In courts and palaces he also reigns,And in luxurious cities, where the noiseOf riot ascends above their loftiest towers,And injury and outrage; and, when nightDarkens the streets, then wander forth the sonsOf Belial, flown with insolence and wine.
In courts and palaces he also reigns,
And in luxurious cities, where the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,
And injury and outrage; and, when night
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.
The public festivals of these later days are glanced at inSamson Agonistes--
Lords are lordliest in their wine;And the well-feasted priest then soonest firedWith zeal, if aught religion seem concerned;No less the people on their holy-daysImpetuous, insolent, unquenchable.
Lords are lordliest in their wine;
And the well-feasted priest then soonest fired
With zeal, if aught religion seem concerned;
No less the people on their holy-days
Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable.
There is no relaxation, no trace of innocent lightheartedness, in any of the later poems. Even the garden of Paradise, where some gentle mirth might perhaps be permissible, is tenanted by grave livers, majestic, but not sprightly. InL' Allegrothe morning song of the milk-maid is "blithe," and the music of the village dance is "jocund." But Eve is described as "jocund" and "blithe" only when she is intoxicated by the mortal fruit of the tree; and the note of gaiety that is heard faintly, like a distant echo, in the earlier poems, is never sounded again by Milton.
So it is also with other things. The flowers scattered on the laureate hearse of Lycidas make a brighter, more various, and withal a homelier display than ever meets the eye in the Hesperian wildernesses of Eden. Or take the world of fairy lore that Milton inherited from the Elizabethans--aworld to which not only Shakespeare, but also laborious and arrogant poet-scholars like Jonson and Drayton had free right of entry. Milton, too, could write of the fairies--in his youth--
With stories told of many a feat,How Faery Mab the junkets eat.
With stories told of many a feat,
How Faery Mab the junkets eat.
But even inComusthe most exquisite passage of fairy description is put into the mouth of Comus himself, chief of the band of ugly-headed monsters in glistering apparel--
The sounds and seas, with all their finny drove,Now to the moon in wavering morrice move;And on the tawny sands and shelvesTrip the pert fairies and the dapper elves.By dimpled brook and fountain-brim,The wood-nymphs decked with daisies trim,Their merry wakes and pastimes keep:What hath night to do with sleep?
The sounds and seas, with all their finny drove,
Now to the moon in wavering morrice move;
And on the tawny sands and shelves
Trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves.
By dimpled brook and fountain-brim,
The wood-nymphs decked with daisies trim,
Their merry wakes and pastimes keep:
What hath night to do with sleep?
The song and the dance are broken off, never to be resumed, when the staid footfall of the lady is heard approaching. Milton cannot draw ugliness; it turns into beauty or majesty on his hands. Satan has a large and enthusiastic party among readers ofParadise Lost. Comus, we are told, stands for a whole array of ugly vices--riot, intemperance, gluttony, and luxury. But what a delicate monster he is, and what a ravishing lyric strain he is master of! The pleasure that Milton forswore was a young god, the companion of Loveand Youth, not an aged Silenus among the wine-skins. He viewed and described one whole realm of pagan loveliness, and then he turned his face the other way, and never looked back. Love is of the valley, and he lifted his eyes to the hills. His guiding star was not Christianity, which in its most characteristic and beautiful aspects had no fascination for him, but rather that severe and self-centred ideal of life and character which is called Puritanism. It is not a creed for weak natures; so that as the nominal religion of a whole populace it has inevitably fallen into some well-merited disrepute. Puritanism for him was not a body of law to be imposed outwardly on a gross and timid people, but an inspiration and a grace that falls from Heaven upon choice and rare natures--
Nor do I name of men the common rout,That, wandering loose about,Grow up and perish as the summer fly,Heads without name, no more remember'd;
Nor do I name of men the common rout,
That, wandering loose about,
Grow up and perish as the summer fly,
Heads without name, no more remember'd;
so sings the Chorus inSamson Agonistes--
But such as thou hast solemnly elected,With gifts and graces eminently adorned,To some great work, thy glory,And people's safety, which in part they effect.
But such as thou hast solemnly elected,
With gifts and graces eminently adorned,
To some great work, thy glory,
And people's safety, which in part they effect.
Under one form or another Puritanism is to be found in almost all religions, and in many systems of philosophy. Milton's Puritanism enabled himto combine his classical and Biblical studies, to reconcile his pagan and Christian admirations, Stoicism, and the Quakers. It was with no sense of incongruity that he gave to the Christ a speech in praise of--
Quintus, Fabricius, Curius, Regulus,...Who could do mighty things, and could contemnRiches, though offered from the hand of Kings.
