PAMPHLETS.
We have now seen Milton engaged in teaching and writing on education,
involved in domestic unhappiness, and speculating on the obligations
of marriage. But neither of these topics formed the principal
occupation of his mind during these years. He had renounced a
cherished scheme of travel because his countrymen were engaged at home
in contending for their liberties, and it could not but be that the
gradually intensified stages of that struggle engrossed his interest,
and claimed his participation.
So imperative did he regard this claim that he allowed it to override
the purposed dedication of his life to poetry. Not indeed for ever and
aye, but for a time. As he had renounced Greece, the Aegean Isles,
Thebes, and the East for the fight for freedom, so now to the same
cause he postponed the composition of his epic of Arthurian romance,
or whatever his mind "in the spacious circuits of her musing proposed
to herself of highest hope and hardest attempting." No doubt at first,
in thus deferring the work of his life, he thought the delay would be
for a brief space. He did not foresee that having once taken an oar,
he would be chained to it for more than twenty years, and that he
would finally owe his release to the ruin of the cause he had served.
But for the Restoration and the overthrow of the Puritans, we should
never have had the great Puritan epic.
The period then of his political activity is to be regarded as an
episode in the life of the poet Milton. It is indeed an episode which
fills twenty years, and those the most vigorous years of manhood, from
his thirty-second to his fifty-second year. He himself was conscious
of the sacrifice he was making, and apologises to the public for thus
defrauding them of the better work which he stood pledged to execute.
As he puts it, there was no choice for him. He could not help himself,
at this critical juncture, "when the Church of God was at the foot
of her insulting enemies;" he would never have ceased to reproach
himself, if he had refused to employ the fruits of his studies in her
behalf. He saw also that a generation inflamed by the passions of
conflict, and looking in breathless suspense for the issue of battles,
was not in a mood to attend to poetry. Nor, indeed, was he ready to
write, "not having yet (this is in 1642) completed to my mind the full
circle of my private studies."
But though he is drawn into the strife against his will, and in
defiance of his genius, when he is in it, he throws into it the whole
vehemence of his nature. The pamphlet period, I have said, is an
episode in the life of the poet. But it is a genuine part of Milton's
life. However his ambition may have been set upon an epic crown, his
zeal for what he calls the church was an equal passion, nay had, in
his judgment, a paramount claim upon him, He is a zealot among
the zealots; his cause is the cause of God; and the sword of the
Independents is the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. He does not
refute opponents, but curses enemies. Yet his rage, even when most
delirious, is always a Miltonic rage; it is grand, sublime, terrible!
Mingled with the scurrilities of the theological brawl are passages
of the noblest English ever written. Hartley Coleridge explains the
dulness of the wit-combats in Shakspeare and Jonson, on the ground
that repartee is the accomplishment of lighter thinkers and a less
earnest age. So of Milton's pamphlets it must be said that he was not
fencing for pastime, but fighting for all he held most worthy. He had
to think only of making his blows tell. When a battle is raging, and
my friends are sorely pressed, am I not to help because good manners
forbid the shedding of blood?
No good man can, with impunity, addict himself to party. And the best
men will suffer most, because their conviction of the goodness of
their cause is deeper. But when one with the sensibility of a poet
throws himself into the excitements of a struggle, he is certain to
lose his balance. The endowment of feeling and imagination which
qualifies him to be the ideal interpreter of life, unfits him
for participation in that real life, through the manoeuvres and
compromises of which reason is the only guide, and where imagination
is as much misplaced as it would be in a game of chess. "The ennobling
difference between one man and another is that one feels more than
another." Milton's capacity of emotion, when once he became champion
of a cause, could not be contained within the bounds of ordinary
speech. It breaks into ferocious reprobation, into terrific blasts of
vituperation, beneath which the very language creaks, as the timbers
of a ship in a storm. Corruptio optimi pessima. The archangel
is recognisable by the energy of his malice. Were all those
accomplishments; those many studious years hiving wisdom, the
knowledge of all the tongues, the command of all the thoughts of
all the ages, and that wealth of English expression--were all these
acquirements only of use, that their possessor might vie in defamation
with an Edwards or a Du Moulin?
