The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton/The Life of Milton
THE LIFE OF MILTON
I
YOUTH AND COLLEGE LIFE, 1608-1632
We are aided in the study of Milton's life by the sharpness of line which separates the three main epochs of his history: his life of student ease, during which he was preparing himself with consecration for his poetic vocation; his life of public service, when he put behind him his poetic ambitions and threw himself with fanatical ardor into the struggle for liberty; and his old age, when, blind and discredited, he sat down amid the wreck of everything for which he had given his best twenty years, to write the poem which from early youth he had felt it his mission to leave to the nation.
Milton's youth was singularly sweet and sheltered. He was born in London on the 9th of December, 1608, the son of John Milton, a scrivener or solicitor doing business at the sign of the Spread Eagle in Bread Street. It is worth noting that for two generations at least the Miltons had exhibited intense partisanship in the religious disputes which agitated the nation. Richard Milton, the poet's grandfather, had been a stubborn Catholic recusant under Elizabeth, and John Milton, the poet's father, had broken with his family in order to join the Puritans. The Puritanism of the home in Bread Street was not, however, of an ascetic or unlovely type. The father was an accomplished musician, of some note as a composer, and could even on occasion try his hand at poetry. This mellow atmosphere of taste and cultivation, spiritualized by a sincere piety, united with larger circumstances to enrich life for the young poet. We must remember that in Milton's childhood Shakespeare was still alive, that at the Mermaid Tavern, probably in the very street where the scrivener's house stood, Ben Jonson held his "merry meetings," and that most of the stalwart figures which had made the reign of the Virgin Queen illustrious were still to be seen about the streets of London. There was as yet hardly a hint of the passing away of those " spacious times," of the spirit of romance and adventure, which had filled Elizabethan England. His nature, therefore, was in no danger of being starved at the outset, as it must have been if his birth had fallen a few decades farther on in the struggle between the old and the new, when Puritanism had narrowed and hardened itself in order to project itself more forcibly against its enemies.
Yet perhaps it is not fanciful to see an adumbration of the new spirit soon to darken over England, in the unchildlike devotion with which the boy Milton gave himself to his studies. First under a private tutor, one Thomas Young, a Presbyterian curate, whom he reverenced tenderly in later life, and afterwards at St. Paul's School, he applied himself so eagerly to his studies that, as he himself says, from his twelfth year on he rarely left his books before midnight. Besides reading the classical authors necessary for admission to the university, he was allowed to wander freely through the literature of his own tongue; the poets who have left the most distinct trace on his early work are Spenser and Sylvester, the latter in his translation of the Divine Weeks and Works of the French moralistic poet Du Bartas. In Milton's earliest verses, the paraphrases of Psalms CXIV and CXXXVI, written at fifteen, commentators have discerned traces of reading from such diverse authors as Chaucer, Drayton, Drummond, Fairfax (the translator of Tasso) and Buchanan. A portrait by the Dutch painter Jansen which has been preserved to us, painted, it is true, before this passion for study began, but doubtless representing faithfully enough the features which Milton retained through boyhood, shows a reassuringly healthy little face. The gaze is frank and level, though with a sweet after-seriousness; the form under the black braided dress betrays a delicate vigor, and the firm lines of the head are emphasized by the close-cropping of the auburn hair.
The one event worth chronicle in his school life is his friendship with Charles Diodati, a young Anglo-Italian whom he met at St. Paul's school. It was full of boyish generosity and emulation, and was perhaps the warmest human relationship which Milton ever experienced. It continued to grow in spite of their separation. Diodati went to Oxford, and Milton, at the age of sixteen, entered Christ's College, Cambridge.
The routine of a seventeenth-century college, with its fixed tasks and small tutorial methods, could hardly fail to be irksome to a spirit like Milton's, just awakening to the first arrogant consciousness of power. He complains that he is dragged from his studies," and compelled to employ himself in "composing some trivial declamation." Whether on this or some other score, he got into trouble with his tutor Chappell, was rusticated for a time, and on his return was transferred to another tutor. A Latin verse-epistle (Elegy I) addressed to Diodati, recounting gaily his visits to the theatres and parks of London, marks the date of his temporary suspension. The same epistle contains a rapturous eulogy of the girls of London, the tone of which, with its youthful hyperbole and ardor, is particularly pleasant in his case.
For already he had begun to lay the foundations of that "conscious moral architecture" which was to be the dominant ideal of his life and to mark him out sharply among the spontaneous and desultory race of poets. His college companions, noting his fresh-colored oval face, his flowing auburn hair, his slender frame, his fastidiousness in manners and in morals, nicknamed him, with the happy offhand criticism given to undergraduates, the "Lady of Christ's." What they interpreted as feminine in him was really the expression of a deep conviction on his part,―a conviction virile enough, since it was to determine his whole conscious existence, but so far removed into the realm of ideality that it may well have seemed a little wan to his boisterous companions, even if they had taken the trouble to understand it. This conviction was that he was appointed to some great work of poetic creation, and that such a work could come only as the outgrowth of a life of austerity. As yet it was merely the delicate austerity, the fastidious abstention, of an Elizabethan; but it was of a kind to turn easily into something sterner. That this double conviction had taken complete possession of Milton's mind before he left college, two passages from his verse of this period testify. One we find imbedded in a Latin epistle to Diodati (Elegy VI), who, sending him some verses, has excused himself for their lightness of tone by the fact that they were composed in the midst of country merry-making. Milton accepts the excuse, but declares that the poet who would sing of great themes, " of wars, and of Heaven under adult Jove, and of pious heroes, and leaders half-divine, singing now the holy counsels of the gods above, and now the realms profound where Cerberus howls, such a poet must live sparely, after the manner of the Samian teacher. Herbs must furnish him his innocent food; clear water in a beechen cup, sober draughts from the pure spring, must be his drink. His youth must be chaste and void of offence; his manners strict; his hands without stain. He shall be like a priest shining in sacred vestment, washed with lustral waters, who goes up to make augury before the jealous gods. . . . Yea, for the bard is sacred to the gods: he is their priest. Mysteriously from his lips and breast he breathes Jove."
There is in this perhaps an element of convention and of boyish bombast, but it is nevertheless the same thought which he expressed twenty years later, when he declared his early belief that " he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem . . . not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy."
Again, in the fragment entitled At a Vacation Exercise in the College, after singing the praises of English speech, he goes on to speak of the kind of subject upon which he longs to try its powers. He would take his hearers,
Above the wheeling pole, and at Heaven's door
Look in, and see each blissful deity
How he before the thunderous throne doth lie
List'ning to what unshorn Apollo sings." . . .
It is a side illustration of the remarkable unity of Milton's purpose, that, translating the pagan terms here given into Biblical ones, this subject is the one to which, in old age, he reverted for his supreme effort.
He did not content himself with theory alone. During the seven years which he spent at Cambridge, he wrote, besides much Latin verse, a number of English poems. Of these only three or four are remarkable enough to have singled Milton out from the crowd of young poets and poeticules who then swarmed at the universities. First among these is of course the Hymn on the Nativity, written in the fifth year of his college residence, when he was twenty-one years old. The Xll
��opening stanzas are disfigured by the conceits and ingenuities which had been made fashionable in England by the extraordinary poems of John Donne, seconded by the example of the Italian poet Marini. But as the poem progresses, Milton's imagination takes fire, the images gain in majesty and richness, and the language gathers a kingly confidence of rhythm and phrase, a shadowed but triumphant music, like the chanting of young seraphs awe-struck at their theme, which were altogether new in English verse. One has to know with some minuteness what poetry had been under Elizabeth and James, to realize the unique quality of voice in this Hymn. Taking the poem as a whole, one can scarcely agree with Hallam that it is " perhaps the finest ode in the English language," but again and again in its unequal lines Milton sends a herald voice into the wilderness, announcing in no dubious tones the advent of a master of song.
Clearly as we can now see Milton's gift announced in these early college efforts, they by no means stilled their author's restless desire to make that announcement more signal. The sonnet on his twenty-third birthday breathes deep dissatisfaction with his accomplishment up to that time. He grudges the " hasting days " which leave him songless, and thinking perhaps, as Mr. Gosse suggests, of young Abraham Cowley, whose marvellously precocious productions had already made him famous in his thirteenth year he speaks enviously of those " more timely happy spirits," the blossoming of whose genius had been seasonable. From this grudging mood he rises at the end into a tone of large resignation to the conditions under which he shall be called to work out his desires. When we consider what those conditions were to be, the words fall upon the ear with a special accent :
" Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure even To that same lot, however mean or high, Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven. All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Task-master's eye."