Quintus, Fabricius, Curius, Regulus,...
Who could do mighty things, and could contemn
Riches, though offered from the hand of Kings.
To reject common ambitions, to refuse common enticements, to rule passions, desires, and fears, "neither to change, nor falter, nor repent,"--this was the wisdom and this the virtue that he set before himself. There is no beatific vision to keep his eyes from wandering among the shows of earth. Milton's heaven is colder than his earth, the home of Titans, whose employ is political and martial. When his imagination deals with earthly realities, the noble melancholy of the Greeks lies upon it. His last word on human life might be translated into Greek with no straining and no loss of meaning--
His servants He, with new acquistOf true experience from this great event,With peace and consolation hath dismissed,And calm of mind, all passion spent.
His servants He, with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event,
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind, all passion spent.
He is therefore one of the few English poets (alone in this respect among the greatest) who have not sung of Love. His only English love-poem,the sonnetTo the Nightingale, is his earliest and poorest sonnet. He elected in his later poems to sing of Marriage, its foundation in reason, its utility, its respectability and antiquity as an institution, and, above all, its amazing dangers. He has thus lost the devotion of the young, who, while they read poetry by the ear and eye for its sonorous suggestions, and its processions of vague shapes, love Milton; but when they come to read it for its matter and sentiment, leave him--in most cases never to return. The atmosphere of his later poems is that of some great public institution. Heaven is an Oriental despotism. Hell is a Secession parliament. In the happy garden itself there is no privacy, no individualism; it is the focus of the action, the central point of the attack and the defence; and a great part of the conversation of its inhabitants turns on the regulations under which they live. They never forget that they are all mankind, and when their psalm goes up in grateful adoration to their Creator, it is like the unanimous voice of all nations and kindreds and people and tongues.
"The plan ofParadise Lost" says Johnson, "has this inconvenience, that it comprises neither human actions nor human manners. The man and woman who act and suffer are in a state which no other man and woman can ever know. The reader finds no transaction in which he can beengaged; beholds no condition in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself; he has, therefore, little natural curiosity and sympathy." Milton, he goes on to explain, "knew human nature only in the gross, and had never studied the shades of character, nor the combinations of concurring or the perplexity of contending passions."
He knew human nature only in the gross. He treated nothing less momentous than the fortunes of the race. It is precisely from this cause that the incomparable grandeur of Milton's characters and situations springs. The conversations that he records are like international parleyings. Eve is the official Mother of mankind. Adam walks forth to meet the angel, in ambassadorial dignity, the accredited representative of the human race--
Without more trainAccompanied than with his own completePerfections; in himself was all his state,More solemn than the tedious pomp that waitsOn princes, when their rich retinue longOf horses led and grooms besmeared with goldDazzles the crowd and sets them all agape.
Without more train
Accompanied than with his own complete
Perfections; in himself was all his state,
More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits
On princes, when their rich retinue long
Of horses led and grooms besmeared with gold
Dazzles the crowd and sets them all agape.
And if the other characters ofParadise Losthave this generic stamp, it is because the chief character of all has it--the character of the poet himself. It lends a strange dignity to the story of Milton's life that in all his doings he felt himself to be a"cause," an agent of mighty purposes. This it is that more than excuses, it glorifies, his repeated magniloquent allusions to himself throughout the prose works. Holding himself on trust or on commission, he must needs report himself, not only to his great Taskmaster, but also from time to time to men, his expectant and impatient beneficiaries. Even inLycidashe is thinking of himself as much as of his dead companion--
So may some gentle MuseWith lucky words favourmydestined urn,And as he passes turn,And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud.
So may some gentle Muse
With lucky words favourmydestined urn,
And as he passes turn,
And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud.
What if he die young himself? Are his dreams and hopes for his own future an illusion? He agonises with the question in the famous digression on poetry and poetic fame. But he consoles himself by appeal to a Court where the success and the fame of this world are as straw in the furnace; and then, having duly performed the obsequies of his friend, with reinvigorated heart he turns once more to the future--"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." A singular ending, no doubt, to an elegy! But it is blind and hasty to conclude that therefore the precedent laments are "not to be considered as the effusion of real passion." A soldier's burial is not the less honoured because his comrades must turn fromhis grave to give their thought and strength and courage to the cause which was also his. The maimed rites, interrupted by the trumpet calling to action, are a loftier commemoration than the desolating laments of those who "weep the more because they weep in vain." And in this way Milton's fierce tirade against the Church hirelings, and his preoccupation with his own ambitions support and explain each other, and find a fit place in the poem. He is looking to his equipment, if perchance he may live to do that in poetry and politics, which Edward King had died leaving unaccomplished. When his own time came he desired to be lamented in no other way--
Come, come; no time for lamentation now,Nor much more cause. Samson hath quit himselfLike Samson, and heroicly hath finishedA life heroic, on his enemiesFully revenged.
