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"Great Writers."
EDITED BY
PROFESSOR ERIC S. ROBERTSON, M.A.
* * * * *
_LIFE OF MILTON._
LIFE
OF
JOHN MILTON
BY
RICHARD GARNETT, LL.D.
LONDON
WALTER SCOTT, 24, WARWICK LANE
1890
(_All rights reserved._)
NOTE.
The number of miniature "Lives" of Milton is great; great also is the
merit of some of them. With one exception, nevertheless, they are all
dismissed to the shelf by the publication of Professor Masson's
monumental and authoritative biography, without perpetual reference to
which no satisfactory memoir can henceforth be composed. One recent
biography has enjoyed this advantage. Its author, the late Mark
Pattison, wanted neither this nor any other qualification except a
keener sense of the importance of the religious and political
controversies of Milton's time. His indifference to matters so momentous
in Milton's own estimation has, in our opinion, vitiated his conception
of his hero, who is represented as persistently yielding to party what
was meant for mankind. We think, on the contrary, that such a mere man
of letters as Pattison wishes that Milton had been, could never have
produced a "Paradise Lost." If this view is well-founded, there is not
only room but need for yet another miniature "Life of Milton,"
notwithstanding the intellectual subtlety and scholarly refinement
which render Pattison's memorable. It should be noted that the recent
German biography by Stern, if adding little to Professor Masson's facts,
contributes much valuable literary illustration; and that Keighley's
analysis of Milton's opinions occupies a position of its own, of which
no subsequent biographical discoveries can deprive it. The present
writer has further to express his deep obligations to Professor Masson
for his great kindness in reading and remarking upon the proofs--not
thereby rendering himself responsible for anything in these pages; and
also to the helpful friend who has provided him with an index.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. 11
Milton born in Bread Street, Cheapside, December 9, 1608;
condition of English literature at his birth; part in its
development assigned to him; materials available for his
biography; his ancestry; his father; influences that surrounded
his boyhood; enters St. Paul's School, 1620; distinguished for
compositions in prose and verse; matriculates at Cambridge, 1625;
condition of the University at the period; his misunderstandings
with his tutor; graduates B.A., 1629, M.A., 1632; his relations
with the University; declines to take orders or follow a
profession; his first poems; retires to Horton, in
Buckinghamshire, where his father had settled, 1632
CHAPTER II. 35
Horton, its scenery and associations with Milton; Milton's studies
and poetical aspirations; exceptional nature of his poetical
development; his Latin poems; "Arcades" and "Comus" composed and
represented at the instance of Henry Lawes, 1633 and 1634; "Comus"
printed in 1637; Sir Henry Wootton's opinion of it; "Lycidas"
written in the same year, on occasion of the death of Edward King;
published in 1638; criticism on "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso,"
"Lycidas" and "Comus"; Milton's departure for Italy, April, 1638.
CHAPTER III. 57
State of Italy at the period of Milton's visit; his acquaintance
with Italian literati at Florence; visit to Galileo; at Rome and
Naples; returns to England, July, 1639; settles in St. Bride's
Churchyard, and devotes himself to the education of his nephews;
his elegy on his friend Diodati; removes to Aldersgate Street,
1640; his pamphlets on ecclesiastical affairs, 1641 and 1642; his
tract on Education his "Areopagitica," November, 1644; attacks the
Presbyterians.
CHAPTER IV. 83
Milton as a Parliamentarian; his sonnet, "When the Assault was
intended to the City," November, 1642; goes on a visit to the
Powell family in Oxfordshire, and returns with Mary Powell as his
wife, May and June, 1643; his domestic unhappiness; Mary Milton
leaves him, and refuses to return, July to September, 1643;
publication of his "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," August,
1643, and February, 1644; his father comes to live with him; he
takes additional pupils; his system of education; he courts the
daughter of Dr. Davis; his wife, alarmed, returns, and is
reconciled to him, August, 1645; he removes to the Barbican,
September, 1645; publication of his collected poems, January,
1646; he receives his wife's relatives under his roof; death of
his father, March, 1647; he writes "The Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates," February, 1649; becomes Latin Secretary to the
Commonwealth, March, 1649.
CHAPTER V. 104
Milton's duties as Latin Secretary; he drafts manifesto on the
state of Ireland; occasionally employed as licenser of the press;
commissioned to answer "Eikon Basilike"; controversy on the
authorship of this work; Milton's "Eikonoklastes" published,
October, 1649; Salmasius and his "Defensio Regia pro Carolo I.";
Milton undertakes to answer Salmasius, February, 1650; publication
of his "Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio," March, 1651; character and
complete controversial success of this work; Milton becomes
totally blind, March, 1652; his wife dies, leaving him three
daughters, May, 1652; his controversy with Morus and other
defenders of Salmasius, 1652-1655; his characters of the eminent
men of the Commonwealth; adheres to Cromwell; his views on
politics; general character of his official writings: his marriage
to Elizabeth Woodcock, and death of his wife, November,
1656-March, 1658; his nephews; his friends and recreations.