It was in such a mood that Milton left Cambridge, after seven years' residence there. His father had intended him for the church, but such a career, although not yet rendered impossible by his broadening opinions, was distasteful because of the trammels it imposed. An academic career was no more alluring, even if it had been possible without taking orders. His discontent with the Cambridge tone comes out several times in his Latin verses and elsewhere. In his first elegy, al- luding to his rustication from college, he exclaims, " How ill does that place suit with poets ! " and in one of his pamphlets he makes disdainful allusion to the young graduates who " flutter off all unfledged into theology, having gotten of philology or philosophy scarce so much as a smattering," and who for theology " are content with just what is enough to enable them to patch up a paltry sermon." Upon Cambridge, therefore, and its " turba legentium prava " he turned his back, not however, to return to the house in Bread Street. His father, having acquired a competency, had retired to the little village of Horton in Buckinghamshire, seven-
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teen miles to the southwest of London ; here, amid rural sights and sounds, Milton was to spend the next five years, the happiest of his life.
��II
HORTON PERIOD, 1632-1638
IT was fortunate for the harmonious development of Milton's genius that during the critical years between youth and manhood, years which in most men's lives are fullest of turmoil and dubiety, he was enabled to live a life of quiet contempla- tion. His nature was fiercely polemical, and without this period of calm set be- tween his college life and his life as a public disputant, the sweeter saps of his mind would never have come to flower and fruitage. It was particularly fortunate, too, that this interim should be passed in the country, where the lyric influences were softest, where all that was pastoral and genial in his imagination was provoked. The special danger of men of his stamp, in whom will and doctrine are constantly president over impulse, is the loss of plasticity, the stiffening of imagination in its bonds. His " long holiday " at Horton left Milton free to capture in verse the ductile grace of youth, to have his leafy season. Afterward his work was to be less a sylvan growth, and more a monumental thing builded with hands.
The narratable facts of these five years are naturally few. Milton says himself that he " spent a long holiday turning over the Latin and Greek authors," and some volumes annotated by him have been preserved to show the wide range of reading indicated. The most notable additions to his treasury of thought were contributed by Euripides and Plato. He made occasional visits to London, for instruction in music and mathematics, to purchase books, to visit the theatres, and to call upon his married sister Anne Phillips or his younger brother Christopher, now entered as barrister at the Inner Temple. The facts of real significance, however, are the ones which cannot be chronicled, the drama which goes on in every sensitive life between the individual soul and the spirit of nature. The epi- sodes are nothing, a ramble by starlight along a piece of water, a nesting bird surprised in the hedge, a speaking light at dawn, but the results, when the one actor is young enough to meet the eternal youth of the other, are not to be mea- sured. In the beautiful Sonnet to the Nightingale we see the habitual seriousness of Milton's nature invaded by the tenderness and soft vague passion of spring in the country ; it has a troubadour grace and wistfulness discernible nowhere else among his utterances. More characteristically and with equal beauty, these new influences found expression in the twin poems IS Allegro and II Penseroso, named from the two typical moods of mind in which the poet confronts the pageantry of nature, the mood of joyous receptivity and the mood of sober contemplation. In the studied symmetry of these poems, their contrapuntal answering of part to part, as well as in the objective standpoint from which they are written, there is a self- eonsciousness alien to the born nature poet. Such a poet indeed Milton was not.
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He sees nature neither with the spiritual insight of Wordsworth nor with the childlike absorption and awe of his contemporary Henry Vaughan. Standing out- side nature, he uses its spectacles as text and illustration of a mood which has its origin within. He does not even draw illustration exclusively from those sights which met his eye in the landscape about Horton, but borrows eclectically, wher- ever in visible nature or in scenes remembered from books he finds matter to his purpose. In any exact sense, therefore, these poems are not personal. In a larger sense they are profoundly so. They are the record of a serious, scholarly mind suddenly invaded in a propitious moment of youth by the beauty of external exist- ence, a beauty gay or sober, as chance may determine, but always richly solicit- ing. In a letter to Diodati, written from Horton, Milton says : " God . . . has instilled into me, if into any one, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labor ... is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proserpina, as it is my habit day and night to seek for this idea of the beautiful . . . through all the forms and faces of things." Such pure sestheticism has on his lips a somewhat alien sound. We seem to be listening to the author of Endymion, rather than to the author of Comics.
Mark Pattison was the first of Milton's biographers to give sufficient emphasis to the pathos which these poems derive from the fact that in them, for the first and last time, Milton spoke in the free, joyous spirit of the time which was passing away forever. Even here, to be sure, the mood is chastened and objectified ; but taken broad and long, in their lightness, their grace, their eager response to sensuous beauty, these poems are of the great lyric age inaugurated by Spenser, though they show a sense of form and an economy of expression which Spenser's diffuser muse could not attain. When we look forward fifteen years and see Milton grimly sec- onding the movements of a party whose fanaticism crushed out the joy and poetry of life in England, cut down the Maypoles, closed the theatres, broke the stained- glass windows, and tore out the organ-pipes, the lines which celebrate the " jocund rebeck," the " well-trod stage," and the " storied windows richly dight," take on a peculiar significance. The man who was to be the pamphleteer champion and the bard of Puritanism is living here in the world of romantic chai-m which Crom- well's armies were to sweep away. The man who had written the Sonnet to the Nightingale was to turn that " small lute " into a trumpet whence he might blow soul-animating strains of strenuous applause.
Either shortly before or shortly after Milton left college he had been asked, prob- ably by young Henry Lawes, at that time gentleman of the Chapel Royal and one of the King's private musicians, to furnish a portion of the words for an entertain- ment to be presented before the Countess Dowager of Derby, at her country-seat of Harefield, by the younger members of her family. The libretto which Milton fur- nished is the fragment known as Arcades, or the Arcadians. Harefield lay only ten miles from Horton, and it is possible that Milton may have been present on the night when the actors in the little masque, disguised as shepherds and sylvan deities, and carrying torches in their hands, approached the aged countess, seated
�� � HORTON PERIOD, 1632-1638 xv
��in state at the end of the historic avenue of elms known as the Queen's walk. The aged dowager had in her youth been Spenser's friend ; and it is pleasant to dwell, with Professor Masson, upon the possibility that the eyes which had seen the first saw now also the last of the great line of Elizabethan minstrels. In any case, Lawes was so well satisfied with Milton's words that three or four years later he applied for a more elaborate piece of work of the same sort, this time to celebrate the inauguration of the countess's son-in-law, the Earl of Bridgewater, into his duties as Lord President of Wales. Lawes had under his instruction the Lady Alice, youngest daughter of the earl, as well as her sister and two brothers ; he desired to put their accomplishments to service in the production of a masque gor- geous enough to suit the august occasion. The heartiness with which Milton threw himself into his part of the project is evidenced by the rich and rounded beauty of the result. He never gave his work a definite title, but it is named in modern editions from the chief dramatis persona, Comus, the god of revelry. All efforts to discover whether or not the young author was present when his masque was given in the banqueting-hall of the historic castle of Ludlow, on the Welsh border, have been futile.
The main motive of the poem, the power of chastity to subdue the forces of evil, is a conventional one in the literature of the time. It is only in occasional passages of deeper conviction that we can see the growth of Milton's mind away from the idyllicism of L 'Allegro and II Penseroso, toward the polemic sternness which, after announcing itself in golden adumbrations of melody in Lycidas, was to go on gathering intensity and losing beauty until its ugly culmination in the Reply to Salmasius. In the light of Milton's later development, the very fact of author- ship in the masque form shows the irony of events. These poem-pageants summed up all that was most gorgeous, extravagant, and pleasure-loving in the court life of the Tudors and the Stuarts. They had always constituted a covert protest against the Puritan barrenness and strictness of life, and shortly before Comus was written, this protest had become overt. The attack made by the Puritan barrister Prynne upon the stage, in his Histriomastix, had given offence to the court ; a passage of ponderous invective against women-players was interpreted as an insult to the Queen, who had shortly before taken part in a masque at Whitehall. The result was a revival of the masque by court sympathizers, on a scale of unprecedented splendor, and the masque became a kind of rallying point for cavalier feeling. Comus belongs certainly by date and probably by intention to this demonstration against the Puritan party. It is indicative of the quiescence of Milton's mind at this time with respect to the political situation, that he should have lent his powers unwittingly to such a task.
