BIOGRAPHICAL.--LITERARY OCCUPATION.--RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.
Revolutions are of two kinds; they are either progressive or
reactionary. A revolution of progress is often destructive, sweeping
away much which should have been preserved. But such a revolution has
a regenerating force; it renews the youth of a nation, and gives free
play to its vital powers. Lost limbs are replaced by new. A revolution
of reaction, on the other hand, is a benumbing influence, paralysing
effort, and levelling character. In such a conservative revolution,
the mean, the selfish, and the corrupt come to the top; man seeks
ease and enjoyment rather than duty; virtue, honour, patriotism, and
disinterestedness disappear altogether from a society which has ceased
to believe in them.
The Restoration of 1660 was such a revolution. Complete and
instantaneous inversion of the position of the two parties in the
nation, it occasioned much individual hardship. But this was only the
fortune of war, the necessary consequence of party ascendancy. The
Restoration was much more than a triumph of the party of the royalists
over that of the roundheads; it was the deathblow to national
aspiration, to all those aims which raise man above himself. It
destroyed and trampled under foot his ideal. The Restoration was a
moral catastrophe. It was not that there wanted good men among the
churchmen, men as pious and virtuous as the Puritans whom they
displaced. But the royalists came back as the party of reaction,
reaction of the spirit of the world against asceticism, of
self-indulgence against duty, of materialism against idealism. For a
time virtue was a public laughing-stock, and the word "saint," the
highest expression in the language for moral perfection, connoted
everything that was ridiculous. I do not speak of the gallantries of
Whitehall, which figure so prominently in the histories of the reign.
Far too much is made of these, when they are made the scapegoat of
the moralist. The style of court manners was a mere incident on the
surface of social life. The national life was more profoundly tainted
by the discouragement of all good men, which penetrated every shire
and every parish, than by the distant reports of the loose behaviour
of Charles II. Servility, meanness, venality, time-serving, and
a disbelief in virtue diffused themselves over the nation like a
pestilential miasma, the depressing influence of which was heavy, even
upon those souls which individually resisted the poison. The heroic
age of England had passed away, not by gradual decay, by imperceptible
degeneration, but in a year, in a single day, like the winter's snow
in Greece. It is for the historian to describe, and unfold the sources
of this contagion. The biographer of Milton has to take note of the
political change only as it affected the worldly circumstances of the
man, the spiritual environment of the poet, and the springs of his
inspiration.
The consequences of the Restoration to Milton's worldly fortunes were
disastrous. As a partisan he was necessarily involved in the ruin of
his party. As a matter of course he lost his Latin secretaryship.
There is a story that he was offered to be continued in it, and that
when urged to accept the offer by his wife, he replied, "Thou art in
the right; you, as other women, would ride in your coach; for me, my
aim is to live and die an honest man." This tradition, handed on by
Pope, is of doubtful authenticity. It is not probable that the man who
had printed of Charles I. what Milton had printed, could have been
offered office under Charles II. Even were court favour to be
purchased by concessions, Milton was not the man to make them, or to
belie his own antecedents, as Marchmont, Needham, Dryden, and so many
others did. Our wish for Milton is that he should have placed himself
from the beginning above party. But he had chosen to be the champion
of a party, and he loyally accepted the consequences. He escaped with
life and liberty. The reaction, though barbarous in its treatment of
its victims, was not bloodthirsty. Milton was already punished by the
loss of his sight, and he was now mulcted in three-fourths of his
small fortune. A sum of 2000 l. which he had placed in government
securities was lost, the restored monarchy refusing to recognise
the obligations of the protectorate. He lost another like sum by
mismanagement, and for want of good advice, says Phillips, or
according to his granddaughter's statement, by the dishonesty of a
money-scrivener. He had also to give up, without compensation, some
property, valued at 60 l. a year, which he had purchased when the
estates of the Chapter of Westminster were sold. In the great fire,
1666, his house in Bread-street was destroyed. Thus, from easy
circumstances, he was reduced, if not to destitution, at least to
narrow means. He left at his death 1500 l., which Phillips calls a
considerable sum. And if he sold his books, one by one, during his
lifetime, this was because, knowing their value, he thought he could
dispose of them to greater advantage than his wife would be able to
do.
