I did not hold the reader’s attention long to the nightmare tragedies of
Webster and Ford, though they show shining passages of amazing dramatic
power. Marston was touched upon, and that satiric vein of his, better
known perhaps than his more ambitious work. We spoke of Massinger, whose
money-monster, Giles Overreach, makes one think of the railway wreckers of
our time; then came the gracious and popular Beaumont and Fletcher, twins
in work and in friendship; the former dying in the same year with
Shakespeare, and Fletcher dying the same year with King James (1625). I
spoke of that Prince Harry who promised well, but died young, and of
Charles, whose sad story will come to ampler mention in our present talk.
We made record of the death of Ben Jonson--of the hack-writing service of
James Howell--of the dilettante qualities of Sir Henry Wotton, and of the
ever-delightful work and enduring fame of the old angler, Izaak Walton.
And last we closed our talk with sketches of two poets: the one, George
Herbert, to whom his priestly work and his saintly verse were “all in
all;” and the other, Robert Herrick, born to a goldsmith’s craft, but
making verses that glittered more than all the jewels of Cheapside.
_King Charles and his Friends._
We open this morning upon times when New-England towns were being planted
among the pine-woods, and the decorous, courtly, unfortunate Charles I.
had newly come to the throne. Had the King been only plain Charles Stuart,
he would doubtless have gone through life with the reputation of an
amiable, courteous gentleman, not over-sturdy in his friendships[47]--a
fond father and good husband, with a pretty taste in art and in books, but
strongly marked with some obstinacies about the ways of wearing his
rapier, or of tying his cravat, or of overdrawing his bank account.
In the station that really fell to him those obstinacies took hold upon
matters which brought him to grief. The man who stood next to Charles, and
who virtually governed him, was that George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham,
who by his fine doublets, fine dancing, and fine presence, had very early
commended himself to the old King James, and now lorded it with the son.
He was that Steenie who in Scott’s _Fortunes of Nigel_ plays the
braggadocio of the court: he had attended Prince Charles upon that
Quixotic errand of his, incognito, across Europe, to play the wooer at the
feet of the Infanta of Spain; and when nothing came of all that show of
gallantry and the lavishment of jewels upon the dusky heiress of Castile,
the same Buckingham had negotiated the marriage with the French princess,
Henrietta. He was a brazen courtier, a shrewd man of the world; full of
all accomplishments; full of all profligacy. He made and unmade bishops
and judges, and bolstered the King in that antagonism to the Commons of
England which was rousing the dangerous indignation of such men as Eliot
and Hampden and Pym. Private assassination, however, took him off before
the coming of the great day of wrath. You must not confound this Duke of
Buckingham with another George Villiers, also Duke of Buckingham, who was
his son, and who figured largely in the days of Charles II.--being even
more witty, and more graceful, and more profligate--if possible--than his
father; a literary man withal, and the author of a play[48] which had
great vogue.
Another striking figure about the court of Charles was a small, red-faced
man, keen-eyed, sanctimonious, who had risen from the humble ranks (his
father having been a clothier in a small town of Berkshire) to the
position of Archbishop of Canterbury. So starched was he in his
High-Church views that the Pope had offered him the hat of a cardinal. He
made the times hard for Non-conformists; your ancestors and mine, if they
emigrated in those days, may very likely have been pushed over seas by the
edicts of Archbishop Laud. His monstrous intolerance was provoking, and
intensifying that agitation in the religious world of England which
Buckingham had already provoked in the political world; and the days of
wrath were coming.
This Archbishop Laud is not only keen-sighted but he is bountiful and
helpful within the lines of his own policy. He endowed Oxford with great,
fine buildings. Some friend has told him that a young preacher of
wonderful attractions has made his appearance at St. Paul’s--down on a
visit from Cambridge--a young fellow, wonderfully handsome, with curling
locks and great eyes full of expression, and a marvellous gift of
language; and the Archbishop takes occasion to see him or hear him; and
finding that beneath such exterior there is real vigor and learning, he
makes place for him as Fellow at Oxford; appoints him presently his own
chaplain, and gives him a living down in Rutland.
_Jeremy Taylor._
This priest, of such eloquence and beauty, was Jeremy Taylor,[49] who was
the son of a barber at Cambridge, was entered at Caius College as sizar,
or charity scholar, just one year after Milton was entered at Christ
College, and from the door of his father’s shop may have looked admiringly
many a time upon the
“rosy cheeks
Angelical, keen eye, courageous look,
And conscious step of purity and pride,”
which belonged even then to the young Puritan poet. But Jeremy Taylor was
not a Puritan; never came to know Milton personally. One became the great
advocate and the purest illustration of the tenets of Episcopacy in
England; and the other--eventually--their most effective and weighty
opponent. In 1640, only one year after Jeremy Taylor was established in
his pleasant Rutland rectory, Archbishop Laud went to the Tower, not to
come forth till he should go to the scaffold; and in the Civil War,
breaking out presently, Jeremy Taylor joined the Royalists, was made
chaplain to the King, saw battle and siege and wounds; but in the top of
the strife he is known by his silvery voice and his exuberant piety, and
by the rare eloquence which colors prayer and sermon with the bloody tinge
of war and the pure light of heaven. He is wounded (as I said), he is
imprisoned, and finally, by the chances of battle, he is stranded in a
small country town near to Caermarthen, in South Wales.
