Life of John Milton Part 2

It were not free if thou had'st power upon it."

It must be admitted that where the Spaniard and the Englishman come directly into compet.i.tion the former excels. The dispute between the Lady and Comus may be, as Johnson says it is, "the most animating and affecting scene in the drama;" but, tried by the dramatic test which Calderon bears so well, it is below the exigencies and the possibilities of the subject. Nor does the poetry here, quite so abundantly as in the other scenes in this unrivalled "suite of speeches," atone for the deficiencies of the play.

It is a just remark of Pattison's that "in a mind of the consistent texture of Milton's, motives are secretly influential before they emerge in consciousness." In September, 1637, Milton had complained to Diodati of his cramped situation in the country, and talked of taking chambers in London. Within a few months we find this vague project matured into a settled scheme of foreign travel. One tie to home had been severed by the death of his mother in the preceding April; and his father was to find another prop of his old age in his second son, Christopher, about to marry and reside with him. "Lycidas" had appeared meanwhile, or was to appear, and its bold denunciation of the Romanizing clergy might well offend the ruling powers. The atmosphere at home was, at all events, difficult breathing for an impotent patriot; and Milton may have come to see what we so clearly see in "Comus," that his asperities and limitations needed contact with the world. Why speak of the charms of Italy, in themselves sufficient allurement to a poet and scholar? His father, trustful and unselfish as of old, found the considerable sum requisite for a prolonged foreign tour; and in April, 1638, Milton, provided with excellent introductions from Sir Henry Wootton and others, seeks the enrichment and renovation of his genius in Italy:--

"And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."

CHAPTER III.

Four times has a great English poet taken up his abode in "the paradise of exiles," and remained there until deeply imbued with the spirit of the land. The Italian residence of Byron and Sh.e.l.ley, of Landor and Browning, has infused into English literature a new element which has mingled with its inmost essence. Milton's brief visit could not be of equal moment. Italian letters had already done their utmost for him; and he did not stay long enough to master the secret of Italian life. A real enthusiasm for Italy's cla.s.sical a.s.sociations is indicated by his original purpose of extending his travels to Greece, an enterprise at that period requiring no little disdain of hards.h.i.+p and peril. But it would have been an anachronism if he could have contemplated the comprehensive and scientific scheme of self-culture by Italian influences of every kind which, a hundred and fifty years later, was conceived and executed by Goethe. At the time of Milton's visit Italian letters and arts sloped midway in their descent from the Renaissance to the hideous but humorous rococo so graphically described by Vernon Lee.

Free thought had perished along with free inst.i.tutions in the preceding century, and as a consequence, though the physical sciences still numbered successful cultivators, originality of mind was all but extinct. Things, nevertheless, wore a gayer aspect than of late. The very completeness of the triumph of secular and spiritual despotism had made them less suspicious, surly, and austere. Spanish power was visibly decaying. The long line of _zelanti_ Popes had come to an end; and it was thought that if the bosom of the actual inc.u.mbent could be scrutinized, no little complacency in Swedish victories over the Faith's defenders would be found. An atmosphere of toleration was diffusing itself, bigotry was imperceptibly getting old-fas.h.i.+oned, the most ill.u.s.trious victim of the Inquisition was to be well-nigh the last. If the n.o.ble and the serious could not be permitted, there was no ban upon the amiable and the frivolous: never had the land been so full of petty rhymesters, antiquarian triflers, and gregarious literati, banded to play at authors.h.i.+p in academies, like the seven Swabians leagued to kill the hare. For the rest, the Italy of Milton's day, its superst.i.tion and its scepticism, and the sophistry that strove to make the two as one; its monks and its bravoes; its processions and its pantomimes; its cult of the Pa.s.sion and its cult of Paganism; the opulence of its past and the impotence of its present; will be found depicted by sympathetic genius in the second volume of "John Inglesant."

