CHAPTER II

MILTON'S LIFE AND CHARACTER

We know far more about Milton than about any other English poet born so

long ago. There are three reasons for this. One is that from his

earliest years he was very much interested in himself, was quite aware

that he was a man above the stature of ordinary men, and had the most

deliberate intention and expectation of doing great things.

Consequently he is not only, like most good poets, fond of bringing

more or less concealed autobiography into his poetry, but still more in

his prose works he inclines often to insert long passages about

himself, his studies, travels, projects, friends and character. It is

these more than anything else which now keep those works alive: and,

coming from a man so proudly truthful as Milton evidently was, they are

of the greatest interest and value. The second reason why we know so

much about him is that he played an active part in politics, a far more

certain way of {24} attracting contemporary attention in England than

writing _Hamlet_ or building St. Paul's Cathedral. And the third is

that his life has been made the subject of perhaps the most minute and

elaborate biography in the language. Mr. Masson's labours enable us to

know, if we choose, every fact, however insignificant, which the most

laborious investigation can discover, not only about Milton himself

but, one may almost say, about everybody who was ever for five minutes

in Milton's company.

From this mass of material, all that can be touched here is a few of

the most salient facts of the life and the most striking features of

the character.

Milton's life is naturally divided into three periods. The first is

that of his education and early poems. It extends from his birth in

1608 to his return from his foreign travels in 1639. The second is

that of his political activity, and extends from 1639 to the

Restoration. The third is that of _Paradise Lost_, _Paradise Regained_

and _Samson_. It concludes with his death, on November 8, 1674.

Milton was born on December 9, 1608, at a house in Bread Street,

Cheapside. The house is gone, but the street is a very short one, and

it is still pleasant to step out of the {25} roar of Cheapside into its

quietness, and think that there, on the left, close by, under the

shadow of Bow Church, was born the greatest poet to whom the greatest

city of the modern world has given birth. London ought to hold fast to

the honour of Milton, for his honour is peculiarly hers. He was not

only born a Londoner but lived in London nearly all his life. And his

mind is throughout that of the citizen. Neither agriculture nor sport

means much to him; and, much as he loves the sights and sounds of the

open country, his allusions to them are those of the delighted but

still wondering alien, not those of the native. None is more often

quoted than the passage in the ninth book of _Paradise Lost_--

"As one who, long in populous city pent,

Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,

Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe

Among the pleasant villages and farms

Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight--

The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,

Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound--

If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,

What pleasing seemed for her now pleases more,

She most, and in her look sums all delight."

{26} And the secret of its charm obviously lies partly in the note of a

personal experience. Just in that way must Milton, as boy and man,

have often issued forth from the weariness of his studies and the noise

and confinement of the streets, for a walk among the open fields that

then lay so close at hand for the Londoner. And perhaps, as the

inhabitants of towns often do, he took a pleasure in the very hedgerows

unknown to those who saw them every day. The present Poet Laureate,

who has spent most of his life in the country, has asked a question to

which it is not easy for the countryman to give the answer he would

like--

"Whose spirit leaps more high,

Plucking the pale primrose,

Than his whose feet must fly

The pasture where it grows?"

If the town-dweller never attains to that mystical communion with the

secret soul of Nature which Wordsworth and such as Wordsworth owe to a

life spent in the "temple's inmost shrine," yet his eye, undulled by

familiarity, commonly sees more in trees and flowers than the eyes of

nearly all those who live every day among them. At its highest

familiarity breeds intimacy, but more often what it breeds is

indifference. A man who {27} reads the Bible for the first time in

middle life will never live inside it as some saints have lived; but he

will see much that is hidden from most of those who have been reading

it every day since they could read at all.

Milton remained in London, so far as we know, for the first sixteen

years of his life. He was educated at St. Paul's School by a private

tutor, one Thomas Young, who was later a conspicuous Presbyterian

figure, and by his father, to whom he owed far more than to any one

except himself. The elder John Milton was a remarkable man. He had,

to begin with, deserted the religious views of his family and taken a

line of his own, a course which may not always indicate wisdom, but

always indicates force of character. The poet's grandfather, who lived

in the Oxford country, had adhered very definitely to Roman Catholicism

and is said to have cast off his son for becoming a Protestant and

something of a Puritan. The son went to London, set up in business as

a scrivener, that is, as something like a modern solicitor, and

prospered so much that by 1632 he was able to retire and live in the

country. He had considerable musical talents, and his compositions are

found in collections of tunes to which such {28} men as Morley, Dowland

and Orlando Gibbons contributed. His house was no doubt full of music,

as were, indeed, many others in that most musical of English centuries,

and it must have been primarily to him that the poet owed the intense

delight in music which appears in all his works. No poet speaks of

music so often, and none in his poetry so often suggests that art. The

untaught music of lark or nightingale he has not; but no poet has so

much of the music which is one of the most consciously elaborate of

those arts by which man expresses at once his senses, his mind and his

soul.

In the spring of 1625, just a month or two after the accession of the

king whose tragical fate was to be the original source of Milton's

European fame and very nearly the cause of his mounting a scaffold

himself, the future author of _Paradise Lost_ went into residence at

Cambridge where he remained for seven years. The college that can

boast his name among its members is Christ's. Unlike so many poets he

had a successful university career, took the ordinary degrees, and

evidently made an impression on his contemporaries. No doubt the

strong natural bias to a studious life which he had from a child made

him apter for university discipline {29} than is usually the case with

genius. From the beginning he had the passion of the student. He says

of himself that from his twelfth year he scarce ever went to bed before

midnight; and Aubrey reports much the same and says that his father

"ordered the maid to sit up for him." And his studies were in the main

the accepted studies of the time, not, like Shelley's, a defiance of

them. All through his life he had a scholar's respect for learning,

and for the great tradition of literature which it is the true business

of scholarship to maintain. Radical and rebel as he was in politics

and theology, contemptuous of law, custom and precedent, he was always

the exact opposite in his art. There he never attempted the method of

the _tabula rasa_, or clean slate, which made his political pamphlets

so barren. The greatest of all proofs of the strength of his

individuality is that it so entirely dominates the vast store of

learning and association with which his poetry is loaded. Such a man

will at least give his university a chance; and, though Milton did not

in later life look back on Cambridge with great affection or respect,

there can be no doubt that the seven years he spent within the walls of

a college were far from useless to the poet who more than any other

{30} was to make learning serve the purposes of poetry.

So strong, self-reliant and proudly virtuous a nature was not likely to

be altogether popular either with the authorities or with his

companions. Nor was he, at any rate at first. He had some difference

with his tutor, had to leave Cambridge for a time, and is alleged, on

very doubtful evidence, to have been flogged. But, whatever his fault

was, it was nothing that he was ashamed of, for he publicly alluded to

the affair in his Latin poems, and was never afraid to challenge

inquiry into his Cambridge career. Nor did it injure him permanently

with the authorities. He took his degrees at the earliest possible

dates, and ten years after he left Cambridge was able to write publicly

and gratefully of "the more than ordinary respect which I found, above

many of my equals, at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the

Fellows of that college wherein I spent some years: who, at my parting

after I had taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways

how much better it would content them that I would stay: as by many

letters full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and

long after, I was assured of their singular good affection towards me."

