In the Valhalla of English literature Anne Manning is sure of a little
and safe place. Her studies of great men, in which her imagination
fills in the hiatus which history has left, are not only literature in
themselves, but they are a service to literature: it is quite
conceivable that the ordinary reader with no very keen _flair_ for
poetry will realise John Milton and appraise him more highly, having
read _Mary Powell_ and its sequel, _Deborah's Diary_, than having read
_Paradise Lost_. In _The Household of Sir Thomas More_ she had for
hero one of the most charming, whimsical, lovable, heroical men God
ever created, by the creation of whose like He puts to shame all that
men may accomplish in their literature. In John Milton, whose first
wife Mary Powell was, Miss Manning has a hero who, though a supreme
poet, was "gey ill to live with," and it is a triumph of her art that
she makes us compunctious for the great poet even while we appreciate
the difficulties that fell to the lot of his women-kind. John Milton,
a Parliament man and a Puritan, married at the age of thirty-four, Mary
Powell, a seventeen-year-old girl, the daughter of an Oxfordshire
squire, who, with his family, was devoted to the King. It was at one
of the bitterest moments of the conflict between King and Parliament,
and it was a complication in the affair of the marriage that Mary
Powell's father was in debt five hundred pounds to Milton. The
marriage took place. Milton and his young wife set up housekeeping in
lodgings in Aldersgate Street over against St. Bride's Churchyard, a
very different place indeed from Forest Hill, Shotover, by Oxford, Mary
Powell's dear country home. They were together barely a month when
Mary Powell, on report of her father's illness, had leave to revisit
him, being given permission to absent herself from her husband's side
from mid-August till Michaelmas. She did not return at Michaelmas; nor
for some two years was there a reconciliation between the bride and
groom of a month. During those two years Milton published his
pamphlet, _On the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_, begun while his
few-weeks-old bride was still with him. In this pamphlet he states
with violence his opinion that a husband should be permitted to put
away his wife "for lack of a fit and matchable conversation," which
would point to very slender agreement between the girl of seventeen and
the poet of thirty-four. This was that Mary Powell, who afterwards
bore him four children, who died in childbirth with the youngest,
Deborah (of the _Diary)_, and who is consecrated in one of the
loveliest and most poignant of English sonnets.
Methought I saw my late-espouséd Saint
Brought to me like Alkestis from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the Old Law did save;
And such, as yet once more, I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
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.
It is a far cry from the woman so enshrined to the child of seventeen
years who was without "fit and matchable conversation" for her
irritable, intolerant poet-husband.
A good many serious writers have conjectured and wondered over this
little tragedy of Milton's young married life: but since all must needs
be conjecture one is obliged to say that Miss Manning, with her gift of
delicate imagination and exquisite writing, has conjectured more
excellently than the historians. She does not "play the sedulous ape"
to Milton or Mary Powell: but if one could imagine a gentle and tender
Boswell to these two, then Miss Manning has well proved her aptitude
for the place. Of Mary Powell she has made a charming creature. The
diary of Mary Powell is full of sweet country smells and sights and
sounds. Mary Powell herself is as sweet as her flowers, frank, honest,
loving and tender. Her diary catches for us all the enchantment of an
old garden; we hear Mary Powell's bees buzz in the mignonette and
lavender; we see her pleached garden alleys; we loiter with her on the
bowling-green, by the fish ponds, in the still-room, the dairy and the
pantry. The smell of aromatic box on a hot summer of long ago is in
our nostrils. We realise all the personages--the impulsive, hot-headed
father; the domineering, indiscreet mother; the cousin, Rose Agnew, and
her parson husband; little Kate and Robin of the Royalist household--as
well as John Milton and his father, and the two nephews to whom the
poet was tutor--and a hard tutor. Miss Manning's delightful humour
comes out in the two pragmatical little boys. But Mary herself
dominates the picture. She is so much a thing of the country, of
gardens and fields, that perforce one is reminded of Sir Thomas
Overbury's _Fair and Happy Milkmaid_:--
"She doth all things with so sweet a grace it seems ignorance will not
suffer her to do ill, being her mind is to do well. . . . The garden
and bee-hive are all her physic and chirugery, and she lives the longer
for it. She dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night and fears no
manner of ill because she means none: yet to say truth she is never
alone, for she is still accompanied by old songs, honest thoughts and
prayers, but short ones. . . . Thus lives she, and all her care is
that she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck
upon her winding-sheet."
The last remnants of Forest Hill, Mary Powell's home, were pulled down
in 1854. A visitor to it three years before its demolition tells us:--
"Still the rose, the sweet-brier and the eglantine are reddest beneath
its casements; the cock at its barn-door may be seen from any of the
windows. . . . In the kitchen, with its vast hearth and overhanging
chimney, we discovered tokens of the good living for which the old
manor-house was famous in its day. . . . The garden, in its massive
wall, ornamental gateway and old sun-dial, retains some traces of its
manorial dignities." The house indeed is gone, but the sweet country
remains, the verdant slopes and the lanes with their hedges full of
sweet-brier that stretch out towards Oxford. And there is the church
in which Mary Powell prayed. I should have liked to quote another of
Miss Manning's biographers, the Rev. Dr. Hutton, who tells us of old
walls partly built into the farmhouse that now stands there, and of the
old walnut trees in the farmyard, and in a field hard by the spring of
which John Milton may have tasted, and the church on the hill, and the
distant Chilterns.
Milton's cottage at Chalfont St. Giles's is happily still in a good
state of preservation, although Chalfont and its neighbourhood have
suffered a sea-change even since Dr. Hutton wrote, a decade ago. All
that quiet corner of the world, for so long green and secluded,--a
"deare secret greennesse"--has now had the light of the world let in
upon it. Motor-cars whizz through that Quaker country; money-making
Londoners hurry away from it of mornings, trudge home of evenings, bag
in hand; the jerry-builder is in the land, and the dust of much traffic
lies upon the rose and eglantine wherewith Milton's eyes were
delighted. The works of our hands often mock us by their durability.
Years and ages and centuries after the busy brain and the feeling heart
are dust, the houses built with hands stand up to taunt our mortality.
Yet the works of the mind remain. Though Forest Hill be only a
party-wall, and Chalfont a suburb of London, the Forest Hill of Mary
Powell, the Chalfont of Milton, yet live for us in Anne Manning's
delightful pages.
Miss Manning did not wish her _Life_ to be written, but we do get some
glimpses of her real self from herself in a chance page here and there
of her reminiscences.