Come, come; no time for lamentation now,
Nor much more cause. Samson hath quit himself
Like Samson, and heroicly hath finished
A life heroic, on his enemies
Fully revenged.
This overmastering sense of the cause breathes through all his numerous references to himself. He stands in the Forum,
Disturbed, yet comely, and in actRaised, as of some great matter to begin;
Disturbed, yet comely, and in act
Raised, as of some great matter to begin;
and addresses himself, as he boasts inThe Second Defence of the People of England, to "the whole collective body of people, cities, states, and councils of the wise and eminent, through the wide expanse of anxious and listening Europe."Having sacrificed the use of his eyes to the service of the commonweal, he bates not a jot of heart or hope--
What supports me, dost thou ask?The conscience, friend, to have lost them overpliedIn Liberty's defence, my noble task,Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In Liberty's defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
And while thus his fighting years are filled with the exaltation of battle, as he plumes and lifts himself upon the cause that is going forward, the story of his closing years has in it much of the pathos of a lost cause. It was remarked by Johnson that there is in theParadise Lostlittle opportunity for the pathetic; only one passage, indeed, is allowed by him to be truly deserving of that name. But the description of the remorse and reconcilement of Adam and Eve, which Johnson doubtless intended, will not compare, for moving quality, with the matchless invocation to the Seventh Book--
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchangedTo hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,And solitude; yet not alone, while thouVisit'st my slumbers nightly, or when MornPurples the East. Still govern thou my song,Urania, and fit audience find, though few.
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East. Still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.
Then the noise that he had heard, in imagination only, thirty years earlier, assails his bodilyears; as evening sets in, the wonted roar is up, not in the wild woods of fancy inhabited by the sensual magician and his crew, but in the unlighted streets of Restoration London, as a chorus of cup-shotten brawlers goes roaring by. The king is enjoying his own again; and the poet, hunted and harassed in his last retreat, raises his petition again to the Muse whom he had invoked at the beginning of his task,--not Clio nor her sisters, but the spirit of heavenly power and heavenly wisdom; his mind reverts to that story of Orpheus which had always had so singular and personal a fascination for him; of Orpheus, who, holding himself aloof from the mad amorists of Thrace, was by them torn to pieces during the orgy of the Dionysia, and sent rolling down the torrent of the Hebrus; and he prays to his goddess and guardian--
But drive far off the barbarous dissonanceOf Bacchus and his revellers, the raceOf that wild rout that tore the Thracian bardIn Rhodope, where woods and rocks had earsTo rapture, till the savage clamour drownedBoth harp and voice; nor could the Muse defendHer son. So fail not thou, who thee implores;For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream.
But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard
In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears
To rapture, till the savage clamour drowned
Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her son. So fail not thou, who thee implores;
For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream.
Disappointed of all his political hopes, living on neglected and poor for fourteen years after the Restoration, and dying a private citizen, passablyobscure, Milton yet found and took a magnanimous revenge upon his enemies. They had crippled only his left hand in silencing the politician, but his right hand, which had hung useless by his side for so many years while he served the State, was his own still, and wielded a more Olympian weapon. In prose and politics he was a baffled man, but in poetry and vision he found his triumph. His ideas, which had gone a-begging among the politicians of his time, were stripped by him of the rags of circumstance, and cleansed of its dust, to be enthroned where they might secure a hearing for all time. The surprise that he prepared for the courtiers of the Restoration world was like Samson's revenge, in that it fell on them from above; and, as elsewhere in the poem ofSamson Agonistes, Milton was thinking not very remotely of his own case when he wrote that jubilant semi-chorus, with the marvellous fugal succession of figures, wherein Samson, and by inference Milton himself, is compared to a smouldering fire revived, to a serpent attacking a hen-roost, to an eagle swooping on his helpless prey, and last, his enemies now silent for ever, to the phœnix, self-begotten and self-perpetuating. The Philistian nobility (or the Restoration notables) are described, with huge scorn, as ranged along the tiers of their theatre, like barnyard fowl blinking on their perch, watching, not without aflutter of apprehension, the vain attempts made on their safety by the reptile grovelling in the dust below--
But he, though blind of sight,Despised, and thought extinguished quite,With inward eyes illuminated,His fiery virtue rousedFrom under ashes into sudden flame,And as an evening dragon came,Assailant on the perchèd roostsAnd nests in order rangedOf tame villatic fowl, but as an eagleHis cloudless thunder bolted on their heads.So Virtue, given for lost,Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,Like that self-begotten birdIn the Arabian woods embost,That no second knows nor third,And lay erewhile a holocaust,From out her ashy womb now teemed,Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous mostWhen most unactive deemed;And, though her body die, her fame survives.A secular bird, ages of lives.
