THE PROSE WORKS
It is customary for the friends of Milton to approach his prose works
with a sigh of apology. There is a deep-rooted prejudice among the
English people against a poet who concerns himself intimately with
politics. Whether this feeling has its origin in solicitude for the poet
or for the politics is hard to determine; indeed it is pretty generally
maintained that each is detrimental to the other. But seeing that for one
man in the modern world who cares for poets there are at least ten who
care for politics, it is safe to assume that the poets, when they are
deprived of the franchise, are deprived rather to maintain the purity and
efficiency of politics than for the good of their own souls. They have
been compared to birds of Paradise, which were long believed to have no
feet; and the common sense of the English people, with a touch of the
municipal logic of Dogberry, has enacted that whereas they have no feet,
and have moreover been proved to have no feet, it shall be forbidden
them, under the strictest pains and penalties, to alight and walk. Their
function is to beautify the distant landscape with the flash of wings.
For most men common-sense is the standard, and immediate utility the end,
whereby they judge political questions, great and small. Now common-sense
judges only the questions that are brought home to it by instant example;
and utility is appealed to for a verdict only amid the dense crowd of
actual conflicting interests. Neither the one nor the other is
far-sighted or imaginative. So it comes about that the political system,
in England, at least, is built up piecemeal; it is founded on appetites
and compromises, and mortared by immemorial habit. To explain this
process, and to transfigure it in the pure light of imagination, was the
work of the great poet-politician, Edmund Burke. But the poet usually
goes a hastier way to work. Looking at the whole domiciliary structure
from outside, he finds it shapeless and ugly, like an ant-heap; and
volunteers to play the architect. His design treats the details of
individual habit and happiness in strict subordination to the desired
whole. What he wants is consistency, symmetry, dignity; and to achieve
these he is willing to make a holocaust of human selfishnesses. He may be
a deep scholar and thinker, but he is apt to forget one point of ancient
wisdom,--that it is the wearer of the shoe, and not the cobbler, who best
knows where the shoe wrings him.
The speculations of the poet awaken no hostile resentment so long as they
are admittedly abstract. He is at liberty to build his Republic, his City
of the Sun, his Utopia, or his New Atlantis, amid the indifferent
applause of mankind. But when his aim becomes practical and immediate,
when he seeks to stir the heap by introducing into it the ruthless
discomfort of an idea, a million littlenesses assail him with deadly
enmity, and he is found sorrowfully protesting his amazement:--
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.
So he is brought, with great reluctance, to the estimate of men which is
expressed by Milton in _The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_; "being
slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the
public state conformably governed to the inward vicious rule whereby they
govern themselves. For indeed none can love freedom heartily but good
men."
Milton cannot claim the exemption from censure which is allowed to the
theorists, the builders of ideal states somewhere in the clouds. On his
own behalf he expressly disclaims any such intention. "To sequester out
of the world," he says, "into Atlantic and Utopian politics, which never
can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely
as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God has placed us
unavoidably." Poetry might well have served him, if his object had been
to add another to imaginary commonwealths. He took up with politics
because he believed that in the disorder of the times his ideas might be
made a "programme," and carried into effect.
It was in 1641, when already "the vigour of the Parliament had begun to
humble the pride of the bishops," that he first intervened. "I saw," he
says, "that a way was opening for the establishment of real liberty; that
the foundation was laying for the deliverance of mankind from the yoke of
slavery and superstition.... I perceived that if I ever wished to be of
use, I ought at least not to be wanting to my country, to the church, and
to so many of my fellow-Christians, in a crisis of so much danger; I
therefore determined to relinquish the other pursuits in which I was
engaged, and to transfer the whole force of my talents and my industry to
this one important object." So he wrote the treatise in two books, _Of
Reformation in England, and the causes that hitherto have hindered it._
His later pamphlets are all similarly occasional in nature, written with
a particular and definite object in view. In these he advocates as
practicable and much-needed reforms, among other things, the
establishment of a perpetual republic on the lines of an oligarchy; the
abolition of bishops, religious ceremonials, liturgies, tithes, and,
indeed, of all regular payment or salary given to ministers of religion;
the supersession of universities and public schools by the erection of
new academic institutions, combining the functions of both, "in every
City throughout this Land"; the legalisation of free divorce; and the
repeal of the ordinances compelling all books to be licensed. If he did
not advocate, in any of the works put forth during his lifetime, the
legal toleration of polygamy, it was probably only because he perceived
that that, at least, did not fall within the scope of practical politics.
He defends it in his posthumous treatise, _De Doctrina Christiana_.
It will readily be seen that on almost all these questions Milton was not
only--to use the foolish modern phrase--"in advance of his time," but
also considerably in advance of ours. Twenty years after his death the
Licensing Acts were abolished; for the rest, his reforms are yet to
accomplish. It is an odd remark of one of his learned biographers that
the _Areopagitica_ is the only one of all Milton's prose writings "whose
topic is not obsolete." It is the only one of his prose writings whose
thesis commands the general assent of modern readers, and is, therefore,
from his own practical point of view, obsolete.
The mere enumeration of his opinions suffices to show that Milton's is a
sad case of the poet in politics. The labours of the twenty prime years
of his manhood have been copiously bewailed. To have Pegasus in harness
is bad enough; but when the waggon that he draws is immovably stuck in
the mud, and he himself bespattered by his efforts, the spectacle is yet
more pitiable. Many of his critics have expressed regret that he did not
make for himself an artificial seclusion, and continue his purely
poetical labours, with the classics for companions. The questions that
drew him into politics were burning questions, it is true; but were there
not others to deal with them, good, earnest, sensible, homely people?