The next three years of Milton's life at Horton were unproductive. He con- tinued that elaborate course of intellectual and spiritual preparation which he had marked out for himself, fortifying himself in all ways for the greater task which vaguely beckoned. To Charles Diodati he writes, in response to an inquiry as to what he is thinking of, " Why, may God help me, of immortality ! I am growing
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my wings for a flight." For broad flight he was not yet ready, and for lesser ones the sting of occasion was lacking, until the autumn of 1637. Then news came of the sinking of a ship in the Irish Sea, and the loss of all on board, including Edward King, a fellow of Christ's and an old college-mate of Milton's. King's Cambridge friends determined to issue a little volume of commemorative verse, to which Milton, as a recent graduate, was asked to contribute. It is an odd experi- ence now to turn over the pages of this little volume, and, after reading the well- meaning heaviness of which it is mainly composed, to come suddenly at the end upon the large threnodic rhythm of the opening lines of Lycidas. Lycidas has been called by so competent a critic as the late Mr. Pattison, the highwater mark, not only of Milton's genius, but of English lyric poetry. Superlatives are danger- ous, and never more so than when dealing with work of a commanding order. It is perhaps more to our purpose to note what the same critic has suggestively pointed out, that in this poem the world of Milton's youth and the world of his manhood meet. The general tone of the lament is indistinguishable from that of the ordinary pastoral threnodies of the school of Spenser. There is the same air of deliberate convention, the same pensive beauty, the same delicious melancholy grace in the wearing of the rue. But once past the induction we come upon lines which apprise us that we are in the presence of a sterner moral conception than ever troubled the smooth pipes of the early pastoralists. In the passage beginning
" Last came and last did go The pilot of the Galilean lake,"
there is a " smothered and suspended menace," a passion of purification, which was soon to wreak itself upon everything in Church and State for which the House of Stuart stood, and to sweep away in its blind zeal much that was beautiful and desirable. It was to take, among other good things, that very gift of pure melody which was given to Milton's youth. He was to come out of the struggle strength- ened to grapple with a vast theme, but stiffened and shorn of grace. He was to live to build language into large harmonic masses, intricate and solemn fugues, but never to recapture that simple singing voice which charms us in the poems written during his " long holiday " at Horton.
Ill
ITALIAN JOURNEY, 1638-1639
TOWARD the end of his fifth year at Horton, Milton began to feel the cramping intellectual conditions of life in the country and to think of taking chambers in London. This project he soon abandoned for the wider one of foreign travel. The expenses of the trip were borne by his father, with that generous acquiescence which he had always shown in his son's plans of self-improvement. After a short stay in Paris Milton proceeded to Italy, then the seat of a decaying but still splen- did civilization, and even richer then than now in beauty.
�� � ITALIAN JOURNEY, 1638-1639 xvii
At Florence, where he tarried for two months, some metrical trifles in Latin, which he managed to patch up on demand, were received with egregious flattery by the various " academies " or literary clubs, where the shallow intellectual life of the time was chiefly centred. The definite eulogiurns of his Florentine friends, as for instance the declaration by Francini that by virtue of these Latin poems Thames may rival Helicon, are in a tone of elaborate compliment too patently con- ventional to have been intended for literal interpretation. Taken broadly, how- ever, they doubtless testify, as has been said, to a genuine impression of power made by the young English poet upon men of a temperament very alien to his own. Whatever amount of sincerity may really have attached to these panegyrics, it is certain from an interesting passage in Milton's pamphlet on Church Gov- ernment, published three years later, that they added materially to his own confi- dence in his powers. The passage is one of many indications, hitherto unempha- sized by his biographers, that in spite of his haughty self-reliance and self-assertion Milton was exceedingly sensitive to influences from without.
In Rome, whither he proceeded in November of 1638, he was treated with a dis- tinction by no means calculated to lessen this feeling. He mentions with some complaisance his reception at a magnificent concert given by Cardinal Barberini, who " himself waiting at the door and seeking me out in so great a crowd, almost laying hold of me by the hand, admitted me within in a truly most honorable manner." It was here that he heard the famous singer Leonora Baroni, commemo- rated in his Latin epigrams, and possibly in the Italian sonnet beginning,
" Diodati, e te '1 diro con maraviglia,"
a passage which would seem to show that this lady shared with the unknown beauty of Bologna to whom the other sonnets are addressed, the honor of an inroad upon the Puritan poet's austere but susceptible heart. From Rome his journey lay to Naples ; here he was entertained by the aged Marquis Manso, a munificent patron of letters who had sheltered Tasso and given aid to Marini. The exchange of courtesies between the two at parting elicited one of Milton's most elegant Latin poems, memorable as containing explicit mention of a plan then maturing in his mind for an epic poem on the legendary history of King Arthur. Incidentally, a glimpse is given us of Milton's uncompromising frankness in the expression of his religious opinions ; the marquis accompanies his parting gift of two richly wrought cups with the hint that his guest's outspokenness has made it impossible for him to extend a fitting hospitality.
Plans for an extended trip eastward to Greece and Palestine were cut short by serious political news from England. King Charles was about to start on his first expedition against the Scots. Milton knew enough of the acute condition of affairs in the kingdom to realize the serious nature of such a move, and started northward, thinking it shame, he says, to be taking his pleasure while his countrymen were fighting for their liberty. His return was leisurely enough, however, to allow of a two months' delay at Florence, made memorable by his meeting with Galileo.
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The meeting probably occurred at the villa of Arcetri, near Florence, where the aged and blind astronomer was still held in partial confinement by the Inquisition. The painter who has given us the picture of Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters might have found here a subject in which truth need not have been sacrificed to picturesqueness. The meeting of these two great navigators of cosmic space, bound together by a common intrepidity and a common fate, exercises a legitimate spell over the imagination. It is open to question whether Milton ever accepted Galileo's cosmic theories as true ; certainly he did not see fit to admit the new astronomy into the scheme of Paradise Lost, except in the tentative form of a discussion of the theory between Adam and Raphael. But that he cherished the august memory of the blind philosopher, in his own days of blindness and defeat, is evidenced by the famous comparison of Satan's shield seen through the " Tuscan artist's optic glass," in Paradise Lost. Another reminiscence of this visit to Arcetri is the comparison of the fallen angels prostrate on the flood, to " autumnal leaves that strew the brook in Vallombrosa."
During February or April, 1639, Milton visited the ancestral home of the Dio- dati at Lucca. The hope of pleasing his bosom friend with an account of the place, which had prompted the visit, was not to be fulfilled. Diodati's death had already occurred. News of his bereavement reached Milton at Genoa, and con- spired with news of the increasing gravity of the political and" religious troubles in England to make his home-coming a solemn one. It is a severe loss to English literature that for the noble poem in which he enshrined the memory of his friend Milton chose the Latin instead of his native tongue. Diodati was much nearer to him than King had been ; the sincere grief which makes itself felt even across the conventionalized medium of the Epitaphium Damonis testifies that if the poet had waited for a like moment of power, and had then poured his emotion into his native idiom, this and not Lycidas might be held to-day as the greatest of English thren- odies. As it is the poem is an exquisite and touching work of art. Its interest is heightened by the autobiographic matter which it contains, especially concerning the projected epic dealing with the early history of Britain. We are informed that the epic is to be in English, the poet having reconciled himself, as Dante did, to the narrower but more susceptible audience thus afforded him ; we learn also that it is already begun.