Milton arrived in Paris about the end of April or beginning of May. Of his short stay there it is only known that he was received with distinction by the English Amba.s.sador, Lord Scudamore, and owed to him an introduction to one of the greatest men in Europe, Hugo Grotius, then residing at Paris as envoy from Christina of Sweden. Travelling by way of Nice, Genoa, Leghorn, and Pisa, he arrived about the beginning of August at Florence; where, probably by the aid of good recommendations, he "immediately contracted the acquaintance of many n.o.ble and learned,"

and doubtless found, with the author of "John Inglesant," that "nothing can be more delightful than the first few days of life in Italy in the company of polished and congenial men." The Florentine academies, he implies answered one of the purposes of modern clubs, and enabled the traveller to multiply one good introduction into many. He especially mentions Gaddi, Dati, Frescobaldi, Coltellini, Bonmattei, Chimentelli, and Francini, of all of whom a full account will be found in Ma.s.son. Two of them, Dati and Francini, have linked their names with Milton's by their encomiums on him inserted in his works. The key-note of these surprising productions is struck by Francini when he remarks that the heroes of England are accounted in Italy superhuman. If this is so, Dati may be justified in comparing a young man on his first and last foreign tour to the travelled Ulysses; and Francini in declaring that Thames rivals Helicon in virtue of Milton's Latin poems, which alone the panegyrist could read. Truly, as Smollett says, Italian is the language of compliments. If ludicrous, however, the flattery is not nauseous, for it is not wholly insincere. Amid all conventional exaggerations there is an under-note of genuine feeling, showing that the writers really had received a deep impression from Milton, deeper than they could well explain or understand. The bow drawn at a venture did not miss the mark, but it is a curious reflection that those of his performances which would really have justified their utmost enthusiasm were hieroglyphical to them. Such of his literary exercises as they could understand consisted, he says, of "some trifles which I had in memory composed at under twenty or thereabout; and other things which I had s.h.i.+fted, in scarcity of books and conveniences, to patch up among them." The former cla.s.s of compositions may no doubt be partly identified with his college declamations and Latin verses. What the "things patched up among them"

may have been is unknown. It is curious enough that his acquaintance with the Italian literati should have been the means of preserving one of their own compositions, the "Tina" of Antonio Malatesti, a series of fifty sonnets on a mistress, sent to him in ma.n.u.script by the author, with a dedication to the _ill.u.s.trissimo signore et padrone osservatissimo_. The pieces were not of a kind to be approved by the laureate of chast.i.ty, and annoyance at the implied slur upon his morals may account for his omission of Malatesti from the list of his Italian acquaintance. He carried the MS. home, nevertheless, and a copy of it, finding its way back to Italy in the eighteenth century, restored Malatesti's fifty indiscretions to the Italian Parna.s.sus. That his intercourse with men of culture involved freedom of another sort we learn from himself. "I have sate among their learned men," he says, "and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while they themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought, that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been written there now these many years but flattery and fustian." Italy had never acquiesced in her degradation, though for a century and a half to come she could only protest in such conventicles as those frequented by Milton.

The very type and emblem of the free spirit of Italy, crushed but not conquered, then inhabited Florence in the person of "the starry Galileo," lately released from confinement at Arcetri, and allowed to dwell in the city under such severe restraint of the Inquisition that no Protestant should have been able to gain access to him. It may not have been until Milton's second visit in March, 1639, when Galileo had returned to his villa, that the English stranger stood unseen before him. The meeting between the two great blind men of their century is one of the most picturesque in history; it would have been more pathetic still if Galileo could have known that his name would be written in "Paradise Lost," or Milton could have foreseen that within thirteen years he too would see only with the inner eye, but that the calamity which disabled the astronomer would restore inspiration to the poet. How deeply he was impressed appears, not merely from the famous comparison of Satan's s.h.i.+eld to the moon enlarged in "the Tuscan artist's optic gla.s.s," but by the ventilation in the fourth and eighth books of "Paradise Lost," of the points at issue between Ptolemy and Copernicus:--

"Whether the sun predominant in heaven Rise on the earth, or earth rise on the sun, He from the east his flaming road begin, Or she from west her silent course advance With inoffensive pace, that spinning sleeps On her soft axle, while she paces even, And bears thee soft with the smooth air along."