CHAPTER VI. 128
Milton's poetical projects after his return from Italy; drafts of
"Paradise Lost" among them; the poem originally designed as a
masque or miracle-play; commenced as an epic in 1658; its
composition speedily interrupted by ecclesiastical and political
controversies; Milton's "Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical
Causes," and "Considerations on the likeliest means to remove
Hirelings out of the Church"; Royalist reaction in the winter of
1659-60; Milton writes his "Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free
Commonwealth"; conceals himself in anticipation of the
Restoration, May 7, 1660; his writings ordered to be burned by the
hangman, June 16; escapes proscription, nevertheless; arrested by
the Serjeant-at-Arms, but released by order of the Commons,
December 15; removes to Holborn; his pecuniary losses and
misfortunes; the undutiful behaviour of his daughters; marries
Elizabeth Minshull, February, 1663; lives successively in Jewin
Street and in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields; particulars of his
private life; "Paradise Lost" completed in or about 1663;
agreement for its publication with Samuel Symmons; difficulties
with the licenser; poem published in August, 1667.
CHAPTER VII. 152
Place of "Paradise Lost" among the great epics of the world; not
rendered obsolete by changes in belief; the inevitable defects of
its plan compensated by the poet's vital relation to the religion
of his age; Milton's conception of the physical universe; his
theology; magnificence of his poetry; his similes; his
descriptions of Paradise; inevitable falling off of the later
books; minor critical objections mostly groundless; his diction;
his indebtedness to other poets for thoughts as well as phrases;
this is not plagiarism; his versification; his Satan compared with
Calderon's Lucifer; plan of his epic, whether in any way suggested
by Andreini, Vondel, or Ochino; his majestic and unique position
in English poetry.
CHAPTER VIII. 173
Milton's migration to Chalfont St. Giles to escape the plague in
London, July, 1665; subject of "Paradise Regained" suggested to
him by the Quaker Ellwood; his losses by the Great Fire, 1666;
first edition of "Paradise Lost" entirely sold by April, 1669;
"Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes" published, 1671;
criticism on these poems; Samson partly a personification of
Milton himself, partly of the English people; Milton's life in
Bunhill Fields; his daughters live apart from him; Dryden adapts
"Paradise Lost" as an opera; Milton's "History of Britain," 1670;
second editions of his poems, 1673, and of "Paradise Lost," 1674;
his "Treatise on Christian Doctrine"; fate of the manuscript;
Milton's mature religious opinions; his death and burial, 1674;
subsequent history of his widow and descendants; his personal
character.
INDEX 199
LIFE OF MILTON.
CHAPTER I.
John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, when Shakespeare had lately
produced "Antony and Cleopatra," when Bacon was writing his "Wisdom of
the Ancients" and Ralegh his "History of the World," when the English
Bible was hastening into print; when, nevertheless, in the opinion of
most foreigners and many natives, England was intellectually unpolished,
and her literature almost barbarous.
The preposterousness of this judgment as a whole must not blind us to
the fragment of truth which it included. England's literature was, in
many respects, very imperfect and chaotic. Her "singing masons" had
already built her "roofs of gold"; Hooker and one or two other great
prose-writers stood like towers: but the less exalted portions of the
edifice were still half hewn. Some literatures, like the Latin and the
French, rise gradually to the crest of their perfection; others, like
the Greek and the English, place themselves almost from the first on
their loftiest pinnacle, leaving vast gaps to be subsequently filled in.