IV
FROM MILTON'S RETURN TO ENGLAND TO THE LATIN SECRETARYSHIP,
1639-1649
EACH succeeding biographer of Milton shares Coleridge's feeling of bathos in the fact that after renouncing his cherished schemes of travel in order to be present at those portentous changes in English religion and politics of which he had pre- sentiment, he should have made haste on his return to London to burden himself with the petty duties of a schoolmaster. At first he had under his tutelage only
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his two nephews, John and Edward Phillips, but later more pupils were added, in- cluding some of eminent family ; nor does the pamphlet war into which he soon plunged appear to have interrupted the daily routine of pedagogy. A mere ruin- ous waste of time, we are tempted with Pattison to declare. To see the author of Lycidas putting by his lyre in order to seize the sword of controversy is endurable, but to see him in the schoolroom, pottering over Frontinus's Stratagems and the egregious poet Manilius, without the excuse of pecuniary necessity, begets in us nothing but impatience. The explanation of his action, however, is tolerably obvious. During the ten years between his return to England and his appointment as Latin Secretary to Cromwell's government, Milton was in a state of extraordinary nervous unrest. He had put poetry behind him to embark in a " troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes," but the part which he found to play in the struggle during these years was not eminent enough to satisfy his haughty and exigent nature, thus divorced from its natural consolation. The five pamphlets which during 1641-43 he launched against the Episcopal scheme of church government, influential as they undoubtedly were, and crowded with passages of lofty eloquence which made amends for their lack of a convincing logic, could not offer nepenthe for the rest- lessness bred of a great task deferred. In such a state of mind, mere busyness is seized upon as a form of self-justification, and incidentally serves as an excellent steadier of the nerves. Minor motives also, in Milton's case, doubtless entered in. That he had a speculative interest in the problems of teaching is attested by his Tractate on Education, with its scheme of training so curiously compounded of practical common-sense and impossible idealism. One may suspect, too, that the attitude of the teacher had, even in this small and concrete form, an attraction for one whose most splendid mental gesture was never quite free from a hint of dogmatism.
Milton's pamphlets on the church question had got him roundly abused by the adherents of Bishop Hall and the extreme prelatical party. The good bishop calls him, among other complimentary things, a " scurrilous Mime, a personated, and, as himself thinks, a grim, lowering, and bitter Fool," and describes the terse fa- miliar Anglo-Saxon with which Milton gave idiomatic flavor to his thunderous periods, as language fit only for fish-wives. These are merely the humors of sev- enteenth - century controversy ; his enemies were soon to have more formidable weapons put into their hands.
Edward Phillips informs us that his uncle left home suddenly in May, 1643, without stating the object of his journey, and returned a month later with a young wife and a train of bridal guests. The solemn house in Aldersgate Street was filled with merry-making for a time ; then the bride's friends departed, and Milton was left with his seventeen-year old wife to discover at leisure that he had made a monstrous blunder. Mary Powell was the daughter of a Cavalier Squire holding the seat of Forest Hill, near Oxford, a gentleman of some social pretension, though burdened with debts and a large family. A considerable portion of this debt had long been held against him by the Miltons, father and son. Whether
�� � xx THE LIFE OF MILTON
Milton's visit to Forest Hill was on this business, or whether he knew Mary Powell previously, we shall probably never know. Precipitancy in such a matter on the poet's part will surprise no one who has studied his character with attention. A great part of the stern self-control which belongs to the Milton of tradition was an outcome of the bitter consequences of this very marriage. He was from youth more than ordinarily susceptible to the charm of women ; boyishly, as we see in the first and seventh Latin elegies ; with a youth's wistful expectancy, as in the Sonnet to the Nightingale ; with a young man's chivalrous ardor, as in the Italian sonnets : and this susceptibility was greatly heightened by the austerity of a life which left the springs of concrete emotion untouched. Mary Powell was probably the first young woman with whom he came into intimate contact ; the freedom of a large household and the beguiling influences of country life were fuel to the fire ; and if a doubt arose concerning the parity of their taste and temper, it was natural both to the lover and to the idealist to believe in the power of masculine will to shape a helpmeet to its own image. He succeeded so well that before the honeymoon was over, the girl-wife returned to her home, ostensibly on a visit, but really in lasting rebellion against her husband's authority ; and the husband sat down in a white passion to write the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, on the thesis that a man has the right to put away his wife for incompatibility of temper. The majority of Milton's biographers, catching at certain phrases of this tract,
"a mute and spiritless mate," " bound fast to an image of earth and phlegm,"
have laid the rupture to the girl's hebetude. Others, notably Mr. Saintsbury, throw the weight of blame on the other side, pointing out that Milton held in the most uncompromising form the doctrine of the inferiority of woman, and that, as Dr. Garnett says, " his famous ' He for God only, she for God in him,' condenses every fallacy concerning woman's relation to her husband and to her Maker." The truth doubtless lies between. She, accustomed to the gaiety of a large house- hold near a Cavalier garrison, was terror-stricken at the silence which fell about her in her husband's sober Puritan house. He, twice her age and full of thoughts which she could not even guess at, was at no pains to fondle and coax her into con- tentment with this twilight life. If he did not go so far as an anonymous pam- phleteer charged him with going, to consider " no woman to due conversation accessible, except she can speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French, and dispute against the canon law," he was doubtless unwisely exigent and perhaps cruelly in- tolerant of the unfurnished mind which he had found in the place of that " sweet and gladsome society " of his love-dream.
The first pamphlet on divorce bears evidence of being written at a white heat. Both in its qualities and its defects it is a peculiarly Miltonic utterance. As in his Tractate on Education he had " legislated for a college of Miltons," here he legis- lates for a society of seraphim. Every man is to have power to loose and bind. No law shall have authority to " force a mixture of minds that cannot unite," nor make irremediable " that melancholy despair which we see in many wedded per- sons." It is the positive side of his doctrine, however, which is most eloquently
�� � MILTON'S RETURN TO ENGLAND xxi
put forth. Marriage as an ideal institution, " the unexpressive nuptial song," has rarely been more nobly conceived than in these pages, and the pleading against violations of the spirit by the letter of wedlock rises at times to passionate poetry. There are few English sentences as full of virile tenderness as that in which Milton says, " Then " (in case his tract is listened to) " I doubt not with one gentle strok- ing to wipe away ten thousand tears out of the life of men." The second edition, published after his wife's refusal to return, according to her word, at Michaelmas of 1643, is strengthened with formal arguments and addressed boldly to the Parlia- ment. The Tract was publicly denounced by Mr. Herbert Palmer in a sermon before the Houses of Parliament, a sermon which had the more weight because of the excitement then reigning in that body over the general growth of " heresy and schism," of which Milton's pamphlet was held to be one of the blackest examples. One of the most signal, at least, it certainly was, indicative of that terrible spirit of question which was abroad in the land, to make a modern England out of the England of the Stuarts. The Areopagitica, or speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing, the pamphlet of Milton's which has alone held an audience to our day, followed as another startling manifesto of his radical thought. Broadly viewed, it is a plea for universal toleration of opinion, exactly what distracted England most needed, if she could only have known it.
In the last but one of his four pamphlets on divorce, Tetrachordon, Milton gave hint of his intention to marry again, in the significant words, " If the Law make not a timely provision, let the Law, as reason is, bear the censure of the conse- quences." He even went so far, according to Phillips, as to select Mary Powell's successor, a Miss Davis, to whom in all likelihood the sonnet To a Virtuous Young Lady was addressed. Frightened by rumors of this match, and further induced by the increasingly desperate condition of the Cavalier cause, the Powells made overtures for a reconciliation. Milton was brought, without warning, face to face with his truant bride at the home of his kinsman, Mr. Blackborough, in St. Mar- tin's le Grand Lane. The passage in Samson Agonistes in which the blind captive repulses his " hyena " wife, and that in Paradise Lost where Adam raises up and comforts remorseful Eve, have been often pointed out as having a probable auto- biographic bearing on this episode. Whether from repentance or a broken spirit, the girl-wife seems to have lived the remaining years of her short life meekly enough. During the seven years until her death, in 1652, she bore Milton three daughters and a son, the son dying in infancy, the daughters surviving to be their father's trial and reproach. Measured against her mute acceptance of the situa- tion, there is something unpleasantly saturnine in the two sonnets with which Mil- ton took leave of the divorce subject. The first of these, on TetracJwrdon, is the only instance in which he deigned to degrade poetry into doggerel ; for the first and last time, in verse, he threw aside his lyre of song and grasped the bastinado of contemporary satire a fact which at least testifies eloquently to the harassed condition of his mind.