It would be interesting to know if Milton's Florentine acquaintance included that romantic adventurer, Robert Dudley, strange prototype of Sh.e.l.ley in face and fortune, whom Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Dean Bargrave encountered at Florence, but whom Milton does not mention. The next stage in his pilgrimage was the Eternal City, by this time resigned to live upon its past. The revenues of which Protestant revolt had deprived it were compensated by the voluntary contributions of the lovers of antiquity and art; and it had become under Paul V. one of the centres of European finance. Recent Popes had added splendid architectural embellishments, and the tendency to secular display was well represented by Urban VIII., a great gatherer and a great dispenser of wealth, an accomplished amateur in many arts, and surrounded by a tribe of nephews, inordinately enriched by their indulgent uncle. Milton arrived early in October. The most vivid trace of his visit is his presence at a magnificent concert given by Cardinal Barberini, who, "himself waiting at the doors, and seeking me out in so great a crowd, nay, almost laying hold of me by the hand, admitted me within in a truly most honourable manner." There he heard the singer, Leonora Baroni, to whom he inscribed three Latin epigrams, omitted from the fifty-six compositions in honour of her published in the following year. But we may see her as he saw her in the frontispiece, reproduced in Ademollo's monograph upon her. The face is full of sensibility, but not handsome.

She lived to be a great lady, and if any one spoke of her artist days she would say, _Chi le ricercava queste memorie?_ Next to hers, the name most entwined with Milton's Roman residence is that of Lucas Holstenius, a librarian of the Vatican. Milton can have had little respect for a man who had changed his religion to become the dependant of Cardinal Barberini, but Holstenius's obliging reception of him extorted his grat.i.tude, expressed in an eloquent letter. Of the venerable ruins and masterpieces of ancient and modern art which have inspired so many immortal compositions, Milton tells us nothing, and but one allusion to them is discoverable in his writings. The study of antiquity, as distinguished from that of cla.s.sical authors, was not yet a living element in European culture: there is also truth in Coleridge's observation that music always had a greater attraction for Milton than plastic art.

After two months' stay in Rome, Milton proceeded to Naples, whence, after two months' residence, he was recalled by tidings of the impending troubles at home, just as he was about to extend his travels to Sicily and Greece. The only name a.s.sociated with his at Naples is that of the Marquis Manso, then pa.s.sing his seventy-ninth year with the halo of reverence due to a veteran who fifty years ago had soothed and s.h.i.+elded Ta.s.so, and since had protected Marini. He now entertained Milton with equal kindness, little dreaming that in return for hospitality he was receiving immortality. Milton celebrated his desert as the friend of poets, in a Latin poem of singular elegance, praying for a like guardian of his own fame, in lines which should never be absent from the memory of his biographers. He also unfolded the project which he then cherished of an epic on King Arthur, and a.s.sured Manso that Britain was not wholly barbarous, for the Druids were really very considerable poets. He is silent on Chaucer and Shakespeare. Manso requited the eulogium with an epigram and two richly-wrought cups, and told Milton that he would have shown him more observance still if he could have abstained from religious controversy. Milton had not acted on Sir Henry Wootton's advice to him, _il volto sciolto, i pensieri stretti_. "I had made this resolution with myself," he says, "not of my own accord to introduce conversation about religion; but, if interrogated respecting the faith, whatsoever I should suffer, to dissemble nothing." To this resolution he adhered, he says, during his second two months' visit to Rome, notwithstanding threats of Jesuit molestation, which probably were not serious. At Florence his friends received him with no less warmth than if they had been his countrymen, and with them he spent another two months. His way to Venice lay through Bologna and Ferrara, and if his sonnets in the Italian language were written in Italy, and all addressed to the same person, it was probably at Bologna, since the lady is spoken of as an inhabitant of "Reno's gra.s.sy vale," and the Reno is a river between Bologna and Ferrara. But there are many difficulties in the way of this theory, and, on the whole, it seems most reasonable to conclude that the sonnets were composed in England, and that their autobiographical character is at least doubtful. That nominally inscribed to Diodati, however, would well suit Leonora Baroni. Diodati had been buried in Blackfriars on August 27, 1638, but Milton certainly did not learn the fact until after his visit to Naples, and possibly not until he came to pa.s.s some time at Geneva with Diodati's uncle. He had come to Geneva from Venice, where he had made some stay, s.h.i.+pping off to England a cargo of books collected in Italy, among which were many of "immortal notes and Tuscan air." These, we may a.s.sume, he found awaiting him when he again set foot on his native soil, about the end of July, 1639.

Milton's conduct on his return justifies Wordsworth's commendation:--

"Thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay."