“In the great storm,” he says, “which dashed the vessel of the
Church all in pieces, I was cast on the coast of Wales, and in a
little boat thought to have enjoyed that rest and quietness which in
England I could not hope for.”
The little boat he speaks of was the obscure mountain home where he taught
school, and where he received, some time, visits from the famous John
Evelyn,[50] who wrote charming books in these days about woods and
gardens, and who befriended the poor stranded chaplain. Here, too, he
wrote that monument of toleration, _The Liberty of Prophesying_, a work
which would be counted broad in its teachings even now, and which
alienated a great many of his more starched fellows in the Church. A
little fragment from the closing pages of this book will show at once his
method of illustration and his extreme liberality:
“When Abraham sat at his tent door, waiting to entertain strangers,
he espied an old man stopping by the way, leaning on his staff,
weary with much travel, and who was a hundred years of age.
“He received him kindly, provided supper, caused him to sit down;
but observing that the old man ate, and prayed not, neither begged
for a blessing on his meat, he asked him why he did not worship the
God of Heaven?
“The old man told him he had been used to worship the sun only.
“Whereupon Abraham in anger thrust him from his tent. When he was
gone into the evils of the night, God called to Abraham, and said,
‘I have suffered this man, whom thou hast cast out, these hundred
years, and couldest thou not endure him one night, when he gave thee
no trouble?’ Upon this Abraham fetched the man back and gave him
entertainment: ‘Go thou and do likewise,’ said the preacher, ‘and
thy charity will be rewarded by the God of Abraham.’”[51]
Jeremy Taylor did not learn this teaching from Archbishop Laud, but from
the _droiture_ of his own conscience, and the kindness of his own heart.
He wrote much other and most delectable matter in his years of Welsh
retirement, when a royal chaplain was a bugbear in England. He lost sons,
too--who had gone to the bad under the influences of that young Duke of
Buckingham I mentioned; but at last, when the restoration of Charles II.
came, he was given a bishopric in the wilds of Ireland, in a sour, gloomy
country, with sour and gloomy looks all around him, which together, broke
him down at the age of fifty-five. I have spoken thus much of him, because
he is a man to be remembered as the most eloquent, and the most kindly,
and the most tolerant of all the Church of England people in that day; and
because his treatises on _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_ will doubtless
give consolation to thousands of desponding souls, in the years to come,
as they have in the years that are past. He was saturated through and
through with learning and with piety; and they gurgled from him together
in a great tide of mellifluous language. The ardors and fervors of
Elizabethan days seem to have lapped over upon him in that welter of the
Commonwealth wars. He has been called the Shakespeare of the pulpit; I
should rather say the Spenser--there is such unchecked, and uncheckable,
affluence of language and illustration; thought and speech struggling
together for precedence, and stretching on and on, in ever so sweet and
harmonious jangle of silvery sounds.
_A Royalist and a Puritan._
Another Royalist of these times, of a different temper, was Sir John
Suckling:[52] a poet too, very rich, bred in luxury, a man of the world,
who had seen every court in Europe worth seeing, who dashed off songlets
and ballads between dinners and orgies; which songlets often hobbled on
their feet by reason of those multiplied days of high living; but yet they
had prettinesses in them which have kept them steadily alive all down to
these prosaic times. I give a sample from his “Ballad upon a Wedding,”
though it may be over-well known:
“Her cheeks so rare a white was on
No daisy makes comparison
(Who sees them is undone):
For streaks of red were mingled there
Such as are on a Catharine pear,
The side that’s next the sun.
Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out
As if they feared the light.
But O, she dances such a way!
No sun upon an Easter day
Is half so fine a sight!”
He was a frequenter of a tavern which stood at the Southwark end of London
Bridge. Aubrey says he was one of the best bowlers of his time. He played
at cards, too, rarely well, and “did use to practise by himself abed.” He
was rich; he was liberal; he was accomplished--almost an “Admirable
Crichton.” His first military service was in support of Gustavus Adolphus,
in Germany. At the time of trouble with the Scots (1639) he raised a troop
for the King’s service that bristled with gilded spurs and trappings; but
he never did much serious fighting on British soil; and in 1641--owing to
what was counted treasonable action in behalf of Strafford, he was
compelled to leave England.
He crossed over to the Continent, wandered into Spain, and somehow became
(as a current tradition reported) a victim of the Inquisition there, and
was put to cruel torture; a strange subject surely to be put to the
torture--in this life. He was said to be broken by this experience, and
strayed away, after his escape from those priest-fangs, to Paris, where,
not yet thirty-five, and with such promise in him of better things, he
came to his death in some mysterious way: some said by a knife-blade which
a renegade servant had fastened in his boot; but most probably by suicide.
There is, however, great obscurity in regard to his life abroad.
He wrote some plays, which had more notice than they should have had;
possibly owing to a revival of dramatic interests very strangely brought
about in Charles I.’s time--a revival which was due to the over-eagerness
and exaggeration of attacks made upon it by the Puritans: noticeable among
these was that of William Prynne[53]--“utter barrister” of Lincoln’s Inn.
