About four o'clock on a September morning of 1665,--when the sun was
not yet shining upon his windows facing the Artillery Fields, and the
autumnal dew lay wet upon his garden leaves,--John Milton awoke with
his customary punctuality, and, true to his austere and abstemious mode
of life, wasted no time over comfortable indolence. He rose and
proceeded to dress, with the help of his manservant Greene. For,
although he was but fifty-four years in age, his hands were partly
crippled with gout and chalkstones, and his eyes, clear, bright and blue
as they had always been to outward seeming, were both stone-blind.
Milton still retained much of that personal comeliness which had won
him, at Cambridge, the nickname of "Lady of Christ's College." His
original red and white had now become a uniform pallor; his thick,
light brown hair, parted at the top, and curling richly on his
shoulders--(no close-cropt Roundhead this!)--was beginning to fade
towards grey. But his features were noble and symmetrical; he was
well-built and well-proportioned; and he was justified in priding
himself upon a personal appearance which he had never neglected or
despised. In his own words, he was "neither large nor small: at no time
had he been considered ugly; and in youth, with a sword by his side, he
had never feared the bravest."
Such was the man who now, neatly dressed in black, was led into his
study, upon the same floor as his bedroom,--a small chamber hung with
rusty green,--and there, seated in a large old elbow-chair, received the
morning salutations of his three daughters.
One after another they entered the room, and each bestowed a
characteristic greeting upon her father. Anne, the eldest, a handsome
girl of twenty, was lame, and had a slight impediment in her speech. She
bade him good-morning with a stammering carelessness, enquired casually
as to his night's rest, and stared out of window, palpably bored at the
commencement of another monotonous, irksome day. Mary, the second,
--dark, impetuous, and impatient,--was in a state of smouldering
rebellion. She addressed him in a tone of almost insolent mock-civility,
--he must needs have been deaf as well as blind not to detect the
unfilial dislike beneath her words. Ten-year-old Deborah, the most
affectionate of the three, ventured to kiss her father, even to stroke
his long, beautiful hair, and to re-tie the tassels of his collar.
"Mary will read to me this morning," said Milton, gravely inclining his
head in acknowledgment of Deborah's attentions. The dark girl, with a
mutinous shrug of her shoulders, sat down and began to read aloud, in a
hard, uninterested voice, out of the great leather-bound Hebrew Old
Testament which lay upon the table. And not one single sentence did she
understand--not one word of what she was reading.
John Milton's theories of education, which he had expounded at length in
pamphlets, were a curious blend of the practical and the ideal. Vastly
in advance of his time in his demand for a practical training, he had
evolved that "fine definition which has never been improved upon,"--"I
call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform,
justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and
public, of peace and war." But he made no allowances for slowness or
stupidity: all his schemes were based upon the existence of scholars
equally gifted with himself. And he entirely left out of all
calculations, much as a Mahommedan might, that complex organism the
female mind. He wished it, one must conjecture, to remain a blank. So
his daughters had received no systematic schooling, only some sort of
home-instruction from a governess. And he had himself trained them to
read aloud in five or six languages,--French, Italian, Latin, Greek,
Hebrew and even Syriac,--in total ignorance of the meaning.
"One tongue," observed Milton brusquely, almost brutally, "is enough
for any woman."
Mary read on, steadily, stolidly, sullenly, for a full hour. The others
had left the room and were busy upon household tasks. At the conclusion
of two chapters, "Leave me," commanded Milton, "I would be alone now for
contemplation,"--and Mary willingly escaped to breakfast.
The great poet reclined in his chair,--wrapt in such solemn and
melancholy meditation as might have served as the model for his own
_Penseroso_. A severe composure suffused his fine features, a serious
sadness looked out of his unclouded eyes; his entire expression was
"that of English intrepidity mixed with unutterable sorrow." For Milton
was a bitterly disappointed man.
It was not merely his comparative poverty,--because the Restoration,
besides depriving him of his post as Latin or Foreign Secretary to the
Commonwealth Council of State, had reduced his means from various
sources almost to vanishing point.
Nor was his melancholy mainly the result of his affliction; that he had
deliberately incurred, and was as deliberately enduring. Constant
headaches, late study, and perpetual recourse to one nostrum after
another, had eventuated in the certainty of total blindness if he
persisted in his mode of work.
