JOHN MILTON, AND THE ENGLISH COMMONWEALTH.
Historical Facts. Charles I. Religious Extremes. Cromwell. Birth and
Early Works. Views of Marriage. Other Prose Works. Effects of the
Restoration. Estimate of his Prose.
HISTORICAL FACTS.
It is Charles Lamb who says "Milton almost requires a solemn service to be
played before you enter upon him." Of Milton, the poet of _Paradise Lost_,
this is true; but for Milton the statesman the politician, and polemic,
this is neither necessary nor appropriate. John Milton and the
Commonwealth! Until the present age, Milton has been regarded almost
solely as a poet, and as the greatest imaginative poet England has
produced; but the translation and publication of his prose works have
identified him with the political history of England, and the discovery in
1823, of his _Treatise on Christian Doctrine_, has established him as one
of the greatest religious polemics in an age when every theological sect
was closely allied to a political party, and thus rendered the strife of
contending factions more bitter and relentless. Thus it is that the name
of John Milton, as an author, is fitly coupled with the commonwealth, as a
political condition.
It remains for us to show that in all his works he was the strongest
literary type of history in the age in which he lived. Great as he would
have been in any age, his greatness is mainly English and historical. In
his literary works may be traced every cardinal event in the history of
that period: he aided in the establishment of the Commonwealth, and of
that Commonwealth he was one of the principal characters. His pen was as
sharp and effective as the sabres of Cromwell's Ironsides.
A few words of preliminary history must introduce him to our reader. Upon
the death of Queen Elizabeth, in 1603, James I. ascended the throne with
the highest notions of kingly prerogative and of a church establishment;
but the progress of the English people in education and intelligence, the
advance in arts and letters which had been made, were vastly injurious to
the autocratic and aristocratic system which James had received from his
predecessor. His foolish arrogance and contempt for popular rights
incensed the people thus enlightened as to their own position and
importance. They soon began to feel that he was not only unjust, but
ungrateful: he had come from a rustic throne in Scotland, where he had
received £5,000 per annum, with occasional presents of fruits, grain, and
poultry, to the greatest throne in Europe; and, besides, the Stuart
family, according to Thackeray, "as regards mere lineage, were no better
than a dozen English and Scottish houses that could be named."
They resisted his illegal taxes and forced loans; they clamored against
the unconstitutional Court of High Commission; they despised his arrogant
favorites; and what they might have patiently borne from a gallant,
energetic, and handsome monarch, they found it hard to bear from a
pedantic, timid, uncouth, and rickety man, who gave them neither glory nor
comfort. His eldest son, Prince Henry, the universal favorite of the
nation, had died in 1612, before he was eighteen.
CHARLES I.--When, after a series of struggles with the parliament, which
he had reluctantly convened, James died in 1625, Charles I. came to an
inheritance of error and misfortune. Imbued with the principles of his
father, he, too, insisted upon "governing the people of England in the
seventeenth century as they had been governed in the sixteenth," while in
reality they had made a century of progress. The cloud increased in
blackness and portent; he dissolved the parliament, and ruled without one;
he imposed and collected illegal and doubtful taxes; he made forced loans,
as his father had done; he was artful, capricious, winding and doubling in
his policy; he made promises without intending to perform them; and found
himself, finally, at direct issue with his parliament and his people.
First at war with the political principles of the court, the nation soon
found itself in antagonism with the religion and morals of the court.
Before the final rupture, the two parties were well defined, as Cavaliers
and Roundheads: each party went to extremes, through the spite and fury of
mutual opposition. The Cavaliers affected a recklessness and dissoluteness
greater than they really felt to be right, in order to differ most widely
from those purists who, urged by analogous motives, decried all amusements
as evil. Each party repelled the other to the extreme of opposition.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMES.--Loyalty was opposed by radicalism, and the invectives
of both were bitter in the extreme. The system and ceremonial of a
gorgeous worship restored by Laud, and accused by its opposers of
formalism and idolatry, were attacked by a spirit of excess, which, to
religionize daily life, took the words of Scripture, and especially those
of the Old Testament, as the language of common intercourse, which issued
them from a gloomy countenance, with a nasal twang, and often with a false
interpretation.