For it should be noted that these pamphlets, now only serving as a
record of the prostitution of genius to political party, were, at the
time at which they appeared, of no use to the cause in which they
were written. Writers, with a professional tendency to magnify their
office, have always been given to exaggerate the effect of printed
words. There are examples of thought having been influenced by
books. But such books have been scientific, not rhetorical. Milton's
pamphlets are not works of speculation, or philosophy, or learning, or
solid reasoning on facts. They are inflammatory appeals, addressed to
the passions of the hour. He who was meditating the erection of an
enduring creation, such as the world "would not willingly let die,"
was content to occupy himself with the most ephemeral of all hackwork.
His own polemical writings may be justly described in the words he
himself uses of a book by one of his opponents, as calculated "to
gain a short, contemptible, and soon-fading reward, not to stir the
constancy and solid firmness of any wise man ... but to catch the
worthless approbation of an inconstant, irrational, and image-doting
rabble."
It would have been not unnatural that the public school and university
man, the admirer of Shakspeare and the old romances, the pet of
Italian academies, the poet-scholar, himself the author of two Masks,
who was nursing his wings for a new flight into the realms of verse,
should have sided with the cavaliers against the Puritans, with the
party of culture and the humanities against the party which shut up
the theatres and despised profane learning. But we have seen that
there was another side to Milton's mind. This may be spoken of as his
other self, the Puritan self, and regarded as in internal conflict
with the poet's self. His twenty years' pamphlet warfare may be
presented by his biographer as the expression of the Puritanic Milton,
who shall have been driven back upon his suppressed instincts as a
poet by the ruin of his political hopes. This chart of Milton's life
is at once simple and true. But like all physiological diagrams it
falls short of the subtlety and complexity of human character. A study
of the pamphlets will show that the poet is all there, indeed only too
openly for influence on opinion, and that the blighted hope of
the patriot lends a secret pathos to _Paradise Lost_ and _Samson
Agonistes_.
This other element in Milton is not accurately named Puritanism. Even
the term republicanism is a coarse and conventional description of
that sentiment which dominated his whole being, and which is the
inspiration at once of his poetry and of his prose. To give a name
to this sentiment, I must call it the love of liberty. It was an
aspiration at once real and vague, after a new order of things, an
order in which the old injustices and oppressions should cease; after
a new Jerusalem, a millennium, a Utopia, an Oceana. Its aim was to
realise in political institutions that great instauration of which
Bacon dreamed in the world of intelligence. It was much more negative
than affirmative, and knew better, as we all do, how good was hindered
than how it should be promoted. "I did but prompt the age to _quit
their clogs_." Milton embodied, more perfectly than any of his
cotemporaries, this spirit of the age. It is the ardent aspiration,
after the pure and noble life, the aspiration which stamps every line
he wrote, verse or prose, with a dignity as of an heroic age. This
gives consistency to all his utterances. The doctrinaire republican of
to-day cannot understand how the man who approved the execution of the
would-be despot Charles Stuart, should have been the hearty supporter
of the real autocrat Oliver Cromwell. Milton was not the slave of a
name. He cared not for the word republic, so as it was well with the
commonwealth. Parliaments or single rulers, he knew, are "but means
to an end; if that end was obtained, no matter if the constitutional
guarantees exist or not. Many of Milton's pamphlets are certainly
party pleadings, choleric, one-sided, personal. But through them all
runs the one redeeming characteristic--that they are all written
on the side of liberty. He defended religious liberty against the
prelates, civil liberty against the crown, the liberty of the
press against the executive, liberty of conscience against the
Presbyterians, and domestic liberty against the tyranny of canon law.
Milton's pamphlets might have been stamped with the motto which Selden
inscribed (in Greek) in all his books, "Liberty before everything."
One virtue these pamphlets possess, the virtue of style. They are
monuments of our language so remarkable that Milton's prose works must
always be resorted to by students, as long as English remains a medium
of ideas. Yet even on the score of style, Milton's prose is subject to
serious deductions. His negligence is such as to amount to an absence
of construction. He who, in his verse, trained the sentence with
delicate sensibility to follow his guiding hand into exquisite syntax,
seems in his prose writing to abandon his meaning to shift for itself.
Here Milton compares disadvantageously with Hooker. Hooker's elaborate
sentence, like the sentence of Demosthenes, is composed of parts
so hinged, of clauses so subordinated to the main thought, that we
foresee the end from the beginning, and close the period with a sense
of perfect roundness and totality. Milton does not seem to have any
notion of what a period means. He begins anywhere, and leaves off, not
when the sense closes, but when he is out of breath. We might have
thought this pell-mell huddle of his words was explained, if not
excused, by the exigencies of the party pamphlet, which cannot wait.