Samuel Butler has enumerated some of those who were dedicating their time
and thought to politics at this important crisis:--
The oyster-women locked their fish up,
And trudged away to cry "No Bishop":
The mouse-trap men laid save-alls by,
And 'gainst ev'l counsellors did cry;
Botchers left old cloaths in the lurch,
And fell to turn and patch the Church;
Some cried the Covenant, instead
Of pudding-pies and ginger-bread,
And some for brooms, old boots and shoes,
Bawled out to purge the Common-house:
Instead of kitchen-stuff, some cry
A gospel-preaching ministry;
And some for old shirts, coats or cloak,
No surplices nor service-book;
A strange harmonious inclination
Of all degrees to reformation.
But what was Milton doing in this malodorous and noisy assembly? Might he
not with all confidence have left the Church to the oyster-women, and the
State to the mouse-trap men? The company that he kept with them ruined
his manners; he had to speak loud in order to be heard, to speak broad in
order to be respected; and so (bitterest thought of all!) he lost
something of that sweet reasonableness which is a poet's proper grace.
The answer to this strain of criticism is to be found in the study of
Milton's works, poetry and prose--and perhaps best in the poetry. We
could not have had anything at all like _Paradise Lost_ from a dainty,
shy poet-scholar; nor anything half so great. The greatest men hold their
power on this tenure, that they shall not husband it because the occasion
that presents itself, although worthy of high effort, is not answerable
to the refinement of their tastes. Milton, it is too often forgotten, was
an Englishman. He held the privilege and the trust not cheap. When God
intends some new and great epoch in human history, "what does he then,"
this poet exultantly asks, "but reveal himself to his servants, and, as
his manner is, first to his Englishmen?" To his chief work in poetry he
was instigated by patriotic motives. "I applied myself," he says, "to
that resolution which Ariosto followed against the persuasions of Bembo,
to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my
native tongue, not to make verbal curiosity the end (that were a toilsome
vanity), but to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest
things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother
dialect."
There is plenty of "verbal curiosity" in Milton's poetry; he is in some
respects the finest craftsman who ever handled the English speech: so
that this declaration is the more timely to remind us by how wide a chasm
he is separated from those modern greenhouse poets who move contentedly
in an atmosphere of art ideals and art theories. He had his breeding from
the ancient world, where AEschylus fought at Marathon, and he could not
think of politics as of a separable part of human life.
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair,
is a lyric ideal that may quite well consist with political indifference,
but how should an epic inspiration be nourished where the prosperity of
the State is lightly esteemed? Even had poetry lost by his political
adventures, he would have been content that politics should gain. And
politics did gain; for Milton's prose works raise every question they
touch, even where they cannot truly be said to advance it. It is as
unseemly for the politicians to complain of his choice, as it would be
for the herdsmen of King Admetus to complain of the presence among them
of a god. The large considerations and high passions imported into the
treatment of practical questions by a Milton, or a Burke, have done much
to keep even party politics at a high level in England, so that civil
servants and journalists may join in the hymn of the herdsmen--
He has been our fellow, the morning of our days,
Us he chose for house-mates, and this way went.
God, of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darkened
That had thee here obscure!
In a long autobiographic passage in the _Second Defence of the People of
England_ Milton makes a formal classification of his prose works written
before that date. All of them, he says, were designed to promote Liberty.
By the accidents of the time he was induced to treat first, in his
anti-episcopal pamphlets, of religious liberty. Once that controversy was
fairly ablaze, in the name of the same goddess he applied his incendiary
torch to humbler piles. "I perceived," he says, "that there were three
species of liberty which are essential to the happiness of social
life--religious, domestic, and civil; and as I had already written
concerning the first, and the magistrates were strenuously active in
obtaining the third, I determined to turn my attention to the second, or
the domestic species." He includes in this division of his work the
Divorce pamphlets, the tractate _Of Education_, and the _Areopagitica_,
as dealing with the "three material questions" (so he calls them) of
domestic liberty, namely, "the conditions of the conjugal tie, the
education of the children, and the free publication of the thoughts."
It seems a strange conception of domestic liberty which makes it rest on
a threefold support--divorce at will, an unrestrained printing-press, and
the encyclopaedic education of polyglot children. But the truth is that
Milton's classification is an after-thought. The pamphlets that he names
were all written by him much about the same time, between 1643 and 1645;
but the true history of their origin is more interesting and less
symmetrical than the later invented scheme of classification. The Divorce
pamphlets were written because Milton was unhappily married. The
_Areopagitica_ was written because his heterodox views concerning
marriage had brought him into collision with the Presbyterian censors of
the press. His treatise on education was written because he had
undertaken the education of his own nephews, and had become deeply
interested in that question. In all three his own experience is the first
motive; in all three that experience is concealed beneath a formidable
array of general considerations, dogmatically propounded.