The {31} Fellows were no doubt clerical dons of the ordinary sort:

indeed, we know they were; but they could not have Milton among them

for seven years without discovering that he was something above the

ordinary undergraduate. Wood, who died in 1695 and therefore writes as

a contemporary, says of Milton that while at Cambridge he was "esteemed

to be a virtuous and sober person yet not to be ignorant of his own

parts." Such young men may not be popular, but if they have the real

thing in them they soon compel respect. By the undergraduates Milton

was called "The Lady of Christ's." And it is plain, from his own

references to this nickname in a Prolusion delivered in the college,

that he owed it not only to his fair complexion, short stature and

great personal beauty, but also to the purity, delicacy and refinement

of his manners. He contemptuously asks the audience who had given him

the nickname whether the name of manhood was to be confined to those

who could drain great tankards of ale or to peasants whose hands were

hard with holding the plough. He disdains the implied charge of

prudery, and indeed his language is what could not have been used by an

effeminate or a coward. No braver man ever held a pen. Wood says {32}

that "his deportment was affable, his gait erect, bespeaking courage

and undauntedness," and he himself tells us that "he did not neglect

daily practice with his sword," and that "when armed with it, as he

generally was, he was in the habit of thinking himself quite a match

for any one and of being perfectly at ease as to any injury that any

one could offer him." Evidently he owed his title of "Lady" to no

weakness, but to a disgust at the coarse and barbarous amusements then

common at the universities. He says of himself that he had no faculty

for "festivities and jests," as indeed was to be witnessed by all his

writings. The witticisms, if such they can be called, which occur in

his poetry and oftener in his prose are akin to what are now called

practical jokes, that is jokes made by the bodies of those whose minds

are not capable of joking. This was partly the common fault of an age

whose jests, as may be seen sometimes even in Shakspeare, appear to us

to alternate between the merely obvious, the merely verbal, and the

merely barbarous; but it was partly also the peculiar temperament of

Milton, whose sense of humour, like that of many learned and serious

men, was so sluggish that it could only be moved by a very violent

stimulus. {33} But in the main with Milton there was no question of

jests, good or bad. It is evident from his own proud confessions that

he was always intensely serious, at least from his Cambridge days,

always conscious of the greatness of life's issues, always uplifted

with the noblest sort of ambition. He says of himself that, however he

might admire the art of Ovid and poets of Ovid's sort, he soon learnt

to dislike their morals and turned from them to the "sublime and pure

thoughts" of Petrarch and Dante. And his "reasonings, together with a

certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness, and self-esteem

either of what I was or what I might be (which let envy call

pride) . . . kept me still above those low descents of mind beneath

which he must deject and plunge himself that can agree to saleable and

unlawful prostitutions." And in repudiating an impudently false charge

against his own character he boldly announces a doctrine far above his

own age, one, indeed, to which ours has not yet attained. "Having had

the doctrine of Holy Scripture unfolding these chaste and high

mysteries with timeliest care infused that 'the body is for the Lord

and the Lord for the body,' thus also I argued to myself,--that, if

unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be {34}

such a scandal and dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the

image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be

much more deflowering and dishonourable. . . . Thus large I have

purposely been that, if I have been justly taxed with this crime, it

may come upon me after all this my confession with a tenfold shame."

Such was the man from the first, severe with others and with himself,

conscious, almost from boyhood, in his own famous words, that "he who

would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable

things ought himself to be a true poem"; a somewhat strange figure, no

doubt, among the tavern-haunting undergraduates of the seventeenth

century, a stranger still to be honoured, a hundred and fifty years

later, in the rooms which then and now were remembered as his, by the

single act of drunkenness in the long and virtuous life of Wordsworth.

When he left the university in 1632 Milton had conquered respect,

though probably not popularity. The tone of the sixth of the academic

Orations, which he delivered at Cambridge and allowed to be published

in his old age, shows that, being still aware that he was not popular,

he was surprised and pleased at the applause with which a previous

discourse of {35} his had been received and at the large gathering

which had crowded to hear the one he was delivering. He says that

"nearly the whole flower of the university" was present; and, after

allowing for compliments, it is plain that only a man whose name

aroused expectations could draw an audience which could be so described

without obvious absurdity.

We may well then believe that there is no great exaggeration in his

nephew's statement, substantially confirmed as it is by other evidence,

that when Milton left Cambridge in 1632 he was already "loved and

admired by the whole university, particularly by the Fellows and most

ingenious persons of his House." He had, as Wood says, "performed the

collegiate and academical exercises to the admiration of all." The

power of his mind, the grave strength of his character, could not but

be plain to all who had come into close contact with him, and even for

those who had not he was a man who had distinction plainly written on

his face. It is possible, even, that he was already known as a poet.

Before he left Cambridge he had written several of the poems which we

still read in his works: the beautiful stanzas _On the Death of a Fair

Infant_, so like and so unlike the early poems of Shakspeare, the noble

_Ode {36} on the Nativity_ begun probably on Christmas Day 1629, though

this is not certain; the pretty little _Song on May Morning_ which one

likes to fancy having been sung at some such Cambridge greeting of the

rising May Day sun as those which are still performed on Magdalen Tower

at Oxford; certainly the remarkable lines which are his tribute to

Shakspeare: certainly also the beautiful _Epitaph on the Marchioness of

Winchester_; and, to mention no more, the autobiographical sonnet on

attaining the age of twenty-three. None of these except the lines on

Shakspeare are known to have been published before they appeared in the

volume of Milton's poems issued in 1645. But the fact that those lines

were printed, though without Milton's name, among the commendatory

verses prefixed to the 1632 Folio Edition of Shakspeare, may imply that

Milton was already known as a young poet. There is also a story that

the poem on the death of Lady Winchester was printed in a contemporary

Cambridge collection. But whether this were so or not (and no such

volume is known to have existed), it seems almost certain that some of

Milton's poems would have got known by being passed about in manuscript

copies. He himself from the first undervalued nothing he wrote, and

was {37} not afraid to say publicly, in his _Reason of Church

Government_, that, from his early youth, it had been found that,

"whether aught was imposed me by them that had the overlooking, or

betaken to of mine own choice in English or other tongue, prosing or

versing, but chiefly this latter, the style, by certain signs it had,

was likely to live." He published these bold words in 1641, when he

had given no public proof at all of their truth. Such a man was not

likely to be unwilling that his verses should be seen: and in

particular such poems as the epitaph on Lady Winchester, whose death

aroused much public interest, or the _Ode on the Nativity_, plainly

challenging the greatest of his predecessors by its high theme and

noble art, are almost sure to have got about and won him some fame.

He had earned distinction, then, and aroused expectation before the end

of his university career. But what surprised his contemporaries was

that for the next seven or eight years he appeared to do little or

nothing to justify the one or fulfil the other. Leaving Cambridge when

he was twenty-three, he entered no profession, but lived till he was

past twenty-nine in studious retirement at his father's country house

at Horton near Windsor. His father, and other friends, very {38}

naturally remonstrated at this apparent inactivity. To them all the

answer is the same. He cannot now enter the Church, as he had

intended, because he would not "subscribe slave" and take oaths that he

could not keep. He is not surrendering himself to "the endless delight

of speculation," or to the pleasure of "dreaming away his years in the

arms of studious retirement." No; he has other things in view than

these: but for their performance he demands time for himself and

patience from his friends: his own thought is not of being early or

late but of being fit. And the work for which he is preparing is in

his own mind a settled thing. It is literature, poetry, and, in

particular, as will soon appear more definitely, a great poem to take

its place among the great poems of the world.

The writing of poetry has never been a recognized and seldom a

lucrative profession. Most poets, like other artists, have had to face

family opposition and the danger of poverty in obeying their inward

call. In this matter Milton is one of the great exceptions. Many

poets have had fathers as rich as his, but it would not be easy to find

one who resigned himself so cheerfully to the prospect of having a

poetic son. The elder Milton was, however, as we have seen, no

ordinary man. His sense {39} of the value of the things of the mind

was almost as great as his faith in his son and far greater than his

ambition for his son's visible success in the eyes of the world. He

had naturally hoped that that son's evident abilities would be

exhibited in the ordinary course in a recognized profession; and he

evidently made some protest against the apparently objectless studies

which, even after leaving Cambridge, Milton seemed to regard as his

sole business in life. The record of this survives in the Latin poem

_Ad Patrem_ which is plainly a reply to some such remonstrance. It is

an appeal, and one of very confident tone, to his father not to scorn

the Muses to whom he himself owes his own great musical gifts. Why

should he, a musician, be astonished to find that his son is a poet?

Poetry more than any of man's other gifts is the proof of his divine

origin: music and poetry rank together; may it not be that he and his

father have divided between them the two great gifts of Apollo?

"Dividuumque Deum genitorque puerque tenemus."