But the same asyntactle disorder is equally found in the _History of
Britain_, which he had in hand for forty years. Nor is it only the
Miltonic sentence which is incoherent; the whole arrangement of his
topics is equally loose, disjointed, and desultory. His inspiration
comes from impulse. Had he stayed to chastise his emotional writing by
reason and the laws of logic, he would have deprived himself of the
sources of his strength.
These serious faults are balanced by virtues of another kind. Putting
Bacon aside, the condensed force and poignant brevity of whose
aphoristic wisdom has no parallel in English, there is no other
prosaist who possesses anything like Milton's command over the
resources of our language. Milton cannot match the musical harmony and
exactly balanced periods of his predecessor Hooker. He is without
the power of varied illustration, and accumulation of ornamental
circumstance, possessed by his contemporary, Jeremy Taylor
(1613-1667). But neither of these great writers impresses the reader
with a sense of unlimited power such as we feel to reside in Milton.
Vast as is the wealth of magnificent words which he flings with both
hands carelessly upon the page, we feel that there is still much more
in reserve.
The critics have observed (Collier's _Poetical Decameron_) that as
Milton advanced in life he gradually disused the compound words he
had been in the habit of making for himself. However this may be, his
words are the words of one who made a study of the language, as a
poet studies language, searching its capacities for the expression of
surging emotion. Jeremy Taylor's prose is poetical prose. Milton's
prose is not poetical prose, but a different thing, the prose of a
poet; not like Taylor's, loaded with imagery on the outside; but
coloured by imagination from within. Milton is the first English
writer who, possessing in the ancient models a standard of the effect
which could be produced by choice of words, set himself to the
conscious study of our native tongue with a firm faith in its as yet
undeveloped powers as an instrument of thought.
The words in Milton's poems have been counted, and it appears that he
employs 8000, while Shakspeare's plays and poems yield about 15,000.
From this it might be inferred that the Miltonic vocabulary is only
half as rich as that of Shakspeare. But no inference can be founded
upon the absolute number of words used by any writer. We must know,
not the total of different words, but the _proportion_ of different
words to the whole of any writer's words. Now to furnish a list of
100 different words the English Bible requires 531 common words,
Shakspeare 164, Milton 135 only. This computation is founded on the
poems; it would be curious to have the same test tried upon the prose
writings, though no such test can be as trustworthy as the educated
ear of a listener to a continued reading.
It is no part of a succinct biography, such as the present, to furnish
an account in detail of the various controversies of the time, as
Milton engaged in them. The reader will doubtless be content with the,
bare indication of the subjects on which he wrote. The whole number of
Milton's political pamphlets Is twenty-five. Of these, twenty-one are
written in English, and four in Latin, Of the _Tractate of Education_
and the four divorce pamphlets something has been already said. Of the
remaining twenty, nine, or nearly half, relate to church government,
or ecclesiastical affairs; eight treat of the various crises of the
civil strife; and two are personal vindications of himself against one
of his antagonists. There remains one tract of which the subject is of
a more general and permanent nature, the best known of all the series,
_Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of unlicensed Printing, to the
Parliament of England_. The whole series of twenty-five extends over
a period of somewhat less than twenty years; the earliest, viz., _Of
Reformation touching Church Discipline in England, and the Causes that
hitherto have hindered it_, having been published in 1641; the latest,
entitled, _A ready and easy way to establish a free Commonwealth_,
coming out in March, 1660, after the torrent of royalism had set in,
which was to sweep away the men and the cause to which Milton had
devoted himself. Milton's pen thus accompanied the whole of the
Puritan revolution from the modest constitutional opposition in
which It commenced, through its unexpected triumph, to its crushing
overthrow by the royalist and clerical reaction.
The autumn of 1641 brought with it a sensible lull in the storm of
revolutionary passion. Indeed, there began to appear all the symptoms
of a reaction, and of the formation of a solid conservative party,
likely to be strong enough to check, or even to suppress, the
movement. The impulse seemed to have spent itself, and a desire for
rest from political agitation began to steal over the nation. Autumn
and the harvest turn men's thoughts towards country occupations and
sports. The King went off to Scotland in August; the Houses adjourned
till the 20th October. The Scottish army had been paid off, and had
repassed the border; the Scottish commissioners and preachers had left
London.