The case is the same with regard to the pamphlets that treat of religious
and civil liberty; they are not only occasional, but intensely personal,
even in their origins. The earliest of them, the five ecclesiastical
pamphlets of the year 1641, deal with a question which had been of
intimate concern to Milton ever since the beginning of his Cambridge
days. The celebrated controversy with Salmasius and his abettors,
concerning the death of King Charles, is a gladiatorial combat from which
every element save the personal is often absent. In these bouts offensive
biography and defensive autobiography serve for sword and shield. This
personal character of the prose writings, while it has repelled some
readers interested mainly in the questions discussed, has attracted
others who are interested chiefly in the writer. A rich harvest of
personal allusion has been gathered from the controversial treatises, and
perhaps, even now, the field has not been gleaned to the last ear. It is
worthy of remark, for instance, how Milton's pre-occupation with the
themes which he had already pondered, and turned this way and that in his
mind, to test their fitness for a monumental work, shows itself in his
choice of figure and allusion. Attention has often been called to the
elaborate comparison, founded on the history of Samson, in _The Reason of
Church Government urged against Prelaty_:--
"I cannot better liken the state and person of a king than to that mighty
Nazarite Samson; who being disciplined from his birth in the precepts and
the practice of temperance and sobriety, without the strong drink of
injurious and excessive desires, grows up to a noble strength and
perfection with those his illustrious and sunny locks, the laws, waving
and curling about his god-like shoulders. And while he keeps them about
him undiminished and unshorn, he may with the jawbone of an ass, that is,
with the word of his meanest officer, suppress and put to confusion
thousands of those that rise against his just power. But laying down his
head among the strumpet flatteries of prelates, while he sleeps and
thinks no harm, they, wickedly shaving off all those bright and weighty
tresses of his law, and just prerogatives, which were his ornament and
strength, deliver him over to indirect and violent counsels, which, as
those Philistines, put out the fair and far-sighted eyes of his natural
discerning, and make him grind in the prison-house of their sinister ends
and practices upon him: till he, knowing this prelatical rasor to have
bereft him of his wonted might, nourish again his puissant hair, the
golden beams of law and right; and they, sternly shook, thunder with ruin
upon the heads of those his evil counsellors, but not without great
affliction to himself."
This ingenious allegorical application naturally finds no place in the
grave poem of Milton's latest years. And yet, in one passage at least,
his earlier love for the high-figured style took him captive again. The
strong drink from which the Samson of the play abstains is strong drink,
not "injurious and excessive desires." There is no hint of prelatical
conspiracy in the enticements of Dalila. But perhaps some faint
reminiscence of his earlier fable concerning Samson's hair recurred to
Milton's mind when he gave to Manoa a speech comparing the locks of the
hero to the strength, not of the law, but of a nation in arms:--
And I persuade me God had not permitted
His strength again to grow up with his hair,
Garrisoned round about him like a camp
Of faithful soldiery, were not his purpose
To use him further yet in some great service.
The theme of _Samson Agonistes_ had thus already taken possession of
Milton's imagination when he wrote his first prose tractates. But the
same writings furnish even stronger evidence of his early dallyings with
the theme of _Paradise Lost_. "It was from out the rind of one apple
tasted," he says in the _Areopagitica_, "that the knowledge of good and
evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world." And
again, in _The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_:--"The academics and
stoics ... knew not what a consummate and most adorned Pandora was
bestowed upon Adam, to be the nurse and guide of his arbitrary happiness
and perseverance, I mean, his native innocence and perfection, which
might have kept him from being our true Epimetheus." Some of these
references show the imaginative scheme of the _Paradise Lost_ in the
process of building. In one passage, for instance, of the last quoted
treatise, Milton expounds the pagan belief that God punishes his enemies
most when he throws them furthest from him:--"Which then they held he
did, when he blinded, hardened, and stirred up his offenders, to finish
and pile up their desperate work since they had undertaken it. To banish
for ever into a local hell, whether in the air or in the centre, or in
that uttermost and bottomless gulf of chaos, deeper from holy bliss than
the world's diameter multiplied, they thought not a punishing so proper
and proportionate for God to inflict as to punish sin with sin." It would
seem as if the poet had not as yet fixed the situation of his local hell,
but remained suspended between rival theories. The other idea, of the
Divine permission and impulse given to hardened sinners, finds a
conspicuous place in the poem. In one instance, at least, a figure drawn
from the story of the Creation is violently handled to serve strange
uses. The evolution of the four elements from the chaotic welter of hot,
cold, moist, and dry, is adduced as a proof that the laws of God and of
nature approve free divorce:--"By his divorcing command the world first
rose out of chaos, nor can be renewed again out of confusion, but by the
separating of unmeet consorts."
Allusions of this kind occur most frequently in the earlier prose
writings, while the studies that had been interrupted by controversy were
yet fresh in Milton's memory. They would hardly be worth the quotation,
were it not that they are another evidence of the transparency of his
mind. In looking through his prose works you see traces of all that was
engaging his imagination and thought at the time. Poetry is the highest
of expressive arts; and poets are the worst dissemblers or economisers of
truth in the world. Their knowledge, like their feeling, possesses them,
and must find expression as argument, or illustration, or figure,
whatever the immediate matter in hand. The prose works of Milton are
thus, from first to last, an exposition of himself. The divorce
pamphlets, especially, are hot with smothered personal feeling. Long
years afterwards, when time and change had softened and blurred it in
memory, his early misadventure was reflected in more than one passage of
the later poems. The humble plaint of Eve, and the description of her
reunion with her alienated lord, in the Tenth Book of _Paradise Lost_,
doubtless contains, as has often been said, some reflection of what took
place at a similar interview in 1645, when Mistress Mary Milton returned
to her offended husband. That one principal cause of the rupture has been
rightly divined, by Mr. Mark Pattison and others, is probable from
certain remarkable lines in the Eighth Book, where Adam describes how he
was presented with his bride:--
On she came,
Led by her Heavenly Maker, though unseen,
And guided by his voice, nor uninformed
Of nuptial sanctity, and marriage rites.
Even at so wide a remove of time, the poet's wounded pride finds
expression in this singular theory--or, rather, in this more than dubious
piece of self-justification.