But he, though blind of sight,
Despised, and thought extinguished quite,
With inward eyes illuminated,
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame,
And as an evening dragon came,
Assailant on the perchèd roosts
And nests in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl, but as an eagle
His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads.
So Virtue, given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay erewhile a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deemed;
And, though her body die, her fame survives.
A secular bird, ages of lives.
It is customary for the friends of Milton to approach his prose works with a sigh of apology. There is a deep-rooted prejudice among the English people against a poet who concerns himself intimately with politics. Whether this feeling has its origin in solicitude for the poet or for the politics is hard to determine; indeed it is pretty generally maintained that each is detrimental to the other. But seeing that for one man in the modern world who cares for poets there are at least ten who care for politics, it is safe to assume that the poets, when they are deprived of the franchise, are deprived rather to maintain the purity and efficiency of politics than for the good of their own souls. They have been compared to birds of Paradise, which were long believed to have no feet; and the common sense of the English people, with a touch of the municipal logic of Dogberry, has enacted that whereas they have nofeet, and have moreover been proved to have no feet, it shall be forbidden them, under the strictest pains and penalties, to alight and walk. Their function is to beautify the distant landscape with the flash of wings.
For most men common-sense is the standard, and immediate utility the end, whereby they judge political questions, great and small. Now common-sense judges only the questions that are brought home to it by instant example; and utility is appealed to for a verdict only amid the dense crowd of actual conflicting interests. Neither the one nor the other is far-sighted or imaginative. So it comes about that the political system, in England, at least, is built up piecemeal; it is founded on appetites and compromises, and mortared by immemorial habit. To explain this process, and to transfigure it in the pure light of imagination, was the work of the great poet-politician, Edmund Burke. But the poet usually goes a hastier way to work. Looking at the whole domiciliary structure from outside, he finds it shapeless and ugly, like an ant-heap; and volunteers to play the architect. His design treats the details of individual habit and happiness in strict subordination to the desired whole. What he wants is consistency, symmetry, dignity; and to achieve these he is willing to make a holocaust of human selfishnesses. He may be a deep scholarand thinker, but he is apt to forget one point of ancient wisdom,--that it is the wearer of the shoe, and not the cobbler, who best knows where the shoe wrings him.
The speculations of the poet awaken no hostile resentment so long as they are admittedly abstract. He is at liberty to build his Republic, his City of the Sun, his Utopia, or his New Atlantis, amid the indifferent applause of mankind. But when his aim becomes practical and immediate, when he seeks to stir the heap by introducing into it the ruthless discomfort of an idea, a million littlenesses assail him with deadly enmity, and he is found sorrowfully protesting his amazement:--
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogsBy the known rules of ancient liberty,When straight a barbarous noise environs meOf owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.
So he is brought, with great reluctance, to the estimate of men which is expressed by Milton inThe Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; "being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public state conformably governed to the inward vicious rule whereby they govern themselves. For indeed none can love freedom heartily but good men."
Milton cannot claim the exemption from censure which is allowed to the theorists, thebuilders of ideal states somewhere in the clouds. On his own behalf he expressly disclaims any such intention. "To sequester out of the world," he says, "into Atlantic and Utopian politics, which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God has placed us unavoidably." Poetry might well have served him, if his object had been to add another to imaginary commonwealths. He took up with politics because he believed that in the disorder of the times his ideas might be made a "programme," and carried into effect.
It was in 1641, when already "the vigour of the Parliament had begun to humble the pride of the bishops," that he first intervened. "I saw," he says, "that a way was opening for the establishment of real liberty; that the foundation was laying for the deliverance of mankind from the yoke of slavery and superstition.... I perceived that if I ever wished to be of use, I ought at least not to be wanting to my country, to the church, and to so many of my fellow-Christians, in a crisis of so much danger; I therefore determined to relinquish the other pursuits in which I was engaged, and to transfer the whole force of my talents and my industry to this one important object." So he wrote the treatise in two books,Of Reformation in England, and the causes thathitherto have hindered it.His later pamphlets are all similarly occasional in nature, written with a particular and definite object in view. In these he advocates as practicable and much-needed reforms, among other things, the establishment of a perpetual republic on the lines of an oligarchy; the abolition of bishops, religious ceremonials, liturgies, tithes, and, indeed, of all regular payment or salary given to ministers of religion; the supersession of universities and public schools by the erection of new academic institutions, combining the functions of both, "in every City throughout this Land"; the legalisation of free divorce; and the repeal of the ordinances compelling all books to be licensed. If he did not advocate, in any of the works put forth during his lifetime, the legal toleration of polygamy, it was probably only because he perceived that that, at least, did not fall within the scope of practical politics. He defends it in his posthumous treatise,De Doctrinâ Christianâ.