It was a critical moment for the Puritan party. Some very considerable
triumphs they had gained. The archenemy Strafford had been brought to
the block; Laud was in the tower; the leading members of Convocation,
bishops, deans, and archdeacons, had been heavily fined; the Star
Chamber and the High Commission Court had been abolished; the Stannary
and Forestal jurisdictions restrained. But the Puritan movement aimed
at far more than this. It was not only that the root-and-branch men
were pushing for a generally more levelling policy, but the whole
Puritan party was committed to a struggle with the hierarchy of the
Established Church. It was not so much that they demanded more and
more reform, with the growing appetite of revolution, but that as
long as bishops existed, nothing that had been wrested from them was
secure. The Puritans could not exist in safety side by side with
a church whose principle was that there was no church without the
apostolic succession. The abolition of episcopacy and the substitution
of the Presbyterian platform was, so it then seemed, a bare measure
of necessary precaution, and not merely the extravagant demand of
dissatisfied spirits. Add to this, that it was well understood by
those near enough to the principal actors in the drama, that the
concessions made by the Court had been easily made, because they could
be taken back, when the time should come, with equal ease. Even the
most moderate men, who were satisfied with the amount of reform
already obtained, must have trembled at its insecurity. The Puritan
leaders must have viewed with dismay the tendency in the nation
towards a reaction in favour of things as they were.
It was upon this condition of the public mind that Milton persistently
poured pamphlet after pamphlet, successive vials of apocalyptic wrath.
He exhausts all the resources of rhetoric, and plays upon every note
in the gamut of public feeling; that he may rouse the apathetic,
confirm the wavering, dumbfound the malignant; where there was zeal,
to fan it into flame; where there was opposition, to sow and browbeat
it by indignant scorn and terrific denunciation. The first of these
manifestoes was (1) _Of Reformation touching Church Discipline_, of
which I have already spoken. This was immediately followed by (2)
_Of Prelaticall Episcopacy_. This tract was a reply, in form, to a
publication of Archbishop Usher. It was about the end of May, 1641,
that Usher had come forward on the breach with his _Judgment of Dr.
Rainolds touching the Original of Episcopacy_, Rainolds, who had been
President of Corpus (1598-1607), had belonged to the Puritan party in
his day, had refused a bishopric, and was known, like Usher himself,
to be little favourable to the exclusive claims of the high
prelatists. He was thus an unexceptionable witness to adduce in
favour of the apostolic origin of the distinction between bishop and
presbyter. Usher, in editing Rainolds' opinions, had backed them up
with all the additional citations which his vast reading could supply.
Milton could not speak with the weight that attached to Usher, the
most learned Churchman of the age, who had spent eighteen years in
going through a complete course of fathers and councils. But, in the
first paragraph of his answer, Milton adroitly puts the controversy
upon a footing by which antiquarian research is put out of court.
Episcopacy is either of human or divine origin. If of human origin, it
may be either retained or abolished, as may be found expedient. If of
divine appointment, it must be proved to be so out of Scripture. If
this cannot be proved out of inspired Scripture, no accumulation of
merely human assertion of the point can be of the least authority.
Having thus shut out antiquity as evidence in the case, he proceeds
nevertheless to examine his opponent's authorities, and sets them
aside by a style of argument which has more of banter than of
criticism.
One incident of this collision between Milton, young and unknown, and
the venerable prelate, whom he was assaulting with the rude wantonness
of untempered youth, deserves to be mentioned here. Usher had
incautiously included the Ignatian epistles among his authorities.
This laid the most learned man of the day at the mercy of an adversary
of less reading than himself. Milton, who at least knew so much
suspicion of the genuineness of these remains as Casaubon's
_Exercitations on Baronius_ and Vedelin's edition (Geneva, 1623) could
suggest, pounced upon this critical flaw, and delightedly denounced
in trenchant tones this "Perkin Warbeck of Ignatius," and the
"supposititious offspring of some dozen epistles." This rude shock it
was which set Usher upon a more careful examination of the Ignatian
question. The result was his well-known edition of Ignatius, printed
1642, though not published till 1644, in which he acknowledged the
total spuriousness of nine epistles, and the partial interpolation of
the other six. I have not noticed in Usher's _Prolegomena_ that he
alludes to Milton's onslaught. Nor, indeed, was he called upon to
do so in a scientific investigation, as Milton had brought no
contribution to the solution of the question beyond sound and fury.