But although the hurt he had suffered, in his most susceptible feelings,
gives eloquence and plangency to his divorce pamphlets, it was not merely
to voice his sufferings that he wrote those pamphlets. Most men in
Milton's position, married to "a nothing, a desertrice, an adversary,"
would have recognised that theirs was one of those exceptional cases for
which the law cannot provide, and would have sat down under their unhappy
chance, to bear it or mitigate it as best they might. Some poets of the
time of the Romantic Revival would have claimed the privilege of genius
to be a law unto itself; the law of the State being designed for the
common rout, whose lesser sensibilities and weaker individuality make
them amenable to its discipline. Milton did neither the one thing nor the
other. The modern idolatry of genius was as yet uninvented; he was a
citizen first, a poet and an unhappy man afterwards. He directed his
energies to proving, not that he should be exempted from the operation of
the law, but that the law itself should be changed. He had entered into
marriage, with full ceremonial ushering, by the main door; he would go
out the same way, or not at all. Thus even in this most personal matter
he pleads, not for himself, but for the commonweal. He cannot conceive of
happiness as of a private possession, to be secretly enjoyed; it stands
rooted, like justice, in the wise and equal ordinances of the State; and
the only freedom that he values is freedom under the law.
Like the citizen of some antique state, he discourses of marriage in the
market-place. In his efforts to be persuasive, both here and in the
_Areopagitica_, he humbles himself to management and the seasonings of
flattery. It is a new trade for him, and suits oddly with his pride. But
he hoped much, at this time, from the Parliament, that "select assembly,"
containing so many "worthy senators" and "Christian reformers," "judges
and lawgivers." In the enthusiasm of his hopes, he credits them with a
desire "to imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece," with a wisdom
greater than that of the Athenian Parliament, with a magnanimous
willingness to repeal their own acts at the dictate of the voice of
reason. And all this at a time when the Presbyterians were in the
ascendant, intent upon establishing a discipline neither old, nor
elegant, nor humane, so little acquainted with Greece, that it was one of
Selden's amusements to confute their divines by citing a reading from the
Greek Testament. Milton was destined to grievous disappointment, and his
rage against the Presbyterians, in some of his later pamphlets, was the
fiercer.
But although his pamphlets are both occasional and personal, and even
address themselves at times to conciliation and persuasion, the views
that they advocate and the system of thought that underlies them were not
the products of time and accident. Milton was an idealist, pure and
simple, in politics. Had he lived under the Tudor sovereigns, he would
have been reduced, with Sir Thomas More, Montaigne, and John Barclay, the
author of _Argenis_, to express himself by way of romance and allegory.
It was his fortune to live at a time when the Tudor state system was
breaking up with appalling suddenness, and along with it the Tudor
compromise in the affairs of the Church, imposed from above upon an
unawakened people, was falling into wreckage. Here was an opportunity
that has not often, in the world's history, come to a poet, of realising
the dream that he had dreamed in his study, of setting up again, for the
admiration and comfort of posterity, the model of an ancient Republic.
The best of all Milton's critics has left us the worst account of his
political opinions. Johnson's censure of _Lycidas_, much as it has been
ridiculed and decried, is judicious and discerning compared with his
explanation of Milton's political creed:--"Milton's republicanism was, I
am afraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire
of independence, in petulance impatient of control, and pride disdainful
of superiority. He hated monarchs in the State, and prelates in the
Church; for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be
suspected that his predominant desire was to destroy, rather than
establish, and that he felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance
to authority." It may, at least, be credited to Johnson for moderation,
that he requires only four of the Seven Deadly Sins, to wit, Pride, Envy,
Anger, and Sloth, to explain Milton's political tenets. Had he permitted
himself another sentence, an easy place might surely have been made for
Gluttony, Luxury, and Covetousness, the three whose absence cannot fail
to be remarked by any lover of thorough and detailed treatment in these
intricate problems of human character.
If, in our more modern fashion, we seek for the origin of Milton's ideas
in his education, his habits of thought, and his admirations, we shall be
obliged to admit that they are all rooted in his conception of the
ancient City State. It was the wish of Thomas Hobbes to abolish the study
of Greek and Latin in our schools and colleges, because this study
fosters a love of freedom, and unfits men to be the subjects of an
absolute monarch. His happiest illustration would have been the case of
his contemporary, Milton. Yet in all Milton's writings there is no trace
of the modern democratic doctrine of equality. A hearing is all that he
claims. So far from hating greatness, he carries his admiration for it,
for personal virtue and prowess, almost to excess. The poet who described
the infernal conclave in the Second Book of _Paradise Lost_ was not
likely to be insensible to the part played in politics by men of eminent
and dominating personality. To think of free government as of an engine
for depressing unusual merit was impossible for Milton. He lived in an
age that had found in Plutarch's men its highest ideals of political
character. Never, since their own day, had the "noble Grecians and
Romans" exercised so irresistible a fascination on the minds of men, or
so real an influence on the affairs of the State, as was theirs at the
time of the Renaissance. The mist in which they had long been enveloped
was swept away, and these colossal figures of soldiers, patriots, and
counsellors loomed large and clear across the ages, their majesty
enhanced by distance and by art, which conspire to efface all that is
accidental, petty, and distracting. We cannot see these figures as they
appeared to the Renaissance world. One of the chief results of modern
historical labour and research has been that it has peopled the Middle
Ages for us, and interposed a whole society of living men, our ancestors,
between us and ancient Rome. But in Milton's time this process was only
beginning; the collections and researches that made it possible were
largely the work of his contemporaries,--and were despised by him. When
he looked back on the world's history, from his own standpoint, he saw,
near at hand and stretching away into the distance, a desert, from which
a black mass of cloud had just been lifted; and, across the desert, lying
fair under the broad sunshine, a city--
With gilded battlements, conspicuous far,
Turrets and terrasses, and glittering spires.