Homer was not less the supreme poet because history was for him
literally an old song, because he would have lacked understanding for
Plato and relish for Aristophanes. Nor were Shakespeare and the
translators of the Bible less at the head of European literature because
they must have failed as conspicuously as Homer would have failed in all
things save those to which they had a call, which chanced to be the
greatest. Literature, however, cannot remain isolated at such altitudes,
it must expand or perish. As Homer's epic passed through Pindar and the
lyrical poets into drama history and philosophy, continually fitting
itself more and more to become an instrument in the ordinary affairs of
life, so it was needful that English lettered discourse should become
popular and pliant, a power in the State as well as in the study. The
magnitude of the change, from the time when the palm of popularity
decorated Sidney's "Arcadia" to that when it adorned Defoe and Bunyan,
would impress us even more powerfully if the interval were not engrossed
by a colossal figure, the last of the old school in the erudite
magnificence of his style in prose and verse; the first of the new,
inasmuch as English poetry, hitherto romantic, became in his hands
classical. This "splendid bridge from the old world to the new," as
Gibbon has been called in a different connection, was John Milton: whose
character and life-work, carefully analyzed, resolve themselves into
pairs of equally vivid contrasts. A stern Puritan, he is none the less a
freethinker in the highest and best sense of the term. The recipient of
direct poetical inspiration in a measure vouchsafed to few, he
notwithstanding studies to make himself a poet; writes little until no
other occupation than writing remains to him; and, in general, while
exhibiting even more than the usual confidence, shows less than the
usual exultation and affluence of conscious genius. Professing to
recognize his life's work in poetry, he nevertheless suffers himself to
be diverted for many a long year into political and theological
controversy, to the scandal and compassion of one of his most competent
and attached biographers. Whether this biographer is right or wrong, is
a most interesting subject for discussion. We deem him wrong, and shall
not cease to reiterate that Milton would not have been Milton if he
could have forgotten the citizen in the man of letters. Happy, at all
events, it is that this and similar problems occupy in Milton's life the
space which too frequently has to be spent upon the removal of
misconception, or the refutation of calumny. Little of a sordid sort
disturbs the sentiment of solemn reverence with which, more even than
Shakespeare's, his life is approached by his countrymen; a feeling
doubtless mainly due to the sacred nature of his principal theme, but
equally merited by the religious consecration of his whole existence. It
is the easier for the biographer to maintain this reverential attitude,
inasmuch as the prayer of Agur has been fulfilled in him, he has been
given neither poverty nor riches. He is not called upon to deal with an
enormous mass of material, too extensive to arrange, yet too important
to neglect. Nor is he, like Shakespeare's biographer, reduced to choose
between the starvation of nescience and the windy diet of conjecture. If
a humbling thought intrudes, it is how largely he is indebted to a
devoted diligence he never could have emulated; how painfully Professor
Masson's successors must resemble the Turk who builds his cabin out of
Grecian or Roman ruins.
Milton's genealogy has taxed the zeal and acumen of many investigators.
He himself merely claims a respectable ancestry (_ex genere honesto_).
His nephew Phillips professed to have come upon the root of the family
tree at Great Milton, in Oxfordshire, where tombs attested the residence
of the clan, and tradition its proscription and impoverishment in the
Wars of the Roses. Monuments, station, and confiscation have vanished
before the scrutiny of the Rev. Joseph Hunter; it can only be safely
concluded that Milton's ancestors dwelt in or near the village of
Holton, by Shotover Forest, in Oxfordshire, and that their rank in life
was probably that of yeomen. Notwithstanding Aubrey's statement that
Milton's grandfather's name was John, Mr. Hyde Clarke's researches in
the registers of the Scriveners' Company have proved that Mr. Hunter and
Professor Masson were right in identifying him with Richard Milton, of
Stanton St. John, near Holton; and Professor Masson has traced the
family a generation further back to Henry Milton, whose will, dated
November 21, 1558, attests a condition of plain comfort, nearer poverty
than riches. Henry Milton's goods at his death were inventoried at £6
19s.; when his widow's will is proved, two years afterwards, the
estimate is £7 4s. 4d. Richard, his son, is stated, but not proved, to
have been an under-ranger of Shotover Forest. He appears to have married
a widow named Jeffrey, whose maiden name had been Haughton, and who had
some connection with a Cheshire family of station. He would also seem to
have improved his circumstances by the match, which may account for the
superior education of his son John, whose birth is fixed by an affidavit
to 1562 or 1563. Aubrey, indeed, next to Phillips and Milton himself,
the chief contemporary authority, says that he was for a time at Christ
Church, Oxford--a statement in itself improbable, but slightly confirmed
by his apparent acquaintance with Latin, and the family tradition that
his course of life was diverted by a quarrel with his father. Queen
Mary's stakes and faggots had not affected Richard Milton as they
affected most Englishmen. Though churchwarden in 1582, he must have
continued to adhere to the ancient faith, for he was twice fined for
recusancy in 1601, which lends credit to the statement that his son was
cast off by him for Protestantism. "Found him reading the Bible in his
chamber," says Aubrey, who adds that the younger Milton never was a
scrivener's apprentice; but this is shown to be an error by Mr. Hyde
Clarke's discovery of his admission to the Scriveners' Company in 1599,
where he is stated to have been apprentice to James Colborn. Colborn
himself had been only four years in business, instead of the seven which
would usually be required for an apprentice to serve out his
indenture--which suggests that some formalities may have been dispensed
with on account of John Milton's age. A scrivener was a kind of cross
between an attorney and a law stationer, whose principal business was
the preparation of deeds, "to be well and truly done after my learning,
skill, and science," and with due regard to the interests of more
exalted personages. "Neither for haste nor covetousness I shall take
upon me to make any deed whereof I have not cunning, without good advice
and information of counsel." Such a calling offered excellent
opportunities for investments; and John Milton, a man of strict
integrity and frugality, came to possess a "plentiful estate." Among his
possessions was the house in Bread Street destroyed in the Great Fire.