“Utter barrister” does not mean æsthetic barrister, but one not yet come
to full range of privilege.
This Prynne was a man of dreadful insistence and severities; he would have
made a terrific schoolmaster. He was the author, in the course of his
life, of no less than one hundred and eighty distinct works; many of them,
it is true, were pamphlets, but others terribly bulky--an inextinguishable
man; that onslaught on the drama and dramatic people, and play-goers,
including people of the Court, called _Histriomastix_, was a foul-mouthed,
close-printed, big quarto of a thousand pages. One would think such a book
could do little harm; but he was tried for it, was heavily fined, and
sentenced to stand in the pillory and lose his ears. He pleaded strongly
against the sentence, and for its remission upon “divers passages [as he
says in his petition] fallen inconsiderately from my pen in a book called
_Histriomastix_.”
But he pleaded in vain; there was no sympathy for him. Ought there to be
for a man who writes a book of a thousand quarto pages--on any subject?
The violence of this diatribe made a reaction in favor of the theatre; his
fellow-barristers of Lincoln’s Inn hustled him out of their companionship,
and got up straightway a gay masque to demonstrate their scorn of his
reproof.
They say he bore his punishment sturdily, though the fumes of his book,
which was burned just below his nose, came near to suffocate him. Later
still, he underwent another sentence for offences growing out of his
unrelenting and imperious Puritanism--this time in company with one Burton
(not Robert Burton,[54] of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_), who was a
favorite with the people and had flowers strown before him as he walked to
the pillory. But Prynne had no flowers, and his ears having been once
cropt, the hangman had a rough time (a very rough time for Prynne) in
getting at his task. Thereafter he was sent to prison in the isle of
Jersey; but he kept writing, ears or no ears, and we may hear his strident
voice again--hear it in Parliament, too.
_Cowley and Waller._
Two other poets of these times I name, because of the great reputation
they once had; a reputation far greater than they maintain now. These are
Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller.[55] The former of these (Cowley) was the
son of a London grocer, whose shop was not far from the home of Izaak
Walton; he was taught at Westminster School, and at Cambridge, and blazed
up precociously at the age of fifteen in shining verses.[56] Indeed his
aptitude, his ingenuities, his scholarship, kept him in the first rank of
men of letters all through his day, and gave him burial between Spenser
and Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. He would take a humbler place if he were
disentombed now; yet, in Cromwell’s time, or in that of Charles II., the
average reading man knew Cowley better than he knew Milton, and admired
him more. I give you a fragment of what is counted his best; it is from
his “Hymn to Light:”
“When, Goddess, thou lift’st up thy waken’d head
Out of the morning’s purple bed,
Thy quire of birds about thee play,
And all the joyful world salutes the rising day.
“All the world’s bravery, that delights our eyes,
Is but thy sev’ral liveries,
Thou the rich dye on them bestowest,
Thy nimble pencil paints this landscape as thou goest.
“A crimson garment in the Rose thou wear’st;
A crown of studded gold thou bear’st,
The virgin lilies in their white,
Are clad but with the lawn of almost naked light!”
If I were to read a fragment from Tennyson in contrast with Cowley’s
treatment of a similar theme I think you might wonder less why his
reputation has suffered gradual eclipse. Shall we try? Cowley wrote a poem
in memory of a dear friend, and I take one of the pleasantest of its
verses:
“Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say,
Have ye not seen us walking every day?
Was there a tree about, which did not know
The love betwixt us two?
Henceforth, ye gentle trees, for ever fade,
Or your sad branches thicker join,
And into darksome shades combine,
Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid.”
Tennyson wrote of _his_ dead friend, and here is a verse of it:
“The path by which we twain did go,
Which led by tracts that pleased us well
Thro’ four sweet years, arose and fell
From flower to flower, from snow to snow;
But where the path we walk’d began
To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
As we descended, following hope,
_There_ sat the shadow feared of man,
Who broke our fair companionship,
And spread his mantle dark and cold,
And wrapped thee formless in the fold,
And dulled the murmur on thy lip,
And bore thee where I could not see
Nor follow--though I walk in haste;
And think--that somewhere in the waste,
The shadow sits, and waits for me!”
Can I be wrong in thinking that under the solemn lights of these stanzas
the earlier poet’s verse grows dim?
Cowley was a good Kingsman; and in the days of the Commonwealth held
position of secretary to the exiled Queen Henrietta, in Paris; he did, at
one time, think of establishing himself in one of the American colonies;
returned, however, to his old London haunts, and, wearying of the city,
sought retirement at Chertsey, on the Thames’ banks (where his old house
is still to be seen), and where he wrote, in graceful prose and cumbrous
verse, on subjects related to country life--which he loved overmuch--and
died there among his trees and the meadows.
Waller was both Kingsman and Republican--steering deftly between extremes,
so as to keep himself and his estates free from harm. This will weaken
your sympathy for him at once--as it should do. He lived in a grand
way--affected the philosopher; _was_ such a philosopher as quick-witted
selfishness makes; yet he surely had wonderful aptitudes in dealing with
language, and could make its harmonious numbers flow where and how he
would. Waller has come to a casual literary importance in these days under
the deft talking and writing of those dilettante critics who would make
this author the pivot (as it were) on which British poesy swung away from
the “hysterical riot of the Jacobeans” into measured and orderly classic
cadence. It is a large influence to attribute to a single writer, though
his grace and felicities go far to justify it. And it is further to be
remembered that such critics are largely given to the discussion of
_technique_ only; they write as distinct art-masters; while we, who are
taking our paths along English Letters for many other things besides art
and rhythm, will, I trust, be pardoned for thinking that there is very
little pith or weighty matter in this great master of the juggleries of
sound.