It was towards this ancient civic life, with its arts and arms and long
renown, that he reached forth passionate hands of yearning. The
intervening tract, whither his younger feet had wandered, almost ceased
to exist for him; the paladins and ladies of mediaeval story were the
deceitful mirage of the desert; the true life of antiquity lay beyond. In
all his allusions to the great themes of romance two things are
noticeable: first, how deeply his imagination had been stirred by them,
so that they are used as a last crown of decoration in some of the most
exalted passages of his great poems; and next, how careful he is to stamp
them as fiction. His studies for the early _History of Britain_ had
cloyed him with legends conveyed from book to book. Once convinced that
no certain historical ground could be found for the feet among the whole
mass of these traditions, Milton ceased to regard them as eligible
subjects for his greatest poem. But their beauty dwelt with him; the
memory of the embattled chivalry of Arthur and Charlemagne recurs to him
when he is seeking for the topmost reach of human power and splendour
that he may belittle it by the side of Satan's rebel host; and the
specious handmaidens who served the Tempter's phantom banquet in the
desert are described as lovely beyond what has been
Fabled since
Of fairy damsels met in forest wide
By Knights of Logres, or of Lyones,
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore.
If Milton's attitude to mediaeval romance is one of regretful suspicion,
his attitude to the greatest of mediaeval institutions is one of bitter
contempt. He inveighs even against the "antiquitarians," such as Camden,
who, he says, "cannot but love bishops as well as old coins and his much
lamented monasteries, for antiquity's sake." For near twelve hundred
years these same bishops "have been in England to our souls a sad and
doleful succession of illiterate and blind guides." It is needless to
multiply extracts illustrative of Milton's opinions on the Church; behind
the enormous wealth of rhetoric and invective poured forth in his
pamphlets, the opinions that he holds are few and simple. When he had
been disappointed by the Presbyterians, and had finally turned from them,
his beliefs inclined more and more, in two points at least, to the tenets
of the newly arisen sect of Quakers--to a pure spiritualism in religion,
and the complete separation of Church and State. Their horror of war he
never shared. The model of the Church he sought in the earliest records
of Christianity, and less and less even there; the model of the State in
the ancient republics. All subsequent experience and precedent was to him
a hindrance and a mischief. So rapidly and easily does his mind leap from
the ancient to the modern world, that even when he speaks of his love for
the drama, as in his first Latin elegy or in _Il Penseroso_, it is
sometimes difficult to say whether he is thinking of the Elizabethan or
of the Attic dramatists.
The lodestar of his hopes is liberty, his main end the establishment of
"a free commonwealth." He knows as well as Montesquieu that democracy in
its pristine dignity can be erected only on a wide foundation of public
virtue. "To govern well," he declares in the treatise _Of Reformation in
England_, "is to train up a nation in true wisdom and virtue, and that
which springs from thence, magnanimity (take heed of that), and that
which is our beginning, regeneration, and happiest end, likeness to God,
which in one word we call godliness;... other things follow as the shadow
does the substance." In the same pamphlet this envious hater of greatness
remarks that "to govern a nation piously and justly, which only is to say
happily, is for a spirit of the greatest size, and divinest mettle." And
men worthy of this description had, as it seemed to him, arisen in his
own time. His praise of Cromwell and the leaders associated with him is
almost extravagant in its enthusiasm. "While you, O Cromwell, are left
among us, he hardly shows a proper confidence in the Supreme, who
distrusts the security of England, when he sees that you are in so
special a manner the favoured object of the Divine regard." His mind is
full of the achievements of Cyrus, Epaminondas, and Scipio; he denies to
the Protector no honour that may be drawn from these high comparisons.
And then, as in _Lycidas_, so also in _The Second Defence of the People
of England_, Milton concludes his celebration of another by a return to
himself and his pride in a duty fulfilled. Opportunity, he declares, is
offered for great achievements; if it be not seized, posterity will judge
"that men only were wanting for the execution; while they were not
wanting who could rightly counsel, exhort, inspire, and bind an unfading
wreath of praise round the brows of the illustrious actors in so glorious
a scene."
In the measures that he recommends to Cromwell as necessary for the
public welfare, his mistakes are the generous errors of an idealist. He
writes as if all were either Cromwells or Miltons, and worthy of the
fullest measure of liberty. "Now the time seems come," he exclaims,
"wherein Moses, the great prophet, may sit in heaven rejoicing to see
that memorable and glorious wish of his fulfilled, when not only our
seventy elders, but all the Lord's people, are become prophets." His
general propositions on the function of law are unimpeachable. "He who
wisely would restrain the reasonable soul of man within due bounds, must
first himself know perfectly how far the territory and dominion extends
of just and honest liberty. As little must he offer to bind that which
God hath loosened as to loosen that which He hath bound. The ignorance
and mistake of this high point hath heaped up one huge half of all the
misery that hath been since Adam." But with the application to issues of
the day it appears that the mistake has been all one way. "Laws are
usually worse in proportion as they are more numerous." The free spirit
of man can govern him without "a garrison upon his neck of empty and
over-dignified precepts."
Whether he treat of religion, of education, of divorce, or of civil
government, the error is always the same, a confidence too absolute in
the capacity and integrity of the reasonable soul of man. A liturgy, for
example, is intolerable, because it is a slur upon the extemporary
effusions of ministers of the Gospel. "Well may men of eminent gifts set
forth as many forms and helps to prayer as they please; but to impose
them on ministers lawfully called and sufficiently tried ... is a
supercilious tyranny, impropriating the Spirit of God to themselves."
