BIOGRAPHICAL. 1640--1649.
In September, 1645, Milton left the garden-house in Aldersgate, for
a larger house in Barbican, in the same neighbourhood, but a little
further from the city gate, i.e. more in the country. The larger house
was, perhaps, required for the accommodation of his pupils (see above,
p. 44), but it served to shelter his wife's family, when they were
thrown upon the world by the surrender of Oxford in June, 1646. In
this Barbican house Mr. Powell died at the end of that year. Milton
had been promised with his wife a portion of 1000 l.; but Mr. Powell's
affairs had long been in a very embarrassed condition, and now by the
consequences of delinquency that condition had become one of absolute
ruin. Great pains have been bestowed by Mr. Masson in unravelling the
entanglement of the Powell accounts. The data which remain are ample,
and we cannot but feel astonished at the accuracy with which our
national records, in more important matters so defective, enable us
to set out a debtor and creditor balance of the estate of a private
citizen, who died more than 200 years ago. But the circumstances
are peculiarly intricate, and we are still unable to reconcile Mr,
Powell's will with the composition records, both of which are extant.
As a compounding delinquent, his fine, assessed at the customary rate
of two years' income, was fixed by the commissioners at 180 l. The
commissioners must have, therefore, been satisfied that his income did
not exceed 90 l. a year. Yet by his will of date December 30, 1646, he
leaves his estate of Forest Hill, the annual value of which alone far
exceeded 90 l., to his eldest son. This property is not mentioned
in the inventory of his estate, real and personal, laid before the
commissioners, sworn to by the delinquent, and by them accepted. The
possible explanation is that the Forest Hill property had really
passed into the possession, by foreclosure, of the mortgagee, Sir
Robert Pye, who sate for Woodstock in the Long Parliament, but that
Mr. Powell, making his will on his deathbed, pleased himself with the
fancy of leaving his son and heir an estate which was no longer his to
dispose of. Putting Forest Hill out of the account, it would appear
that the sequestrators had dealt somewhat harshly with Mr. Powell; for
they had included in their estimate one doubtful asset of 500 l., and
one non-existent of 400 l. This last item was a stock of timber stated
to be at Forest Hill, but which had really been appropriated without
payment by the Parliamentarians, and part of it voted by Parliament
itself towards repair of the church in the staunch Puritan town of
Banbury.
The upshot of the whole transaction is that, in satisfaction of his
claim of 1500 l. (1000 l. his wife's dower, 500 l. an old loan of
1627), Milton came into possession of some property at Wheatley. This
property, consisting of the tithes of Wheatley, certain cottages,
and three and a half yard lands, had in the time of the disturbances
produced only 40 l. a year. But as the value of all property improved
when, the civil war came to an end, Milton found the whole could now
be let for 80 l. But then out of this he had to pay Mr. Powell's
composition, reduced to 130 l. on Milton's petition, and the widow's
jointure, computed at 26 l. 13 s. 4 d. per annum. What of income
remained after these disbursements he might apply towards repaying
himself the old loan of 1627. This was all Milton ever saw of the 1000
l. which Mr. Powell, with the high-flying magnificence of a cavalier
who knew he was ruined, had promised as his daughter's portion.
Mr. Powell's death was followed in less than three months by that of
John Milton, senior. He died in the house in Barbican, and the entry,
"John Milton, gentleman, 15 (March)," among the burials in 1646,
is still to be seen in the register of the parish of St. Giles's,
Cripplegate. A host of eminent men have traced the first impulse of
their genius to their mother. Milton always acknowledged with just
gratitude that it was to his father's discerning taste and fostering
care, that he owed the encouragement of his studies, and the leisure
which rendered them possible. He has registered this gratitude in both
prose and verse. The Latin hexameters, "Ad patrem," written at Horton,
are inspired by a feeling far beyond commonplace filial piety, and a
warmth which is rare indeed in neo-Latin versification. And when, in
his prose pamphlets, he has occasion to speak of himself, he does not
omit the acknowledgment of "the ceaseless diligence and care of my
father, whom God recompense." (_Reason of Church Government_.)