The poem rings with the scorn of wealth, from which one must suppose

that the old man of business had pointed out that the {40} scholar's

life was not usually lived under the smiles of Fortune. How can you,

of all men, replies his son, ask me to care much for that? You trained

me from the first for learning, not for the City or the Bar; the father

who had his son taught not only Latin, but Greek and Hebrew, French and

Italian, astronomy and physical science, cannot ask him to regard money

making as the object of life. I have chosen a better part than that:

and you were the inspirer of my choice. And I know that at heart you

agree with it and share it.

The poem is one of the most interesting of Milton's Latin poems, being

rather less affected than most of them by that artificiality of

classical allusion which is the bane of such productions. So far as we

know, it was the last word on its subject. From henceforth no one

questioned Milton's right to be a poet and himself. If he ever

afterwards deserted his poetic vocation it was at what he believed to

be a still higher call. For the present he lived on quietly at Horton,

near the Church where his mother's grave may still be seen; walking

often, as we may suppose, about that quietly beautiful country washed

by the Thames and crowned by Windsor Castle; and sometimes, as we know

from his own words, travelling the seventeen or eighteen miles to {41}

London to buy books or learn "anything new in Mathematics or in Music,

in which sciences I then delighted." Some of these visits to London

evidently lasted days or weeks.

The interesting thing about these six years at Horton is that they are

the only part of his life during which the least rural of our poets

lived continuously in the country. And perhaps we may say that they

bore their natural fruit; for it was while he was at Horton that Milton

wrote _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, in which he touched rural life

and rural scenes with a freshness and directness which he never again

equalled. And the most important of the other poems written during

these years, _Arcades_, _Comus_, and above all, _Lycidas_, show the

same influence. _Arcades_ and _Comus_ point also to the effect of his

visits to London and the musical world: for both of these were written

for the music of his friend Henry Lawes, and probably at his

suggestion; and, written as they were for entertainments given by

members of the noble families of Stanley and Egerton, they show that

Milton's plan of life did not involve cutting himself off from the

great world, where they must have caused his name to be talked of. His

life at Horton was evidently not that of a mere recluse, {42}

forgetting the world outside and forgotten by it. _Arcades_ and

_Comus_, and still more the wonderful outburst _At a Solemn Music_, are

visible links with the cultivated circles of the town, as _Lycidas_,

which followed them in 1637 and was printed in 1638 at Cambridge with

other poems to the memory of Edward King, is a visible link with his

old university.

The mention of the poems of these years, the most delightful that

Milton was ever to write, show that the six years spent at Horton were

not entirely what he calls them, "a complete holiday spent in reading

over the Greek and Latin writers." If he had never written another

line, he had written enough by the time he left Horton to give him a

place among the very greatest men who have practised the art of poetry

in England. When he started abroad in 1638 he must have known, and his

father too, that his daring choice had already justified itself. "You

ask what I am about, what I am thinking of," he writes to his friend

Diodati at the end of the Horton time; "why, with God's help, of

immortality." It is the voice of a man who knows he has already done

great things but counts them as nothing compared with what he is to do

later on.

Man proposes. In 1637 Milton was "pluming {43} his wings" for the very

mightiest of poetic flights, for such a poem as would give full scope

to his genius and place him among the great poets of the world. But in

the result he actually wrote less poetry in the next twenty years than

he had written in the previous five: less in quantity and far less in

quality and importance. The first interruption was the completion of

his elaborate education by a grand tour. His generous father, who was

well-to-do rather than rich, had acquiesced in his not so far earning

one penny for himself, and was now prepared to provide him with about a

thousand pounds of our present money to enable him to go abroad for a

year or two in comfortable style and with the attendance of a servant.

Leaving England in the spring of 1638, he spent a few days in Paris,

where he was civilly entertained by the famous Grotius, then Swedish

Ambassador there, as well as by the English Ambassador, Lord Scudamore,

but soon moved south, entering Italy by Nice and Genoa and arriving at

Florence in August or September. There he spent two months, and was

enthusiastically received by the various academies or clubs of men of

letters which then flourished in Florence, one of whose still existing

minute {44} books records that at its meeting on September the 16th a

certain John Milton, an Englishman, read to the members a Latin

hexameter poem showing great learning. There also he paid his famous

visit to Galileo, now old and blind, and still a sort of nominal

prisoner of the Inquisition, for the sin, as Milton says in the

_Areopagitica_, of "thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan

and Dominican licensers thought." One may be sure that it was not

merely the interest of the new theory about the motion of the earth

which drew him back so often to that question in _Paradise Lost_. The

blind astronomer, whose scientific heresies had placed him in some

danger of the thumbscrew, must have been a very near and moving memory

to the blind poet whose political and ecclesiastical heresies had so

nearly brought him to the gallows.

From Florence Milton went on to Rome, where his scholarly tastes

gratified themselves for two months in the study of what remained of

the ancient city. The famous picture of Rome in _Paradise Regained_

may owe something to these weeks. There, too, he was well received by

several of Rome's most distinguished scholars who paid him compliments

of Italian extravagance. There, too, he heard the famous Leonora

Baroni {45} sing, and was so moved as to write three Latin epigrams in

her praise. But it was at Naples, whither he passed on before winter,

that he made the acquaintance which, except that of Galileo, is the

most interesting his Italian tour brought him. It was that of the

Neopolitan patrician, Giovanni Manso, who had been intimate with Tasso

and Marini and had been celebrated by Tasso in the _Gerusalemme

Conquistata_. His courtesy to a foreigner was soon to procure him a

still greater honour; for before leaving Naples Milton addressed to him

a Latin poem thanking him for his kindness, speaking openly of his own

poetic ambitions and praying that, if he lives to write the great

Arthurian Epic which he was then planning, he may find such a friend as

Tasso found to welcome his poem, comfort his old age and cherish his

fame. The only difficulty which separated Manso and Milton was that of

religion, where Milton's unguarded frankness embarrassed his host. So,

when he abandoned his intended tour in Greece because he thought it

"base" to be "travelling abroad at case for intellectual culture while

his fellow-countrymen were fighting at home for liberty," he was warned

that the Jesuits at Rome had their eyes on him. But he stayed there

two {46} months nevertheless, fearlessly keeping his resolution, not

indeed to introduce or invite religious controversy but, if questioned,

then, as he says, "whatsoever I should suffer to dissemble nothing."

By February he was again in Florence; and after visits to Bologna,

Ferrara and Venice, whence he characteristically shipped "a chest or

two of choice music books" for England, he crossed the Alps, spent a

week or two at Geneva and in France, and was at home by August 1639.

The elaborate education was now formally complete; and what ordinary

men call practical life was at last to begin for Milton. Now for the

first time he had an abode of his own, a lodging in St. Bride's, Fleet

Street, and soon afterwards a house in Aldersgate Street where he

settled with a young nephew whom he undertook to educate. But the real

work which he had in view was that of a poet, not of a schoolmaster.

The high expectations which he knew he had excited among Italian men of

letters had reinforced those of his English friends; and he was now

more than ever inclined to follow that "inward prompting which now grew

daily upon me that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my

portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I

might {47} perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes as they

should not willingly let it die." So, as his extant notes show, he was

weighing a large number of subjects for the great poem, slowly settling

on a Biblical one, and indeed on that of the Fall of Man, and perhaps

writing some earliest lines of what we now know as _Paradise Lost_.

But in November 1640 occurred an event which governed Milton's life for

the next twenty years. The Long Parliament met, and, from that time

forward till its final meeting in 1660 to dissolve itself and prepare

the way for Charles II, politics were the dominant interest of Milton's

mind. It is his age of prose; during it he wrote very little verse of

any kind, and none of importance except the finer of his eighteen

Sonnets which nearly all belong to these years. On the other hand,

most of his prose works were written between 1640 and 1660. Of these

it is enough to say that they are perhaps the most curious of all

illustrations of the great things which a poet alone can bring to prose

and of the dangers which he runs in bringing them. A poet of the

stature of Milton is ready at all times to catch all kinds of fire, not

only the fires of faith and zeal and enthusiasm, but also, as a rule,

those of a scorn {48} that knows no limit and a hatred that knows no

mercy. Such a man needs a strongly made vessel to control his boiling

ardours. Prose is not such a vessel: and they too often overflow from

it in extravagance and violence. Poetry in all its severer forms

places a restraint upon the poet from which as the mood of art gains

upon him he has no desire to escape. Law and limitation, willing

obedience to the prescribed conditions, are of the very essence of art.