Waller married early in life, but lost his wife while still very young;
thenceforth, for many years--a gay and coquettish widower--he pursued the
Lady Dorothy Sidney with a storm of love verses, of which the best (and it
is really amazingly clever in its neatness and point) is this:
“Go, lovely Rose,
Tell her, that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows
When I resemble her to thee
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have, uncommended, died.”
But neither this, nor a hundred others, brought the Lady Dorothy to terms:
she married--like a wise woman--somebody else. And he? He went on singing
as chirpingly as ever--sang till he was over eighty.
_John Milton._
And now we come to a poet of a larger build--a weightier music--and of a
more indomitable spirit; a poet who wooed the world with his songs; and
the world has never said him “Nay.” I mean John Milton.[57]
He is the first great poet we have encountered, in respect to whom we can
find in contemporary records full details of family, lodgement, and birth.
A great many of these details have been swooped together in Dr. Masson’s
recently completed _Life and Times of Milton_, which I would more
earnestly commend to your reading were it not so utterly long--six fat
volumes of big octavo--in the which the pith and kernel about Milton, the
man, floats around like force meat-balls in a great sea of historic soup.
Our poet was born in Bread Street, just out of Cheapside, in London, in
the year 1608.
In Cheapside--it may be well to recall--stood the Mermaid Tavern; and it
stood not more than half a block away from the corner where Milton’s
father lived. And on that corner--who knows?--the boy, eight years old, or
thereby, when Shakespeare died, may have lingered to see the stalwart Ben
Jonson go tavern-ward for his cups, or may be, John Marston, or Dekker, or
Philip Massinger--all these being comfortably inclined to taverns.
The father of this Bread Street lad was a scrivener by profession; that
is, one who drafted legal papers; a well-to-do man as times went; able to
give his boy some private schooling; proud of him, too; proud of his clear
white and red face, and his curly auburn hair carefully parted--almost a
girl’s face; so well-looking, indeed, that the father employed a good
Dutch painter of those days to take his portrait; the portrait is still in
existence--dating from 1618, when the poet was ten, showing him in a
banded velvet doublet and a stiff vandyke collar, trimmed about with lace.
In those times, or presently after, he used to go to St. Paul’s Grammar
School; of which Lily, of Lily’s _Latin Grammar_, was the first master
years before. It was only a little walk for him, through Cheapside, and
then, perhaps, Paternoster Row--the school being under the shadow of that
great cathedral, which was burned fifty years after. He studied hard
there; studied at home, too; often, he says himself, when only fourteen,
studying till twelve at night. He loved books, and he loved better to be
foremost.
He turns his hand to poetry even then. Would you like to see a bit of what
he wrote at fifteen? Well, here it is, in a scrap of psalmody:
“Let us blaze his name abroad,
For of gods, he is the God,
…
Who by his wisdom did create
The painted heavens so full of state,
…
And caused the golden tressèd sun
All the day long his course to run,
The hornèd moon to hang by night
Amongst her spangled sisters bright;
For his mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.”
It is not of the best, but I think will compare favorably with most that
is written by young people of fifteen. At Christ’s College, Cambridge,
whither he went shortly afterward--his father being hopeful that he would
take orders in the Church--he was easily among the first; he wrote Latin
hexameters, quarrelled with his tutor (notwithstanding his handsome face
had given to him the mocking title of “The Lady”), had his season of
_rustication_ up in London, sees all that is doing in theatrics
thereabout, but goes back to study more closely than ever.
The little Christmas song,
“It was the winter wild,
While the heaven-born Child,” etc.,
belongs to his Cambridge life; though his first public appearance as an
author was in the “Ode to Shakespeare,” attaching with other and various
commendatory verses to the second folio edition of that author’s dramas,
published in the year 1632.
Milton was then twenty-four, had been six or seven at Cambridge; did not
accept kindly his father’s notion of taking orders in the Church, but had
exaggerated views of a grandiose life of study and literary work; in which
views his father--sensible man that he was--did not share; but--kind man
that he was--he did not strongly combat them. So we find father and son
living together presently, some twenty miles away from London, in a little
country hamlet called Horton, where the old gentleman had purchased a
cottage for a final home when his London business was closed up.
Here, too, our young poet studies--not books only, borrowed where he can,
and bought if he can; but studies also fields and trees and skies and
rivers, and all the natural objects that are to take embalmment sooner or
later in his finished verse. Here he wrote, almost within sight of Windsor
towers, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” You know them; but they are
always new and always fresh; freshest when you go out from London on a
summer’s day to where the old tower of Horton Church still points the
road, and trace there (if you can)
“The russet lawns and fallows gray
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
…
Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide.
…
Sometimes with secure delight
The upland hamlets will invite,
When the merry bells ring round
And the jocund rebecks sound
To many a youth and many a maid
Dancing in the chequered shade;
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday.”