During the lull in politics following the defeat of the King at Naseby, in July,
�� � xxii THE LIFE OF MILTON
1645, Milton got together the poems which he had written up to that time, and gave them for publication to Humphrey Moseley, a printer of disinterested enthu- siasm for pure literature, to whom seventeenth-century poetry stands much indebted. It was high time that such a collection should be made. In his pamphlets Milton had made more than one reference to his vocation as poet, to the work which he hoped to accomplish, and which his nation " would not willingly let die." Such words had begun to fall upon incredulous ears, for with the exception of an un- signed edition of Comus published by Lawes, the Cambridge memorial volume containing Lycidas, and a stray piece or two in the miscellanies, none of Milton's poems were in print. The motto which he chose for the volume,
" Baccare frontem Ciagite, ne vati noceat mala lingua f uturo,' '
(Wreathe his brow with laurel, and let no grudging tongue harm the future poet), gracefully combined modesty of claim for his present performance with a proud confidence in what was to come. As frontispiece to this famous edition of 1645 there is prefixed a portrait of the author, a spiritless and bungled engraving, as " grim, lowering, and bitter " as good Bishop Hall could have desired. When the picture was shown to Milton by the engraver, one Marshall, he made no objection to it, but gravely wrote out a Greek motto to be added beneath, which the luckless artist as gravely copied on his plate, innocent of the fact that he was handing down to posterity a biting lampoon upon his own handiwork. It was a clever practical joke, and reminds us of a remark of Dryden's, years after, that Milton's manner of pronouncing the letter r, the " dog-letter," betrayed a " satiric wit." The cleverness of the joke makes ill amends for its saturninity. The poet had moved many leagues from the golden clime of his birth before he permitted himself that diversion. To be sure, he had moved under bitter stress ; some of the sweet saps of his youthful nature may well have been turned to satiric acids.
It is pleasant, after this, to read the sonnet to Henry Lawes, written after Mil- ton was installed with his wife and pupils in a large house which he had taken in the Barbican ; for the placid and gracious lines show returning calmness of spirit. The halcyon season, however, when the friends might please themselves with " im- mortal notes and Tuscan air," was short. Soon the surrender of Oxford drove the Powells in a body from Forest Hill to the house in the Barbican. The birth of a daughter, Anne, who was from the first " a kind of cripple," added to the disturbed condition of the household. The departure of the Powell family was followed by the death of Milton's father, and the poet, wearied out with the strain of the past months, resolved to give up teaching and remove to a smaller house in High Hoi- born, near Lincoln's Inn Fields.
His inheritance from his father had now placed him in easy financial circum- stances, and the triumph of the Independent party had left his mind comparatively free. Why did he not turn now to that great task of poetic creation of which he had thought so long, and for which, as his preserved notebooks show, he had al- ready made exhaustive study ? It is impossible to say. Perhaps, in spite of the
�� � LATIN SECRETARYSHIP, 1649-1659 xxiii
specious calm, he divined the storms which were still rolling up from the political horizon, and had dim prescience of the part he himself should be called upon to play in the drama of the King's death and Cromwell's sovereignty. Perhaps the springs of his fancy were dried up by the harassing years just past ; certainly the version of the nine psalms made at this time point to a state of extreme poetic sterility. Indeed, Milton was at no time rich in creative impulses from within. Endowed to an unmatchable degree with sheer voice, pure potentiality of expres- sion, he had to a less degree than many smaller men the kind of imagination which puts forth spontaneous and inevitable bloom in its season. The beautiful appari- tions of Coinus and Lycidas had been evoked from without ; so were the sterner and vaster lines of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes to arise in response to an occasion. But that occasion was to be no less than the overthrow of Puritan England, and for that the time was not ripe. However we explain the case, it is with a kind of impatient wonder that we see the poet, in this time of precious quiet, burdening himself with three huge tasks of compilation, a Latin dictionary, a complete history of England from the earliest times to his own day, and a vast body of divinity, or Methodical Digest of Christian Doctrine. It should in fair- ness be said, perhaps, that mere encyclopaedic scholarship held a much higher place in the seventeenth century than it does to-day. The immense reputation achieved by such men as Salmasius, Milton's future antagonist, apprises us how eager the world then was to set learning above wisdom. This prejudice of the age deter- mined the direction of Milton's effort ; the effort itself was doubtless prompted, as his school-teaching had formerly been, by a nervous desire to lose in busyness the impatience born of greater work deferred.
��LATIN SECRETARYSHIP, 1649-1659
THE time had now come when Milton's patriot zeal was to lift him to a place of eminence in the eyes of his countrymen. He had been known hitherto, second- arily, as a poet of promise, chiefly as a vigorous pamphleteer of rather startling and indecorous opinions ; but his work in neither kind had given him that " experience of great men " and that conversation with great events which he deemed necessary to the making of a poet. When he threw into the silence of consternation which followed the execution of the King at Whitehall, in January, 1649, his fearless de- fence of the regicides, entitled the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, the eyes of the whole country turned towards him. His was the first powerful voice lifted in greeting, as it was to be the last lifted in desperate defence, of the free Common- wealth. In tacit recognition of his service Bradshaw's Council of State offered him the Latin Secretaryship. The duties were large and ill-defined, but chiefly consisted in the translating and inditing of correspondence with foreign powers, and the replying to seditious pamphleteers who attacked the new government. Milton
�� � xxiv THE LIFE OF MILTON
accepted without hesitation. By so doing he put off once more, this time it might seem for ever, the possibility of fulfilling his secret purpose. He had not served in the armies of Parliament ; indeed, when the King's forces had advanced to Brentford and thrown London into a panic, he had not even gone out with the train-bands to Turnham Green to join in repulsing the foe, but had stayed at home instead and written a sonnet to Prince Rupert's troopers, beseeching them, in the name of the Muses, to spare his house from rapine. But if he had not chosen to shoulder a musket he had shown himself able to do yeoman's service with his quill. It may well have been with the thought of making good his failure to take up the sword in the time of his country's need, that he now laid at her feet the most elo- quent pen in Europe.
His first important service was a reply to the Eikon Basilike, a book purport- ing to have been written by the late King while in imprisonment, and now seized upon with devotion by the partisans of the exiled family. Against this " Royal Image " Milton wrote Ikonoklastes, the " Image-breaker." It is a work which reflects little credit upon the author. He imputes to the dead king, as one of his crimes, a taste for Shakespeare, and makes it a prime argument of his hypocrisy that one of the prayers which he was believed to have used in his captivity was taken from a passage a very beautiful and devout passage of Sidney's Ar- cadia. One of the curiosities of Milton's complex character was, as Lowell has reminded us, his power to force his conviction into the service of his enthusiasm. When it was necessary for him to defend his use of blank verse in Paradise Lost he repudiated the value of rhyme in toto, though his own works were there to gain- say him ; his own marriage having proved unfortunate, he was for wiping the whole institution out of existence. In the same spirit of false but absolutely sincere gen- eralization, he turns here upon his beloved Shakespeare and honored Sidney, be- cause he finds them made use of by a man whose memory he execrates.
Following upon these pamphlets came Milton's great opportunity for a European hearing in vindication of the Commonwealth, and he embraced it at a frightful price. Charles II., an exile at the Hague, had cast about for some man learned enough to support the cause of his house against the revolutionists. He found such a one in Salmasius, a world-famous scholar and a mighty man of Latin. Nobody to-day would dream of employing for such a task the services of a mere scholar, however colossal, but the seventeenth-century reverence for the pedantry of learn- ing gave the name of Salmasius a portentous weight. On the appearance of his book, the Defensio 2egia, Milton was instructed to prepare a rejoinder. He gave himself to the task with an ardor doubly inflamed by the magnitude of the quarrel and the reputation of his antagonist. He called his reply a Defense of the English People, but as we look at it to-day the great issues seem buried almost irrecover- ably beneath a mass of very unheroic personalities. Milton sneers at Salmasius's Latinity, twits him with subjection to his wife, and exhausts the vocabulary of thieves' Latin trying to find a name of contumely adequate to character his base- ness. In the midst of this work Milton's eyes showed signs of failing, and he was
�� � LATIN SECRETARYSHIP, 1649-1659 xxv
warned by his physician that to persevere to the end would mean certain blindness. With stoical devotion, as splendid as it was perverted, he decided to pay the price. We groan when we think of the real insignificance of the object for which the light of those eyes was spent spent recklessly, with a kind of frenzy of waste which shows what funds of fanaticism lay beneath the placid surface of his nature.