And this is as true of the greatest of the arts as of any other. It is

not merely that the poet accepts the bondage of rhymes, or stanzas, or

numbered syllables, as the painter accepts those of a flat canvas and

the sculptor those of bronze or marble; it is that they all alike

submit to the mood of art which is always universal and eternal as well

as individual and temporal and therefore disdains such crudities of

personal violence as are to be found everywhere in Milton's prose and

nowhere in his poetry.

But if a poet's prose has its inevitable disadvantages it has also some

great qualities which only a poet can supply. In 1640 Milton plunged

into a great struggle in which his attitude throughout was that of an

angry and contemptuous partisan. And his pamphlets exhibit all the

distortion of facts, {49} injustice to opponents, and narrowness of

view which are the inevitable if often unconscious vices of the man who

writes in the interest of a party. But they also contain flights of

noble eloquence, in which, as in the passage about the City of London

in the _Areopagitica_, the soul of partisanship has undergone a fiery

purification and emerges free of all its grosser elements, a pure

essence of zeal and faith and spiritual vision.

The first stage of the struggle was largely ecclesiastical, and Milton

plunged into it with five pamphlets in 1641 and 1642, fiercely

demanding the abolition of Episcopacy and the establishment of a

Presbyterian system in England. Fortunately for himself, as he was

soon to see, the views he advocated did not in the end prevail. For

the next step he took in the way of pamphlet writing would assuredly

have got him into difficulties with any possible kind of ecclesiastical

jurisdiction, whether after the model of Laud or of Calvin. It grew

out of the most important and disastrous event in the whole of his

private life. In the spring of 1643 he went into Oxfordshire, from

which county his father had originally come, and, to the surprise of

his friends, who knew nothing of his intention, returned a married man.

His wife was one {50} Mary Powell, the daughter of a Justice of the

Peace at Forest Hill, near Oxford. The Powell family owed the Milton

family five hundred pounds, which may have been the poet's introduction

to them. If so, the marriage to which it led had the results that

might be expected from such a beginning. The war had then already

begun, the King was at Oxford and the Powells were Cavaliers; so that

when Mrs. Milton, who had been accompanied to London by her relations,

was to be left alone with a husband of twice her age, and of severe

tastes, she shrank from the prospect, got away on a visit to her family

and did not return till 1645, by which time the King was ruined and

with him the Powells.

When Shelley deserted his wife he wrote to her asking her to come and

live with him and the lady who had supplanted her. When Milton's wife

deserted him he wrote a series of pamphlets advocating divorce at the

will of the husband. Such are the extravagances of those whose eyes

are so accustomed to a brighter light that when brought into that of

common day they see nothing, and make mistakes which are justly

ridiculous to the children of this world. It is an old story: Plato's

philosopher in the cave, the saint in politics, the modern poet in the

world of war, {51} commerce, or industry: the eye that sees heaven

often blunders on earth. Milton's divorce pamphlets, like nearly all

his controversial writings, have three fatal defects. They are utterly

blind to the temper of those to whom they were addressed, to the

reasonable arguments of opponents, and to the practical difficulties

inherent in their proposals. He argues that, as the law gives relief

to a man whose wife disappoints him of the physical end of marriage, it

is an outrage that he should have none when deprived of the social and

intellectual companionship which is its moral end. But he takes no

note of the awkward fact that the dismissed wife is not and cannot be

in the same position as she was before her marriage. Nor does he give

the wife any corresponding rights to get rid of her husband. These,

and a hundred other difficulties all too visible to duller eyes, he

utterly ignores as he proceeds on his violent way of deliverance from

what he calls "imaginary and scarecrow sins." Nothing is allowed to

stand in his path. For instance, the awkward texts in the Bible, whose

authority he accepts, are given new interpretations with which it is to

be feared his temper had more to do than his knowledge of the meaning

of Greek words. But {52} there is not a hint of his own case in all he

says, and it is not desertion that he discusses but incompatibility of

temper. Masson even sees reason to think that he began the first

pamphlet before his wife left him, but when, no doubt, her unfitness to

be his wife was only too evident. However all that may be, we can only

think with wondering pity of those summer weeks of 1643 and of the two

years which followed. Everything in Milton's life and writings shows

him a man unusually susceptible to the attraction of women, one whose

love was of that strongest sort which is built on a chastity born not

of coldness but of purity and self-control. Such a man, in such a

plight, with the added misery of knowing that he owed it to his own

rash folly, may be pardoned for forgetting the true bearing of his own

doctrine that laws are made for the "common lump of men." Cases like

his are the real tragedies, the tragedies of life so much more bitter

than the more visible ones of death; and no thinking or feeling man

will lightly decide that they must remain unrelieved. But neither

Milton nor any of his successors must look at the problem from his own

point of view alone. Laws are made, and ought to be, as he himself

says, for the "lump of men"; and the wisdom or {53} unwisdom of

facilities for divorce must be judged, not merely by the relief they

afford in unhappy marriages, but also by the danger of disturbance they

produce in the far more numerous marriages which, though experiencing

their days of doubt or difficulty, are on the whole happy or at least

not unhappy. Perhaps Milton himself might have hesitated if he could

have foreseen the consequences of an application of his theories.

Modern divorce laws have filled our newspapers with just that

"clamouring debate of utterless things" which he dreaded and abhorred,

while few will argue that they have increased the number of unions

which answer to his conception of "the true intent of marriage."

After all, Milton's own story illustrates the advantages of putting

delays and difficulties in the way of divorce. According to his nephew

he had planned to act upon his principles and marry "a very handsome

and witty gentlewoman"; but the lady had more regard than he to the

world's opinion. And she did Milton a service by her reluctance. For

the rumour of her, helped by their own misfortunes, brought the Powells

to their senses; and with the help of Milton's friends they managed the

well-known scene at a room in St. Martin's the Grand, in which he was

{54} surprised by the sight of his wife on her knees before him.

"Soon his heart relented

Towards her, his life so late, and sole delight,

Now at his feet submissive in distress."

So he glances back at the scene twenty years later when he was drawing

to the close of his great poem. Meanwhile he received back his wife,

who bore him three daughters and died in 1653 or 1654. He was to marry

again in 1656; but this second wife, the "espoused saint" of his

sonnet, lived little more than a year; and in 1663 he married his third

wife who long survived him. But to return to the house in the

Barbican, to which he removed with his wife in 1645. With him there

were also his father, two nephews and other boys whom it was his

principal occupation to teach. It is somewhat surprising that he found

pupils, as his views on the divorce question had naturally caused

scandal in all quarters and received little support in any. He could

now see that the Presbyterian Church discipline which he had advocated

so eagerly in his first pamphlets might have its inconveniences; the

elders of an English kirk would be no more merciful than his detested

bishops to such freedom of thought, speech and action as he now

demanded. {55} From henceforth he is an Independent and more than an

Independent; for he was attached to no congregation, apparently

attended no church regularly, and maintained that profoundly religious

temper which is even more visible in his last works than in his first

without the support of any authority, creed or companionship in prayer.

With these views growing upon him it was natural that, when the

struggle came between the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independent

Army, he had no hesitation in supporting the Army; nor is it surprising

that such a man of no compromise as he had shown himself to be was

ready to come forward, even before the deed was done, with a defence of

the execution of Charles I. It is in connection with that event that

his name first became known to all Europe and was soon so famous that

foreigners visiting England desired to see two men above all others,

Oliver Cromwell and John Milton. This Milton, from henceforth a

European celebrity, was not the author of _Paradise Lost_ which was not

yet written, nor of his earlier poems which were little known in

England and quite unknown elsewhere. He was the apologist of the

Regicides, the Foreign Secretary of the world-famed Protector.