After the death of his father, being now more at ease in his
circumstances, he gave up taking pupils, and quitted the large house
in Barbican for a smaller in High Holborn, opening backwards into
Lincoln's-Inn-Fields. This removal was about Michaelmas, 1647.
During this period, 1639--1649, while his interests were engaged by
the all-absorbing events of the civil strife, he wrote no poetry,
or none deserving the name. All artists have intervals of
non-productiveness, usually caused by exhaustion. This was not
Milton's case. His genius was not his master, nor could it pass, like
that of Leonardo da Vinci, unmoved through the most tragic scenes. He
deliberately suspended it at the call of what he believed to be duty
to his country. His unrivalled power of expression was placed at the
service of a passionate political conviction. This prostitution of
faculty avenged itself; for when he did turn to poetry, his strength
was gone from him. The period is chiefly marked, by sonnets, not many,
one in a year, or thereabouts. That _On the religious memory of Mrs.
Catherine Thomson_, in 1646, is the lowest point touched by Milton in
poetry, for his metrical psalms do not deserve the name.
The sonnet, or Elegy on Mrs. Catherine Thomson in the form of a
sonnet, though in poetical merit not distinguishable from the
average religious verse of the Caroline age, has an interest for the
biographer. It breathes a holy calm that is in sharp contrast with the
angry virulence of the pamphlets, which were being written at this
very time by the same pen. Amid his intemperate denunciations of
his political and ecclesiastical foes, it seems that Milton did not
inwardly forfeit the peace which passeth all understanding. He had
formerly said himself (_Doctrine and Disc._), "nothing more than
disturbance of mind suspends us from approaching to God." Now, out of
all the clamour and the bitterness of the battle of the sects, he can
retire and be alone with his heavenly aspirations, which have lost
none of their ardour by having laid aside all their sectarianism. His
genius has forsaken him, but his soul still glows with the fervour
of devotion. And even of this sonnet we may say what Ellis says of
Catullus, that Milton never ceases to be a poet, even when his words
are most prosaic.
The sonnet (xv.) _On the Lord-General Fairfax, at the siege of
Colchester_, written in 1648, is again a manifesto of the writer's
political feelings, nobly uttered, and investing party with a
patriotic dignity not unworthy of the man, Milton. It is a hortatory
lyric, a trumpet-call to his party in the moment of victory to
remember the duties which that victory imposed upon them. It is not
without the splendid resonance of the Italian canzone. But it can
scarcely be called poetry, expressing, as it does, facts directly, and
not indirectly through their imaginative equivalents. Fairfax was,
doubtless, well worthy that Milton should have commemorated him in a
higher strain. Of Fairfax's eminent qualities the sonnet only dwells
on two, his personal valour, which had been tried in many fights--he
had been three times dangerously wounded in the Yorkshire
campaign--and his superiority to sordid interests. Of his generalship,
in which he was second to Cromwell only, and of his love of arts and
learning, nothing is said, though the last was the passion of his
life, for which at forty he renounced ambition. Perhaps in 1648
Milton, who lived a very retired life, did not know of these tastes,
and had not heard that it was by Fairfax's care that the Bodleian
library was saved from wreck on the surrender of Oxford in 1646. And
it was not till later, years after the sonnet was written, that the
same Fairfax, "whose name in arms through Europe rings," became a
competitor of Milton in the attempt to paraphrase the Psalms in metre.