In the quarrel which dragged on for several years more with Morus, to whom Salmasius's cause had descended, the tone of petty personality gained steadily over the real question at issue, though at the same time the frankly autobiographic passages of Milton grow nobly dignified, and his eulogies upon the leading men of the Commonwealth, taken together, form an august vindication of their cause. It would be unprofitable to dwell upon the disagreeable aspects of the Salmasius controversy, were it not that they illustrate forcibly certain elements of the poet's nature which tradition has obscured, yet which are essential to even a primary understanding of him. Wordsworth condensed into a single line the popular mis- apprehension. So far from being a soul which dwelt like a star apart, Milton was one of the most inflammable, mobile, and social of beings. A slight stung him, an honor lifted him, a sneer maddened and blinded him. For poetry, indeed, he kept the clear ichor of his temperament, free from roil ; and it is as a poet that he is remembered ; but one who looks discerningly can detect in the very splendor and volume of that utterance the stress of a humanity more than ordinarily obvious to passion.
By 1652 Milton's blindness had become complete. He had meanwhile removed from rooms in Whitehall, assigned him during the first years of his incumbency of the Secretaryship, to a house in Petty France, pleasantly situated near St. James Park, across which he had to be led when his presence was needed at the Council. His duties were gradually lightened, the routine work being given to an assistant. Edward Phillips was still with him, to serve as amanuensis, and acquaintance with the young poet Andrew Marvell, afterwards his assistant in the Secretaryship, brought him another hand to lighten the burden of his blindness. We get from Edward Phillips and others many pleasant glimpses of the life which he now led, visited by distinguished strangers anxious for a sight of the victor in the Salmasius quarrel, " of which all Europe rang from side to side." Hints of more intimate converse we get in the sonnets to Cyriack Skinner and to young Lawrence, poetical invitations to supper and a cosy evening by the fireside, which assure us by their tone of sober gaiety how well Milton bore his misfortune. The geniality of the lines reminds us of Phillips's bit of gossip concerning the young " beaux " with .whom his uncle, after his return from Italy, was accustomed to keep an occasional " gaudy-day." But that life in the little house was not all made up of amenities we can conjecture from the characters of the three young girls who had been left motherless there. During these untended years rebellion against their stern father was growing towards its sickening outcome. In 1656 their father married again, this time Katharine Woodcock, of whom nothing is known but what can be gleaned from the sonnet which he wrote upon her death, little more than a year later. To
�� � xxvi THE LIFE OF MILTON
judge from the deep marital tenderness of these lines upon his late espoused saint," hers must have been the most gracious influence in the poet's adult life.
Up to the close of Cromwell's reign Milton continued, as a kind of Latin Secre- tary extraordinary, to indite those messages to foreign powers which made the period of the Protectorate the most dignified in the diplomatic history of England. The most famous of these was among the last, a letter to the Duke of Savoy con- cerning the Piedmontese massacre ; in its official way it is as impressive as the sonnet on the same subject in which Milton gave vent to his individual horror and indignation. His duties were nominally continued under Cromwell's son Richard ; but events were hastening with irresistible force toward the downfall of the Pro- tectorate and the recall of the King. Milton was one of the last to succumb to the logic of the situation. His attitude toward the great questions of Church and State had changed many times in the twenty years that were passed. He had begun as an Episcopalian with reservations ; he had written his first pamphlets in advo- cacy of a modified Presbyterianism ; next he had gone over to the " Root and Branch " party, and advocated complete disestablishment of the Church ; then, turning fiercely upon the Presbyterians, and declaring that " New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large," he had joined the Independents, and had finally pushed the thesis of this party to the length of complete toleration of religious opinion. But in all these changes, except the last, he had gone with the country. His mind, as Lowell says, had not so much changed as expanded to meet new national condi- tions. Though he had differed stoutly from Cromwell in his later policy, he had remained unshaken in his allegiance to the idea of popular government, even in the unpropitious form of a military dictatorship. Dismissed from his office by Gen- eral Monk in April, 1659, on the very eve of the return of the exiled court, he pub- lished his pamphlet entitled A Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Com- monwealth. The very phrase was full of unconscious satire. Upon the blind poet, as he sat meditating through those days of public rejoicing, there rested a second blindness, that of the idealist resolute to see nothing but his ideal.
The King's return, however, at last became so imminent that the stoutest idealism had to succumb. Nobody knew how inclusive the royal clemency would prove to be, and Milton was too marked a man to abide the event with safety. The last glimpse we get of him for the next four months is in the shape of a conveyance of bond for four hundred pounds, to Cyriack Skinner, dated the day before the public proclamation of Charles in London. With the ready money thus furnished he went into hiding, Phillips informs us, at a friend's house in Bartholomew Close. On June 16 an order for his arrest was issued by the House of Commons, and two months later his EikonoJdastes and Defense of the English People were ordered burnt by royal proclamation. Strangely enough, however, in the final Bill of In- demnity his name is not mentioned. Why the author of the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates should have been let off scot free from the vengeance which overtook so many men essentially less implicated, constitutes a historical puzzle which Pro- fessor Masson has labored in vain to solve. Andrew Marvell afterwards obtained
�� � COMPLETION OF PARADISE LOST xxvii
from the House an abatement of the excessive fee demanded from Milton by an officious sergeant who had carried out the nullified order of arrest, and his voice was doubtless raised now in behalf of his friend and master. There is also a pleasant tradition that the poet Davenant repaid an old kindness by a like intercession. To whomever the clemency was due, however, Milton was left free by the passage of the Act of Oblivion to emerge from hiding. He was not yet perhaps wholly free from danger by mob violence. On the night before the anniversary of Charles I.'s death, the disinterred corpses of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were brought for safe keeping to the Red Lion Inn, only a short distance from Milton's new lodgings in Holborn ; and it was up Holborn that the crazy mob fol- lowed the carts next day to the ghastly gibbeting at Tyburn.
But to Milton's ears, in these days, the rioting of the " sons of Belial " who had come back to flout with insolence and outrage every ideal for which the men of the Commonwealth had given their lives, must have sounded dim and far away. The time had come for him to fulfil the boyish boast made more than twenty years before, when he had replied to his friend's question, " Of what am I thinking ? In God's name, of immortality ! I am pluming my wings for a flight." Though held under by an immense sustained effort of will, the ambition conceived so long ago had never for long been absent from his mind. Added to the sense of his mission as a singer, sent by the great Task-master to add to the sum of beauty in the world, there rested upon him now another obligation, no less impelling. The Puri- tan moral scheme, the new social instauration, which had failed on earth, he must carry over into the world of imaginative permanence. He must justify to men the ways of that God who had dealt so darkly with his chosen people. Already, though " long choosing and beginning late," he had carved out from the hollow dark the vast traits of his theme.
��VI
FROM THE ACT OF OBLIVION TO THE COMPLETION OF PARADISE LOST,
1660-1665
FOR a man of Milton's temper the state of public affairs alone would have been a sufficient bitterness ; but private trials added their simples to the cup. One of the minor but most satiric of these was furnished by the two nephews upon whom he had lavished his time and his educational theories. How well the youngest, John ' Phillips, had imbibed his uncle's teachings, he had shown long ago by pub- lishing a Satire Against Hypocrites and a Miscellany of Choice Drolleries, which earned him a sharp reprimand from Cromwell's Council. His graver brother Edward followed the primrose path thus gallantly marked out, by publishing a volume entitled The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, or the Arts of Wooing and Complimenting, with a preface to the youthful gentry of England. The royalism of both was pronounced ; and although Edward continued to visit the house on
�� � xxviii THE LIFE OF MILTON
terms of friendship, his presence must have been to his uncle a pretty emphatic reminder of the collapse of his own teaching.