{56}

For the next eleven years, from 1649 to 1660, Milton had a public and

official as well as a private life. Charles was executed on January

30, 1649. Within a few days after appeared Milton's _Tenure of Kings

and Magistrates_, largely written, of course, before the execution, and

justifying it and all the other proceedings of the Army without any

hesitation or compromise. It has some breathings of the Miltonic

grandeur; but that is all. For the rest it is a mere party polemic

written for the moment; and, as is the case with all pamphlets, the

very qualities which gave it its contemporary interest make it

unreadable to posterity. Part of it is a sweeping assertion of the

inalienable right of the whole people to choose, judge and depose their

rulers; a democratic doctrine which a few years later, when England had

grown tired of the Army and the Puritans, he was to find as

inconvenient as he had already found his early advocacy of the

Presbyterian system in matters ecclesiastical. For the moment,

however, the pamphlet made him a person of importance. Such a man,

learned, eloquent, of high character, of visible sincerity, of utter

fearlessness, was not an ally to be despised by a Government which had

outraged public opinion at home and abroad. Within a few {57} weeks he

was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State;

and from henceforth till after the death of Cromwell he wrote the

weightiest of the vindications, remonstrances and authoritative demands

which the great Protector addressed to an astonished and overawed

Europe. We can read them still. Many are insignificant, dealing with

petty personal details; but the best, especially those that deal with

the universal cause of Protestantism and freedom, rise on spiritual

wings far above the language of diplomacy and officialism, letting us

hear the authentic voice of Milton preluding the thunders of Cromwell

and Blake.

But the first important work required of Milton belonged rather to the

man of letters than to the Foreign Secretary. The horror aroused both

at home and abroad by the execution of Charles, already great enough in

itself to be very inconvenient to the Government, was greatly increased

by the publication of a book called _Eikon Basilike_ which purported to

be the work of the king himself and appeared immediately after his

death. It is a kind of religious portrait of Charles, reporting his

spiritual meditations and containing a justification of his life. Its

success was prodigious; fifty editions are said {58} to have appeared

within a year. It was obviously necessary that some reply should be

attempted; and the task was naturally assigned to Milton, who published

his _Eikonoklastes_, or Image-Breaker, in October. It is a mere

pamphlet, even more violent than the _Tenure of Kings_, not ashamed to

rake up such absurdities as the alleged poisoning of James I by

Buckingham, with the usual Miltonic inconsistencies, such as that which

denounces Charles for the crime of refusing his consent to bills passed

by Parliament and forgets that the Government on whose behalf he is

writing established itself by a forcible suppression of the

Parliamentary majority. It survives now only by the curious passage in

it which tells us that William Shakspeare was "the closet companion" of

Charles I in the "solitudes" of the end of his life; and by the

puritanical allusion to the "vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip

Sidney's _Arcadia_" from which, however "full of worth and wit" in its

own kind, it was a disgrace to the king to borrow a prayer at so grave

an hour. Perhaps as a mark of their approval of _Eikonoklastes_, the

Council of State gave Milton lodgings in Whitehall; and soon

afterwards, in January 1650, called upon him to reply to another

Royalist book which was making a {59} great stir. The result was the

beginning of a political and personal controversy which lasted almost

as long as it was safe for Milton to write about politics at all.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries great scholars had a

position which they are never likely to occupy again. In those

cosmopolitan days when an Italian governed France, and regiments and

even armies were often commanded by foreigners, the honour of

possessing a celebrated scholar was eagerly disputed not only by

universities, but by cities, sovereign states, and even kings.

Learning had then a market value in the world: for then, as always,

especially since the invention of printing, European opinion was worth

having on one's side; and in the days before journalism the practice

was to hire distinguished scholars to write to a political brief.

After the death of Charles I it was obviously the policy of Charles II

to secure support by a powerful indictment of the iniquity of the

rulers of the English Commonwealth. For this purpose his advisers

obtained the services of a certain Claude de Saumaise, or, as he was

generally called, Salmasius. This man, forgotten now except for

Milton, was then a scholar of such fame that his presence was disputed

between Oxford {60} and Venice, the French and the Dutch, between the

Pope who wanted him at Rome and Christina of Sweden who was soon to

persuade him to go to Stockholm. So it is not altogether surprising

that Charles II was advised to pay him, and perhaps paid him, much more

than he could afford for writing a book called _Defensio Regia_, which

was to be before all Europe the public statement of the case against

the new rulers of England. Milton spent a year in preparing his reply,

which came out in the beginning of 1651. The _Pro Populo Anglicano

Defensio_ is now pleasanter reading for Milton's detractors than for

those who honour his name. The unbridled insults which it heaps upon

Charles I and still more upon Salmasius, for whom its least offensive

titles are such as "blockhead," "liar" and "apostate," exceed even the

wide limits of abuse customary in these days. _Corruptio optimi

pessima_: such a man as Milton, if he once descends to the bandying of

foul language, will beat the very bargemen themselves. But what

astonished his contemporaries was not his violence but his courage. An

unknown Englishman had dared to meet the giant of learning on his own

ground and had at least held his own. It may have been partly as the

result of this {61} that Salmasius no longer found Holland a pleasant

place of residence and removed to Sweden. A more certain result is

that the English David who had stood up to Goliath was from henceforth

a European celebrity. With his usual proud courage he had put his own

name on the title-page of his book, challenging to himself both the

glories and the dangers that might come of it. He was not to be

disappointed of either.

From henceforth he was in the thick of a violent controversy, which

made so much more noise than it deserved in its own day that it need

make none here. Replies came out both to his _Eikonoklastes_ and to

his _Defensio_: new books grew out of the controversy; Milton's nephew

wrote on his behalf, and anonymous friends of Salmasius on his; the

adversaries of Milton no more spared his character than he had spared

theirs; a _Defensio Secunda_ from his own hand seemed necessary, and

appeared in 1654; and so with minor pamphlets and second editions we

get on to the end of the weary controversy, in which for contemporaries

there was perhaps some fire and light, but for us now little but smoke

and darkness of confusion.

Such was the work which was Milton's chief occupation during the

Commonwealth, to the {62} doing of which he deliberately sacrificed his

eyesight. Within a year after the publication of his book against

Salmasius its foreseen result was complete. From henceforth Milton was

dependent upon the eyes of others. He was only forty-four when

overtaken by this calamity. Yet his courage seems never to have failed

him. "I argue not," he tells Cyriack Skinner in his sonnet--

"Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot

Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer

Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?

The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied

In Liberty's defence, my noble task,

Of which all Europe rings from side to side."

Whoever had begun to have doubts about the course taken in 1649 and

since, he had none; and no one had suffered more in defence of it. The

other and greater sonnet on his blindness--

"When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide"

shows him content if need be to take his place among those whose desire

to serve {63} God must find its peace in the thought that

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

In the same spirit, perhaps, is the motto which he appended to his

signature in the album of a learned foreigner in 1651: "I am made

perfect in weakness." But nothing of weakness, not even its

perfection, could ever come near Milton. He played a greater part in

this world without his eyes than ever he had played with them. Without

their help he did what prose could do towards justifying the ways of

England to Europe, and was very soon to do what verse could do towards

justifying the ways of God to men. He cannot, perhaps, be said to have

succeeded in either, but one at least of the failures is a whole heaven

above what ordinary men call success.