Full, as his notebooks of the period attest, of magnificent aspiration for "flights above the Aonian mount," he yet quietly sat down to educate his nephews, and lament his friend. His brother-in-law Phillips had been dead eight years, leaving two boys, Edward and John, now about nine and eight respectively. Mrs. Phillips's second marriage had added two daughters to the family, and from whatever cause, it was thought best that the education of the sons should be conducted by their uncle. So it came to pa.s.s that "he took him a lodging in St. Bride's Churchyard, at the house of one Russel, a tailor;" Christopher Milton continuing to live with his father.

We may well believe that when the first cares of resettlement were over, Milton found no more urgent duty than the bestowal of a funeral tribute upon his friend Diodati. The "Epitaphium Damonis" is the finest of his Latin poems, marvellously picturesque in expression, and inspired by true manly grief. In Diodati he had lost perhaps the only friend whom, in the most sacred sense of the term, he had ever possessed; lost him when far away and unsuspicious of the already accomplished stroke; lost him when returning to his side with aspirations to be imparted, and intellectual treasures to be shared. _Bis ille miser qui serus amavit._ All this is expressed with earnest emotion in truth and tenderness, surpa.s.sing "Lycidas," though void of the varied music and exquisite felicities which could not well be present in the conventionalized idiom of a modern Latin poet. The most pathetic pa.s.sage is that in which he contrasts the general complacency of animals in their kind with man's dependence for sympathy on a single breast; the most biographically interesting where he speaks of his plans for an epic on the story of Arthur, which he seems about to undertake in earnest. But the impulses from without which generally directed the course of this seemingly autocratic, but really susceptible, nature, urged him in quite a different direction: for some time yet he was to live, not make a poem.

The tidings which, arriving at Naples about Christmas, 1638, prevailed upon Milton to abandon his projected visit to Sicily and Greece, were no doubt those of the revolt of Scotland, and Charles's resolution to quell it by force of arms. Ere he had yet quitted Italy, the King's impotence had been sufficiently demonstrated, and about a month ere he stood on English soil the royal army had "disbanded like the break-up of a school." Milton may possibly have regretted his hasty return, but before many months had pa.s.sed it was plain that the revolution was only beginning. Charles's ineffable infatuation brought on a second Scottish war, ten times more ridiculously disastrous than the first, and its result left him no alternative but the convocation (November, 1640) of the Long Parliament, which sent Laud to the Tower and Strafford to the block, cleared away servile judges and corrupt ministers, and made the persecuted Puritans persecutors in their turn. Not a member of this grave a.s.semblage, perhaps, but would have laughed if told that not its least memorable feat was to have prevented a young schoolmaster from writing an epic.

Milton had by this time found the lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard insufficient for him, and had taken a house in Aldersgate Street, beyond the City wall, and suburban enough to allow him a garden. "This street,"

writes Howell, in 1657, "resembleth an Italian street more than any other in London, by reason of the s.p.a.ciousness and uniformity of the buildings and straightness thereof, with the convenient distance of the houses." He did not at this time contemplate mixing actively in political or religious controversy.

"I looked about to see if I could get any place that would hold myself and my books, and so I took a house of sufficient size in the city; and there with no small delight I resumed my intermitted studies; cheerfully leaving the event of public affairs, first to G.o.d, and then to those to whom the people had committed that task."

But this was before the convocation of the Long Parliament. When it had met,

"Perceiving that the true way to liberty followed on from these beginnings, inasmuch also as I had so prepared myself from my youth that, above all things, I could not be ignorant what is of Divine and what of human right, I resolved, though I was then meditating certain other matters, to transfer into this struggle all my genius and all the strength of my industry."

Milton's note-books, to be referred to in another place, prove that he did not even then cease to meditate themes for poetry, but practically he for eighteen years ceased to be a poet.

There is no doubt something grating and unwelcome in the descent of the scholar from regions of serene culture to fierce political and religious broils. But to regret with Pattison that Milton should, at this crisis of the State, have turned aside from poetry to controversy is to regret that "Paradise Lost" should exist. Such a work could not have proceeded from one indifferent to the public weal, and if Milton had been capable of forgetting the citizen in the man of letters we may be sure that "a little grain of conscience" would ere long have "made him sour." It is sheer literary fanaticism to speak with Pattison of "the prost.i.tution of genius to political party." Milton is as much the idealist in his prose as in his verse; and although in his pamphlets he sides entirely with one of the two great parties in the State, it is not as its instrument, but as its prophet and monitor. He himself tells us that controversy is highly repugnant to him.