As opposed to the genuflections of Laud and the pomp of his ritual, the
land swarmed with unauthorized preachers; then came out from among the
Presbyterians the Independents; the fifth-monarchy men, shouting for King
Jesus; the Seekers, the Antinomians, who, like Trusty Tomkins, were elect
by the fore-knowledge of God, who were not under the law but under grace,
and who might therefore gratify every lust, and give the rein to every
passion, because they were sealed to a certain salvation. Even in the army
sprang up the Levellers, who wished to abolish monarchy and aristocracy,
and to level all ranks to one. To each religious party, there was a
political character, ranging from High Church and the divine right of
kings, to absolute levellers in Church and State. This disintegrating
process threatened not only civil war, with well-defined parties, but
entire anarchy in the realm of England. It was long resisted by the
conservative men of all opinions. At length the issue came: the king was a
prisoner, without a shadow of power.
The parliament was still firm, and would have treated with the king by a
considerable majority; but Colonel Pride surrounded it with two regiments,
excluded more than two hundred of the Presbyterians and moderate men; and
the parliament, thus _purged_, appointed the High Court of Justice to try
the king for treason.
Charles I. fell before the storm. His was a losing cause from the day he
erected his standard at Nottingham, in 1642, to that on which, after his
noble bearing on the scaffold, the masked executioner held up his head and
cried out, "This is the head of a traitor."
With a fearful consistency the Commons voted soon after to abolish
monarchy and the upper house, and on their new seal inscribed, "On the
first year of freedom by God's blessing restored, 1648." The dispassionate
historian of the present day must condemn both parties; and yet, out of
this fierce travail of the nation, English constitutional liberty was
born.
CROMWELL.--The power which the parliament, under the dictation of the
army, had so furiously wielded, passed into the hands of Cromwell, a
mighty man, warrior, statesman, and fanatic, who mastered the crew, seized
the helm, and guided the ship of State as she drove furiously before the
wind. He became lord protector, a king in everything but the name. We
need not enter into an analysis of these parties: the history is better
known than any other part of the English annals, and almost every reader
becomes a partisan. Cromwell, the greatest man of his age, was still a
creature of the age, and was led by the violence of circumstances to do
many things questionable and even wicked, but with little premeditation:
like Rienzi and Napoleon, his sudden elevation fostered an ambition which
robbed him of the stern purpose and pure motives of his earlier career.
The establishment of the commonwealth seemed at first to assure the
people's liberty; but it was only in seeming, and as the sequel shows,
they liked the rule of the lord protector less than that of the
unfortunate king; for, ten years after the beheading of Charles I., they
restored the monarchy in the person of his son, Charles.
Such, very briefly and in mere outline, was the political situation. And
now to return to Milton: It is claimed that of all the elements of these
troublous times, he was the literary type, and this may be demonstrated--
I. By observing his personal characteristics and political
appointments;
II. By the study of his prose works; and
III. By analyzing his poems.
BIRTH AND EARLY WORKS.--John Milton was born on the 9th of December, 1608,
in London. His grandfather, John Mylton, was a Papist, who disinherited
his son, the poet's father, for becoming a Church-of-England man. His
mother was a gentlewoman. Milton was born just in time to grow up with the
civil troubles. When the outburst came in 1642, he was thirty-four years
old, a solemn, cold, studious, thoughtful, and dogmatic Puritan. In 1624
he entered Christ College, Cambridge, where, from his delicate and
beautiful face and shy airs, he was called the "Lady of the College." It
is said that he left the university on account of peculiar views in
theology and politics; but eight years after, in 1632, he took his degree
as master of arts. Meanwhile, in December, 1629, he had celebrated his
twenty-first birthday, when the Star of Bethlehem was coming into the
ascendant, with that pealing, organ-like hymn, "On the Eve of Christ's
Nativity"--the worthiest poetic tribute ever laid by man, along with the
gold, frankincense, and myrrh of the Eastern sages, at the feet of the
Infant God:
See how from far upon the Eastern road,
The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet;
O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,
And lay it lowly at his blessed feet;
Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,
And join thy voice unto the angel choir,
From out his secret altar touched with hallowed fire.