A few words may be said of his attitude towards men and measures during

this political period of his life. His unqualified and immediate

support of the King's execution had, of course, united him with the

Cromwellian party who had brought it about. And his anti-Presbyterian

views carried him in the same direction. So we are not surprised to

find that, when Cromwell got rid of the Parliament by military force

and soon {64} afterwards became Protector, Milton approved his action

and gladly continued to serve under him. Nor was Milton the man to be

disturbed by the Protector's rapid dissolution of his first Parliament,

by the period of personal Government which followed, or by his angry

breach with his second Parliament. Poets have seldom understood

politics, and Milton, the most political of poets, perhaps less than

any. No man ever had less of that sense of law and custom, of the need

of continuity, which is the very centre and secret of politics. Few

great statesmen have been able to maintain perfect consistency; but the

least consistent have generally been aware that there was something in

inconsistencies that needed explanation. Milton never shows any

consciousness of the patent incongruity between his early exaltation of

the indefeasible rights of Parliaments and his support of the

Cromwellian attitude towards them: between his angry denunciation of

Charles I for presuming to retain the ancient right of the kings to

refuse their assent to Bills submitted to them and his approval of

Cromwell's dismissal of a Parliament for attempting to deny the same

right to the Protector: between the extreme doctrine of free printing

claimed in the _Areopagitica_ and the fact that its author {65} was

afterwards concerned in licensing books under a Government which

vigorously suppressed "seditious" publications. But inconsistencies by

themselves are of little importance, particularly in revolutionary

times; they would be of none, in Milton's case, if he had ever admitted

that he had learnt from experience and consequently changed his mind.

But he never did. Parliaments remained sacred when they were for

pulling down bishops, profane when they were for establishing

Presbyterianism, and utterly detestable when they were for restoring

Charles II. The fact is, of course, that Milton, like most men of much

imagination and no political experience, saw a vision of certain things

in the value of which he believed with all his soul, and saw none of

the objections to them and none of the difficulties that stood in their

way. At the very end, when the bonfires for Charles II were almost

lighted in the streets, he could publish _A Ready and Easy Way to

Establish a Free Commonwealth_; and the title he chose for that book

was typical of his whole attitude in all practical matters. He had to

an extreme degree the man of vision's blindness to the all-important

fact that the mass of men would not have what he aims at if they {66}

could and could not if they would. At least in a free country the

statesman knows that he has got to work through stupid people, with

their consent, and with regard to the measure of their capacities. For

such men as Milton stupid people either do not exist or are to be

merely ignored. That is his attitude all through. Alike in the matter

of divorce and in the matter of education, in the ecclesiastical

problem and in the political, he was always eager to put forward a

"ready and easy way" which entirely ignored the nature of the human

material which was to walk in it. He simply chose not to see that in

all these matters men had for centuries been walking in a way which was

not his, a way which had in fact by now diverged many miles from his;

and that they could not possibly, even if they would, transport

themselves in a moment, at a mere wave of his wand, across the

intervening bogs and forests which the lapse of years had rendered

impassable. He never appears to have had a single glimpse of the truth

that the essential business of the statesman is to be always moving

from the past to the future without ever letting the bridge between

them break down. The principal food of a political people is custom,

and to break the bridge is to cut off the only source {67} of its

supply. The greatest proof that Cromwell was really a statesman and

not a mere political emergency man of unusual character and ability is

that in his last years he was evidently seeing more and more plainly

that the right metaphor for a statesman is taken from grafting and not

from "root and branch" operations. It is clear that he had seen that

political branches may be pruned away but roots can very seldom be

safely disturbed; and that among the roots in English politics were a

hereditary Monarchy and an established Church. Dynasty and formularies

might perhaps be safely changed; but the things themselves were of the

root, and the tree would not flourish if they were touched. It is

characteristic of Milton that in both these matters he was strongly

opposed to the policy towards which Cromwell was feeling his way. Ten

years had taught him nothing, and the death of Cromwell found him as

blind to political possibilities as the death of Charles I.

One would like to know something of the relations between the two

greatest men of the Commonwealth. But there is little or nothing to

know. It is plain that in most matters they must have been in close

agreement; and in a few, as in the business of the {68} Piedmont

massacres, the two great hearts must have beaten as one, while the

sword of Cromwell stood ready drawn behind the trumpet of Milton's

noble prose and nobler verse. The only surviving act of personal

contact between them is to be found in Milton's sonnet; and that is a

public tribute with no suggestion of private intimacy in it. Indeed,

as Masson has pointed out, it may easily be taken to mean more than it

really does; for it was not written because Milton could not keep

silence about his admiration of Cromwell, but rather, as its full title

shows, as a petition or appeal to Cromwell to save the nation from

parliamentary proposals for the setting up of a State Church and for

limiting the toleration of dissent from it. The sonnet, then, proves

less than it has sometimes been made to prove; and in any case it

proves no intimacy. Perhaps after all, in the case of Milton as in

that of most men who deal with public affairs, we are apt to exaggerate

the importance in their daily lives of these visible official

activities. The world thinks it knows men who fight battles, or make

speeches, or write books; but it knows nothing of their private

thoughts or studies and still less of their private loves and joys and

sorrows which to themselves {69} and in truth are much the most real

part of their lives. So with Milton during these years; his wife and

little children may have been, his second wife and such friends as

Cyriack Skinner and Henry Lawrence and Lady Ranelagh and the poet

Marvell certainly were, much greater realities to him in his daily

thoughts than either the hated Salmasius and Morus of the pamphlets or

the admired Cromwell of the sonnet. The "weekly table" he is said to

have kept, at the expense of the State, for foreign ministers, must

have provided interesting talk; but the true Milton cannot have lived

in these gatherings so fully at the time or remembered them afterwards

so affectionately as those other more intimate parties of which he

gives us a picture in the two sonnets to Lawrence and Skinner which,

for lovers of poetry, look so pleasantly back to Horace and so

pleasantly forward to Cowper and Tennyson.

"Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,

Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire,

Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire

Help waste a sullen day, what may be won

From the hard season gaining? Time will run

{70}

On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire

The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire

The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun.

What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,

Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise

To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice

Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?

He who of those delights can judge, and spare

To interpose them oft, is not unwise."

This is his own graver and older parallel to what his nephew tells us

of his schoolmastering days when he would turn from "hard study and

spare diet" to "drop once a month or so into the society of some young

sparks of his acquaintance," and with them "would so far make bold with

his body as now and then to keep a gawdy day." The sonnet shows that

the poet is still the poet of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, no narrow

fanatic, but a lover of company and the arts, and of the richness and

fulness of life. Such occasions as that it describes must have been

oases in the desert of controversy and public business abroad and of

blindness and loneliness at home. He did not live long in Whitehall,

{71} moving in 1652 to a house overlooking St. James's Park, near what

is now Queen Anne's Gate. There his first wife died in 1653, or 1654,

and her short-lived successor too; there he lived during the remaining

years of the Commonwealth, working at his pamphlets and State papers,

even beginning _Paradise Lost_, with young friends to read to him,

write for him, lead their blind great man about in the Park or

elsewhere, till the catastrophe of 1660 arrived and it was no longer

safe for the defender of Regicide to be seen in the streets.

Why Milton was not hanged at the Restoration is still something of a

mystery. His name must have been more hatefully known to the returning

exiles than that of any one except the dead Cromwell whose death did

not save his body from a grim ceremony at Tyburn. He had not only

defended Charles I's execution before all Europe, and in a tone almost

of exultation, but he had pursued the whole Stuart family with

vituperation and contempt. Even in the very last weeks, when the bells

were already almost ringing for Charles II, he had dared to raise his

voice against the "abjured and detested thraldom of kingship";

declaring that he would not be silent though he should but speak "to

trees and stones: and had none to cry to, but {72} with the prophet 'O

Earth, Earth, Earth!' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse

inhabitants are deaf to,"--a passage, if interpreted by its original

context, of awful imprecation upon Charles I. A man so famous, so

utterly unrepentant, so defiant to the very end, seemed to challenge to

himself the gallows. That his challenge would receive its natural

answer was the openly expressed opinion of his enemies. No doubt it

was also the fear of his friends, who concealed him in Smithfield from

May till August 1660. By the 24th of August the danger was over. The

Act of Indemnity, which was a pardon to all political offenders not by

name excepted in it, became law on that day; and Milton's was not one

of the excepted names. How was that managed? There are various

stories; perhaps each has some truth in it; many influences may have

combined. One is that he had saved Davenant in his danger some years

before and now the Cavalier poet in his turn saved the Puritan. But

Davenant was not in Parliament, and the real work must have been done

by a group of friends who were. The most important of them seem to

have been Annesley (afterwards Lord Anglesey), Sir Thomas Clarges, who

was Monk's brother-in-law, Monk's secretary Morrice, and the poet's

less powerful but {73} still more devoted friend Andrew Marvell.