"I trust to make it manifest with what small willingness I endure to interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these, and leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoa.r.s.e disputes, put from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies, to come in to the dim reflection of hollow antiquities sold by the seeming bulk."

But he felt that if he allowed such motives to prevail with him, it would be said to him:

"Timorous and ungrateful, the Church of G.o.d is now again at the foot of her insulting enemies, and thou bewailest, What matters it for thee or thy bewailing? When time was, thou would'st not find a syllable of all that thou hast read or studied to utter on her behalf. Yet ease and leisure was given thee for thy retired thoughts, but of the sweat of other men. Thou hast the diligence, the parts, the language of a man, if a vain subject were to be adorned or beautified; but when the cause of G.o.d and His Church was to be pleaded, for which purpose that tongue was given thee which thou hast, G.o.d listened if He could hear thy voice among His zealous servants, but thou wert dumb as a beast; from henceforward be that which thine own brutish silence hath made thee."

A man with "Paradise Lost" in him must needs so think and act, and, much as it would have been to have had another "Comus" or "Lycidas," were not even such well exchanged for a hymn like this, the high-water mark of English impa.s.sioned prose ere Milton's mantle fell upon Ruskin?

"Thou, therefore, that sittest in light and glory unapproachable.

Parent of angels and men! next, Thee I implore, Omnipotent King, Redeemer of that lost remnant whose nature Thou didst a.s.sume, ineffable and everlasting Love! And Thou, the third subsistence of Divine Infinitude, illuminating Spirit, the joy and solace of created things! one Tri-personal G.o.dhead! look upon this Thy poor and almost spent and expiring Church, leave her not thus a prey to these importunate wolves, that wait and think long till they devour Thy tender flock; these wild boars that have broke into Thy vineyard, and left the print of their polluting hoofs on the souls of Thy servants. O let them not bring about their d.a.m.ned designs that stand now at the entrance of the bottomless pit, expecting the watchword to open and let out those dreadful locusts and scorpions to reinvolve us in that pitchy cloud of infernal darkness, where we shall never more see the sun of Thy truth again, never hope for the cheerful dawn, never more hear the bird of morning sing. Be moved with pity at the afflicted state of this our shaken monarchy, that now lies labouring under her throes, and struggling against the grudges of more dreaded calamities.

"O Thou, that, after the impetuous rage of five b.l.o.o.d.y inundations, and the succeeding sword of intestine war, soaking the land in her own gore, didst pity the sad and ceaseless revolution of our swift and thick-coming sorrows; when we were quite breathless of Thy free grace didst motion peace and terms of covenant with us; and, having first well-nigh freed us from anti-Christian thraldom, didst build up this Britannic Empire to a glorious and enviable height, with all her daughter-islands about her; stay us in this felicity, let not the obstinacy of our half-obedience and will-wors.h.i.+p bring forth that viper of sedition, that for these fourscore years hath been breeding to eat through the entrails of our peace; but let her cast her abortive sp.a.w.n without the danger of this travailing and throbbing kingdom: that we may still remember in our solemn thanksgivings, how, for us, the northern ocean, even to the frozen Thule, was scattered with the proud s.h.i.+pwrecks of the Spanish Armada, and the very maw of h.e.l.l ransacked, and made to give up her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that horrible and d.a.m.ned blast.

"O how much more glorious will those former deliverances appear, when we shall know them not only to have saved us from greatest miseries past, but to have reserved us for greatest happiness to come? Hitherto Thou hast but freed us, and that not fully, from the unjust and tyrannous claim of Thy foes, now unite us entirely and appropriate us to Thyself, tie us everlastingly in willing homage to the prerogative of Thy eternal throne.

"And now we know, O Thou, our most certain hope and defence, that Thine enemies have been consulting all the sorceries of the great wh.o.r.e, and have joined their plots with that sad, intelligencing tyrant that mischiefs the world with his mines of Ophir, and lies thirsting to revenge his naval ruins that have larded our seas: but let them all take counsel together, and let it come to nought; let them decree, and do Thou cancel it; let them gather themselves, and be scattered; let them embattle themselves, and be broken; let them embattle, and be broken, for Thou art with us.