But far outweighing such considerations as pecuniary ruin, and
personal discomfort, was the shock which the moral nature felt from
the irretrievable discomfiture of all the hopes, aims, and aspirations
which had hitherto sustained and nourished his soul. In a few months
the labour of twenty years was swept away without a trace of it being
left. It was not merely a political defeat of his party, it was the
total wreck of the principles, of the social and religious ideal, with
which Milton's life was bound up. Others, whose convictions only had
been engaged in the cause, could hasten to accommodate themselves to
the new era, or even to transfer their services to the conqueror. But
such flighty allegiance was not possible for Milton, who had embarked
in the Puritan cause not only intellectual convictions, but all the
generosity and ardour of his passionate nature. "I conceive myself to
be," he had written in 1642, "not as mine own person, but as a member
incorporate into that truth whereof I was persuaded, and whereof I had
declared myself openly to be the partaker." It was now in the moment
of overthrow that Milton became truly great. "Wandellos im ewigen
Ruin," he stood alone, and became the party himself. He took the
only course open to him, turned away his thoughts from the political
disaster, and directed the fierce enthusiasm which burned within,
upon an absorbing poetic task. His outward hopes were blasted, and he
returned with concentrated ardour to woo the muse, from whom he had so
long truanted. The passion which seethes beneath the stately march of
the verse in _Paradise Lost_, is not the hopeless moan of despair, but
the intensified fanaticism which defies misfortune to make it "bate
one jot of heart or hope." The grand loneliness of Milton after 1668,
"is reflected in his three great poems by a sublime independence of
human sympathy, like that with which mountains fascinate and rebuff
us" (_Lowell_).
Late then, but not too late, Milton, at the age of fifty-two,
fell back upon the rich resources of his own mind, upon poetical
composition, and the study of good books, which he always asserted to
be necessary to nourish and sustain a poet's imagination. Here he had
to contend with the enormous difficulty of blindness. He engaged a
kind of attendant to read to him. But this only sufficed for English
books--imperfectly even for these--and the greater part of the choice,
not extensive, library upon which Milton drew, was Hebrew, Greek,
Latin, and the modern languages of Europe. In a letter to Heimbach, of
date 1666, he complains pathetically of the misery of having to
spell out, letter by letter, the Latin words of the epistle, to the
attendant who was writing to his dictation. At last he fell upon the
plan of engaging young friends, who occasionally visited him, to read
to him and to write for him. In the precious volume of Milton MSS.
preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, six different
hands have been distinguished. Who they were is not always known. But
Phillips tells us that, "he had daily about him one or other to read
to him; some persons of man's estate, who of their own accord greedily
catch'd at the opportunity of being his reader, that they might as
well reap the benefit of what they read to him, as oblige him by
the benefit of their reading; others of younger years sent by their
parents to the same end." Edward Phillips himself, who visited his
uncle to the last, may have been among the number, as much as his own
engagements as tutor, first to the only son of John Evelyn, then in
the family of the Earl of Pembroke, and finally to the Bennets, Lord
Arlington's children, would permit him. Others of these casual readers
were Samuel Barrow, body physician to Charles II., and Cyriac Skinner,
of whom mention has been already made (above, p. 132).
To a blind man, left with three little girls, of whom the youngest was
only eight at the Restoration, marriage seemed equally necessary for
their sake as for his own. Milton consulted his judicious friend and
medical adviser, Dr. Paget, who recommended to him Elizabeth Minshull,
of a family of respectable position near Nantwich, in Cheshire. She
was some distant relation of Paget, who must have felt the terrible
responsibility of undertaking to recommend. She justified his
selection. The marriage took place in February 1663, and during the
remaining eleven years of his life, the poet was surrounded by the
thoughtful attentions of an active and capable woman. There is
but scanty evidence as to what she was like, either in person or
character. Aubrey, who knew her, says she was "a gent. (genteel?)
person, (of) a peaceful and agreeable humour." Newton, Bishop of
Bristol, who wrote in 1749, had heard that she was "a woman of a most
violent spirit, and a hard mother-in-law to his children." It is
certain that she regarded her husband with great veneration, and
studied his comfort. Mary Fisher, a maidservant in the house, deposed
that at the end of his life, when he was sick and infirm, his wife
having provided something for dinner she thought he would like, he
"spake to his said wife these or like words, as near as this deponent
can remember: 'God have mercy, Betty, I see thou wilt perform
according to thy promise, in providing me such dishes as I think fit
while I live, and when I die thou knowest I have left thee all.'"
There is no evidence that his wife rendered him literary assistance.
Perhaps, as she looked so thoroughly to his material comfort, her
function was held, by tacit agreement, to end there.