The tenement where the poet was born, being a shop, required a sign, for
which he chose The Spread Eagle, either from the crest of such among the
Miltons as had a right to bear arms, among whom he may have reckoned
himself; or as the device of the Scriveners' Company. He had been
married about 1600 to a lady whose name has been but lately ascertained
to have been Sarah Jeffrey. John Milton the younger was the third of six
children, only three of whom survived infancy. He grew up between a
sister, Anne, several years older, and a brother, Christopher, seven
years younger than himself.
Milton's birth and nurture were thus in the centre of London; but the
London of that day had not half the population of the Liverpool of ours.
Even now the fragrance of the hay in far-off meadows may be inhaled in
Bread Street on a balmy summer's night; then the meadows were near the
doors, and the undefiled sky was reflected by an unpolluted stream.
There seems no reason to conclude that Milton, in his early boyhood,
enjoyed any further opportunities of resort to rural scenery than the
vicinity of London could afford; but if the city is his native element,
natural beauty never appeals to him in vain. Yet the influences which
moulded his childhood must have been rather moral and intellectual than
merely natural:--
"The starlight smile of children, the sweet looks
Of women, the fair breast from which I fed,"
played a greater part in the education of this poet than
"The murmur of the unreposing brooks,
And the green light which, shifting overhead,
Some tangled bower of vines around me shed,
The shells on the sea-sand, and the wild flowers."
Paramount to all other influences must have been the character of his
father, a "mute" but by no means an "inglorious" Milton, the preface and
foreshadowing of the son. His great step in life had set the son the
example from which the latter never swerved, and from him the younger
Milton derived not only the independence of thought which was to lead
him into moral and social heresy, and the fidelity to principle which
was to make him the Abdiel of the Commonwealth, but no mean share of his
poetical faculty also. His mastery of verbal harmony was but a new phase
of his father's mastery of music, which he himself recognizes as the
complement of his own poetical gift:--
"Ipse volens Phoebus se dispertire duobus,
Altera dona mihi, dedit altera dona parenti."
As a composer, the circumspect, and, as many no doubt thought prosaic
scrivener, took rank among the best of his day. One of his
compositions, now lost, was rewarded with a gold medal by a Polish
prince (Aubrey says the Landgrave of Hesse), and he appears among the
contributors to _The Triumphs of Oriana_, a set of twenty-five madrigals
composed in honour of Queen Elizabeth. "The Teares and Lamentations of a
Sorrowful Soule"--dolorous sacred songs, Professor Masson calls
them--were, according to their editor, the production of "famous
artists," among whom Byrd, Bull, Dowland, Orlando Gibbons, certainly
figure, and three of them were composed by the elder Milton. He also
harmonized the Norwich and York psalm tunes, which were adapted to six
of the Psalms in Ravenscroft's Collection. Such performance bespeaks not
only musical accomplishment, but a refined nature; and we may well
believe that Milton's love of learning, as well as his love of music,
was hereditary in its origin, and fostered by his contact with his
father. Aubrey distinctly affirms that Milton's skill on the organ was
directly imparted to him by his father, and there would be nothing
surprising if the first rudiments of knowledge were also instilled by
him. Poetry he may have taught by precept, but the one extant specimen
of his Muse is enough to prove that he could never have taught it by
example.
We have therefore to picture Milton growing up in a narrow street amid a
strict Puritan household, but not secluded from the influences of nature
or uncheered by melodious recreations; and tenderly watched over by
exemplary parents--a mother noted, he tells us, for her charities among
her neighbours, and a father who had discerned his promise from the very
first. Given this perception in the head of a religious household, it
almost followed in that age that the future poet should receive the
education of a divine. Happily, the sacerdotal caste had ceased to
exist, and the education of a clergyman meant not that of a priest, but
that of a scholar. Milton was instructed daily, he says, both at grammar
schools and under private masters, "as my age would suffer," he adds, in
acknowledgment of his father's considerateness. Like Disraeli two
centuries afterwards (perhaps the single point of resemblance), he went
for schooling to a Nonconformist in Essex, "who," says Aubrey, "cut his
hair short." His own hair? or his pupil's? queries Biography. We boldly
reply, Both. Undoubtedly Milton's hair is short in the miniature painted
of him at the age of ten by, as is believed, Cornelius Jansen. A
thoughtful little face, that of a well-nurtured, towardly boy; lacking
the poetry and spirituality of the portrait of eleven years later, where
the long hair flows down upon the ruff.