If the defection of his nephews was satiric, the rebellion of his daughters was sordidly tragic. The eldest, Anne, a handsome girl in spite of her lameness, was now seventeen ; Mary, the second, was fifteen, and Deborah eleven. They had received only the rudiments of an education, the eldest not even being able to write. In spite of this their father undertook to make them do him a service in his literary labors which they would hardly have been prepared for by a formal college training. Edward Phillips says that he used them to " supply his want of eyesight by their ears and tongues. For though he had daily about him one or other to read to him, some, persons of man's estate, who of their own accord greedily catched at the opportunity of being his readers, . . . others, of younger years, sent by their parents to the same end, yet, excusing only the eldest by reason of her bodily deformity and difficult utterance of speech (which, to say truth, I doubt was the principal cause of excusing her), the other two were condemned to the perform- ance of reading and exactly pronouncing of all the languages of whatever book he should at one time or other think fit to peruse : viz. the Hebrew (and, I think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the Italian, Spanish, and French." That young girls could have been trained to read intelligibly languages of which they did not, as Phillips declares, understand a word, is almost beyond belief ; but whether literally true or not, the statement implies a sternness and a length of discipline gruesome to imagine. Rebellion on their part was natural and inevitable, but before the miserable details of their growing aversion to their father, their con- spiring with the servants in petty pilf erings from his purse, their making away with his books, the remark of one of them, on hearing of her father's third marriage, that " that was no news, but, if she could hear of his death, that was something," the mind turns sick, and wonders whether, if there were another Paradise Lost to purchase, it would be worth such a price. Taking the facts as we have them, even casuistry can make of them no clean bill of conscience for the father. The girls were, it is true, the fruit of an unloving marriage ; their recalcitrancy Milton may have looked upon as a part of the grim logic of that forced " union of minds that cannot unite," and he may have found justification for his tyranny in the bitter memories of the days when he was pouring out his wrath and anguish in the tracts on divorce. The radical meanness of nature which betrays itself in their petty revenges may have served to wither affection in the bud. But such considera- tions explain, without extenuating, his attitude. His daughters remain the great blot upon his memory ; they cannot make it less than august, but they suffice to render it, from the standpoint of the simple human charities, forbidding. They remained with him for eight years longer, when they were put out to learn femi- nine handicrafts. A glimpse which we get of the youngest, Deborah, many years after, gives a comforting assurance that, however she may have failed in filial duty during her father's lifetime, she cherished a sincere affection for his memory. In 1721 she was sought out by Addison and others in the weavers' district of Spital-
�� � COMPLETION OF PARADISE LOST xxix
fields, where she lived in obscure widowhood. Some pictures of her father were ehown her, to get her opinion of their authenticity. Several she passed by, saying " No, no," to the question whether she had ever seen such a face ; but when a cer- tain picture in crayons was produced, she cried out in transport, " 'T is my father, 't is my dear father ; I see him, 't is him ! " and then she put her hands to several parts of the face, crying, " 'T is the very man ! here, here ! " In all her reminis- cences of her father there was, her visitors report, the same tone of reverence and fondness.
Besides the robust and cheery figure of Andrew Marvell, a faithful visitor, there came to break the gloom of the Milton household a young Quaker, Thomas Ell- wood. He was the son of a small country squire, and possessed of all the simplicity and heartiness proper to the character. He had embraced the Quaker faith by con- tagion from the enthusiasm of a family of Penningtons whom he visited, and along with his new faith felt a desire to grow in the wisdom of books. To that end, he was introduced to Milton, took a house in the neighborhood, and came every day full of joyous zeal to imbibe learning from the works which the great man set him to read aloud. Whether poor Ellwood gathered much intellectual sustenance from this haphazard diet or not, his presence must have been a wholesome and inspirit- ing one to the solitary scholar. From him and Phillips we get some interesting hints concerning Milton's habits of composition. " Leaning back obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it," he would dictate ten, twenty, thirty lines at a sitting. Sometimes he would " lie awake all night, striving, but unable to make a single line." Then again, when the mood was on him, the verse would come " with a certain impetus and aestro as himself seemed to believe," and he would call his daughter Mary out of bed to take the words from his lips. His own statement is recorded, too, that " his vein never happily flowed but from the autumnal equinoctial to the vernal, and that whatever he attempted (in the other part of the year) was never to his satisfaction, though he courted his fancy never so much."
How far Paradise Lost had progressed by the time of Milton's instalment in the house in Jewin Street, whither he removed from his temporary lodgings in Hoi- born, is only matter of conjecture. At the beginning of the third book the move- ment of the poem is interrupted by a splendid " hymn to light " which may mark the resumption of the task after interruption caused by the King's return. A simi- lar break occurs at the beginning of Book VII, and references in this passage to the " evil days and evil tongues " upon which the poet has fallen, as well as to post- restoration literature and manners, the " barbarous dissonance of Bacchus and his revellers," point to this as more probably marking the time of resumption. The probability is increased by the fact that the next distinct break in the narrative, at the beginning of Book IX, would then correspond to the last serious interrup- tion which the work could have suffered, that occasioned by Milton's third mar- riage, this time to Elizabeth Minshull, a handsome young woman of twenty-six, and his removal to a new house in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. It was certainly fin-
�� � XXX
��ished by the summer of 1665. In July of that year the coming of the great Plague, the most terrible which ever visited England, made it necessary for Milton to find some refuge in the country. Ellwood found a place for him, a " pretty box " in the little village of Chalfont St. Giles, only a few miles from Harefield, the scene of Arcades, and not far from Horton, where in early manhood he had spent the five happy years of his " long vacation." The country sights, which in those days he had given delighted chronicle in L' Allegro and II Penseroso, could not reach him now. Those poems belonged to a world which was shut away from him by many a tragic change besides that which had quenched his bodily vision. But he carried with him, blind and fallen on evil days, the resultant of the twenty- five intervening years of battle and sacrifice, in the mighty martial rhythms and battailous imaginings of his completed epic. Honest Ellwood was rewarded for his fidelity by being the first, so far as we know, to see Paradise Lost in its final form. He came one day to visit Milton at the little irregular cottage in sleepy Chalfont, and thus describes the incident : " After some discourse had passed be- tween us, he called for a manuscript of his ; which, being brought, he delivered to me, bidding me to take it home with me and read it at my leisure, and, when I had so done, to return it to him, with my judgment thereon. When I came home and had set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entitled Paradise Lost"
��VII MILTON'S LAST YEARS, 1666-1674
ALTHOUGH by February or March of 1666 the Plague had sufficiently abated to allow of a return to the house in Artillery Walk, it was not until September of the following year that Paradise Lost was published. A part of this delay was doubtless due to the great fire which raged in London from the second to the fifth of September, 1666. Among the worst sufferers were the booksellers and pub- lishers, whose shops were clustered thickly about Old St. Paul's. When the poem did appear, it was with the imprint of an obscure publisher, one Samuel Simmons. There was for a moment some question whether even under these modest auspices it was to see the light, for a passage in the first book aroused suspicions of treason in the breast of the Rev. Thomas Tomkyns, M. A., whose business it became to license the manuscript. The contract for the book is still extant, showing that the author received five pounds at the time of issue, and was guaranteed a similar amount upon the exhaustion of each succeeding issue, up to the sum of twenty pounds. The first edition of 1300 copies was exhausted in eighteen months.
Milton's life-dream was fulfilled. He had accomplished the purpose which had been the secret motive of his whole conscious existence, as well as the subject of many a proud public utterance in the midst of those noises and hoarse disputes where he had felt the need of such utterance to sustain him. But he did not for
�� � MILTON'S LAST YEARS, 1666-1674
��that reason loose his grasp on the large lyre so painfully builded and strung. A chance remark of Elhvood's on returning the manuscript of Paradise Lost had suggested to him a companion subject. " Thou hast said much here," the young Quaker had observed (" pleasantly," as he assures us), " of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found ? " The poet had made no answer, but sat some time in a muse. Had he, after all, completed his task of justifying the ways of God to men ? Satan he had left triumphant, man he had left outcast from Eden, earning his painful bread under the curse. Did not the real justification lie in that part of the cosmic story which he had as yet only vaguely foreshadowed, in the bruising of the Serpent's head by that greater man who should recover Para- dise ? Out of such questioning came, some time in the next two years, Paradise Regained. The poem was finished before the publication of Paradise Lost, but not published until 1671.