"Then amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, some one may perhaps be heard offering at high strains in new and lofty measures, to sing and celebrate Thy Divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout all ages; whereby this great and warlike nation, instructed and inured to the fervent and continual practice of truth and righteousness, and casting far from her the rags of her old vices, may press on hard to that high and happy emulation to be found the soberest, wisest, and most Christian people at that day, when Thou, the Eternal and shortly-expected King, shalt open the clouds to judge the several kingdoms of the world, and distributing national honours and rewards to religious and just commonwealths, shall put an end to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming Thy universal and mild monarchy through heaven and earth; where they undoubtedly, that by their labours, counsels, and prayers, have been earnest for the common good of religion, and their country, shall receive above the inferior orders of the blessed, the regal addition of princ.i.p.alities, legions, and thrones into their glorious t.i.tles, and in supereminence of beatific vision, progressing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity, shall clasp inseparable hands with joy and bliss, in over-measure for ever.

"But they contrary, that by the impairing and diminution of the true faith, the distresses and servitude of their country, aspire to high dignity, rule and promotion here, after a shameful end in this life (which G.o.d grant them), shall be thrown down eternally into the darkest and deepest gulf of h.e.l.l, where, under the despiteful control, the trample and spurn of all the other d.a.m.ned, that in the anguish of their torture, shall have no other ease than to exercise a raving and b.e.s.t.i.a.l tyranny over them as their slaves and negroes, they shall remain in that plight for ever, the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot, and down-trodden va.s.sals of perdition."

The five pamphlets in which Milton enunciated his views on Church Government fall into two well-marked chronological divisions. Three--"Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England," "Of Prelatical Episcopacy," "Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuus"--which appeared almost simultaneously, belong to the middle of 1641, when the question of episcopacy was fiercely agitated.

Two--"The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy," and "The Apology for Smectymnuus,"[1] belong to the early part of 1642, when the bishops had just been excluded from the House of Lords. To be just to Milton we must put ourselves in his position. At the present day forms of church government are usually debated on the ground of expediency, and even those to whom they seem important cannot regard them as they were regarded by Milton's contemporaries. Many may protest against Episcopacy receiving especial recognition from the State, but no one dreams of abolis.h.i.+ng it, or of endowing another form of ecclesiastical administration in its room. It is no longer contended that the national religion should be changed, the contention is that no religion should be national, but that all should be placed on an impartial footing. But Milton at this time desired a theocracy, and nothing doubted that he could produce a pattern agreeable in every respect to the Divine will if only Prelacy could be hurled after Popery. The controversy, therefore, a.s.sumed far grander proportions than would be possible in our day, when it is three-fourths a protest against the airs of superiority which the alleged successors of the Apostles think it becoming to a.s.sume towards teachers whose education and circ.u.mstances approach more closely than their own to the Apostolic model. What would seem exaggerated now was then perfectly in place. Milton, in his own estimation, had a theme for which the cloven tongues of Pentecost were none too fiery, or the tongues of angels too melodious. As bursts of impa.s.sioned prose-poetry the finest pa.s.sages in these writings have never been surpa.s.sed, nor ever will be equalled so long as short sentences prevail, and the interminable period must not unfold itself in heights and hollows like the incoming tide of ocean, nor peal forth melodious thunder like a mighty organ. But, considered as argumentative compositions, they are exceedingly weak. No masculine head could be affected by them; but a manly heart may easily imbibe the generous contagion of their n.o.ble enthusiastic idealism. No man with a single fibre of ideality or enthusiasm can help confessing that Milton has risen to a transcendent height, and he may imagine that it has been attained by the ladder of reason rather than the pinion of poetry. Such an one may easily find reasons for agreeing with Milton in many inspired outbursts of eloquence simulating the logic that is in fact lacking to them. The following splendid pa.s.sage, for instance, and there are very many like it, merely proves that a seat in the House of Lords is not essential to the episcopal office, which no one ever denied. It would have considerable force if the question involved the nineteenth century one of the Pope's temporal sovereignty:--

"Certainly there is no employment more honourable, more worthy to take up a great spirit, more requiring a generous and free nurture, than to be the messenger and herald of heavenly truth from G.o.d to man, and by the faithful work of holy doctrine to procreate a number of faithful men, making a kind of creation like to G.o.d's by infusing his spirit and likeness into them, to their salvation, as G.o.d did into him; arising to what climate soever he turn him, like that Sun of Righteousness that sent him, with healing in his wings, and new light to break in upon the chill and gloomy hearts of his hearers, raising out of darksome barrenness a delicious and fragrant spring of saving knowledge and good works.