Milton, we know, did not habitually attend public worship at any of the
conventicles of the sectaries, or perhaps he might have found reason to
modify this censure.
Some of his impassioned pleadings were possibly not wholly without effect
on the politics of the time. It is interesting, at any rate, to find
Cromwell, in his letter written in 1650 to the Governor of Edinburgh
Castle, adopting one of the main arguments of the _Areopagitica_, and
enforcing it against the Presbyterians by a figure which may have been
borrowed from that tract. "Your pretended fear," he writes, "lest error
should step in, is like the man who would keep all wine out of the
country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise
jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition that
he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge." But Cromwell never
applied his logic to the removal of the restraint upon printing, which by
this same argument Milton had judged to be "the greatest displeasure and
indignity to a free and knowing spirit that can be put upon him." He was
too practical a statesman to be frightened into logic by a little paper
shot.
Logical Milton always was. He learned little or nothing from the
political events of his time. He was throughout consistent with himself;
prepared to take any risks that his advocacy might bring upon him, not
prepared to forego or modify his opinions because of human incompetence
or human imbecility. Between the consistent and unflinching Royalists on
the one hand, and the consistent and unflinching Republicans on the
other, the most of the population of England wavered and hung. But
half-measures and half-heartedness were alike unintelligible to Milton.
He fell upon the Presbyterians when they showed a disposition to palter
with the logical consequences of their own action, and scourged them
unmercifully. They had "banded and borne arms against their king,
divested him, disanointed him, nay, cursed him all over in their pulpits,
and their pamphlets." But when once the king was brought to trial, then
"he who but erewhile in the pulpits was a cursed tyrant, an enemy to God
and saints, laden with all the innocent blood spilt in three kingdoms,
and so to be fought against, is now, though nothing penitent or altered
from his first principles, a lawful magistrate, a sovereign lord, the
Lord's anointed, not to be touched, though by themselves imprisoned." He
prepares for them a similar dilemma, between the horns of which they have
since been content to dwell, in his treatment of the question of divorce:
"They dare not affirm that marriage is either a sacrament or a mystery
... and yet they invest it with such an awful sanctity, and give it such
adamantine chains to bind with, as if it were to be worshipped like some
Indian deity, when it can confer no blessing upon us, but works more and
more to our misery."
Milton's astonishment and indignation in cases like these are a
convincing evidence of his inability to understand average politics, and
that world of convenience, precaution, and compromise which is their
native place. His own tenacity and constancy have something grim about
them. Andrew Marvell, in his tract called _The Rehearsal Transposed_,
speaking of the intolerance of his adversary, Samuel Parker, says: "If
you have a mind to die, or to be of his party (there are but these two
conditions), you may perhaps be rendered capable of his charity." Neither
of these two conditions was a certain title to the charity of Milton. In
the _Eikonoklastes_ he pursues the dead king with jibe and taunt, and
exults over the smallest advantage gained. The opening words of the tract
show him conscious of the difficulty and delicacy of the part he acted in
making war on one who had "paid his final debt to nature and his faults."
But what then? If the king, being dead, could speak, the dead king must
be answered, and his gauntlet taken up "in the behalf of liberty and the
commonwealth."
The manner in which he conducts this and other controversies has brought
upon Milton's head universal reproach. He is intemperate and violent, he
heaps up personal scurrilities against his adversaries, and triumphs in
their misfortunes. There is nothing wherein our age more differs from his
than in the accepted rules governing controversy, and he has lost
estimation accordingly. Yet not a few critics, it may be suspected, have
allowed their dislike of the thing he says to hurry them into an
exaggerated censure on his manner of saying it. It is important, in the
first place, to remember that his violences are not the violences of the
hired rhetorician. He was prepared to stand by what he wrote, and he knew
the risks that he ran in those shifting and uncertain times. His life was
in danger at the Restoration, and was saved by some unknown piece of good
fortune or clemency. He was not a coward reviler, a "tongue-doughty
giant," whose ears are the most delicate part about him, but an open
fighter, who got as good as he gave. And then it is sometimes forgotten
that the most scurrilous of Milton's pamphlets were written in Latin, a
language which has always enjoyed an excellent liberty in the matter of
personal abuse; while even his English pamphlets, wherein at times he
shows almost as pretty a talent in reviling, were written for an audience
inured to the habitual amenities of Latin controversy. Sir Thomas More
was famous for his knack of calling bad names in good Latin, yet his
posterity rise up and call him blessed. Milton, like More, observed the
rules of the game, which allowed practices condemned in the modern
literary prize-ring. He calls Salmasius a poor grammarian, a pragmatical
coxcomb, a silly little scholar, a mercenary advocate, a loggerhead, a
hare-brained blunderbuss, a witless brawler, a mongrel cur; he reproaches
him with the domestic tyranny put upon him by that barking she-wolf, his
wife, and winds up with an elaborate comparison (not wholly unfamiliar to
modern methods of controversy) between Salmasius and Judas. With his
nameless opponent in the Divorce quarrel he deals--this time in
English--no less contemptuously: "I mean not to dispute philosophy with
this pork, who never read any." The creature is a conspicuous gull, an
odious fool, a dolt, an idiot, a groom, a rank pettifogger, a
presumptuous losel, a clown, a vice, a huckster-at-law, whose "jabberment
is the flashiest and the fustiest that ever corrupted in such an
unswilled hogshead." "What should a man say more to a snout in this
pickle? What language can be low and degenerate enough?" In the _Apology_
for Smectymnuus, Milton sets forth his own defence of his acrimony and
violence: "There may be a sanctified bitterness," he remarks, "against
the enemies of the truth;" and he dares to quote the casuistry of Electra
in _Sophocles_:--
'Tis you that say it, not I. You do the deeds,
And your ungodly deeds find me the words.