After leaving his Essex pedagogue, Milton came under the private tuition
of Thomas Young, a Scotchman from St. Andrews, who afterwards rose to be
master of Jesus College, Cambridge. It would appear from the elegies
subsequently addressed to him by his pupil that he first taught Milton
to write Latin verse. This instruction was no doubt intended to be
preliminary to the youth's entrance at St. Paul's School, where he must
have been admitted by 1620 at the latest.
At the time of Milton's entry, St. Paul's stood high among the schools
of the metropolis, competing with Merchant Taylors', Westminster, and
the now extinct St. Anthony's. The headmaster, Dr. Gill, was an
admirable scholar, though, as Aubrey records, "he had his whipping
fits." His fitful severity was probably more tolerable than the
systematic cruelty of his predecessor Mulcaster (Spenser's schoolmaster
when he presided over Merchant Taylors'), of whom Fuller approvingly
records: "Atropos might be persuaded to pity as soon as he to pardon
where he found just fault. The prayers of cockering mothers prevailed
with him as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing
than mitigating his severity on their offending children." Milton's
father, though by no means "cockering," would not have tolerated such
discipline, and the passionate ardour with which Milton threw himself
into the studious life of the school is the best proof that he was
exempt from tyranny. "From the twelfth year of my age," he says, "I
scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight." The ordinary
school tasks cannot have exacted so much time from so gifted a boy: he
must have read largely outside the regular curriculum, and probably he
practised himself diligently in Latin verse. For this he would have the
prompting, and perhaps the aid, of the younger Gill, assistant to his
father, who, while at the University, had especially distinguished
himself by his skill in versification. Gill must also have been a man of
letters, affable and communicative, for Milton in after-years reminds
him of their "almost constant conversations," and declares that he had
never left his company without a manifest accession of literary
knowledge. The Latin school exercises have perished, but two English
productions of the period, paraphrases of Psalms executed at fifteen,
remain to attest the boy's proficiency in contemporary English
literature. Some of the unconscious borrowings attributed to him are
probably mere coincidences, but there is still enough to evince
acquaintance with "Sylvester, Spenser, Drummond, Drayton, Chaucer,
Fairfax, and Buchanan." The literary merit of these versions seems to us
to have been underrated. There may be no individual phrase beyond the
compass of an apt and sensitive boy with a turn for verse-making; but
the general tone is masculine and emphatic. There is not much to say,
but what is said is delivered with a "large utterance," prophetic of the
"os magna soniturum," and justifying his own report of his youthful
promise:--"It was found that whether aught was imposed me by them that
had the overlooking, or betaken to of mine own choice, in English or
other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly by this latter, the style,
by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live."
Among the incidents of Milton's life at St. Paul's School should not be
forgotten his friendship with Charles Diodati, the son of a Genevese
physician settled in England, whose father had been exiled from Italy
for his Protestantism. A friendship memorable not only as Milton's
tenderest and his first, but as one which quickened his instinctive love
of Italian literature, enhanced the pleasure, if it did not suggest the
undertaking, of his Italian pilgrimage, and doubtless helped to inspire
the execration which he launched in after years against the slayers of
the Vaudois. The Italian language is named by him among three which,
about the time of his migration to the University, he had added to the
classical and the vernacular, the other two being French and Hebrew. It
has been remarked, however, that his use of "Penseroso," incorrect both
in orthography and signification, shows that prior to his visit to Italy
he was unacquainted with the niceties of the language. He entered as "a
lesser pensioner" at Christ's College, Cambridge, on February 12, 1625;
the greatest poetic name in an University roll already including
Spenser, and destined to include Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Byron, and Tennyson. Why Oxford was not preferred has been much debated.
The father may have taken advice from the younger Gill, whose Liberalism
had got him into trouble at that University. He may also have been
unwilling to place his son in the neighbourhood of his estranged
relatives. Shortly before Milton's matriculation his sister had married
Mr. Edward Phillips, of the office of the Clerk of the Crown, now
abolished, then charged with the issue of Parliamentary and judicial
writs. From this marriage were to spring the young men who were to find
an instructor in Milton, as he in one of them a biographer.
The external aspect of Milton's Cambridge is probably not ill
represented by Lyne's coloured map of half a century earlier, now
exhibited in the King's Library at the British Museum. Piles of stately
architecture, from King's College Chapel downward, tower all about, over
narrow, tortuous, pebble-paved streets, bordered with diminutive,
white-fronted, red-tiled dwellings, mere dolls' houses in comparison. So
modest, however, is the chartographer's standard, that a flowery Latin
inscription assures the men of Cambridge they need but divert
Trumpington Brook into Clare Ditch to render their town as elegant as
any in the universe. Sheep and swine perambulate the environs, and green
spaces are interspersed among the colleges, sparsely set with trees, so
pollarded as to justify Milton's taunt when in an ill-humour with his
university:--
"Nuda nec arva placent, umbrasque negantia molles,
Quam male Phoebicolis convenit ille locus!"