As casual visitors, or volunteer readers, were not always in the way,
and a hired servant who could not spell Latin was of very restricted
use, it was not unnatural that Milton should look to his daughters, as
they grew up, to take a share in supplying his voracious demand for
intellectual food. Anne, the eldest, though she had handsome features,
was deformed and had an impediment in her speech, which made her
unavailable as a reader. The other two, Mary and Deborah, might
now have been of inestimable service to their father, had their
dispositions led them to adapt themselves to his needs, and the
circumstances of the house. Unfortunate it was for Milton, that
his biblical views on the inferiority of woman had been reduced to
practice in the bringing up of his own daughters. It cannot indeed
be said that the poet whose imagination created the Eve of _Paradise
Lost_, regarded woman as the household drudge, existing only to
minister to man's wants. Of all that men have said of women nothing is
more loftily conceived than the well-known passage at the end of Book
viii.:--
When I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems,
And in herself complete, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say
Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best;
All higher knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded; wisdom in discourse with her
Loses discountenanc'd, and like folly shows;
Authority and reason on her wait,
As one intended first, not after made
Occasionally; and, to consummate all,
Greatness of mind, and nobleness, their seat
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard angelic plac'd.
Bishop Newton thought that, in drawing Eve, Milton had in mind his
third wife, because she had hair of the colour of Eve's "golden
tresses." But Milton had never seen Elizabeth Minshull. If reality
suggested any trait, physical or mental, of the Eve, it would
certainly have been some woman seen in earlier years.
But wherever Milton may have met with an incarnation of female
divinity such as he has drawn, it was not in his own family. We cannot
but ask, how is it that one, whose type of woman is the loftiest known
to English literature, should have brought up his own daughters on so
different a model? Milton is not one of the false prophets, who turn
round and laugh at their own enthusiasms, who say one thing in their
verses, and another thing over their cups. What he writes in his
poetry is what he thinks, what he means, and what he will do. But in
directing the bringing up of his daughters, he put his own typical
woman entirely on one side. His practice is framed on the principle
that
Nothing lovelier can be found
In woman, than to study household good.
_Paradise Lost_, ix. 233.
He did not allow his daughters to learn any language, saying with a
gibe that one tongue was enough for a woman. They were not sent to any
school, and had some sort of teaching at home from a mistress. But in
order to make them useful in reading to him, their father was at the
pains to train them to read aloud in five or six languages, of none of
which they understood one word. When we think of the time and labour
which must have been expended to teach them to do this, it must occur
to us that a little more labour would have sufficed to teach them so
much of one or two of the languages, as would have made their reading
a source of interest and improvement to themselves. This Milton
refused to do. The consequence was, as might have been expected, the
occupation became so irksome to them, that they rebelled against it.
In the case of one of them, Mary, who was like her mother in person,
and took after her in other respects, this restiveness passed into
open revolt. She first resisted, then neglected, and finally came to
hate, her father. When some one spoke in her presence of her father's
approaching marriage, she said "that was no news to hear of his
wedding; but if she could hear of his death, that was something." She
combined with Anne, the eldest daughter, "to counsel his maidservant
to cheat him in his marketings." They sold his books without his
knowledge. "They made nothing of deserting him," he was often heard to
complain. They continued to live with him five or six years after
his marriage. But at last the situation became intolerable to both
parties, and they were sent out to learn embroidery in gold or silver,
as a means of obtaining their livelihood. Deborah, the youngest, was
included in the same arrangement, though she seems to have been more
helpful to her father, and to have been at one time his principal
reader. Aubrey says that he "taught her Latin, and that she was his
amanuensis." She even spoke of him when she was old--she lived to be
seventy-four--with some tenderness. She was once, in 1725, shewn
Faithorne's crayon drawing of the poet, without being told for whom it
was intended. She immediately exclaimed, "O Lord! that is the picture
of my father!" and stroking down the hair of her forehead, added,
"Just so my father wore his hair."
One of Milton's volunteer readers, and one to whom we owe the most
authentic account of him in his last years, was a young Quaker, named
Thomas Ellwood. Milton's Puritanism had been all his life slowly
gravitating in the direction of more and more liberty, and though he
would not attach himself to any sect, he must have felt in no remote
sympathy with men who repudiated state interference in religious
matters, and disdained ordinances. Some such sympathy with the pure
spirituality of the Quaker may have disposed Milton favourably
towards Ellwood. The acquaintance once begun, was cemented by mutual
advantage. Milton, besides securing an intelligent reader, had a
pleasure in teaching; and Ellwood, though the reverse of humble, was
teachable from desire to expand himself. Ellwood took a lodging near
the poet, and went to him every day, except "first-day," in the
afternoon, to read Latin to him.