Of Milton's third pamphlet, entitled (3) _Animadversions on the
Remonstrants defence against Smectymnuus_, it need only be said that
it is a violent personal onfall upon Joseph Hall, bishop, first, of
Exeter and afterwards of Norwich. The bishop, by descending into the
arena of controversy, had deprived himself of the privilege which his
literary eminence should have secured to him. But nothing can excuse
or reconcile us to the indecent scurrility with which he is assailed
in Milton's pages, which reflect more discredit on him who wrote them,
than on him against whom they are written.
The fifth pamphlet, called (5) _An Apology against a Pamphlet called
"A Modest Confutation, &c."_ (1642), is chiefly remarkable for a
defence of his own Cambridge career. A man who throws dirt, as Milton
did, must not be surprised if some of it comes back to him. A son of
Bishop Hall, coming forward as his father's champion and avenger,
had raked up a garbled version of Milton's quarrel with his tutor
Chappell, and by a further distortion, had brought it out in the shape
that, "after an inordinate and violent youth spent at the university,"
Milton had been "vomited out thence." From the university this
"alchemist of slander" follows him to the city, and declares that
where Milton's morning haunts are, he wisses not, but that his
afternoons are spent in playhouses and bordelloes. Milton replies to
these random charges by a lengthy account of himself and his studious
habits. As the reader may expect a specimen of Milton's prose style, I
quote a part of this autobiographical paragraph:--
"I had my time, as others have who have good learning bestowed upon
them, to be sent to those places where the opinion was it might be
sooner attained; and, as the manner is, was not unstudied in those
authors which are most commended, whereof some were grave orators and
historians, whom methought I loved indeed, but as my age then was, so
I understood them; others were the smooth elegiac poets, whereof the
schools are not scarce; whom both for the pleasing sound of their
numerous writing, which in imitation I found most easy, and most
agreeable to nature's part in me, and for their matter, which what
it is there be few who know not, I was so allowed to read, that no
recreation came to me better welcome.... Whence having observed them
to account it the chief glory of their wit, in that they were ablest
to judge, to praise, and by that could esteem themselves worthiest to
love those high perfections which under one or other name they toot
to celebrate, I thought with myself by every instinct and presage of
nature which is not wont to be false, that what emboldened them to
this task might with such diligence as they used embolden me, and that
what judgment, wit, or elegance was my share, would herein best appear
and best value itself by how much more wisely and with more love of
virtue I should choose (let rude ears be absent) the object of
not unlike praises.... Nor blame it in those years to propose to
themselves such a reward as the noblest dispositions above other
things in this life have sometimes preferred. Whereof not to be
sensible when good and fair in one person meet, argues both a gross
and shallow judgment, and withal an ungentle and swainish breast.
For by the firm settling of these persuasions I became so much a
proficient, that if I found those authors anywhere speaking unworthy
things of themselves, or unchaste of those names which before they had
extolled, this effect it wrought with me, from that time forward their
art I still applauded, but the men I deplored; and above them all
preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never
write but honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying
sublime and pure thoughts without transgression. And long it was not
after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he, who would not
be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things,
ought himself to be a true poem, that is a composition and pattern of
the best and honourablest things, not presuming to sing high praises
of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the
experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy.
"These 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, and lastly that modesty, whereof,
though not in the title-page, yet here, I may be excused to make some
beseeming profession, all these uniting the supply of their natural
aid together, 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.
"Next, for hear me out now, readers, that I may tell ye whither my
younger feet wandered, I betook me among those lofty fables and
romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood
founded by our victorious kings, and from hence had in renown over
all Christendom. There I read it in the oath of every knight, that he
should defend to the expence of his best blood, or of his life if it
so befel him, the honour and chastity of virgin or matron. From whence
even then I learnt what a noble virtue chastity ever must be, to
the defence of which so many worthies by such a dear adventure of
themselves had sworn. And if I found in the story afterwards any of
them by word or deed breaking that oath, I judged it the same fault of
the poet as that which is attributed to Homer to have written undecent
things of the gods. Only this my mind gave me, that every free and
gentle spirit without that oath ought to be borne a knight, nor needed
to expect the gilt spur, or the laying of a sword upon his shoulder,
to stir him up both by his counsel and his arm to serve and protect
the weakness of any attempted chastity. So that even those books which
to many others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose living, I
cannot think how unless by divine indulgence, proved to me so many
incitements to the love and steadfast observation of virtue."