It will readily be seen that on almost all these questions Milton was not only--to use the foolish modern phrase--"in advance of his time," but also considerably in advance of ours. Twenty years after his death the Licensing Acts were abolished; for the rest, his reforms are yet to accomplish. It is an odd remark of one of his learned biographers that theAreopagiticais the only one of all Milton's prose writings "whosetopic is not obsolete." It is the only one of his prose writings whose thesis commands the general assent of modern readers, and is, therefore, from his own practical point of view, obsolete.
The mere enumeration of his opinions suffices to show that Milton's is a sad case of the poet in politics. The labours of the twenty prime years of his manhood have been copiously bewailed. To have Pegasus in harness is bad enough; but when the waggon that he draws is immovably stuck in the mud, and he himself bespattered by his efforts, the spectacle is yet more pitiable. Many of his critics have expressed regret that he did not make for himself an artificial seclusion, and continue his purely poetical labours, with the classics for companions. The questions that drew him into politics were burning questions, it is true; but were there not others to deal with them, good, earnest, sensible, homely people? Samuel Butler has enumerated some of those who were dedicating their time and thought to politics at this important crisis:--
The oyster-women locked their fish up,And trudged away to cry "No Bishop":The mouse-trap men laid save-alls by,And 'gainst ev'l counsellors did cry;Botchers left old cloaths in the lurch,And fell to turn and patch the Church;Some cried the Covenant, insteadOf pudding-pies and ginger-bread,And some for brooms, old boots and shoes,Bawled out to purge the Common-house:Instead of kitchen-stuff, some cryA gospel-preaching ministry;And some for old shirts, coats or cloak,No surplices nor service-book;A strange harmonious inclinationOf all degrees to reformation.
The oyster-women locked their fish up,
And trudged away to cry "No Bishop":
The mouse-trap men laid save-alls by,
And 'gainst ev'l counsellors did cry;
Botchers left old cloaths in the lurch,
And fell to turn and patch the Church;
Some cried the Covenant, instead
Of pudding-pies and ginger-bread,
And some for brooms, old boots and shoes,
Bawled out to purge the Common-house:
Instead of kitchen-stuff, some cry
A gospel-preaching ministry;
And some for old shirts, coats or cloak,
No surplices nor service-book;
A strange harmonious inclination
Of all degrees to reformation.
But what was Milton doing in this malodorous and noisy assembly? Might he not with all confidence have left the Church to the oyster-women, and the State to the mouse-trap men? The company that he kept with them ruined his manners; he had to speak loud in order to be heard, to speak broad in order to be respected; and so (bitterest thought of all!) he lost something of that sweet reasonableness which is a poet's proper grace.
The answer to this strain of criticism is to be found in the study of Milton's works, poetry and prose--and perhaps best in the poetry. We could not have had anything at all likeParadise Lostfrom a dainty, shy poet-scholar; nor anything half so great. The greatest men hold their power on this tenure, that they shall not husband it because the occasion that presents itself, although worthy of high effort, is not answerable to the refinement of their tastes. Milton, it is too often forgotten, was an Englishman. He held the privilege and the trust not cheap. When Godintends some new and great epoch in human history, "what does he then," this poet exultantly asks, "but reveal himself to his servants, and, as his manner is, first to his Englishmen?" To his chief work in poetry he was instigated by patriotic motives. "I applied myself," he says, "to that resolution which Ariosto followed against the persuasions of Bembo, to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue, not to make verbal curiosity the end (that were a toilsome vanity), but to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect."
There is plenty of "verbal curiosity" in Milton's poetry; he is in some respects the finest craftsman who ever handled the English speech: so that this declaration is the more timely to remind us by how wide a chasm he is separated from those modern greenhouse poets who move contentedly in an atmosphere of art ideals and art theories. He had his breeding from the ancient world, where Æschylus fought at Marathon, and he could not think of politics as of a separable part of human life.