Milton's frequent change of abode has been thought indicative of a
restless temperament, seeking escape from petty miseries by change of
scene. On emerging from hiding, or escaping from the serjeant-at-arms
in 1660, he lived or a short time in Holborn, near Red Lion Square.
From this he removed to Jewin Street, and moved again, on his
marriage, in 1662, to the house of Millington, the bookseller, who
was now beginning business, but who, before his death in 1704, had
accumulated the largest stock of second-hand books to be found in
London. His last remove was to a house in a newly-created row facing
the Artillery-ground, on the site of the west side of what is now
called Bunhill Row. This was his abode from his marriage till his
death, nearly twelve years, a longer stay than he had made in any
other residence. This is the house which, must be associated with the
poet of _Paradise Lost_, as it was here that the poem was in part
written, and wholly revised and finished. Bat the Bunhill Row house is
only producible "by the imagination; every trace of it has long
been swept away, though the name Milton Street, bestowed upon a
neighbouring street, preserves the remembrance of the poet's connexion
with the locality. Here "an ancient clergyman of Dorsetshire, Dr.
Wright, found John Milton in a small chamber, "hung with rusty green,
sitting in an elbow-chair, and dressed neatly in black; pale, but not
cadaverous, his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones." At
the door of this house, sitting in the sun, looking out upon the
Artillery-ground, "in a, grey coarse cloth coat," he would receive his
visitors. On colder days he would walk for hours--three or four hours
at a time. In his garden. A garden was a _sine qua non_, and he took
care to have one to every house he lived in.
His habit in early life had been to study late into the night. After
he lost his sight, he changed his hours, and retired to rest at nine.
In summer he rose at four, in winter at five, and began the day with
having the Hebrew Scriptures read to him. "Then he contemplated. At
seven his man came to him again, and then read to him and wrote till
dinner. The writing was as much as the reading" (Aubrey). Then he took
exercise, either walking in the garden, or swinging in a machine. His
only recreation, besides conversation, was music. He played the organ
and the bass viol, the organ most. Sometimes he would sing himself or
get his wife to sing to him, though she had, he said, no ear, yet a
good voice. Then he went up to his study to be read to till six. After
six his friends were admitted to visit him, and would sit with him
till eight. At eight he went down to supper, usually olives or some
light thing. He was very abstemious in his diet, having to contend
with a gouty diathesis. He was not fastidious in his choice of meats,
but content with anything that was in season, or easy to be procured.
After supping thus sparingly, he smoked a pipe of tobacco, drank a
glass of water, and then retired to bed. He was sparing in his use of
wine. His Samson, who in this as in other things, is Milton himself,
allays his thirst "from the clear milky juice."
Bed with its warmth and recumbent posture he found favourable to
composition. At other times he would compose or prune his verses, as
he walked in the garden, and then, coming in, dictate. His verse was
not at the command of his will. Sometimes he would lie awake the whole
night, trying but unable to make a single line. At other times lines
flowed without premeditation "with a certain impetus and oestro." What
was his season of inspiration is somewhat uncertain. In the elegy
"To Spring," Milton says it was the spring which restored his poetic
faculty. Phillips, however, says, "that his vein never flowed happily
but from the autumnal equinox to the vernal," and that the poet told
him this. Phillips' reminiscence is perhaps true at the date of
_Paradise Lost_, when Milton's habits had changed from what they
had been at twenty. Or we may agree with Toland, that Phillips has
transposed the seasons, though preserving the fact of intermittent
inspiration. What he composed at night, he dictated in the day,
sitting obliquely in an elbow-chair, with his leg thrown over the arm.
He would dictate forty lines, as it were in a breath, and then reduce
them to half the number.
Milton's piety is admitted, even by his enemies; and it is a piety
which oppresses his writings as well as his life, The fact that a man,
with a deep sense of religion, should not have attended any place of
public worship, has given great trouble to Milton's biographers. And
the principal biographers of this thorough-going nonconformist have
been Anglican clergymen; Bishop Newton, Todd, Mitford; Dr. Johnson,
more clerical than any cleric, being no exception, Mitford would give
Milton a dispensation on the score of his age and infirmities. But the
cause lay deeper. A profound apprehension of the spiritual world leads
to a disregard of rites. To a mind so disposed externals become, first
indifferent, then impedient. Ministration is officious intrusion. I
do not find that Milton, though he wrote against paid ministers as
hirelings, ever expressly formulated an opinion against ministers as
such. But as has already been hinted, there grew up in him, in the
last period of his life, a secret sympathy with the mode of thinking
which came to characterise the Quaker sect. Not that Milton adopted
any of their peculiar fancies. He affirms categorically the
permissibility of oaths, of military service, and requires that women
should keep silence in the congregation. But in negativing all means
of arriving at truth except the letter of scripture interpreted by
the inner light, he stood upon the same platform as the followers of
George Fox.