This is one of the autobiographical cases in these pamphlets, which
are otherwise arid deserts of sand, scorched by the fire of extinct
passion. It may be asked why it is that a few men, Gibbon or Milton,
are indulged without challenge in talk about themselves, which would
be childish vanity or odious egotism in others. When a Frenchman
writes, "Nous avons tous, nous autres Français, des séduisantes
qualités"(Gaffarel), he is ridiculous. The difference is not merely
that we tolerate in a man of confessed superiority what would be
intolerable in an equal. This is true; but there is a further
distinction of moral quality in men's confessions. In Milton, as
in Gibbon, the gratification of self-love, which attends all
autobiography, is felt to be subordinated to a nobler intention.
The lofty conception which Milton formed of his vocation as a poet,
expands his soul and absorbs his personality. It is his office, and
not himself, which he magnifies. The details of his life and nurture
are important, not because they belong to him, but because he belongs,
by dedication, to a high and sacred calling. He is extremely jealous,
not of his own reputation, but of the credit which is due to lofty
endeavour. We have only to compare Milton's magnanimous assumption of
the first place with the paltry conceit with which, in the following
age of Dryden and Pope, men spoke of themselves as authors, to see
the wide difference between the professional vanity of successful
authorship and the proud consciousness of a prophetic mission. Milton
leads a dedicated life, and has laid down for himself the law that
"he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in
laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem."
If Milton had not been the author of _Lycidas_ and _Paradise Lost_,
his political pamphlets would have been as forgotten as are the
thousand civil war tracts preserved in the Thomason collection in
the Museum, or have served, at most, as philological landmarks. One,
however, of his prose tracts has continued to enjoy some degree of
credit down to the present time, for its matter as well as for its
words, _Areopagitica_. This tract belongs to the year 1644, the most
fertile year in Milton's life, as in it he "brought out two of his
divorce tracts, the _Tractate of Education_, and the _Areopagitica_.
As Milton's moving principle was not any preconceived system of
doctrine but the passion for liberty in general, it was natural that
he should plead, when occasion called, for liberty of the press, among
others. The occasion was one personal to himself.
It is well known that, early in the history of printing, governments
became jealous of this new instrument for influencing opinion. In
England, in 1556, under Mary, the Stationers' Company was invested
with legal privileges, having the twofold object of protecting the
book trade and controlling writers. All publications were required, to
be registered in the register of the company. No persons could set
up a press without a licence, or print anything which had not been
previously approved by some official censor. The court, which had
come to be known as the court of Star-chamber, exercised criminal
jurisdiction over offenders, and even issued its own decrees for the
regulation of printing. The arbitrary action of this court had no
small share in bringing about the resistance to Charles I. But the
fall of the royal authority did not mean the emancipation of the
press. The Parliament had no intention of letting go the control which
the monarchy had exercised; the incidence of the coercion was to be
shifted from themselves upon their opponents. The Star-chamber was
abolished, but its powers of search and seizure were transferred to
the Company of Stationers. Licensing was to go on as before, but to be
exercised by special commissioners, instead of by the Archbishop and
the Bishop of London. Only whereas, before, contraband had consisted
of Presbyterian books, henceforward it was Catholic and Anglican books
which would be suppressed.
Such was not Milton's idea of the liberty of thought and speech in a
free commonwealth. He had himself written for the Presbyterians four
unlicensed pamphlets. It was now open to him to write any number, and
to get them licensed, provided they were written on the same side.
This was not liberty, as he had learned it in his classics, "ubi
sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet." Over and above this
encroachment on the liberty of the free citizen, it so happened that
at this moment Milton himself was concerned to ventilate an
opinion which was not Presbyterian, and had no chance of passing a
Presbyterian licenser. His _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_ was
just ready for press when the ordinance of 1643 came into operation.