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair,
is a lyric ideal that may quite well consist withpolitical indifference, but how should an epic inspiration be nourished where the prosperity of the State is lightly esteemed? Even had poetry lost by his political adventures, he would have been content that politics should gain. And politics did gain; for Milton's prose works raise every question they touch, even where they cannot truly be said to advance it. It is as unseemly for the politicians to complain of his choice, as it would be for the herdsmen of King Admetus to complain of the presence among them of a god. The large considerations and high passions imported into the treatment of practical questions by a Milton, or a Burke, have done much to keep even party politics at a high level in England, so that civil servants and journalists may join in the hymn of the herdsmen--
He has been our fellow, the morning of our days,Us he chose for house-mates, and this way went.God, of whom musicAnd song and blood are pure,The day is never darkenedThat had thee here obscure!
He has been our fellow, the morning of our days,
Us he chose for house-mates, and this way went.
God, of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darkened
That had thee here obscure!
In a long autobiographic passage in theSecond Defence of the People of EnglandMilton makes a formal classification of his prose works written before that date. All of them, he says, were designed to promote Liberty. By the accidents of the time he was induced to treat first, in hisanti-episcopal pamphlets, of religious liberty. Once that controversy was fairly ablaze, in the name of the same goddess he applied his incendiary torch to humbler piles. "I perceived," he says, "that there were three species of liberty which are essential to the happiness of social life--religious, domestic, and civil; and as I had already written concerning the first, and the magistrates were strenuously active in obtaining the third, I determined to turn my attention to the second, or the domestic species." He includes in this division of his work the Divorce pamphlets, the tractateOf Education, and theAreopagitica, as dealing with the "three material questions" (so he calls them) of domestic liberty, namely, "the conditions of the conjugal tie, the education of the children, and the free publication of the thoughts."
It seems a strange conception of domestic liberty which makes it rest on a threefold support--divorce at will, an unrestrained printing-press, and the encyclopædic education of polyglot children. But the truth is that Milton's classification is an after-thought. The pamphlets that he names were all written by him much about the same time, between 1643 and 1645; but the true history of their origin is more interesting and less symmetrical than the later invented scheme of classification. The Divorce pamphlets were written because Milton was unhappily married.TheAreopagiticawas written because his heterodox views concerning marriage had brought him into collision with the Presbyterian censors of the press. His treatise on education was written because he had undertaken the education of his own nephews, and had become deeply interested in that question. In all three his own experience is the first motive; in all three that experience is concealed beneath a formidable array of general considerations, dogmatically propounded.
The case is the same with regard to the pamphlets that treat of religious and civil liberty; they are not only occasional, but intensely personal, even in their origins. The earliest of them, the five ecclesiastical pamphlets of the year 1641, deal with a question which had been of intimate concern to Milton ever since the beginning of his Cambridge days. The celebrated controversy with Salmasius and his abettors, concerning the death of King Charles, is a gladiatorial combat from which every element save the personal is often absent. In these bouts offensive biography and defensive autobiography serve for sword and shield. This personal character of the prose writings, while it has repelled some readers interested mainly in the questions discussed, has attracted others who are interested chiefly in the writer. A rich harvest of personal allusion has been gathered from the controversial treatises, and perhaps, even now, thefield has not been gleaned to the last ear. It is worthy of remark, for instance, how Milton's pre-occupation with the themes which he had already pondered, and turned this way and that in his mind, to test their fitness for a monumental work, shows itself in his choice of figure and allusion. Attention has often been called to the elaborate comparison, founded on the history of Samson, inThe Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty:--
"I cannot better liken the state and person of a king than to that mighty Nazarite Samson; who being disciplined from his birth in the precepts and the practice of temperance and sobriety, without the strong drink of injurious and excessive desires, grows up to a noble strength and perfection with those his illustrious and sunny locks, the laws, waving and curling about his god-like shoulders. And while he keeps them about him undiminished and unshorn, he may with the jawbone of an ass, that is, with the word of his meanest officer, suppress and put to confusion thousands of those that rise against his just power. But laying down his head among the strumpet flatteries of prelates, while he sleeps and thinks no harm, they, wickedly shaving off all those bright and weighty tresses of his law, and just prerogatives, which were his ornament and strength, deliver him over to indirect and violent counsels, which, as thosePhilistines, put out the fair and far-sighted eyes of his natural discerning, and make him grind in the prison-house of their sinister ends and practices upon him: till he, knowing this prelatical rasor to have bereft him of his wonted might, nourish again his puissant hair, the golden beams of law and right; and they, sternly shook, thunder with ruin upon the heads of those his evil counsellors, but not without great affliction to himself."
This ingenious allegorical application naturally finds no place in the grave poem of Milton's latest years. And yet, in one passage at least, his earlier love for the high-figured style took him captive again. The strong drink from which the Samson of the play abstains is strong drink, not "injurious and excessive desires." There is no hint of prelatical conspiracy in the enticements of Dalila. But perhaps some faint reminiscence of his earlier fable concerning Samson's hair recurred to Milton's mind when he gave to Manoa a speech comparing the locks of the hero to the strength, not of the law, but of a nation in arms:--
And I persuade me God had not permittedHis strength again to grow up with his hair,Garrisoned round about him like a campOf faithful soldiery, were not his purposeTo use him further yet in some great service.