Milton's latest utterance on theological topics is found in a tract
published by him the year before his death, 1673. The piece is
entitled _Of true religion, heresy, schism, toleration_; but its
meagre contents do not bear out the comprehensiveness of the title.
The only matter really discussed in the pages of the tract is the
limit of toleration. The stamp of age is upon the style, which is more
careless and incoherent even, than usual. He has here dictated his
extempore thoughts, without premeditation or revision, so that we have
here a record of Milton's habitual mind. Having watched him gradually
emancipating himself from the contracted Calvinistic mould of the
Bread-street home, it is disappointing to see that, at sixty-five,
his development has proceeded no further than we here find. He is now
willing to extend toleration to all sects who make the Scriptures
their sole rule of faith. Sects may misunderstand Scripture, but to
err is the condition of humanity, and will be pardoned by God, if
diligence, prayer, and sincerity have been used. The sects named as
to be tolerated are, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Arians,
Socinians, Arminians. They are to be tolerated to the extent of being
allowed, on all occasions, to give account of their faith, by arguing,
preaching in their several assemblies, writing and printing.
In this pamphlet the principle of toleration is flatly enunciated in
opposition to the practice of the Restoration. But the principle is
rested not on the statesman's ground of the irrelevancy of religious
dispute to good government, but on the theological ground of the
venial nature of religious error. And to permissible error there are
very narrow limits; limits which exclude Catholics. For Milton will
exclude Romanists from toleration, not on the statesman's ground
of incivism, but on the theologian's ground of idolatry. All his
antagonism in this tract is reserved for the Catholics. There is not
a hint of discontent with the prelatry, once intolerable to him. Yet
that prelatry was now scourging the nonconformists with scorpions
instead of with whips, with its Act of Uniformity, its Conventicle
Act, its Five-mile Act, filling the gaols with Milton's own friends
and fellow-religionists. Several times, in these thirteen pages, he
appeals to the practice or belief of the Church of England, once even
calling it "our church."
This tract alone is sufficient refutation of an idle story that Milton
died a Roman Catholic, The story is not well vouched, being hearsay
three times removed. Milton's younger brother. Sir Christopher, is
said to have said so at a dinner entertainment. If he ever did say as
much, it must be set down to that peculiar form of credulity which
makes perverts think that every one is about to follow their
example. In Christopher Milton, "a man of no parts or ability, and a
superstitions nature" (Toland), such credulity found a congenial soil.
The tract _Of true religion_ was Milton's latest published work. But
he was preparing for the press, at the time of his death, a more
elaborate theological treatise. Daniel Skinner, a nephew of his old
friend Cyriac, was serving as Milton's amanuensis in writing out a
fair copy. Death came before a third of the work of correction, 196
pages out of 735, had been completed, of which the whole rough draft
consists. The whole remained in Daniel Skinner's hands in 1674.
Milton, though in his preface he if aware that his pages contain not a
little which will be unpalatable to the reigning opinion in religion,
would have dared publication, if he could have passed the censor. But
Daniel Skinner, who was a Fellow of Trinity, and had a career before
him, was not equally free. What could not appear in London, however,
might be printed at Amsterdam. Skinner accordingly put both the
theological treatise, and the epistles written by the Latin Secretary,
into the hands of Daniel Elzevir. The English government getting
intelligence of the proposed publication of the foreign correspondence
of the Parliament and the Protector, interfered, and pressure was put
upon Skinner, through the Master of Trinity, Isaac Barrow. Skinner
hastened to save himself from the fate which in 1681 befel Locke, and
gave up to the Secretary of State, not only the Latin letters, but the
MS. of the theological treatise. Nothing further was known as to the
fate of the MS. till 1823, when it was disinterred from one of the
presses of the old State Paper Office. The Secretary of State, Sir
Joseph Williamson, when he retired from office in 1678, instead of
carrying away his correspondence as had been the custom, left it
behind him. Thus it was that the _Treatise of Christian doctrine_
first saw light, one hundred and fifty years after the author's death.
In a work which had been written as a text-book for the use of
learners, there can be little scope for originality. And Milton
follows the division of the matter into heads usual in the manuals
then current. But it was impossible for Milton to handle the dry bones
of a divinity compendium without stirring them into life. And divinity
which is made to live, necessarily becomes unorthodox.