His own college stands conspicuous at the meeting of three ways, aptly
suggestive of Hecate and infernal things. Its spiritual and intellectual
physiognomy, and that of the university in general, must be learned from
the exhaustive pages of Professor Masson. A book unpublished when he
wrote, Ball's life of Dr. John Preston, Master of Emmanuel, vestige of
an entire continent of submerged Puritanism, also contributes much to
the appreciation of the place and time. We can here but briefly
characterize the University as an institution undergoing modification,
rather by the decay of the old than by the intrusion of the new. The
revolution by which mathematics became the principal instrument of
culture was still to be deferred forty years. Milton, who tells us that
he delighted in mathematics, might have been nearly ignorant of that
subject if he pleased, and hardly could become proficient in it by the
help of his Alma Mater. The scholastic philosophy, however, still
reigned. But even here tradition was shaky and undermined; and in
matters of discipline the rigid code which nominally governed the
University was practically much relaxed. The teaching staff was
respectable in character and ability, including many future bishops. But
while the academical credentials of the tutors were unimpeachable,
perhaps not one among them all could show a commission from the Spirit.
No one then at Cambridge seems to have been in the least degree capable
of arousing enthusiasm. It might not indeed have been easy for a Newman
or a Green to captivate the independent soul of Milton, even at this
susceptible period of his life; failing any approach to such external
influence, he would be likely to leave Cambridge the same man as he
entered it. Ere, indeed, he had completed a year's residence, his
studies were interrupted by a temporary rupture with the University,
probably attributable to his having been at first placed under an
uncongenial tutor. William Chappell was an Arminian and a tool of Laud,
who afterwards procured him preferment in Ireland, and, as Professor
Masson judges from his treatise on homiletics, "a man of dry, meagre
nature." His relations with such a pupil could not well be harmonious;
and Aubrey charges him with unkindness, a vague accusation rendered
tangible by the interlined gloss, "Whipt him." Hence the legend, so dear
to Johnson, that Milton was the last man to be flogged at college. But
Aubrey can hardly mean anything more than that Chappell on some occasion
struck or beat his pupil, and this interpretation is supported by
Milton's verses to Diodati, written in the spring of 1626, in which,
while acknowledging that he had been directed to withdraw from Cambridge
("_nec dudum vetiti me laris angit amor_") he expresses his intention
of speedily returning:--
"Stat quoque juncosas Cami remeare paludes,
Atque iterum raucae murmur adire scholae."
A short rustication would be just the notice the University would be
likely to take of the conduct of a pupil who had been engaged in a
scuffle with his tutor, in which the fault was not wholly or chiefly
his. Formal corporal punishment would have rendered rustication
unnecessary. That Milton was not thought wholly in the wrong appears
from his not having been mulcted of a term's residence, his absence
notwithstanding, and from the still more significant fact that Chappell
lost his pupil. His successor was Nathaniel Tovey, in whom his
patroness, the Countess of Bedford, had discerned "excellent talent."
What Milton thought of him there is nothing to show.
This temporary interruption of the smoothness of Milton's University
life occurred, as has been seen, quite early in its course. Had it
indeed implied a stigma upon him or the University, the blot would in
either case have been effaced by the perfect regularity of his
subsequent career. He went steadily through the academic course, which
to attain the degree of Master of Arts, then required seven years'
residence. He graduated as Bachelor at the proper time, March, 1629, and
proceeded Master in July, 1632. His general relations with the
University during the period may be gathered partly from his own account
in after years, when perhaps he in some degree "confounded the present
feelings with the past," partly from a remarkable passage in one of his
academical exercises, fortunately preserved to us, the importance of
which was first discerned by his editor and biographer Mitford.
Professor Masson, however, ascertained the date, which is all important.