In reading such verse we do not know where to stop--at least, I do not. He
writes, too, in that country quietude, within sight of Windsor forest, his
charming “Lycidas,” one of the loveliest of memorial poems, and the
“Comus,” which alone of all the masques of that time, and preceding times,
has gone in its entirety into the body of living English literature.
In 1638, then thirty years old, equipped in all needed languages and
scholarship, he goes for further study and observation to the Continent;
he carries letters from Sir Henry Wotton; he sees the great Hugo Grotius
at Paris; sees the sunny country of olives in Provence; sees the superb
front of Genoa piling out from the blue waters of the Mediterranean; sees
Galileo at Florence--the old philosopher too blind to study the face of
the studious young Englishman that has come so far to greet him. He sees,
too, what is best and bravest at Rome; among the rest St. Peter’s, just
then brought to completion, and in the first freshness of its great tufa
masonry. He is fêted by studious young Italians; has the freedom of the
Accademia della Crusca; blazes out in love sonnets to some dark-eyed
signorina of Bologna; returns by Venice, and by Geneva where he hobnobs
with the Diodati friends of his old school-fellow, Charles Diodati; and
comes home to England to find changes brewing--the Scotch marching over
the border with battle-drums--the Long Parliament portending--Strafford
and Laud in way of impeachment--his old father drawing near to his
end--and bloody war tainting all the air.
The father’s fortune, never large, is found crippled at his death; and
Milton, now thirty-two, must look out for his own earnings. He takes a
house; first in Fleet Street, then near Aldersgate, with garden attached,
where he has three or four pupils; his nephew Phillips[58] among them.
_Milton’s Marriage._
It was while living there that he brought back, one day, a bride--Mary
Powell; she was a young maiden in her teens, daughter of a
well-established loyalist family near to Oxford. The young bride is at the
quiet student’s house in Aldersgate a month, perhaps two, when she goes
down for a visit to her mother; she is to come back at Michaelmas; but
Michaelmas comes, and she stays; Milton writes, and she stays; Milton
writes again, and she stays; he sends a messenger--and she stays.
What is up, then, in this new household? Milton, the scholar and poet, is
up, straightway, to a treatise on divorce, whereby he would make it easy
to undo yokes where parties are unevenly yoked. There is much scriptural
support and much shrewd reasoning brought by his acuteness to the
overthrow of those rulings which the common-sense of mankind has
established; even now those who contend for easy divorce get their best
weapons out of this old Miltonian armory.
Meantime the poet went on teaching, I suspect rapping his boys over the
knuckles in these days for slight cause. But what does it all mean? It
means incongruity; not the first case, nor will it be the last.
He--abstracted, austere, bookish, with his head in the clouds; she--with
her head in ribbons, and possibly loving orderly housewifery:[59]
intellectual affinities and sympathies are certainly missing.
Fancy the poet just launched into the moulding of such verse as this:
“Hail, bounteous May, that dost inspire
Mirth and youth, and warm desire!
Woods and groves are of thy dressing----”
when a servant gives sharp rat-tat at the door, “Please, sir, missus says,
‘Dinner’s waiting!’” But the poet sweeps on--
“O nightingale, that on yon blooming spray
Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still,
Thou, with fresh heat, the lover’s heart dost fill,
Now timely sing, ere the rude bird of hate----”
And there is another rat-tat!--“Please, sir, missus says, ‘Dinner is all
getting cold.’” Still the poet ranges in fairyland--
“----ere the rude bird of hate
Foretell my hopeless doom, in some grove nigh,
As thou from year to year hast sung too late
For my relief, yet hadst no reason why----”
And now, maybe, it is the pretty mistress who comes with a bounce--“Mr.
Milton, are you _ever_ coming?”--and a quick bang of the door, which is a
way some excellent petulant young women have of--not breaking the
commandments.
There is a little prosaic half-line in the “Paradise Lost” (I don’t think
it was ever quoted before), which in this connection seems to me to have a
very pathetic twang in it; ’tis about Paradise and its charms--
“No fear lest dinner cool!”
However, it happens that through the advocacy of friends on both sides
this great family breach is healed, or seems to be; and two years after,
Milton and his recreant, penitent, and restored wife are living again
together; lived together till her death; and she became the mother of his
three daughters: Anne, who was crippled, never even learned to write, and
used to be occupied with her needle; Mary, who was his amanuensis and
reader most times, and Deborah, the youngest, who came to perform similar
offices for him afterward.
Meantime the Royalist cause had suffered everywhere. The Powells (his
wife’s family having come to disaster) did--with more or less children--go
to live with Milton. Whether the presence of the mother-in-law mended the
poet’s domesticity I doubt; doubt, indeed, if ever there was absolute
harmony there.
On the year of the battle of Naseby appeared Milton’s first unpretending
booklet of poems,[60] containing with others, those already named, and
not before printed. Earlier, however, in the lifetime of the poet had
begun the issue of those thunderbolts of pamphlets which he wrote on
church discipline, education, on the liberty of unlicensed printing, and
many another topic--cumbrous with great trails of intricate sentences,
wondrous word-heaps, sparkling with learning, flaming with anger--with
convolutions like a serpent’s, and as biting as serpents.