Some years of travel on the Continent matured his mind, and gave full
scope to his poetic genius. At Paris he became acquainted with Grotius,
the illustrious writer upon public law; and in Rome, Genoa, Florence, and
other Italian cities, he became intimate with the leading minds of the
age. He returned to England on account of the political troubles.
MILTON'S VIEWS OF MARRIAGE.--In the consideration of Milton's personality,
we do not find in him much to arouse our heart-sympathy. His opinions
concerning marriage and divorce, as set forth in several of his prose
writings, would, if generally adopted, destroy the sacred character of
divinely appointed wedlock. His views may be found in his essay on _The
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce;_ in his _Tetrachordon, or the four
chief places in Scripture, which treat of Marriage, or Nullities in
Marriage_; in his _Colasterion_, and in his translation of Martin Bucer's
_Judgment Concerning Divorce_, addressed to the Parliament of England.
Where women were concerned he was a hard man and a stern master.
In 1643 he married Mary Powell, the daughter of a Cavalier; and, taking
her from the gay life of her father's house, he brought her into a gloom
and seclusion almost insupportable. He loved his books better than he did
his wife. He fed and sheltered her, indeed, but he gave her no tender
sympathy. Then was enacted in his household the drama of the rebellion in
miniature; and no doubt his domestic troubles had led to his extended
discussion of the question of divorce. He speaks, too, almost entirely in
the interest of husbands. With him woman is not complementary to man, but
his inferior, to be cherished if obedient, to minister to her husband's
welfare, but to have her resolute spirit broken after the manner of
Petruchio, the shrew-tamer. In all this, however, Milton was eminently a
type of the times. It was the canon law of the established Church of
England at which he aimed, and he endeavored to lead the parliament to
legislation upon the most sacred ties and relations of human life.
Happily, English morals were too strong, even in that turbulent period, to
yield to this unholy attempt. It was a day when authority was questioned,
a day for "extending the area of freedom," but he went too far even for
emancipated England; and the mysterious power of the marriage tie has
always been reverenced as one of the main bulwarks of that righteousness
which exalteth a nation.
His apology for Smectymnuus is one of his pamphlets against Episcopacy,
and receives its title from the initial letters of the names of five
Puritan ministers, who also engaged in controversy: they were Stephen
Marshall, Edward Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcome, William Spenston.
The Church of England never had a more intelligent and relentless enemy
than John Milton.
OTHER PROSE WORKS.--Milton's prose works are almost all of them of an
historical character. Appointed Latin Secretary to the Council, he wrote
foreign dispatches and treatises upon the persons and events of the day.
In 1644 he published his _Areopagitica_, a noble paper in favor of
_Unlicensed Printing_, and boldly directed against the Presbyterian party,
then in power, which had continued and even increased the restraints upon
the press. No stouter appeal for the freedom of the press was ever heard,
even in America. But in the main, his prose pen was employed against the
crown and the Church, while they still existed; against the king's memory,
after the unfortunate monarch had fallen, and in favor of the parliament
and all its acts. Milton was no trimmer; he gave forth no uncertain sound;
he was partisan to the extreme, and left himself no loop-hole of retreat
in the change that was to come.
A famous book appeared in 1649, not long after Charles's execution,
proclaimed to have been written by King Charles while in prison, and
entitled _Eikon Basilike_, or _The Kingly Image_, being the portraiture of
his majesty in his solitude and suffering. It was supposed that it might
influence the people in favor of royalty, and so Milton was employed to
answer it in a bitter invective, an unnecessary and heartless attack upon
the dead king, entitled _Eikonoklastes_, or _The Image-breaker_. The Eikon
was probably in part written by the king, and in part by Bishop Gauden,
who indeed claimed its authorship after the Restoration.
