most
When most unactive deemed;
And, though her body die, her fame survives.
A secular bird, ages of lives.

CHAPTER II
THE PROSE WORKS

It is customary for the friends of Milton to approach his prose works
with a sigh of apology. There is a deep-rooted prejudice among the
English people against a poet who concerns himself intimately with
politics. Whether this feeling has its origin in solicitude for the poet
or for the politics is hard to determine; indeed it is pretty generally
maintained that each is detrimental to the other. But seeing that for one
man in the modern world who cares for poets there are at least ten who
care for politics, it is safe to assume that the poets, when they are
deprived of the franchise, are deprived rather to maintain the purity and
efficiency of politics than for the good of their own souls. They have
been compared to birds of Paradise, which were long believed to have no
feet; and the common sense of the English people, with a touch of the
municipal logic of Dogberry, has enacted that whereas they have no feet,
and have moreover been proved to have no feet, it shall be forbidden
them, under the strictest pains and penalties, to alight and walk. Their
function is to beautify the distant landscape with the flash of wings.

For most men common-sense is the standard, and immediate utility the end,
whereby they judge political questions, great and small. Now common-sense
judges only the questions that are brought home to it by instant example;
and utility is appealed to for a verdict only amid the dense crowd of
actual conflicting interests. Neither the one nor the other is
far-sighted or imaginative. So it comes about that the political system,
in England, at least, is built up piecemeal; it is founded on appetites
and compromises, and mortared by immemorial habit. To explain this
process, and to transfigure it in the pure light of imagination, was the
work of the great poet-politician, Edmund Burke. But the poet usually
goes a hastier way to work. Looking at the whole domiciliary structure
from outside, he finds it shapeless and ugly, like an ant-heap; and
volunteers to play the architect. His design treats the details of
individual habit and happiness in strict subordination to the desired
whole. What he wants is consistency, symmetry, dignity; and to achieve
these he is willing to make a holocaust of human selfishnesses. He may be
a deep scholar and thinker, but he is