The exigencies of controversy revealed in Milton not only an
inexhaustible store of coarse invective, but also, at times, the flash of
real wit. "My fate," he says, with some sense of the incongruity of the
thing, "extorts from me a talent of sport, which I had thought to hide in
a napkin." We are privileged to hear Milton laugh. It is not mirthful nor
gentle laughter, but rather the fierce, harsh, vehement laughter of the
Hebrew Psalms, the laughter of scorn, the shooting out of the lips, the
saying "Ha, ha." He speaks with his mouth, and swords are in his lips.
Thus, of Alexander Morus, Professor of Sacred History at Amsterdam, whom
he suspected to be the author of a tract in support of Salmasius, he
says: "There is one More, part Frenchman and part Scot, so that one
country or one people cannot be quite overwhelmed with the whole infamy
of his extraction"; and he indulges himself in a debauch of punning on
_Morus_, the Latin word for a mulberry. In the prelatical controversy,
after discussing with his opponent the meaning of the word "angel," he
continues: "It is not ordination nor jurisdiction that is angelical, but
the heavenly message of the Gospel, which is the office of all ministers
alike.... And if you will contend still for a superiority in one person,
you must ground it better than from this metaphor, which you may now
deplore as the axe-head that fell into the water, and say, 'Alas, master!
for it was borrowed'; unless you have as good a faculty to make iron
swim, as you had to make light froth sink." In the _Apology_ for
Smectymnuus he heaps one grotesque comparison on another. His adversary,
the son of Bishop Hall, is like "some empiric of false accusations to try
his poisons upon me, whether they would work or not." The learning that
was displayed by the champion of Episcopacy and the very typographical
arrangement of his book incur an equal contempt: the margin of his
treatise "is the sluice most commonly that feeds the drought of his
text.... Nor yet content with the wonted room of his margin, but he must
cut out large docks and creeks into his text, to unlade the foolish
frigate of his unseasonable authorities." His best folios "are
predestined to no better end than to make winding-sheets in Lent for
pilchers." With this last stroke Milton is so well pleased that he
repeats the same prediction in an elaborated form over the works of
Salmasius, and even celebrates in numerous verse the forethought and
bounty of one who has thus taken pity on the nakedness of fishes.
The fantastic nature of these quips and taunts reminds us that Milton
belonged to the age of the metaphysical poets and satirists, the age of
Cowley, and Cleveland, and Butler. His prose works have been searched
chiefly for passages that may be used to illustrate his poetry; and
although the search has been rewarded with many natural coincidences of
expression, not a few passages of lofty self-confidence, and some
raptures of poetic metaphor, the result has been in the main a
disappointment. His admirers, too jealous for the poetic dignity of their
hero, have turned away sorrowfully from this memorial heap of odd-shaped
missiles, hurled from his dire left hand for the confusion of his
enemies. And yet, rightly judged, there is instruction, and an increased
reverence for the poet, to be found in these also--in all that wild array
of subjects and methods which he commands for the purposes of his prose,
but dismisses from the service of his verse. It was a strict and rare
selection that he made among the auxiliaries when he addressed himself to
the more arduous attempt. Here and there, even in _Paradise Lost_, his
education in the handling of satire and invective stood him in stead. The
poem contains more than one "flyting"--to use the Scottish term--and the
high war of words between Satan and Abdiel in heaven, or between Satan
and Gabriel on earth, could not have been handled save by a master of all
the weapons of verbal fence and all the devices of wounding invective. In
the great close of the Fourth Book, especially, where the arch-fiend and
the archangel retaliate defiance, and tower, in swift alternate flights,
to higher and higher pitches of exultant scorn, Milton puts forth all his
strength, and brings into action a whole armoury of sarcasm and insult
whetted and polished from its earlier prosaic exercise. Even the
grotesque element in his humour is not wholly excluded from the _Paradise
Lost_; it has full scope, for once, in the episodical description of the
Paradise of Fools--that barren continent, beaten on by the storms of
chaos, dark save for some faint glimmerings from the wall of heaven, the
inhabitants a disordered and depraved multitude of philosophers,
crusaders, monks, and friars, blown like leaves into the air by the winds
that sweep those desert tracts. Unlike the Paradise that was lost, this
paradise is wholly of Milton's invention, and is the best extant monument
to that spirit of mockery and savage triumph which is all the humour that
he knows.
The style of his prose works is a style formed upon oratorical models.
The long winding sentence, propped on epithets and festooned with
digressions, was the habitual vehicle of his meaning. The effect it
produces at its best was well described by Marvell, who, in a letter to
Milton thanking him for a copy of the _Defence of the People of England_,
remarks: "When I consider how equally it turns and rises with so many
figures, it seems to me a Trajan's column, in whose winding ascent we see
embossed the several monuments of your learned victories." The clink of
the rhyming couplet was not more displeasing to Milton's ear than the
continued emphatic bark of a series of short sentences. Accustomed as he
was to the heavy-armed processional manner of scholarly Renaissance
prose, he felt it an indignity to "lie at the mercy of a coy, flirting
style; to be girded with frumps and curtal jibes, by one who makes
sentences by the statute, as if all above three inches long were
confiscate." Later on in the _Apology_ he returns to this grievance, and
describes how his adversary "sobs me out half a dozen phthisical mottoes,
wherever he had them, hopping short in the measure of convulsion fits; in
which labour the agony of his wit having escaped narrowly, instead of
well-sized periods, he greets us with a quantity of thumb-ring posies."