The usual method of the school text-books of the seventeenth
century was to exhibit dogma in the artificial terminology of the
controversies of the sixteenth century. For this procedure Milton
substitutes the words of Scripture simply. The traditional terms of
the text-books are retained, but they are employed only as heads under
which to arrange the words of Scripture. This process, which in other
hands would be little better than index making, becomes here pregnant
with meaning. The originality which Milton voluntarily resigns, in
employing only the words of the Bible, he recovers by his freedom of
exposition. He shakes himself loose from the trammels of traditional
exposition, and looks at the texts for himself. The truth was
Left only in those written records pure,
Though not but by the spirit understood.
_Paradise Lost_, xii. 510.
Upon the points which interested him most closely, Milton knew that
his understanding of the text differed from the standard of Protestant
orthodoxy. That God created matter, not out of nothing, but out of
Himself, and that death is, in the course of nature, total extinction
of being, though not opinions received, were not singular. More
startling, to European modes of thinking, is his assertion that
polygamy is not, in itself, contrary to morality, though it may be
inexpedient. The religious sentiment of his day was offended by his
vigorous vindication of the freewill of man against the reigning
Calvinism, and his assertion of the inferiority of the Son in
opposition to the received Athanasianism. He labours this point of the
nature of God with especial care, showing how greatly it occupied
his thoughts. He arranges his texts so as to exhibit in Scriptural
language the semi-Arian scheme, i.e. a scheme which, admitting the
co-essentiality, denies the eternal generation. Through all this
manipulation of texts we seem to see, that Milton is not the school
logician erecting a consistent fabric of words, but that he is
dominated by an imagination peopled with concrete personalities, and
labouring to assign their places to the Father and the Son as separate
agents in the mundane drama. The _De doctrina Christiana_ is the prose
counterpart of _Paradise Lost_ and _Regained_, a caput mortuum of the
poems, with every ethereal particle evaporated.
In the royal injunctions of 1614, James I. had ordered students in the
universities not to insist too long upon compendiums, but to study the
Scriptures, and to bestow their time upon the fathers and councils. In
his attempt to express dogmatic theology in the words of Scripture,
Milton was unwittingly obeying this injunction. The other part of the
royal direction as to fathers and councils it was not in Milton's plan
to carry out. Neither indeed was it in his power, for he had not the
necessary learning. M. Scherer says that Milton "laid all antiquity,
sacred and profane, under contribution." So far is this from being the
case, that while he exhibits, in this treatise, an intimate knowledge
of the text of the canonical books, Hebrew and Greek, there is an
absence of that average acquaintance with Christian antiquity which
formed at that day the professional outfit of the episcopal divine.
Milton's references to the fathers are perfunctory and second-hand.
The only citation of Chrysostom, for instance, which I have noticed
is in these words: "the same is said to be the opinion of Chrysostom,
Luther, and other moderns." He did not esteem the judgment of
the fathers sufficiently, to deem them worth studying. In the
interpretation of texts, as in other matters of opinion, Milton
withdrew within the fortress of his absolute personality.
I have now to relate the external history of the composition of
_Paradise Lost_. When Milton had to skulk for a time in 1660, he was
already in steady work upon the poem. Though a few lines of it were
composed as early as 1642, it was not till 1658 that he took up the
task of composition continuously. If we may trust our only authority
(Aubrey-Phillips), he had finished it in 1663, about the time of his
marriage. In polishing, re-writing, and writing out fair, much might
remain to be done, after the poem was, in a way, finished. It is
in 1665, that we first make acquaintance with _Paradise Lost_ in a
complete state. This was the year of the plague, known in our annals
as the Great Plague, to distinguish its desolating ravages from former
slighter visitations of the epidemic. Every one who could fled from
the city of destruction. Milton applied to his young friend Ellwood to
find him a shelter, Ellwood, who was then living as tutor in the house
of the Penningtons, took a cottage for Milton, in their neighbourhood,
at Chalfont St. Giles, in the county of Bucks, Not only the
Penningtons, but General Fleetwood had also his residence near this
village, and a report is mentioned by Howitt that it was Fleetwood who
provided the ex-secretary with a refuge. The society of neither of
these friends was available for Milton. For Fleetwood was a sentenced
regicide, and in July, Pennington and Ellwood were hurried off to
Aylesbury gaol by an indefatigable justice of the peace, who was
desirous of giving evidence of his zeal for the king's government.