A show is kept up of his school-keeping, but with doubtful success; for in
1647 we learn that “he left his great house in Barbican, and betook
himself to a smaller in High Holborn, among those that open back into
Lincoln’s Inn Fields;” but there is no poem-making of importance (save one
or two wondrous Sonnets) now, or again, until he is virtually an old man.
_The Royal Tragedy._
Meantime the tide of war is flowing back and forth over England and
engrossing all hopes and fears. The poor King is one while a captive of
the Scots, and again a captive of the Parliamentary forces, and is
hustled from palace to castle. What shall be done with the royal prisoner?
There are thousands who have fought against him who would have been most
glad of his escape; but there are others--weary of his doublings--who have
vowed that this son of Baal shall go to his doom and bite the dust.
Finally, and quickly too (for events move with railroad speed), his trial
comes--the trial of a King. A strange event for these English, who have
venerated and feared and idolized so many kings and queens of so many
royal lines. How the Royalist verse-makers must have fumed and raved!
Milton, then just turned of forty, was, as I have said, living near High
Holborn; the King was eight years his senior--was in custody at St.
James’s, a short way above Piccadilly. He brought to the trial all his
kingly dignity, and wore it unflinchingly--refusing to recognize the
jurisdiction of the Parliament, cuddling always obstinately that poor
figment of the divine right of kings--which even then Milton, down in his
Holborn garden, was sharpening his pen to undermine and destroy.
The sentence was death--a sentence that gave pause to many. Fairfax, and
others such, would have declared against it; even crop-eared Prynne, who
had suffered so much for his truculent Puritanism, protested against it;
two-thirds of the population of England would have done the same; but
London and England and the army were all in the grip of an iron man whose
name was Cromwell. Time sped; the King had only two days to live; his son
Charles was over seas, never believing such catastrophe could happen; only
two royal children--a princess of thirteen and a boy of eight--came to say
adieu to the royal prisoner. “He sat with them some time at the window,
taking them on his knees, and kissing them, and talking with them of their
duty to their mother, and to their elder brother, the Prince of Wales.” He
carried his habitual dignity and calmness with him on the very morning,
going between files of soldiers through St. James’s Park--pointing out a
tree which his brother Henry had planted--and on, across to Whitehall,
where had come off many a gay, rollicking masque of Ben Jonson’s, in
presence of his father, James I. He was led through the window of the
banqueting-hall--the guides show it now--where he had danced many a
night, and so to the scaffold, just without the window, whence he could
see up and down the vast court of Whitehall, from gate to gate,[61] paved
with a great throng of heads. Even then and there rested on him the same
kingly composure; the fine oval face, pale but unmoved; the peaked beard
carefully trimmed, as you see it in the well-known pictures by Vandyke, at
Windsor or at Blenheim.
He has a word with old Bishop Juxon, who totters beside him; a few words
for others who are within hearing; examines the block, the axe; gives some
brief cautions to the executioner; then, laying down his head, lifts his
own hand for signal, and with a crunching thud of sound it is over.
And poet Milton--has he shown any relenting? Not one whit; he is austere
among the most austere; in this very week he is engaged upon his defence
of regicide, with its stinging, biting sentences. He is a friend and
party to the new Commonwealth; two months only after the execution of the
King, he is appointed Secretary to the State Council, and under it is
conducting the Latin correspondence. He demolishes, by order of the same
Council, the _Eikon Basilike_ (supposed in that day to be the king’s work)
with his fierce onslaught of the _Eikonoklastes_. His words are bitter as
gall; he even alludes, in no amiable tone--with acrid emphasis, indeed--to
the absurd rumor, current with some, that the King, through his
confidential instrument, Buckingham, had poisoned his own father.
He is further appointed to the answering of Salmasius,[62] an answer with
which all Europe presently rings. It was in these days, and with such work
crowding him, that his vision fails; and to these days, doubtless belongs
that noble sonnet on his blindness, which is worth our staying for, here
and now:
“When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent, which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he, returning, chide;
‘Dost God exact day-labor, light denied?’
I fondly ask: But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies--‘God doth not need
Either man’s work, or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve, who only stand and wait.’”
Wonderful, is it not, that such a sonnet--so full of rare eloquence and
rare philosophy--so full of all that most hallows our infirm humanity
could be written by one--pouring out his execrations on the head of
Salmasius--at strife in his own household--at strife (as we shall find)
with his own daughters? Wonderful, is it not, that Carlyle could write as
he did about the heroism of the humblest as well as bravest, and yet grow
into a rage--over his wife’s shoulders and at her cost--with a rooster
crowing in his neighbor’s yard? Ah, well, the perfect ones have not yet
come upon our earth, whatever perfect poems they may write.
_Change of Kings._
But at last comes a new turn of the wheel to English fortunes. Cromwell is
dead; the Commonwealth is ended; all London is throwing its cap in the air
over the restoration of Charles II. Poor blind Milton[63] is in hiding and
in peril. His name is down among those accessory to the murder of the
King. The ear-cropped Prynne--who is now in Parliament, and who hates
Milton as Milton scorned Prynne--is very likely hounding on those who
would bring the great poet to judgment. ’Tis long matter of doubt. Past
his house near Red Lion Square the howling mob drag the bodies of Cromwell
and Ireton, and hang them in their dead ghastliness.