"The choice lay before me between dereliction of a supreme duty and
loss of eyesight; ... and I therefore concluded to employ the
little remaining eyesight I was to enjoy in doing this, the
greatest service to the common weal it was in my power to render."
No: it was not a personal matter which could sadden John Milton to the
very roots of his stern, ambitious, courageous soul. It was the
contravention of all that he held most dear in life,--the frustration,
as he conceived it, of that liberty which was his very heart's blood by
the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy. He had resolved, in his own
words, to transfer into the struggle for liberty "all my genius and all
the strength of my industry." It appeared that he had flung away both
in vain. The Stuart monarchy, to him, lay monstrously black,
overshadowing all the land, like his own conception of Satan.
The Restoration was not merely the political defeat of his party, it was
the total defeat of the principles, of the religious and social ideals,
with which Milton's life was bound up. He had always stood aloof from
the other salient men of the time. Of Cromwell he had practically no
personal knowledge: with the bulk of the Presbyterians he was openly at
enmity. "Shut away behind a barrier of his own ideas," he did not care
to associate with men of less lofty intellectual standing. But now he
was even more isolated. Since the downfall of the Puritan régime, he of
necessity "stood alone, and became the party himself." And he presented,
in his _Samson Agonistes_, "the intensest utterance of the most intense
of English poets--the agonised cry of the beaten party," condensed into
the expression of one unflinching and heroic soul.
Upon the mysterious and inscrutable decrees of Providence, which had
laid in the dust what seemed to him the very cause of God, Milton sat
and pondered, in a despondency so profound, a disappointment so
poignant, that his own great lines had sought in vain to voice it:
"... I feel my genial spirits droop,
My hopes all flat: Nature within me seems
In all her functions weary of herself;
My race of glory run, and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest."
(_Samson Agonistes_).
Yet his indomitable spirit was by no means quenched in despair: and an
outlet was now open to him at last, which for eighteen years he had
foregone,--the outlet of poetic expression. He was conscious of his
capacity to travel and to traverse the regions which none had dared
explore save Dante. And with that tremendous chief of pioneers he was
measuring himself, man to man.
He was able, above the turmoil of faction and the tumult of conflicting
troubles, to weigh
"... his spread wings, at leisure to behold
Far off the empyreal Heaven, extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With opal towers and battlements adorned
Of living sapphire, once his native seat."
(_Paradise Lost_).
That Milton had been silent for so long a period was due, firstly to his
preoccupation with political and polemical questions, into which he had
thrown the whole weight of his mind; and, secondly, to the effect of his
own firm resolve that the great epic, which, he had always secretly
intended, should be the outcome of matured and ripened powers: the
apotheosis of all that was worthiest in him: the full fruit of his
strenuous life. He had long since arrived at that conclusion, never
surpassed in its terseness and truth, that true poetry must be "simple,
sensuous, impassioned,"--words which might serve as the text and
touchstone of art. "And long it was not after" when he
"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."
For poetry, to John Milton, was no sounding brass or tinkling cymbal; in
his hand "the thing became a trumpet," apt to seraphic usages and the
rallying of celestial cohorts.
Therefore, when he ceased to touch the "tender stops of various quills"
that trembled into silence in _Lycidas_, it was not as one discomfited
of his attainment. Rather it was as one convinced of a mighty purpose,
and patiently awaiting the just time of its fulfilment. The "woodnotes
wild" of _Comus_, the exquisitely stippled _genre_ painting of
_Allegro_ and _Penseroso_, were mere childish attempts compared with
that monumental work to which Milton firmly proposed to devote the
fruition of his genius. And now, having become a man through mental and
physical experience even more than through the passage of years, he had
put away childish things. He had resolved at last upon, and had at last
undertaken, the one subject most congenial to his taste, and most
suitable to his style and diction. _Paradise Lost_ was the triumphant
offspring of his brain. It had sprung, like light, from chaos. Out of
the darkness of poverty, blindness and defeat arose the poem which was
to set him on the pinnacles of Parnassus.