We must picture Milton "affable, erect, and manly," as Wood describes
him, speaking from a low pulpit in the hall of Christ's College, to an
audience of various standing, from grave doctors to skittish
undergraduates, with most of whom he was in daily intercourse. The term
is the summer of 1628, about nine months before his graduation; the
words were Latin, but we resort to the version of Professor Masson:--
"Then also there drew and invited me, in no ordinary degree, to
undertake this part your very recently discovered graciousness to
me. For when, some few months ago, I was about to perform an
oratorical office before you, and was under the impression that
any lucubrations whatsoever of mine would be the reverse of
agreeable to you, and would have more merciful judges in Aeacus
and Minos than almost any of you would prove, truly, beyond my
fancy, beyond my hope if I had any, they were, as I heard, nay, as
I myself felt, received with the not ordinary applause of
all--yea, of those who at other times were, on account of
disagreements in our studies, altogether of an angry and
unfriendly spirit towards me. A generous mode of exercising
rivalry this, and not unworthy of a royal breast, if, when
friendship itself is wont often to misconstrue much that is
blamelessly done, yet then sharp and hostile enmity did not grudge
to interpret much that was perchance erroneous, and not a little,
doubtless, that was unskilfully said, more clemently than I
merited."
It is sufficiently manifest from this that after two years' residence
Milton had incurred much anger and unpopularity "on account of
disagreements in our studies," which can scarcely mean anything else
than his disapprobation of the University system. Notwithstanding this
he had been received on a former occasion with unexpected favour, and on
the present is able to say, "I triumph as one placed among the stars
that so many men, eminent for erudition, and nearly the whole University
have flocked hither." We have thus a miniature history of Milton's
connection with his Alma Mater. We see him giving offence by the freedom
of his strictures on the established practices, and misliking them so
much as to write in 1642, "Which [University] as in the time of her
better health and mine own younger judgment, I never greatly admired, so
now much less." But, on the other hand, we see his intellectual revolt
overlooked on account of his unimpeachable conduct and his brilliant
talents, and himself selected to represent his college on an occasion
when an able representative was indispensable. Cambridge had all
imaginable complacency in the scholar, it was towards the reformer that
she assumed, as afterwards towards Wordsworth, the attitude of
"Blind Authority beating with his staff
The child that would have led him."
The University and Milton made a practical covenant like Frederick the
Great and his subjects: she did what she pleased, and he thought what he
pleased. In sharp contrast with his failure to influence her educational
methods is "that more than ordinary respect which I found above any of
my equals at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the Fellows
of that College wherein I spent seven years; who, at my parting, after I
had taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways how much
better it would content them that I would stay; as by many letters full
of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and long after, I
was assured of their singular good affection toward me." It may be added
here that his comeliness and his chastity gained him the appellation of
"Lady" from his fellow collegians: and the rooms at Christ's alleged to
have been his are still pointed out as deserving the veneration of poets
in any event; for whether Milton sacrificed to Apollo in them or not, it
is certain that in them Wordsworth sacrificed to Bacchus.
For Milton's own sake and ours his departure from the University was the
best thing that could have happened to him. It saved him from wasting
his time in instructing others when he ought to be instructing himself.
From the point of view of advantage to the University, it is perhaps the
most signal instance of the mischief of strictly clerical fellowships,
now happily things of the past. Only one fellowship at Christ's was
tenable by a layman: to continue in academical society, therefore, he
must have taken orders. Such had been his intention when he first
repaired to Cambridge, but the young man of twenty-three saw many
things differently from the boy of sixteen. The service of God was still
as much as ever the aim of his existence, but he now thought that not
all service was church service. How far he had become consciously
alienated from the Church's creed it is difficult to say. He was able,
at all events, to subscribe the Articles on taking his degree, and no
trace of Arianism appears in his writings for many years. As late as
1641 he speaks of "the tri-personal Deity." Curiously enough, indeed,
the ecclesiastical freethought of the day was then almost entirely
confined to moderate Royalists, Hales, Chillingworth, Falkland. But he
must have disapproved of the Church's discipline, for he disapproved of
all discipline. He would not put himself in the position of those Irish
clergymen whom Strafford frightened out of their conscientious
convictions by reminding them of their canonical obedience. This was
undoubtedly what he meant when he afterwards wrote: "Perceiving that he
who would take orders must subscribe slave." Speaking of himself a
little further on as "Church-outed by the prelates," he implies that he
would not have refused orders if he could have had them on his own
terms. As regarded Milton personally this attitude was reasonable, he
had a right to feel himself above the restraints of mere formularies;
but he spoke unadvisedly if he meant to contend that a priest should be
invested with the freedom of a Prophet. His words, however, must be
taken in connection with the peculiar circumstances of the time. It was
an era of High Church reaction, which was fast becoming a shameful
persecution. The two moderate prelates, Abbot and Williams, had for
years been in disgrace, and the Church was ruled by the well-meaning,
but sour, despotic, meddlesome bigot whom wise King James long refused
to make a bishop because "he could not see when matters were well." But
if Laud was infatuated as a statesman, he was astute as a manager; he
had the Church completely under his control, he was fast filling it with
his partisans and creatures, he was working it for every end which
Milton most abhorred, and was, in particular, allying it with a king who
in 1632 had governed three years without a Parliament. The mere thought
that he must call this hierarch his Father in God, the mere foresight
that he might probably come into collision with him, and that if he did
his must be the fate of the earthen vessel, would alone have sufficed to
deter Milton from entering the Church.