The men of the Renaissance despised the homely savour of the native
English syntax with its rude rhetoric and abrupt logic and its lore of
popular adages and maxims; they had learned to taste a subtler pleasure
in the progressive undulations of a long mobile sentence, rising and
falling alternately, reaching the limit of its height towards the middle,
and at the close either dying away or breaking in a sudden crash of
unexpected downward emphasis. This is the sentence preferred by Milton,
and, where haste or zeal does not interfere with the leisurely ordering,
handled by him with excellent skill. At its best and at its worst alike
his prose is the prose of a poet. His sentences rarely conform to any
strict periodic model; each idea, as it occurs to him, brings with it a
train of variation and enrichment, which, by the time the sentence
closes, is often found in sole possession. The architecture depends on
melody rather than on logic. The emphasis and burden of the thought
generally hangs on the epithets, descriptive terms, and phrases, which he
strengthens by arranging them in pairs, after a fashion much practised by
poets. Thus, to take a few examples from the Divorce pamphlets, a wife,
who should be "an intimate and speaking help," "a ready and reviving
associate," to comfort "the misinformed and wearied life of man" with "a
sweet and gladsome society," is too often "a mute and spiritless mate,"
united to her husband in "a disconsolate and unenjoined matrimony,"
whereby the blessing that was expected with her is changed "into a
familiar and coinhabiting mischief, at least into a drooping and
disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption." "The
mystical and blessed union of marriage can be no way more unhallowed and
profaned, than by the forcible uniting of such disunions and
separations." "And it is a less breach of wedlock to part with wise and
quiet consent betimes, than still to foil and profane that mystery of joy
and union with a polluting sadness and perpetual distemper."
The balance of epithet, the delicate music, the sentence that resembles a
chain with link added to link rather than a hoop whose ends are welded
together by the hammer--these are the characteristics of Milton's prose.
They are illustrated in that short passage of the _Areopagitica_, well
known to all readers of English: "I cannot praise a fugitive and
cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and
seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal
garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." Or in the striking
description of London during the Civil War: "Behold now this vast city, a
city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded
with his protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and
hammers working, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed
justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads
there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new
notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their
fealty, the approaching reformation; others as fast reading, trying all
things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement."
This sonorous balance of phrase and epithet cannot always escape what
Milton himself calls "the heathenish battology of multiplying words." It
serves the uses of rhetoric rather than of logic, and by the fervour of
its repetitions and enlargements unfits his prose for the plainer
purposes of argument or exposition. His argument is sometimes destroyed
or blemished by the fire that it kindles, his narrative overwhelmed in
the tide of passions that it sways.
His vocabulary is extraordinarily rich, and here again the contrast is
great between his prose and his verse. A full-bodied and picturesque
dictionary might be made of the words that occur only in the prose. Most
of these words would be found to derive from the Saxon stock, which
yields him almost all his store of invective and vituperation. The
resources of his Latinised vocabulary enable him to rise by successive
gyrations to a point of vantage above his prey, and then the downward
rush that strikes the quarry is a Saxon monosyllable. In this cardinal
point of art for those who have to do with the English speech he became
the teacher of Burke, who, with a lesser wealth of Saxon at his command,
employed it with a more telling parsimony.
Milton avoids no word of humble origin, so it serve his purpose. His
contempt finds voice in such expressions as to "huddle" prayers, and to
"keck" at wholesome food. Gehazi "rooks" from Naaman; the bishops "prog
and pander for fees," and are "the common stales to countenance every
politic fetch that was then on foot." The Presbyterians were earnest
enough "while pluralities greased them thick and deep"; the gentlemen who
accompanied King Charles in his assault on the privileges of the House of
Commons were "the spawn and shipwreck of taverns and dicing-houses." The
people take their religion from their minister "by scraps and mammocks,
as he dispenses it in his Sunday's dole"; and "the superstitious man by
his good will is an atheist, but being scared from thence by the pangs
and gripes of a boiling conscience, all in a pudder shuffles up to
himself such a God and such a worship as is most agreeable to remedy his
fear."
There were few incidents in Milton's career, from his personal relations
with his college tutor to his choice of blank verse for his epic, that he
was not called upon at some time or other in his life to explain and
defend. When his free use of homely figures and turns of speech was
objected to him, his answer was ready: "Doth not Christ Himself teach the
highest things by the similitude of old bottles and patched clothes? Doth
He not illustrate best things by things most evil? His own coming to be
as a thief in the night, and the righteous man's wisdom to that of an
unjust steward?" But the defence is misleading, for the rules that
governed Milton's usage are not what it would suggest. When he came to
treat of the best and highest things his use of native English became
more sparing and dainty, while the rank, strong words that smack of the
home soil were all foregone.
His prose works, therefore, help us to appreciate better the tribulations
of the process whereby he became a classic poet. Eclecticism and the
severe castigation of style are dangerous disciplines for any but a rich
temperament; from others they produce only what is exquisite and thin and
vapid. The "stylist" of the modern world is generally an interesting
invalid; his complexion would lose all its transparency if it were
exposed to the weather; his weak voice would never make itself heard in
the hubbub of the bazaar. Sunbeams cannot be extracted from cucumbers,
nor can the great manner in literature emanate from a chill self-culture.
But Milton inherited the fulness and vigour of the Elizabethans, and so
could afford to write an epic poem in a selection of the language really
used by men. The grandeur of _Paradise Lost_ or _Samson Agonistes_ could
never, by any conceivable device of chemistry or magic, be compounded
from delicate sensibilities and a superfine ear for music. For the
material of those palaces whole provinces were pillaged, and the waste
might furnish forth a city.