Between them somehow they saved him, aided no doubt by the general pity

for a blind man, the general respect for his learning which found

expression even in that moment and even in Royalist pamphlets, and, one

may hope, by the knowledge of a few of them that this was a man of

genius from whom there might be great things yet to come. The names of

those who thus made possible the greatest poem in the English language

deserve lasting record; and a word of gratitude may be added to

Clarendon and to Charles II for refraining from saying the easy and not

unnatural word which would have been instantly fatal to their old enemy.

The odd thing is that he was arrested after all. There had been an

order of the House of Commons for his arrest and for the burning of his

books, possibly, as Masson thinks, obtained by his friends to make it

seem unnecessary to except him in the Indemnity Bill. The books were

duly burnt, or such copies of them as came to the hands of the hangman;

and ultimately, at some uncertain date, Milton himself was got into the

custody of the Sergeant-at-Arms. He was soon released, and the story

would not be worth relating but for a curious proof it gives of the

{74} obstinate courage of the poet. The House ordered his release on

December 15; and one would have supposed that he would have been glad

to escape into obscurity and safety again on any terms. But no; the

Sergeant-at-Arms demanded high fees which Milton thought unreasonable;

and even then, when he had almost felt the hangman's rope on his neck,

he would not be bullied by any man. He refused to pay: and though the

Solicitor-General ominously remarked that he deserved hanging, his

friends got the fees referred to a committee and presumably reduced.

Before the beginning of 1661 he was definitely a free man to live his

final fourteen years of political defeat, isolation and silence, of

unparalleled poetic fertility, and, before the end, of acknowledged

poetic fame.

He did not return any more to the fashionable and therefore dangerous

neighbourhood of Whitehall, but lived the rest of his life in a

succession of houses in or near the city, ending in Artillery Walk,

Bunhill Fields, where he died. His friends must for years have feared

that he might be attacked and perhaps murdered by some drunken Cavalier

revellers accidentally coming across the old regicide. And in spite of

the Act of Indemnity he can hardly have felt absolutely comfortable on

{75} the side of the law when so late as 1664 his _Tenure of Kings_ was

denounced by the censor as still extant and an unfortunate printer was

hanged, drawn and quartered for issuing a sort of new version of it.

Misfortunes without and fears within might be the summing up, if not of

the poet's, at least of the man's life during these first years after

the Restoration. To begin with, he was a much poorer man. His salary

as Secretary was, of course, gone. But besides that he had lost 2000

pounds, equal to about 7000 pounds now, which he had invested in

Commonwealth Securities, as well as some confiscated property he had

bought of the Chapter of Westminster; and he was soon to lose, at least

temporarily, the rent he received from his father's house in Bread

Street which was destroyed by the Fire of London. Masson calculates

that he was left after the Restoration with an income about equal to

700 pounds of our money which his further losses and outlay on his

daughters had reduced to 300 pounds or 350 pounds before his death; not

quite poverty even at the end, but something very different from what

the eldest son of a rich man had been accustomed to. A graver

misfortune was the gout which afflicted him for the rest of his life

and gave him so much pain that he made little of his blindness in {76}

comparison with it. Worst of all was his unhappy relation to his

daughters. That is the ugliest thing in the story of his life. How

things might have gone with his son, if the baby boy had lived, one

does not know; but his oriental views of the moral and intellectual

inferiority of women, which doubled the dangers of their fascinations,

made him certain to be a despotic father to three motherless girls.

And so he was. He had plenty of young men eager for the privilege of

reading to him: but of course they could not be always with him, and

the result was that dreadful picture which comes to us from his nephew,

no unfriendly witness, of the daughters "condemned to the performance

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," none of which languages they understood. Nor did

he show any desire that they should; saying grimly that one tongue was

enough for a woman. History and fiction are alike full of the

tragedies that result from the blindness of extraordinary minds to

ordinary duties; and Milton's case is one of the saddest. The

daughters cheated him and made away with {77} his books; he spoke of

them gravely and repeatedly as his "unkind children"; one of them is

even reported, on very good evidence, to have said, at his third

marriage in 1663, that "that was no news to hear of his wedding but, if

she could hear of his death, that was something." At last it was

thought better that he and they should part; and they were put out, at

considerable expense to their father, to learn embroidery work and

other "curious and ingenious manufactures" for their living. It is

pleasant to hear that the youngest, Deborah, who was visited by Addison

not long before he died, and received fifty guineas from Queen

Caroline, was "in a transport" of delight when shown a portrait of her

father, crying out "'Tis my father, 'tis my dear father, I see him;

'tis him; 'tis the very man! here, here!" as she pointed to some of the

features. So one likes to be told, on her authority, that he was

delightful company and "the life of the conversation, full of

unaffected cheerfulness and civility" when he had his little parties of

friends. And to us, if not to her, it is a pleasant story that she

could still repeat many lines from Homer, Euripides and Ovid, though

she said she did not understand Greek or Latin. The wife of a

Spitalfields weaver must at last have felt {78} some pride in these

survivals of her childish drudgery, proof audible to all men, if to her

unintelligible, that she was the daughter of Mr. Milton, the great

scholar and poet.

No more need to be said of sorrow or failure. The rest is a serene and

productive old age. _Paradise Lost_ was published in 1667, _Paradise

Regained_ and _Samson_ in 1671. Besides these there was, in 1673, a

new edition of his earlier poems reprinted, with additions from that of

1645; and many publications of prose works mostly written in earlier

years but never printed, such as his _History of Britain_, and little

books on Education, Logic and Grammar. He kept up his strenuous life

of study and composition apparently to the end. He is said to have got

up at four or five in the morning, and, after hearing a chapter or two

from the Hebrew Bible and breakfasting, to have passed the five hours

before his midday dinner dictating or having some book read to him. In

the afternoon he would walk a little in his garden; all his life a

garden had been one of the things he would not do without. Then music

and more private study carried him on to an Horatian supper of olives

or other "light things"; and so to a pipe of tobacco, a glass of water

and bed. He drank but little wine, and that only with his meals. {79}

Such a way of life deserved a healthful old age, which, but for that

healthy man's disease the gout, he had, and a death such as he had, so

easy as to be imperceptible to the bystanders. That was on November 8,

1674. Four days later his body was buried in the church of St. Giles,

Cripplegate, where his grave may still be seen; the funeral being

accompanied by "all his learned and great friends in London, not

without a concourse of the vulgar."

By that time the battle of his life had been won. The astonishing

achievements of his last years had more than fulfilled the high promise

and proud words of his long distant youth. Perhaps no seven years in

all literary history provide a finer record of poetic genius triumphing

over difficulties external and internal than these last seven of

Milton's life from 1667 to 1674. They had their reward and not only

from posterity. There is a still lingering delusion, based chiefly on

the five pounds paid for the first edition of _Paradise Lost_, that

Milton's greatness was little recognized in his lifetime. The truth is

the exact reverse. He had far more chance of hearing his own praises,

if he cared for that, than most of the great English poets: than Keats

and Shelley, for instance; than Wordsworth, {80} at least till he was

old; nay, in all probability than Shakspeare himself. Which of them

heard the most popular poet of their day say of them anything at all

like Dryden's famous and generous "This man cuts us all out and the

ancients too"? It is not even true that _Paradise Lost_ sold badly.

On the contrary, in a year and a half from the day of publication over

thirteen hundred copies had been sold, from which the author received

10 pounds and the publisher, it is believed, 50 pounds or 60 pounds.

He would be a sanguine publisher to-day who would be quite certain of

making in eighteen months the modern equivalent of this sum, say 180

pounds, out of a new epic, even if it were as great as Milton's.

But the money question was not of the first importance to Milton and is

of none to us. The interesting thing is the almost immediate

recognition of the greatness of the poem. Nothing in the world could

be more alien to the tone of the society and literature of the London

of Charles II than this long Biblical Puritan poem with its scarcely

veiled attacks on the revived Monarchy and Episcopacy and its entirely

unveiled attacks on the fashionable men of Belial. Yet it was from the

very high priests of this society that the most unstinted praise came.