Salmasius having defended Charles in a work of dignified and moderate
tone, Milton answered in his first _Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_; in
which he traverses the whole ground of popular rights and kingly
prerogative, in a masterly and eloquent manner. This was followed by a
second _Defensio_. For the two he received £1,000, and by his own account
accelerated the disease of the eyes which ended in complete blindness.
No pen in England worked more powerfully than his in behalf of the
parliament and the protectorate, or to stay the flood tide of loyalty,
which bore upon its sweeping heart the restoration of the second Charles.
He wrote the last foreign despatches of Richard Cromwell, the weak
successor of the powerful Oliver; but nothing could now avail to check the
return of monarchy. The people were tired of turmoil and sick of blood;
they wanted rest, at any cost. The powerful hand of Cromwell was removed,
and astute Monk used his army to secure his reward. The army, concurring
with the popular sentiment, restored the Stuarts. The conduct of the
English people in bringing Charles back stamped Cromwell as a usurper, and
they have steadily ignored in their list of governors--called
monarchs--the man through whose efforts much of their liberty had been
achieved; but history asserts itself, and the benefits of the "Great
Rebellion" are gratefully acknowledged by the people, whether the
protectorate appears in the court list or not.
THE EFFECT OF THE RESTORATION.--Charles II. came back to such an
overwhelming reception, that he said, in his witty way, it must have been
his own fault to stay away so long from a people who were so glad to see
him when he did come. This restoration forced Milton into concealment: his
public day was over, and yet his remaining history is particularly
interesting. Inheriting weak eyes from his mother, he had overtasked their
powers, especially in writing the _Defensiones_, and had become entirely
blind. Although his person was included in the general amnesty, his
polemical works were burned by the hangman; and the pen that had so
powerfully battled for a party, now returned to the service of its first
love, poetry. His loss of power and place was the world's gain. In his
forced seclusion, he produced the greatest of English poems--religious,
romantic, and heroic.
ESTIMATE OF HIS PROSE.--Before considering his poems, we may briefly state
some estimate of his prose works. They comprise much that is excellent,
are full of learning, and contain passages of rarest rhetoric. He said
himself, that in prose he had only "the use of his left hand;" but it was
the left hand of a Milton. To the English scholar they are chiefly of
historical value: many of them are written in Latin, and lose much of
their terseness in a translation which retains classical peculiarities of
form and phrase.
His _History of England from the Earliest Times_ is not profound, nor
philosophical; he followed standard chronicle authorities, but made few,
if any, original investigations, and gives us little philosophy. His
tractate on _Education_ contains peculiar views of a curriculum of study,
but is charmingly written. He also wrote a treatise on _Logic_. Little
known to the great world outside of his poems, there is one prose work,
discovered only in 1823, which has been less read, but which contains the
articles of his Christian belief. It is a tractate on Christian doctrine:
no one now doubts its genuineness; and it proves him to have been a
Unitarian, or High Arian, by his own confession. This was somewhat
startling to the great orthodox world, who had taken many of their
conceptions of supernatural things from Milton's _Paradise Lost_; and yet
a careful study of that poem will disclose similar tendencies in the
poet's mind. He was a Puritan whose theology was progressive until it
issued in complete isolation: he left the Presbyterian ranks for the
Independents, and then, startled by the rise and number of sects, he
retired within himself and stood almost alone, too proud to be instructed,
and dissatisfied with the doctrines and excesses of his earlier
colleagues.
In 1653 he lost his wife, Mary Powell, who left him three daughters. He
supplied her place in 1656, by marrying Catherine Woodstock, to whom he
was greatly attached, and who also died fifteen months after. Eight years
afterward he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, who survived him.