Even so resolute a spirit as Milton's could hardly contemplate the
relinquishment of every definite calling in life without misgiving, and
his friends could hardly let it pass without remonstrance. There exists
in his hand the draft of a letter of reply to the verbal admonition of
some well-wisher, to whom he evidently feels that he owes deference. His
friend seems to have thought that he was yielding to the allurements of
aimless study, neglecting to return as service what he had absorbed as
knowledge. Milton pleads that his motive must be higher than the love of
lettered ease, for that alone could never overcome the incentives that
urge him to action. "Why should not all the hopes that forward youth and
vanity are afledge with, together with gain, pride, and ambition, call
me forward more powerfully than a poor, regardless, and unprofitable
sin of curiosity should be able to withhold?" And what of the "desire of
honour and repute and immortal fame seated in the breast of every true
scholar?" That his correspondent may the better understand him, he
encloses a "Petrarchean sonnet," recently composed, on his twenty-third
birthday, not one of his best, but precious as the first of his frequent
reckonings with himself:--
"How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career;
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arrived so near;
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
Than some more timely-happy spirits indu'th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Towards which Time leads me, and the Will of Heaven.
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."
The poetical temperament is especially liable to misgiving and
despondency, and from this Milton evidently was not exempt. Yet he is
the same Milton who proclaimed a quarter of a century afterwards--
"I argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer
Right onward."
There is something very fine in the steady resolution with which, after
so fully admitting to himself that his promise is yet unfulfilled, and
that appearances are against him, he recurs to his purpose, frankly
owning the while that the gift he craves is Heaven's, and his only the
application. He had received a lesson against over-confidence in the
failure of his solitary effort up to this time to achieve a work on a
large scale. To the eighth and last stanza of his poem, "The Passion of
Christ," is appended the note: "This subject the author finding to be
above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what
was begun, left it unfinished." It nevertheless begins nobly, but soon
deviates into conceits, bespeaking a fatigued imagination. The "Hymn on
the Nativity," on the other hand, begins with two stanzas of far-fetched
prettiness, and goes on ringing and thundering through strophes of
ever-increasing grandeur, until the sweetness of Virgin and Child seem
in danger of being swallowed up in the glory of Christianity; when
suddenly, by an exquisite turn, the poet sinks back into his original
key, and finally harmonizes his strain by the divine repose of
concluding picture worthy of Correggio:--
"But see, the Virgin blest
Hath laid the Babe to rest;
Time is our tedious song should here have ending;
Heaven's youngest-teemed star
Hath fixed her polished car,
Her sleeping Lord with handmaid lamp attending;
And all about the courtly stable
Bright harnessed Angels sit in order serviceable."
In some degree this magnificent composition loses force in our day from
its discordance with modern sentiment. We look upon religions as
members of the same family, and are more interested in their
resemblances than their antagonisms. Moloch and Dagon themselves appear
no longer as incarnate fiends, but as the spiritual counterparts of
antediluvian monsters; and Milton's treatment of the Olympian deities
jars upon us who remember his obligations to them. If the most Hebrew of
modern poets, he still owed more to Greece than to Palestine. How living
a thing Greek mythology was to him from his earliest years appears from
his college vacation exercise of 1628, where there are lines which, if
one did not know to be Milton's, one would declare to be Keats's. Among
his other compositions by the time of his quitting Cambridge are to be
named the superb verses, "At a Solemn Music," perhaps the most perfect
expression of his ideal of song; the pretty but over fanciful lines, "On
a fair Infant dying of a cough;" and the famous panegyric of
Shakespeare, a fancy made impressive by dignity and sonority of
utterance.
With such earnest of a true vocation, Milton betook himself to
retirement at Horton, a village between Colnbrook and Datchet, in the
south-eastern corner of Buckinghamshire, county of nightingales, where
his father had settled himself on his retirement from business. This
retreat of the elder Milton may be supposed to have taken place in 1632,
for in that year he took his clerk into partnership, probably devolving
the larger part of the business upon him. But it may have been earlier,
for in 1626 Milton tells Diodati--
"Nos quoque lucus habet vicina consitus ulmo,
Atque suburbani nobilis umbra loci."
And in a college declamation, which cannot have been later than 1632, he
"calls to witness the groves and rivers, and the beloved village elms,
under which in the last past summer I remember having had supreme
delight with the Muses, when I too, among rural scenes and remote
forests, seemed as if I could have grown and vegetated through a hidden
eternity."