In this poem there is noticeable a distinct change from Milton's earlier manner, a sudden purging away of ornament, a falling back on the naked concept, a pre- ference for language as slightly as possible tinctured with metaphoric suggestion. A portion of this change may be due to failing vividness of imagination ; certainly the abandonment of rapid narrative for tedious argumentation marks the increas- ing garrulity of age. Christ and Satan in the wilderness dispute with studied casuistry, until the sense of the spiritual drama in which they are protagonists is almost lost. As this same weakness is apparent also in the later books of Paradise Lost, we must lay it largely to the score of flagging creative energy. But in still greater measure the change seems to be a deliberate experiment in style, or perhaps more truly a conscious reproduction, in language, of that rarefied mental atmo- sphere to which the author had climbed from the rich valley mists of his youth. Unalluring at first, this bareness comes in time to have a solemn charm of its own, comparable, as has been said, to that of mountain scenery above the line of vegeta- tion. Some such beauty as this Milton, himself above all a student and amateur of style, must have prized in Paradise Regained, unless we are to attribute to- a narrow pride his refusal to tolerate the opinion of its inferiority to Paradise Lost. Whether deliberate or not, this same quality of style appears in the dramatic poem of Samson Agonistes. of the same 1671 volume, stripped of discursiveness, and wrought to the hard dark finish of bronze. By reason both of its form and of its content this last work of Milton is of absorbing interest.
Ever since the days of Arcades and Comus, Milton had cherished a fondness for the dramatic form. For several years after his return from Italy he had per- severed in the intention to make his master-work a drama, and even made sev- eral tentative sketches of Paradise Lost in that form. The suppression of stage plays by the Long Parliament he had concurred in, but without loss of sympathy with the theatre, at least as an ideal institution. It was characteristic of the unified purpose of his intellectual life that he should go back now to gather up this, the only one of the main threads of his intention still left hanging. For a subject, too, he went back to a theme pondered thirty years before. Samson Purso-
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��phorus or the Fire-bringer, and Samson Hybristes or Samson Marrying, were among the subjects pencilled in his note-book in 1642. At that time Samson had apparently engaged his attention no more deeply than other Bible heroes whose names occur in his notes ; but events had gradually been shaping his life into such a form that it now found in Samson's story its sufficient prototype and symbol. No hint escapes the poet that the many-sided correspondence of his own case with that of his hero is in his mind ; the treatment is throughout sternly objective, even sculpturesque in its detachment ; but the autobiographic meaning is everywhere latent, giving to the most restrained lines an ominous emphasis and to the least significant a strange kind of wintry passion. He too had been a champion favored of the Lord, and had matched his giant strength against the enemies of his people. He had sent the fire-brands of his pamphlets among their corn, and slain their strongest with simple weapons near at hand. He too had taken a wife from among the worshippers of Dagon ; he had made festival with her people over the nuptials which brought him a loss as tragic as Samson's, the loss of human tenderness, a lowered ideal, and a warped understanding of the deepest human relationships. Now, blind and fettered in the midst of an idolatrous generation, he may well have longed for another Salmasius upon whom to wreak, as Samson upon Harapha of Gath, the energy which still swelled his veins. In another year or two, when Dryden should " tag his verses," and transform his august epic into a trivial opera, he would be brought like Samson to make sport before the Philistines, as a juggler or a mime. Perhaps he might still hope, bowing his head in prayer to the God of the spirit, to bring down the temple builded by the men of the Restoration to the gods of the flesh, and bury in the ruins all the insolence and outrage of the times. With some such autobiographic second intention in mind as this, one must read the gray pages of Samson Agonistes. It offers perhaps the most remarka- ble instance in all art of an artist's personal story revealed by impersonal symbols, set forth in their traditional integrity, unmanipulated to any private end.
Milton had three more years to live after the publication of his last poems. His daughters had a year before been put out to learn, Phillips says, " some curious and ingenious sorts of manufacture that are proper for women to learn, particularly embroideries in gold and silver ; " and he was left alone in the house in Bunhill Fields with his young wife Elizabeth, of whom he seems to have been fond. The publication of Paradise Lost had again made him a figure of some note, visited by persons of distinction. The most interesting of these visits was that made by Dryden, for the purpose of asking permission to put Paradise Lost into rhyme, as a kind of sacred opera. The value of rhyme over blank verse, for heroic pur- poses, had been the main contention of Dryden's Essay on Dramatic Poetry, and the publication of the epic shortly after had been a powerful practical manifesto on Milton's part of his opposed opinion. This difference of artistic theory only serves to emphasize the fundamental differences between the two men, spokesmen and champions of antipodal creeds. Their trivial meeting takes on a kind of moral picturesqueness when we think of them in their typical characters, the militant
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spirit of an age of fiery baptism, the time-serving spirit of an age of pleasure. There is a half-humorous recognition of the gulf set between them in Milton's " Yes, you may tag my verses," with which he granted his visitor's request, a reply which does not gain in urbanity when contrasted with Dryden's generous and whole-souled praise of the poem he was called upon to travesty.
We get from the painter Richardson some vivid glimpses of Milton in old age. He speaks of him being led about the streets, clad in cold weather in a gray cam- blet coat, and wearing no sword, though " 't was his custom not long before to wear one, with a small silver hilt." And again, " I have heard that he used to sit in a grey coarse cloth coat at the door of his house, near Bunhill Fields, without Moor- gate, in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air, and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts, as well as quality ; and very lately I had the good fortune to have another picture of him from an aged clergy- man in Dorsetshire. He found him in a small house, he thinks but one room on a floor. In that, up one pair of stairs, which was hung with a rusty green, he found John Milton, sitting in an elbow chair ; black clothes, and neat enough, pale but not cadaverous, his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones." The Faithorne portrait, engraved in 1670, shows a face deeply seamed with lines of thought and of pain, eyes unblemished, but full of the disappointed query of blind- ness, hair flat over the brows and falling slightly waved to the shoulders, and a mouth of singular richness, which seems still to crave life, the one lingering fea- ture of the youthful mask.
Rising at four o'clock in summer and five in winter, hearing a chapter of the Bible in Hebrew read to him before breakfast, passing the day in work, with music and a little walk for diversion, and ending with a supper " of olives or some light tiling," a pipe and a glass of water, he lived placidly the meagre days left to him. Shortly before his death, being at dinner with his young wife, and finding a favorite dish prepared for him, he cried out, " God have mercy, Betty, I see thou wilt perform according to thy promise in providing me such dishes as I think fit whilst I live ; and when I die, thou knowest that I have left thee all." The nun- cupative will thus made was contested at law by his daughters, and broken. He died on the eighth of November, 1674, " with so little pain that the time of his ex- piring was not perceived by those in the room." " All his learned and great friends in London," says Toland, " not without a concourse of the vulgar, accompanied his body to the church of St. Giles, near Cripplegate, where he was buried in the chancel."
Many circumstances have combined to falsify for the modern mind the outlines of Milton's character. The theme most closely linked with his name as a poet has thrown about him a traditional reverence which has obscured his human lineaments. The political passions of his day are many of them still, under changed names, potent enough to distort his figure according to the direction of our approach. Added to these difficulties is the more essential one, that the harmony which he forced upon his character was made up of a hundred dissonances. He added
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��to the complexity of the poet the complexities of the theologian, the theorist, and the publicist. He was compelled to make himself over from Elizabethan to Crom- wellian, not quietly and by slow processes, but in the centre of clashing forces. This slight sketch can at best have pointed out only the most salient material ne- cessary to judgment of a character so variously endowed and acted upon. It will have accomplished its end if it has dissatisfied the reader with a conventional opinion.
As for his poetry, Milton must be thought of first and last as a master stylist. Keats is more poignant, Shakespeare more various, Coleridge more magical ; but nobody who has written in English has had at his command the same unfailing majesty of utterance. His is the organ voice of England. The figure suggests, too, the defect of his qualities. His voice is always his own ; he has none of the ventriloquism of the dramatic poets, none of the thaumaturgy by which they ob- scure themselves in their subject. Milton is always Miltonic, always lofty and grave, whether the subject sinks or rises. Through him we come nearest to that union of measure and might which is peculiar to the master poets of antiquity, and it is through a study of him that the defects of taste incident upon our modern systems of education can be most surely made good.
W. V. M.
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