Can a man thus employed find himself discontented or dishonoured for want of admittance to have a pragmatical voice at sessions and jail deliveries? or because he may not as a judge sit out the wrangling noise of litigious courts to shrive the purses of unconfessing and unmortified sinners, and not their souls, or be discouraged though men call him not lord, whereas the due performance of his office would gain him, even from lords and princes, the voluntary t.i.tle of father?"

When it was said of Robespierre, _cet homme ira bien loin, car il croit tout ce qu'il dit_, it was probably meant that he would attain the chief place in the State. It might have been said of Milton in the literal sense. The idealist was about to apply his principles of church polity to family life, to the horror of many nominal allies. His treatise on Divorce was the next of his publications in chronological order, but is so entwined with his domestic life that it will be best to postpone it until we again take up the thread of his personal history, and to pa.s.s on for the present to his next considerable writings, his tracts on education and on the freedom of the press.

Milton's tract on Education, like so many of his performances, was the fruit of an impulse from without. "Though it be one of the greatest and n.o.blest designs that can be thought on, and for want of which this nation perishes, I had not at this time been induced but by your earnest entreaties and serious conjurements." The efficient cause thus referred to existed in the person of Samuel Hartlib, philanthropist and polypragmatist, precursor of the Franklins and Rumfords of the succeeding century. The son of a Polish exile of German extraction, Hartlib had settled in England about 1627. He found the country behindhand both economically and socially, and with benign fervour applied himself to its regeneration. Agriculture was his princ.i.p.al hobby, and he effected much towards its improvement in England, rather however by editing the unpublished treatises of Weston and Child than by any direct contributions of his own. Next among the undertakings to which he devoted himself were two of no less moment than the union of British and foreign Protestants, and the reform of English education by the introduction of the methods of Comenius. This Moravian pastor, the Pestalozzi of his age, had first of men grasped the idea that the ordinary school methods were better adapted to instil a knowledge of words than a knowledge of things. He was, in a word, the inventor of object lessons. He also strove to organize education as a connected whole from the infant school to the last touch of polish from foreign travel. Milton alludes almost scornfully to Comenius in his preface to Hartlib, but his tract is nevertheless imbued with the Moravian's principles. His aim, like Comenius's, is to provide for the instruction of all, "before the years of p.u.b.erty, in all things belonging to the present and future life." His view is as strictly utilitarian as Comenius's. "Language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known." Of the study of language as intellectual discipline he says nothing, and his whole course of instruction is governed by the desire of imparting useful knowledge. Whatever we may think of the system of teaching which in our day allows a youth to leave school disgracefully ignorant of physical and political geography, of history and foreign languages, it cannot be denied that Milton goes into the opposite extreme, and would overload the young mind with more information than it could possibly digest. His scheme is further vitiated by a fault which we should not have looked for in him, indiscriminate reverence for the cla.s.sical writers, extending to subjects in which they were but children compared with the moderns. It moves something more than a smile to find ingenuous youth referred to Pliny and Solinus for instruction in physical science; and one wonders what the agricultural Hartlib thought of the proposed course of "Cato, Varro, and Columella," whose precepts are adapted for the climate of Italy. Another error, obvious to any dunce, was concealed from Milton by his own intellectual greatness. He legislates for a college of Miltons.

He never suspects that the course he is prescribing would be beyond the abilities of nine hundred and ninety-nine scholars in a thousand, and that the thousandth would die of it. If a difficulty occurs he contemptuously puts it aside. He has not provided for Italian, but can it not "be easily learned at any odd hour"? "Ere this time the Hebrew tongue" (of which we have not hitherto heard a syllable), "might have been gained, whereto it would be no impossibility to add the Chaldee and the Syrian dialect." This sublime confidence in the resources of the human intellect is grand, but it marks out Milton as an idealist, whose mission it was rather to animate mankind by the greatness of his thoughts than to devise practical schemes for human improvement. As an ode or poem on education, Milton's tract, doubtless, has delivered many a teacher and scholar from bondage to routine; and no man's aims are so high or his thoughts so generous that he might not be further profited and stimulated by reading it. As a practical treatise it is only valuable for its emphatic denunciation of the folly of teasing youth, whose element is the concrete, with grammatical abstractions, and the advice to proceed to translation as soon as possible, and to keep it up steadily throughout the whole course. Neglect of this precept is the princ.i.p.al reason why so many youths not wanting in capacity, and a.s.siduously taught, leave school with hardly any knowledge of languages. Milton's scheme is also remarkable for its bold dealing with day schools and universities, which it would have entirely superseded.