Milton, however, makes lucky escape, with only a short term of prison; but
for some time thereafter he was in fear of assassination. Such a
rollicking daredevil, as Scott in his story of _Woodstock_, has painted
for us in Roger Wildrake (of whom there were many afloat in those times)
would have liked no better fun than to run his rapier through such a man
as John Milton; and in those days he would have been pardoned for it.
That capital story of _Woodstock_ one should read when they are upon these
times of the Commonwealth. There are, indeed, anachronisms in it; kings
escaping too early or too late, or dying a little out of time to
accommodate the exigencies of the plot; but the characterization is
marvellously spirited; and you see the rakehelly cavaliers, and the fine
old king-ridden knights, and the sour-mouthed Independents, and the glare
and fumes and madness of the civil war, as you find them in few history
pages.
Milton, meanwhile, in his quiet home again, revolves his old project of a
great sacred poem. He taxes every visitor who can, to read to him in
Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Dutch. His bookly appetite is omnivorous. His
daughters have large share of this toil. Poor girls, they have been little
taught, and not wisely. They read what they read only by rote, and count
it severe task-work. Their mother is long since dead, and a second wife,
who lived only for a short time, dead too. We know very little of that
second wife; but she is embalmed forever in a sonnet, from which I steal
this fragment:--
“Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis from the grave;
…
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shin’d
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But oh, as to embrace me she inclined
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.”
The Miltonian reading and the work goes on, but affection, I fear, does
not dominate the household; the daughters overtasked, with few
indulgences, make little rebellions; and the blind, exacting old man is as
unforgiving as the law. Americans should take occasion to see the great
picture by Munkacsy, in the Lenox Gallery, New York, of Milton dictating
_Paradise Lost_; it is in itself a poem; a dim Puritan interior; light
coming through a latticed window and striking on the pale, something
cadaverous face of the old poet, who sits braced in his great armchair,
with lips set together, and the daughters, in awed attention, listening or
seeming to listen.
I am sorry there is so large room to doubt of the intellectual and
affectionate sympathy existing between them; nevertheless--that it did not
is soberly true; his own harsh speeches, which are of record, show it;
their petulant innuendoes, which are also of record, show it.
Into this clouded household--over which love does not brood so fondly as
we would choose to think--there comes sometimes, with helpfulness and
sympathy, a certain Andrew Marvell, who had been sometime assistant to
Milton in his official duties, and who takes his turn at the readings, and
sees only the higher and better lights that shine there; and he had
written sweet poems of his own, (to which I shall return) that have kept
his name alive, and that will keep it alive, I think, forever.
There comes also into this home, in these days, very much to the surprise
and angerment of the three daughters, a third wife to the old poet, after
some incredibly short courtship.[64] She is only seven years the senior of
the daughter Anne; but she seems to have been a sensible young person, not
bookishly given, and looking after the household, while Anne and Mary and
Deborah still wait, after a fashion, upon the student-wants of the poet.
In fits of high abstraction he is now bringing the “Paradise” to a
close--not knowing, or not caring, maybe, for the little bickerings which
rise and rage and die away in the one-sided home.
I cannot stay to characterize his great poem; nor is there need; immortal
in more senses than one; humanity counts for little in it; one pair of
human creatures only, and these looked at, as it were, through the big end
of the telescope; with gigantic, Godlike figures around one, or colossal
demons prone on fiery floods. It is not a child’s book; to place it in
schools as a parsing-book is an atrocity that I hope is ended. Not, I
think, till we have had some fifty years to view the everlasting fight
between good and evil in this world, can we see in proper perspective the
vaster battle which, under Milton’s imagination, was pictured in Paradise
between the same foes. Years only can so widen one’s horizon as to give
room for the reverberations of that mighty combat of the powers of light
and darkness.
We talk of the organ-music of Milton. The term has its special
significance; it gives hint of that large quality which opens heavenly
spaces with its billows of sound; which translates us; which gives us a
lookout from supreme heights, and so lifts one to the level of his
“Argument.” There is large learning in his great poem--weighty and
recondite; but this spoils no music; great, cumbrous names catch sonorous
vibrations under his modulating touch, and colossal shields and spears
clash together like cymbals. The whole burden of his knowledges--Pagan,
Christian, or Hebraic, lift up and sink away upon the undulations of his
sublime verse, as heavy-laden ships rise and fall upon some great
ground-swell making in from outer seas.
A bookish color is pervading; if he does not steal flowers from books, he
does what is better--he shows the fruit of them. There are stories of his
debt to Cædmon, and still more authentic, of his debt to the Dutch poet
Vondel,[65] and the old Provençal Bishop of Vienne,[66] who as early as
the beginning of the sixth century wrote on kindred themes. There is
hardly room for doubt that Milton not only knew, but literally translated
some of the old Bishop’s fine Latin lines, and put to his larger usage
some of his epithets.
Must we not admit that--in the light of such developments--when the
Puritan poet boasts of discoursing on
“Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,”
that it is due to a little lurking stimulant of that Original Sin which
put bitterness into his Salmasian papers, and an ugly arrogance into his
domestic discipline? But, after all, he was every way greater than his
forerunners, and can afford to admit Cædmon and Vondel and Avitus, and all
other claimants, as supporting columns in the underlying crypt upon which
was builded the great temple of his song.
