own God. The God