Of its professional men of {81} letters Dryden was already rapidly

advancing to the unquestioned primacy which was soon to be his, and to

remain his for his life; of its amateurs Lord Dorset had perhaps the

most brilliant reputation. It was these two men who, more than any

others, made the town recognize the greatness of Milton. Both were as

unlike Milton as men could be, and Dryden had just committed himself to

a strong championship of rhymed verse as against blank. There is

nowhere a finer proof of the compelling power of great art upon those

who know it when they see it than the unbounded praise with which

Dryden at once saluted Milton. The fact that his admiration at first

took the absurd form of turning Milton's epic into a "heroic opera" in

rhyme does not detract from the significance of his writing publicly

within a year of Milton's death that the blind old regicide's poem was

"one of the greatest, most noble and sublime which either this age or

nation has produced," and to this he was to add, thirteen years later,

the still bolder tribute of the well-known epigram about "three poets

in three distant ages born" which gives Milton a place above Homer and

Virgil. The lines are in detail absurd; but their absurdity does not

destroy the fact that the intellectual life of England was never {82}

keener, or more eager to welcome talent in art or letters, than in the

reign of Charles II; and nothing is clearer proof of it than the

honours received by the rebel Milton from a Court composer like Henry

Lawes, a Court physician like Samuel Barrow, a statesman and minister

like Lord Anglesey, and a poet laureate like Dryden.

So we may think of him happily enough in these last years. He had now

done the work which from his early manhood he had felt it was his task

in life to do. When he was not much over thirty he had boldly written

in public of what his mind, "in the spacious circuits of her musing,

hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest

attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and

those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse and the book of Job

a brief model . . . or whether those dramatic constitutions, wherein

Sophocles and Euripides reign, shall be found more doctrinal and

exemplary to a nation." For the moment nothing seemed to come of these

high words; but before he died not one only, but both of his dreams,

the drama as well as the epic, were accomplished facts. _Paradise

Lost_, begun as a drama, had become the greatest of modern {83} epics;

and the abandoned drama had reappeared in _Samson_, not the greatest of

English tragedies, but the one which best recalls the peculiar

greatness of the drama of Greece. Self-confident young men have always

been common enough, but there are two differences between them and

Milton: their performance falls far short of their promise instead of

exceeding it; and neither promise nor performance is marked by this

exalting and purifying sense of a thing divinely inspired and divinely

aided. Such work can wait, as his did, being such as is "not to be

raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine; like that which

flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher

fury of a rhyming parasite; nor to be obtained by the invocation of

dame memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that

eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and

sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch

and purify the lips of whom he pleases."

Now the task is done; and he can sit alone in his upstairs room in

Artillery Walk and thank God that in spite of blindness, private

sorrows and public disappointments, he had been enabled at last to bear

the witness of a work of immortal beauty to the high truth {84} that

had been in him even from a boy. So it may have been in the graver

moments of solitude; while, as we know from several sources, there were

other times, when he would enjoy the companionship of friends and the

homage of learned strangers by whom we are told he was "much visited,

more than he did desire." The picture suggested to us is that of a man

who at sixty-five, then a greater age than now, retained all his powers

of mind and much of the physical beauty which had been so remarkable in

his youth; who was gracious but somewhat reserved and dignified with

strangers; a delightful companion to friends and especially to younger

men; full of literature, especially of poetry, and with a memory that

enabled him to recite long passages from Homer and Virgil; above all,

an ardent lover of music, making a practice, so far as possible, of

hearing some, whether vocal or instrumental, every afternoon. His ears

were eyes to him; and when he heard a lady sing finely he would say:

"Now will I swear this lady is handsome." All kinds of music, and not

only the severer, were delightful to the "organ-voice of England."

That is not the least interesting thing about him. The greatest of

England's Puritans {85} was also the greatest of her artists. He had

nothing in him of the morbid scrupulosity which is such an inhuman

feature in French Jansenism and some of the English sects. His was a

large nature which demanded a free expansion of life. Lonely figure as

he is in our literary history, with no real predecessors or followers,

his mighty arch yet bridges the gulf between Elizabeth and the

Revolution, and is of nearer or less distant kin to Shakspeare than to

Pope. His prose is the swan song of the old eloquence, as inspired and

as confused as an oracle. To read it when it is at its best is to soar

on wings through the empyrean and despise Swift and Addison walking in

neat politeness on the pavement. There as everywhere, in his verse, in

his character, in his mind, in his life, he has the strength and the

weakness of an aristocrat. The youth who in his Cambridge days was

"esteemed a virtuous person yet not to be ignorant of his parts" did

not belie the opinion formed of him in either of those respects. His

Republicanism was of the proud Roman sort, and at least as near

Coriolanus as Gracchus; a boundless faith in the State and a boundless

desire to spend and be spent in its service, a total and scornful

indifference to the opinions of all {86} those, though they might be

five-sixths of the nation, who did not desire to be served in the way

which he had decided to be for their good. The modern way of deciding

matters of State by counting heads may very likely be the best of many

unsatisfactory ways of accomplishing a very difficult business; but it

has always been peculiarly exasperating to men of genius who see their

way plainly and cannot understand why a million blind men are to keep

them out of it. Milton liked the voice of the majority well enough

when he could plead it against Charles I; but when he found it calling

for Charles II he treated it as a mere impertinent absurdity; the vain

babble of a "misguided and abused multitude" with whom wise men have

nothing to do except to keep them in their place. And it is in the

latter attitude that he is most really himself. His is, of course, an

aristocracy of mind and character, not of birth and wealth; but the

self-sufficient scorn which was almost a virtue in Aristotle's eyes,

and is in ours the besetting sin of even the noblest of aristocrats, is

too frequent a note in all his prose, and even in his poetry; and it is

sometimes poured out upon those who are fitter subjects for tenderness

than for contempt. One can scarcely imagine a child {87} or an

ignorant man being quite at ease in Milton's company.

But these are the penalties that greatness has too often to pay for

being itself. So long as we remain human beings and not divine, it

will be found hard to unite humility, ease of manner, and the glad

sufferance of fools with a mind struggling in a storm of sublime

thoughts, with powers that are and know themselves to be far above

those of ordinary men. It will never be easy for men of supreme genius

to behave to their inferiors as if they were their equals. But that is

not the side of Milton of which we ought to think most often now. It

is more just as well as more merciful to him, and it is of more use to

ourselves, to fix our eyes on his strength, and not on the weakness

that more or less inevitably accompanied it. The ancients admired

strength more than the moderns have, at least until lately. But no one

can refuse to admire such strength as Milton's, so continuous, so

triumphant over exceptional obstacles, so disdainful of all petty or

personal ends. There is a majesty about it to which one scarcely knows

any real parallel. Strength implies purpose and art implies unity of

conception; the instinct of art was only less strong in Milton than the

resolute will; so that it {88} is not surprising that scarcely any life

has such unity as his. It is itself a perfect work of art. If we put

aside, as we may fairly, the partial political inconsistencies, the

rest is absolutely of one piece; a great building, nobly planned from

the beginning and nobly executed to the last harmonious detail of the

original design. We men are, most of us, weak creatures who accomplish

but the tiniest fragments of even such poor designs as we make for our

lives. There is something that uplifts us in the spectacle of the

triumphant completion of so great a plan as the life of Milton. We are

exalted by the thought that, after all, we are of the same flesh and

blood, nay, even of the same breed, as this wonderful man. To read the

_Paradise Lost_ is to realize, in the highest degree, how the poet's

imagination can impose a majestic order on the tumultuous confusion of

human speech and knowledge. To read its author's life is to realize,

with equally exalting clearness, how a strong man's will can so

victoriously mould a world of adverse circumstances that affliction,

defeat--nay, even the threatening shadow of death itself--are made the

very instruments by which he becomes that which he has, from the

beginning of his years, chosen for himself to be.

{89}