_Last Days._
The home of Milton in these latter days of his life was often changed.
Now, it was Holborn again; then Jewin Street; then Bunhill Row; and--one
while--for a year or more, when the great plague of 1665 desolated the
city, he fled before it to the little village of Chalfont, some twenty
miles distant from London on the Aylesbury road. There the cottage[67] may
still be seen in which he lived, and the garden in which he walked--but
never saw. There, too, is the latticed window looking on the garden, at
which he sat hour by hour, with the summer winds blowing on him from over
honeysuckle beds, while he brooded, with sightless eyes turned to the sky,
upon the mysteries of fate and foreknowledge.
A young Quaker, Ellwood, perhaps his dearest friend, comes to see him
there, to read to him and to give a helping hand to the old man’s study;
his daughters, too, are at their helpful service; grateful, maybe, that
even the desolation of the plague has given a short relief from the dingy
house in the town and its treadmill labors, and put the joy of blooming
flowers and of singing birds into their withered hearts.
The year after, which finds them in Bunhill Row again, brings that great
London fire which the Monument now commemorates; they passing three days
and nights upon the edge of that huge tempest of flame and smoke which
devoured nearly two-thirds of London; the old poet hearing the din and
roar and crackle, and feeling upon his forehead the waves of fierce heat
and the showers of cinders--a scene and an experience which might have
given, perhaps, other color to his pictures of Pandemonium, if his great
poem had not been just now, in these fateful years, completed--completed
and bargained for; £20 were to be paid for it conditionally,[68] in four
payments of £5 each, at a day when London had been decimated by the
plague, and half the city was a waste of ruin and ashes. And to give an
added tint of blackness to the picture, we have to fancy his three
daughters leaving him, as they did, tired of tasks, tired of wrangling.
Anne, the infirm one, who neither read nor wrote, and Mary, so overworked,
and Deborah, the youngest (latterly being very helpful)--all desert him.
They never return. “Undutiful daughters,” he says to Ellwood; but I think
he does not soften toward them, even when gone. Poor, stern, old man! He
would have cut them off by will from their small shares of inheritance in
his estate; but the courts wisely overruled this. Anne, strangely enough,
married--dying shortly after; Mary died years later, a spinster; and
Deborah, who became Mrs. Clark, had some notice, thirty years later, when
it was discovered that a quiet woman of that name was Milton’s daughter.
But she seems to have been of a stolid make; no poetry, no high sense of
dignity belonging to her; a woman like ten thousand, whose descendants are
now said (doubtfully) to be living somewhere in India.
But Milton wrought on; his wife Betty, of whom he spoke more
affectionately than ever once of his daughters, humored his poor fagged
appetites of the table. _Paradise Regained_ was in hand; and later the
“Samson Agonistes.” His habits were regular; up at five o’clock; a chapter
of the Hebrew Bible read to him by his daughter Mary--what time she
stayed; an early breakfast, and quiet lonely contemplation after it (his
nephew tells us) till seven. Then work came, putting Quaker Ellwood to
helpful service, or whoever happened in, and could fathom the
reading--this lasting till mid-day dinner; afterward a walk in his garden
(when he had one) for two hours, in his old gray suit, in which many a
time passers-by saw him sitting at his door. There was singing in later
afternoon, when there was a voice to sing for him; and instrumental music,
when his, or a friendly hand touched the old organ. After supper, a pipe
and a glass of water; always persistently temperate; and then, night and
rest.
He attended no church in his later years, finding none in absolute
agreement with his beliefs; sympathizing with the Quakers to a certain
degree, with the orthodox Independents too; but flaming up at any
procrustean laws for faith; never giving over a certain tender love, I
think, for the organ-music and storied splendors of the Anglican Church;
but with a wild, broad freedom of thought chafing at any ecclesiastic law
made by man, that galled him or checked his longings. His clear, clean
intellect--not without its satiric jostlings and wrestlings--its
petulancies and caprices--sought and maintained, independently, its own
relation with God and the mysterious future.
Our amiable Dr. Channing, with excellent data before him, demonstrated his
good Unitarian faith; but though Milton might have approved his nice
reasonings, I doubt if he would have gone to church with him. He loved
liberty; he could not travel well in double harness, not even in his
household or with the elders. His exalted range of vision made light of
the little aids and lorgnettes which the conventional teachers held out to
him. Creeds and dogmas and vestments and canons, and all humanly
consecrated helps, were but Jack-o’-lanterns to him, who was swathed all
about with the glowing clouds of glory that rolled in upon his soul from
the infinite depths.
In the year 1674--he being then sixty-five years old--on a Sunday, late at
night, he died; and with so little pain that those who were with him did
not know when the end came. He was buried--not in the great cemetery of
Bunhill Fields, close by his house--but beside his father, in the old
parish church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where he had been used to go as a
boy, and where he had been used to hear the old burial Office for the
Dead--now intoned over his grave--“_Ashes to ashes, dust to dust_.” There
was no need for the monument erected to him there in recent years. His
poems make a monument that is read of all the world, and will be read in
all times of the world.