He published it without licence and without printer's name, in
defiance of the law, and awaited the consequences. There were no
consequences. He repeated the offence in a second edition in February,
1644, putting his name now (the first edition had been anonymous), and
dedicating it to the very Parliament whose ordinance he was setting
at nought. This time the Commons, stirred up by a petition from
the Company of Stationers, referred the matter to the committee of
printing. It went no further. Either it was deemed inexpedient
to molest so sound a Parliamentarian as Milton, or Cromwell's
"accommodation resolution" of September 13, 1644, opened the eyes of
the Presbyterian zealots to the existence in the kingdom of a new, and
much wider, phase of opinion, which ominously threatened the compact
little edifice of Presbyterian truth that they had been erecting with
a profound conviction of its exclusive orthodoxy.
The occurrence had been sufficient to give a new direction to Milton's
thoughts. Regardless of the fact that his plea for liberty in marriage
had fallen upon deaf ears, he would plead for liberty of speech. The
_Areopagitica, for the Liberty of unlicensed Printing_, came out in
November, 1644, an unlicensed, unregistered publication, without
printer's or bookseller's name. It was cast in the form of a speech
addressed to the Parliament. The motto was taken from Euripides, and
printed in the original Greek, which was not, when addressed to the
Parliament of 1644, the absurdity which it would be now. The title is
less appropriate, being borrowed from the _Areopagitic Discourse_ of
Isocrates, between which and Milton's _Speech_ there is no resemblance
either in subject or style. All that the two productions have in
common is their form. They are both unspoken orations, written to the
address of a representative assembly--the one to the Boulé or Senate
of Athens, the other to the Parliament of England.
Milton's _Speech_ is in his own best style; a copious flood of
majestic eloquence, the outpouring of a noble soul with a divine
scorn of narrow dogma and paltry aims. But it is a mere pamphlet,
extemporised in, at most, a month or two, without research or special
knowledge, with no attempt to ascertain general principles, and more
than Milton's usual disregard of method. A jurist's question, is here
handled by a rhetorician. He has preached a noble and heart-stirring
sermon on his text, but the problem for the legislator remains where
it was. The vagueness and confusion of the thoughts finds a vehicle
in language which is too often overcrowded and obscure. I think the
_Areopagitica_ has few or no offences against taste; on the other
hand, it has few or none of those grand passages which redeem the
scurrility of his political pamphlets. The passage in which Milton's
visit to Galileo "grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition," is
mentioned, is often quoted for its biographical interest; and the
terse dictum, "as good almost kill a man as kill a good book," has
passed into a current axiom. A paragraph at the close, where he hints
that the time may be come to suppress the suppressors, intimates, but
so obscurely as to be likely to escape notice, that Milton had already
made up his mind that a struggle with the Presbyterian party was to be
the sequel of the overthrow of the Royalists. He has not yet arrived
at the point he will hereafter reach, of rejecting the very idea of
a minister of religion, but he is already aggrieved by the implicit
faith which the Puritan laity, who had cast out bishops, were
beginning to bestow upon their pastor; "a factor to whose care and
credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs."
Finally, it must be noted, that Milton, though he had come to see
round Presbyterianism, had not, in 1644, shaken off all dogmatic
profession. His toleration of opinion was far from complete. He
would call in the intervention of the executioner in the case of
"mischievous and libellous books," and could not bring himself to
contemplate the toleration of Popery and open superstition, "which as
it extirpates all religious and civil supremacies, so itself should be
extirpate; provided first that all charitable and compassionate means
be used to win and gain the weak and misled."
The _Areopagitica_, as might be expected, produced no effect upon the
legislation of the Long Parliament, of whom (says Hallam) "very
few acts of political wisdom or courage are recorded." Individual
licensers became more lax in the performance of the duty, but this is
reasonably to be ascribed to the growing spirit of independency--a
spirit which was incompatible with any embargo on the utterance of
private opinion. A curious epilogue to the history of this publication
is the fact, first brought to light by Mr. Masson, that the author of
the _Areopagitica_, at a later time, acted himself in the capacity of
licenser. It was in 1651, under the Commonwealth, Marchmont Needham
being editor of the weekly paper called _Mercurius Politicus_, that
Milton was associated with him as his censor or supervising editor.
Mr. Masson conjectures, with some probability, that the leading
articles of the _Mercurius_, during part of the year 1651, received
touches from Milton's hand. But this was, after all, rather in the
character of editor, whose business it is to see that nothing improper
goes into the paper, than in that of press licenser in the sense in
which the _Areopagitica_ had denounced it.