That the Chalfont cottage "was not pleasantly situated," must have
been indifferent to the blind old man, as much so as that the
immediate neighbourhood, with its heaths and wooded uplands,
reproduced the scenery he had loved when he wrote _Il Allegro_.
As soon as Ellwood was relieved from imprisonment, he returned to
Chalfont. Then it was that Milton put into his hands the completed
_Paradise Lost_, "bidding me take it home with me, and read it at my
leisure, and when I had so done, return it to him with my judgment
thereupon." On returning it, besides giving the author the benefit of
his judgment, a judgment not preserved, and not indispensable--the
Quaker made his famous speech, "Thou hast said much here of _Paradise
Lost_, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?" Milton afterwards
told Ellwood that to this casual question was due his writing
_Paradise Regained_, We are not, however, to take this complaisant
speech quite literally, for it is highly probable that the later poem
was included in the original conception, if not in the scheme of the
first epic. But we do get from Ellwood's reminiscence a date for the
beginning of _Paradise Regained_, which must have been at Chalfont in
the autumn of 1665.
When the plague was abated, and the city had become safely habitable,
Milton returned to Artillery Row. He had not been long back when
London was devastated by a fresh calamity, only less terrible than the
plague, because it destroyed the home, and not the life. The Great
Fire succeeded the Great Plague. 13,000 houses, two-thirds of the
city, were reduced to ashes, and the whole current of life and
business entirely suspended. Through these two overwhelming disasters,
Milton must have been supporting his solitary spirit by writing
_Paradise Regained_, _Samson Agonistes_, and giving the final touches
to _Paradise Lost_. He was now so wholly unmoved by his environment,
that we look in vain in the poems for any traces of this season of
suffering and disaster. The past and his own meditations were now all
in all to him; the horrors of the present were as nothing to a man who
had outlived his hopes. Plague and fire, what were they, after the
ruin of the noblest of causes? The stoical compression of _Paradise
Regained_ is in perfect keeping with the fact that it was in the
middle of the ruins of London that Milton placed his finished poem in
the hands of the licenser.
For licenser there was now, the Archbishop of Canterbury to wit, for
religious literature. Of course the Primate read by deputy, usually
one of his chaplains. The reader into whose hands _Paradise Lost_
came, though an Oxford man, and a cleric on his preferment, who had
written his pamphlet against the dissenters, happened to be one whose
antecedents, as Fellow of All Souls, and Proctor (in 1663), ensured
his taking a less pedantic and bigoted view of his duties. Still,
though Dryden's dirty plays would have encountered no objection before
such a tribunal, the same facilities were not likely to be accorded to
anything which bore the name of John Milton, ex-secretary to Oliver,
and himself an austere republican. Tomkyns--that was the young
chaplain's name--did stumble at a phrase in Book i, 598,
With fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.
There had been in England, and were to be again, times when men had
hanged for less than this. Tomkyns, who was sailing on the smooth sea
of preferment with a fair wind, did not wish to get into trouble, but
at last he let the book pass, Perhaps he thought it was only religious
verse written for the sectaries, which would never be heard of
at court, or among the wits, and that therefore it was of little
consequence what it contained.
A publisher was found, notwithstanding that Paul's, or as it now was
again, St, Paul's-Churchyard had ceased to exist, in Aldersgate, which
lay outside the circuit of the conflagration. The agreement, still
preserved in the national museum, between the author, "John Milton,
gent, of the one parte, and Samuel Symons, printer, of the other
parte," is among the curiosities of our literary history. The
curiosity consists not so much in the illustrious name appended (not
in autograph) to the deed, as in the contrast between the present fame
of the book, and the waste-paper price at which the copyright is being
valued. The author received 5 l. down, was to receive a second 5 l.
when the first edition should be sold, a third 5 l. when the second,
and a fourth 5 l., when the third edition should be gone. Milton lived
to receive the second 5 l., and no more, 10 l. in all, for _Paradise
Lost_. I cannot bring myself to join in the lamentations of the
biographers over this bargain. Surely it is better so; better to know
that the noblest monument of English letters had no money value, than
to think of it as having been paid for at a pound the line.
The agreement with Symons is dated 27 April, 1667, the entry in the
register of Stationers' Hall is 20th August. It was therefore in the
autumn of 1667 that _Paradise Lost_ was in the hands of the public.
We have no data for the time occupied in the composition of _Paradise
Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_. We have seen that the former poem
was begun at Chalfont in 1665, and it may be conjecturally stated that
_Samson_ was finished before September, 1667. At any rate, both the
poems were published together in the autumn of 1670.
Milton had four years more of life granted him after this publication.