And I persuade me God had not permitted
His strength again to grow up with his hair,
Garrisoned round about him like a camp
Of faithful soldiery, were not his purpose
To use him further yet in some great service.
The theme ofSamson Agonisteshad thus already taken possession of Milton's imagination when hewrote his first prose tractates. But the same writings furnish even stronger evidence of his early dallyings with the theme ofParadise Lost. "It was from out the rind of one apple tasted," he says in theAreopagitica, "that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world." And again, inThe Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce:--"The academics and stoics ... knew not what a consummate and most adorned Pandora was bestowed upon Adam, to be the nurse and guide of his arbitrary happiness and perseverance, I mean, his native innocence and perfection, which might have kept him from being our true Epimetheus." Some of these references show the imaginative scheme of theParadise Lostin the process of building. In one passage, for instance, of the last quoted treatise, Milton expounds the pagan belief that God punishes his enemies most when he throws them furthest from him:--"Which then they held he did, when he blinded, hardened, and stirred up his offenders, to finish and pile up their desperate work since they had undertaken it. To banish for ever into a local hell, whether in the air or in the centre, or in that uttermost and bottomless gulf of chaos, deeper from holy bliss than the world's diameter multiplied, they thought not a punishing so proper and proportionate for God to inflict as to punish sin with sin." Itwould seem as if the poet had not as yet fixed the situation of his local hell, but remained suspended between rival theories. The other idea, of the Divine permission and impulse given to hardened sinners, finds a conspicuous place in the poem. In one instance, at least, a figure drawn from the story of the Creation is violently handled to serve strange uses. The evolution of the four elements from the chaotic welter of hot, cold, moist, and dry, is adduced as a proof that the laws of God and of nature approve free divorce:--"By his divorcing command the world first rose out of chaos, nor can be renewed again out of confusion, but by the separating of unmeet consorts."
Allusions of this kind occur most frequently in the earlier prose writings, while the studies that had been interrupted by controversy were yet fresh in Milton's memory. They would hardly be worth the quotation, were it not that they are another evidence of the transparency of his mind. In looking through his prose works you see traces of all that was engaging his imagination and thought at the time. Poetry is the highest of expressive arts; and poets are the worst dissemblers or economisers of truth in the world. Their knowledge, like their feeling, possesses them, and must find expression as argument, or illustration, or figure, whatever the immediate matter in hand. The prose works of Milton are thus, from first tolast, an exposition of himself. The divorce pamphlets, especially, are hot with smothered personal feeling. Long years afterwards, when time and change had softened and blurred it in memory, his early misadventure was reflected in more than one passage of the later poems. The humble plaint of Eve, and the description of her reunion with her alienated lord, in the Tenth Book ofParadise Lost, doubtless contains, as has often been said, some reflection of what took place at a similar interview in 1645, when Mistress Mary Milton returned to her offended husband. That one principal cause of the rupture has been rightly divined, by Mr. Mark Pattison and others, is probable from certain remarkable lines in the Eighth Book, where Adam describes how he was presented with his bride:--
On she came,Led by her Heavenly Maker, though unseen,And guided by his voice, nor uninformedOf nuptial sanctity, and marriage rites.
On she came,
Led by her Heavenly Maker, though unseen,
And guided by his voice, nor uninformed
Of nuptial sanctity, and marriage rites.
Even at so wide a remove of time, the poet's wounded pride finds expression in this singular theory--or, rather, in this more than dubious piece of self-justification.
But although the hurt he had suffered, in his most susceptible feelings, gives eloquence and plangency to his divorce pamphlets, it was not merely to voice his sufferings that he wrote thosepamphlets. Most men in Milton's position, married to "a nothing, a desertrice, an adversary," would have recognised that theirs was one of those exceptional cases for which the law cannot provide, and would have sat down under their unhappy chance, to bear it or mitigate it as best they might. Some poets of the time of the Romantic Revival would have claimed the privilege of genius to be a law unto itself; the law of the State being designed for the common rout, whose lesser sensibilities and weaker individuality make them amenable to its discipline. Milton did neither the one thing nor the other. The modern idolatry of genius was as yet uninvented; he was a citizen first, a poet and an unhappy man afterwards. He directed his energies to proving, not that he should be exempted from the operation of the law, but that the law itself should be changed. He had entered into marriage, with full ceremonial ushering, by the main door; he would go out the same way, or not at all. Thus even in this most personal matter he pleads, not for himself, but for the commonweal. He cannot conceive of happiness as of a private possession, to be secretly enjoyed; it stands rooted, like justice, in the wise and equal ordinances of the State; and the only freedom that he values is freedom under the law.
