The purpose held in view by those who place the study of Milton in high school English courses is twofold: first, that youth may seasonably become acquainted with a portion of our great classic poetry; and, secondly, that they may in this poetry encounter and learn to conquer difficulties more serious than those they have met in the literature they have hitherto read. It is for the teacher to see to it that both these aims are attained. The pupil must read with interest, and he must expect at the same time to have to do some strenuous thinking and not to object to turning over many books.

The average pupil will not at first read anything of Milton with perfect enjoyment. He will, with his wonted docility, commit passages to memory, and he will do his best to speak these passages with the elocution on which you insist. But the taste for this poetry is an acquired one, and in the acquisition usually costs efforts quite alien to the prevailing conceptions of reading as a pleasurable recreation.

The task of pedagogy at this point becomes delicate. First of all, the teacher must recognize the fact that his class will not, however good their intentions, leap to a liking for Comus or Lycidas or even for the Nativity Ode. It is of no use to assign stanzas or lines as lessons and to expect these to be studied to a conclusion like a task of French translation. The only way not to be disappointed in the performance of the class is to expect nothing. It will be well at first, except where the test is quite simple, for the teacher to read it himself, making comment, in the way of explanation, as he goes on. Now and then he will stop and have a little quiz to hold attention. When classical allusions come up requiring research, the teacher will tell in what books the matter may be looked up, and will show how other poets, or Milton elsewhere, have played with the same piece of history or mythology. Thus a poem may be dealt with for a number of days. Repetition is, to a certain extent, excellent. The verses begin to sink into the young minds; the measure appeals to the inborn sense of rhythm; the poem is caught by the ear like a piece of music; the utterance of it becomes more like singing than speaking. In fact, the great secret of teaching poetry in school is to get rid of the commonplace manner of speech befitting a recitation in language or science, and to put in practice the obvious truth that verse has its own form, which is very different from the form of prose. But repetition may go too far. Over-familiarity may beget indifference. Other poems await the attention of the class.

The teacher who really means to interest his classes, and begins by being interested and interesting himself, will rarely fail to accomplish his purpose. The principal obstacle to success here is the necessity, that frequently exists, of conforming to the custom of examining, marking, and ranking—a practice that thwarts genuine personal influence, formalizes all procedures, and tends to deaden natural interest by substituting for it the artificial interest of school standing. The Milton lesson must be a serious one because it is given to the study of the serious work of the gravest and most high-minded of men; and it must be an enjoyable one because it deals with the verse of the most musical of poets, and because one mood of joy is the only mood in which literature can be profitably studied.

As to the difficulties which the learner first encounters when he comes to Milton, these grow sometimes out of the diction, sometimes out of the syntax, and sometimes out of the poet’s figures and allusions. Some difficulties can be explained at once and completely. Others cannot be explained at all with any reasonable hope of touching the beginner’s mind with matter that he can appropriate. Often the young reader slips over points of possible learned annotation without the least consciousness that here great scholarship might make an imposing display. Perfectly useless is it to set forth for the pupil the interesting echoes from ancient poets which generations of delving scholars have accumulated in their notes to Milton, pleasing as these are to mature readers.

The rule should be to expound and illustrate sufficiently to remove those perplexities which really tease the pupil’s mind and cause him to feel dissatisfaction with himself. In many cases our only course is to postpone exposition and to trust that the learner will grow up to the insight which he as yet does not possess and which we cannot possibly give him. A learned writer, like Milton, who has read all antiquity, and who has no purpose of writing for children, inevitably contemplates a public of men approximately his equals in culture, and expects to find “fit audience, though few.”

But many of the difficulties that confront the beginner in Milton ask only to be explained at once by some one who has had more experience in the older literature. Archaic forms of words and expressions, with which the ripe student is familiar, worry the tyro, and must be accounted for. Often the common dictionaries will give all needed help; but the best means of acquiring speedy familiarity with obsolete and rare forms is a Milton concordance—such as that of Bradshaw—in connection with the Century Dictionary, or with the Oxford Dictionary, so far as this goes. These means of easy research should be at hand. I find that pupils often need a pretty sharp spur to make them use even their abridged dictionaries. But so far as concerns acquaintance with the vocabulary of poetic diction, nothing will do except the dictionary habit, accompanied by an effort of the memory to retain what has been learned.

Difficulties that lurk in an involved syntax the pupil may usually be expected to solve by study. But such a peculiar construction as that in Sonnet X 9 will probably have to be explained to him.

In the puritan theology and its implications he cannot take much interest, and will of course not be asked to do so. But high school students of Milton will ordinarily, in their historical courses, have come down to the times in which the poet lived, will understand his relation to public events, and will appreciate his feeling toward the English ecclesiastical system. Puritanism, a phenomenon of the most tremendous importance at a certain period of English history, has so completely disappeared from the modern world, that the utterances of a seventeenth-century poet, professedly a partisan, on matters of church and state, no longer exasperate, and can barely even interest, students of literature.

To read either Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy we must find the poet’s cosmical and his theological standpoint. We have no right to be surprised or shocked at his conceptions. We must take him as he is, and let him lead us through the universe as he has planned it. So long as we set up our modern views as a standard, and by this standard judge the ancient men, we fail in hospitality of thought, and come short of our duty as readers.

This consideration suggests yet another purpose in setting youth to the reading of Milton. By no means an ancient poet, he takes us, nevertheless, to a world different from our own, and in some sense helps us out of the modern time in which our lives have fallen, to show us how other ages conceived of God and Heaven. The mark of an educated man is respect for the past; the old philosophies and religions do not startle and repel him; his ancestors were once in those stages of belief; in some stage of this vast movement of thought he and his fellows are at the present moment. This largeness of view can be fruitfully impressed on youth only by letting them read, under wise guidance, the older poets.