"You make many enquiries as to what I am about" he wrote in bygone years to
his old schoolfellow, Charles Diodati. "What am I thinking of? Why with
God's help, of immortality! Forgive the word, I only whisper it in your
ear. Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight." Nor was this the idle
boasting of an egotist, the empty imagination of a dreamer.
Consumed by "the desire of honour and repute and universal fame,
seated," as he put it, "in the breast of every true scholar," Milton
sedulously and assiduously had prepared himself for the achievement of
his aims. That he should "strictly meditate the thankless Muse" required
a certain self-control. "To scorn delights and live laborious days" is
not the customary delight of a handsome young scholar, expert in
swordsmanship as in languages. To equip himself for his self-chosen
task, still a misty, undefined prospect in the remotest future, required
strenuous and disciplined study; and necessitated his forgoing too
frequently the scenes of rustic happiness which he had pictured so
charmingly in _L'Allegro_,--absenting himself from "The groves and
ruins, and the beloved village elms ... where I too, among rural scenes
and remote forests, seemed as if I could have grown and vegetated
through a hidden eternity."
And this, though Milton had neither the eye nor the ear of a born
nature-lover, was in itself a sufficient deprivation and sacrifice. For
beauty appealed to him with a most earnest insistence,--and the purer,
the more abstract form it took, the more urgent was that appeal. "God
has instilled into me, at all events," he declared, "a vehement love of
the beautiful. Not with so much labour is Ceres said to have sought
Proserpine, as I am wont, day and night, to search for the idea of the
beautiful through all forms and faces of things, and to follow it
leading me on with certain assured traces."
Yet not alone among "forms and faces" was he predestined to discover
that Absolute Beauty. The passionate love of music, so frequently
characteristic of a great linguist, which led him into sound-worlds as
well as sight-worlds, was fated to remain with him, an incalculable
consolation, when "forms and faces" could be no more seen. And into the
vocabulary of _Paradise Lost_, that incomparably rich vocabulary, with
its infallible ear for rhythm, for phrase, for magnificent consonantal
effects and the magic of great names that reverberate through open
vowels,--into this he poured forth his whole sense of beautiful sound,
"as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid,
Tunes her nocturnal note."
_Paradise Lost_ remains, as has been observed, "The elaborated outcome
of all the best words of all antecedent poetry--the language of one who
lives in the companionship of the great and the wise of all past time,
equally magnificent in verbiage, whether describing man, or God, or the
Arch-Enemy visiting" this pendent world, when
Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accursed, and in a cursed hour, he lives.
At seven o'clock the body-servant Greene re-entered, followed by Mrs.
Milton, the poet's third wife, and by Mary Fisher, their maid-servant,
bringing in his breakfast, a light, slight repast. Mrs. Milton, _née_
Elizabeth Minshull, of Nantwich, was a comely, active, capable woman,
"of a peaceful and agreeable humour," so far at least as her husband was
concerned: for she shared the traditional destiny of a stepmother in not
"hitting it off" with the first wife's daughters. Her golden hair and
calm commonsense were in striking contrast, alike with the dark beauty
and petulant spirit of Mary Powell, and with the fragile sweetness of
Catherine Woodcock, Milton's former spouses. If she did not in her heart
confirm her husband's celebrated theory of the relative position of man
and wife,--"He for God only, she for God in him,"--(which, it has been
said, "condenses every fallacy about woman's true relation to her
husband and to her Maker"), she managed very adroitly to convey an
impression of entire acquiescence in the will of her lord. And at least
she was entirely adequate as a housewife.
Had Milton ever encountered that "not impossible She" whom he portrayed
in his ideal Eve? or was this latter a mere visionary abstract of great
qualities, "to show us how divine a thing a woman may be made"? Neither
of his three wives, nor yet that "very handsome and witty gentlewoman,"
Miss Davis, to whom he had at one time paid his addresses, conformed to
this description: one cannot even conjecture that it was a _pasticcio_
of their respective fine attributes.
Mrs. Milton, third of that name, as she bustled and busied herself about
the study, was by no means a new Eve. She regarded her husband's
ambitions and achievements with that good natured tolerance so
characteristic of the materially-minded. Only genius can appreciate
genius; and the man who shut himself away from his _confrères_ in
scholarship and literature was not likely to unbosom himself to his
housewifely, provincial wife.