Like the citizen of some antique state, he discourses of marriage in the market-place. In hisefforts to be persuasive, both here and in theAreopagitica, he humbles himself to management and the seasonings of flattery. It is a new trade for him, and suits oddly with his pride. But he hoped much, at this time, from the Parliament, that "select assembly," containing so many "worthy senators" and "Christian reformers," "judges and lawgivers." In the enthusiasm of his hopes, he credits them with a desire "to imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece," with a wisdom greater than that of the Athenian Parliament, with a magnanimous willingness to repeal their own acts at the dictate of the voice of reason. And all this at a time when the Presbyterians were in the ascendant, intent upon establishing a discipline neither old, nor elegant, nor humane, so little acquainted with Greece, that it was one of Selden's amusements to confute their divines by citing a reading from the Greek Testament. Milton was destined to grievous disappointment, and his rage against the Presbyterians, in some of his later pamphlets, was the fiercer.
But although his pamphlets are both occasional and personal, and even address themselves at times to conciliation and persuasion, the views that they advocate and the system of thought that underlies them were not the products of time and accident. Milton was an idealist, pure and simple,in politics. Had he lived under the Tudor sovereigns, he would have been reduced, with Sir Thomas More, Montaigne, and John Barclay, the author ofArgenis, to express himself by way of romance and allegory. It was his fortune to live at a time when the Tudor state system was breaking up with appalling suddenness, and along with it the Tudor compromise in the affairs of the Church, imposed from above upon an unawakened people, was falling into wreckage. Here was an opportunity that has not often, in the world's history, come to a poet, of realising the dream that he had dreamed in his study, of setting up again, for the admiration and comfort of posterity, the model of an ancient Republic.
The best of all Milton's critics has left us the worst account of his political opinions. Johnson's censure ofLycidas, much as it has been ridiculed and decried, is judicious and discerning compared with his explanation of Milton's political creed:--"Milton's republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of independence, in petulance impatient of control, and pride disdainful of superiority. He hated monarchs in the State, and prelates in the Church; for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be suspected that his predominant desire was to destroy, rather than establish, and that he felt not so much the love of liberty asrepugnance to authority." It may, at least, be credited to Johnson for moderation, that he requires only four of the Seven Deadly Sins, to wit, Pride, Envy, Anger, and Sloth, to explain Milton's political tenets. Had he permitted himself another sentence, an easy place might surely have been made for Gluttony, Luxury, and Covetousness, the three whose absence cannot fail to be remarked by any lover of thorough and detailed treatment in these intricate problems of human character.
If, in our more modern fashion, we seek for the origin of Milton's ideas in his education, his habits of thought, and his admirations, we shall be obliged to admit that they are all rooted in his conception of the ancient City State. It was the wish of Thomas Hobbes to abolish the study of Greek and Latin in our schools and colleges, because this study fosters a love of freedom, and unfits men to be the subjects of an absolute monarch. His happiest illustration would have been the case of his contemporary, Milton. Yet in all Milton's writings there is no trace of the modern democratic doctrine of equality. A hearing is all that he claims. So far from hating greatness, he carries his admiration for it, for personal virtue and prowess, almost to excess. The poet who described the infernal conclave in the Second Book ofParadise Lostwas not likely to be insensible to thepart played in politics by men of eminent and dominating personality. To think of free government as of an engine for depressing unusual merit was impossible for Milton. He lived in an age that had found in Plutarch's men its highest ideals of political character. Never, since their own day, had the "noble Grecians and Romans" exercised so irresistible a fascination on the minds of men, or so real an influence on the affairs of the State, as was theirs at the time of the Renaissance. The mist in which they had long been enveloped was swept away, and these colossal figures of soldiers, patriots, and counsellors loomed large and clear across the ages, their majesty enhanced by distance and by art, which conspire to efface all that is accidental, petty, and distracting. We cannot see these figures as they appeared to the Renaissance world. One of the chief results of modern historical labour and research has been that it has peopled the Middle Ages for us, and interposed a whole society of living men, our ancestors, between us and ancient Rome. But in Milton's time this process was only beginning; the collections and researches that made it possible were largely the work of his contemporaries,--and were despised by him. When he looked back on the world's history, from his own standpoint, he saw, near at hand and stretching away into the distance, a desert, from which a black mass of cloud had just been lifted;and, across the desert, lying fair under the broad sunshine, a city--