Milton's paraphrase of the Psalms belongs to history, but to the
history of psalmody, not that of poetry. At St. Paul's School, at
fifteen, the boy had turned two psalms, the 114th and the 136th, by
way of exercise. That in his day of plenary inspiration, Milton, who
disdained Dryden as "a rhymist but no poet," and has recorded his own
impatience with the "drawling versifiers," should have undertaken
to grind down the noble antistrophic lyrics of the Hebrew bard
into ballad rhymes for the use of Puritan worship, would have been
impossible. But the idea of being useful to his country had acquired
exclusive possession of his mind. Even his faculty of verse should
be employed in the good cause. If Parliament had set him the task,
doubtless he would have willingly undertaken it, as Corneille, in the
blindness of Catholic obedience, versified the _Imitatio Christi_ at
the command of the Jesuits. Milton was not officially employed, but
voluntarily took up the work. The Puritans were bent upon substituting
a new version of the Davidic Psalms for that of Sternhold and Hopkins,
for no other reason than that the latter formed part of the hated Book
of Common Prayer. The Commons had pronounced in favour of a version by
one of their own members, the staunch Puritan M.P. for Truro, Francis
Rouse. The Lords favoured a rival book, and numerous other claimants
were before the public. Dissatisfied with any of these attempts,
Milton would essay himself. In 1648 he turned nine psalms, and
recurring to the task in 1653, "did into verse" eight more. He thought
these specimens worth preserving, and annexing to the volume of his
poems which he published himself in 1673. As this doggerel continues
to encumber each succeeding edition of the _Poetical Works_, it is as
well that Milton did not persevere with his experiment and produce a
complete Psalter. He prudently abandoned a task in which success is
impossible. A metrical psalm, being a compromise between the psalm and
the hymn, like other compromises, misses, rather than combines, the
distinctive excellences of the things united. That Milton should ever
have attempted what poetry forbids, is only another proof how entirely
at this period more absorbing motives had possession of his mind, and
overbore his poetical judgment. It is a coincidence worth remembering
that Milton's contemporary, Lord Clarendon, was at this very time
solacing his exile at Madrid by composing, not a version but a
commentary upon the Psalms, "applying those devotions to the troubles
of this time."
Yet all the while that he was thus unfaithful in practice to his art,
it was poetry that possessed his real affections, and the reputation
of a poet which formed his ambition. It was a temporary separation,
and not a divorce, which he designed. In each successive pamphlet he
reiterates his undertaking to redeem his pledge of a great work, as
soon as liberty shall be consolidated in the realm. Meanwhile, as an
earnest of what should be hereafter, he permitted the publication of a
collection of his early poems.
This little volume of some 200 pages, rude in execution as it is,
ranks among the highest prizes of the book collector, very few copies
being extant, and those mostly in public libraries. It appeared in
1645, and owed its appearance, not to the vanity of the author, but
to the zeal of a publisher. Humphrey Moseley, at the sign, of the
Prince's Arms, in St. Paul's Churchyard, suggested the collection to
Milton, and undertook the risk of it, though knowing, as he says
in the prefixed address of The Stationer to the Reader, that "the
slightest pamphlet is nowadays more vendible than the works of
learnedest men." It may create some surprise that, in 1645, there
should have been any public in England for a volume of verse. Naseby
had been fought in June, Philiphaugh in September, Fairfax and
Cromwell were continuing their victorious career in the west, Chester,
Worcester, and the stronghold of Oxford, alone holding out for the
King. It was clear that the conflict was decided in favour of the
Parliament, but men's minds must have been strung to a pitch of
intense expectation as to what kind of settlement was to come. Yet, at
the very crisis of the civil strife, we find a London publisher able
to bring out the Poems of Waller (1644), and sufficiently encouraged
by their reception to follow them up, in the next year, with the Poems
of Mr. John Milton. Are we warranted in inferring that a finer public
was beginning to loathe the dreary theological polemic of which it had
had a surfeit, and turned to a book of poetry as that which was
most unlike the daily garbage, just as a later public absorbed five
thousand copies of Scott's _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ in the year of
Austerlitz? One would like to know who were the purchasers of
Milton and Waller, when the cavalier families were being ruined by
confiscations and compositions, and Puritan families would turn with
pious horror from the very name of a Mask.
Milton was himself editor of his own volume, and prefixed to it, again
out of Virgil's Eclogues, the characteristic motto, "Baccare frontem
Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua _futuro_," indicating that his
poetry was all to come.