But he wrote no more poetry. It was as if he had exhausted his
strength in a last effort, in the Promethean agony of Samson, and knew
that his hour of inspiration was passed away. But, like all men who
have once tasted the joys and pangs of composition, he could not now
do without its excitement. The occupation, and the indispensable
solace of the last ten sad years, had been his poems. He would not
write more verse, when the oestrus was not on him, but he must write.
He took up all the dropped threads of past years, ambitious plans
formed in the fulness of vigour, and laid aside, but not abandoned. He
was the very opposite of Shelley, who could never look at a piece of
his own composition a second time, but when he had thrown it off at a
heat, rushed into something else. Milton's adhesiveness was such that
he could never give up a design once entered upon. In these four
years, as if conscious that his time was now nearly out, he laboured
to complete five such early undertakings.
(1.) Of his _Compendium of Theology_ I have already spoken. He was
overtaken by death while preparing this for the press.
(2.) His _History of Britain_ must hare cost him much labour, bestowed
upon comparison of the conflicting authorities. It is the record of
the studies he had made for his abandoned epic poem, and is evidence
how much the subject occupied his mind.
The _History of Britain_, 1670, had been preceded by (3) a Latin
grammar, in 1669, and was followed by (4) a Logic on, the method of
Ramus, 1672.
(5.) In 1673 he brought out a new edition of his early volume of
_Poems_. In this volume he printed for the first time the sonnets, and
other pieces, which had been written in the interval of twenty-seven
years, since the date of his first edition. Not, indeed, all the
sonnets which we now have. Four, in which Fairfax, Vane, Cromwell, and
the Commonwealth are spoken of as Milton would speak of them, were
necessarily kept back, and not put into print till 1694, by Phillips,
at the end of his life of his uncle.
In proportion to the trouble which Milton's words cost him, was his
care in preserving them. His few Latin letters to his foreign friends
are remarkably barren either of fact or sentiment. But Milton liked
them well enough to have kept copies of them, and now allowed a
publisher, Brabazon Aylmer, to issue them in print, adding to them,
with a view to make out a volume, his college exercises, which he had
also preserved.
Among the papers which he left at his death, were the beginnings of
two undertakings, either of them of overwhelming magnitude, which
he did not live to complete. We have seen that he taught his pupils
geography out of _Davity, Description de l'Univers_. He was not
satisfied with this, or with any existing compendium. They were all
dry; exact enough with their latitudes and longitudes, but omitted
such uninteresting stuff as manners, government, religion, &c. Milton
would essay a better system. All he had ever executed was Russia,
taking the pains to turn over and extract for his purpose all the best
travels in that country. This is the fragment which figures in his
Works as a _Brief History of Moscovia_.
The hackneyed metaphor of Pegasus harnessed to a luggage trolley,
will recur to us when we think of the author of _L'Allegro_, setting
himself to compile a Latin lexicon. If there is any literary drudgery
more mechanical than another, it is generally supposed to be that of
making a dictionary. Nor had he taken to this industry as a resource
in age, when the genial flow of invention had dried up, and original
composition had ceased to be in his power. The three folio volumes of
MS. which Milton left were the work of his youth; it was a work which
the loss of eyesight of necessity put an end to. It is not Milton
only, but all students who read with an alert mind, reading to grow,
and not to remember, who have felt the want of an occupation which
shall fill those hours when mental vigilance is impossible, and
vacuity unendurable. Index-making or cataloguing has been the resource
of many in such hours. But it was not, I think, as a mere shifting of
mental posture that Milton undertook to rewrite Robert Stephens; it
was as part of his language training. Only by diligent practice and
incessant exercise of attention and care, could Milton have educated
his susceptibility to the specific power of words, to the nicety which
he attained beyond any other of our poets. Part of this education is
recorded in the seemingly withered leaves of his Latin Thesaurus,
though the larger part must have been achieved, not by a reflective
and critical collection of examples, but by a vital and impassioned
reading.
Milton's complaint was what the profession of that day called gout.
"He would be very cheerful even in his gout fits, and sing," says
Aubrey. This gout returned again and again, and by these repeated
attacks wore out his resisting power. He died of the "gout struck in"
on Sunday, 8th November, 1674, and was buried, near his father, in the
chancel of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. The funeral was attended, Toland
says, "by all his learned and great friends in London, not without a
friendly concourse of the vulgar." The disgusting profanation of the
leaden coffin, and dispersion of the poet's bones by the parochial
authorities, during the repair of the church in August, 1790, has been
denied, but it is to be feared the fact is too true.