The next publication of Milton's is another instance of the dependence of his intellectual workings upon the course of events outside him. We owe the "Areopagitica," not to the lonely overflowings of his soul, or even to the disinterested observation of public affairs, but to the real jeopardy he had incurred by his neglect to get his books licensed. The Long Parliament had found itself, in 1643, with respect to the Press, very much in the position of Lord Canning's government in India at the time of the Mutiny. It marks the progress of public opinion that, whereas the Indian Government only ventured to take power to prevent inopportune publication with many apologies, and as a temporary measure, the Parliament a.s.sumed it as self-evident that "forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed papers, pamphlets, and books" had no right to exist, and should be nipped in the bud by the appointment of licensers. Twelve London ministers, therefore, were nominated to license books in divinity, which was equivalent to enacting that nothing contrary to Presbyterian orthodoxy should be published in England.[2]

Other departments, not forgetting poetry and fiction, were similarly provided for. The ordinance is dated June 14, 1643. Milton had always contemned the licensing regulations previously existing, and within a month his brain was busy with speculations which no reverend licenser could have been expected to confirm with an imprimatur. About August 1st the "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce" appeared, with no recognition of or from a licenser; and the second edition, published in the following February, equally infringed the Parliamentary ordinance. No notice appears to have been taken until the election of a new Master of the Stationers' Company, about the middle of 1644. The Company had an interest in the enforcement of the ordinance, which was aimed at piracy as well as sedition and heresy; and whether for this reason, or at the instigation of Milton's adversaries, they (August 24th) pet.i.tioned Parliament to call him to account. The matter was referred to a committee, but more urgent business thrust it out of sight. Milton, nevertheless, had received his marching orders, and on November 24, 1644, appeared "Areopagitica; a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing": itself unlicensed.

The "Areopagitica" is by far the best known of Milton's prose writings, being the only one whose topic is not obsolete. It is also composed with more care and art than the others. Elsewhere he seeks to overwhelm, but here to persuade. He could without insincerity profess veneration for the Lords and Commons to whom his discourse is addressed, and he spares no pains to give them a favourable opinion both of his dutifulness and his reasonableness. More than anywhere else he affects the character of a practical man, pressing home arguments addressed to the understanding rather than to the pure reason. He points out sensibly, and for him calmly, that the censors.h.i.+p is a Papal invention, contrary to the precedents of antiquity; that while it cannot prevent the circulation of bad books, it is a grievous hindrance to good ones; that it destroys the sense of independence and responsibility essential to a manly and fruitful literature. We hear less than might have been expected about first principles, of the sacredness of conscience, of the obligation on every man to manifest the truth as it is within him. He does not dispute that the magistrate may suppress opinions esteemed dangerous to society after they have been published; what he maintains is that publication must not be prevented by a board of licensers. He strikes at the censor, not at the Attorney-General. This judicious caution cramped Milton's eloquence; for while the "Areopagitica" is the best example he has given us of his ability as an advocate, the diction is less magnificent than usual. Yet nothing penned by him in prose is better known than the pa.s.sage beginning, "Methinks I see in my mind a n.o.ble and puissant nation;" and none of his writings contain so many seminal sentences, pithy embodiments of vital truths. "Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth." "A dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil doing. For G.o.d more esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person than the restraint of ten vicious." "Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making." "A man maybe a heretic in the truth." Towards the end the argument takes a wider sweep, and Milton, again the poet and the seer, hails with exultation the approach of the time he thinks he discerns when all the Lord's people shall be prophets. "Behold now this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompa.s.sed and surrounded with His protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers working to fas.h.i.+on out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching reformation." He clearly indicates that he regards the licensing ordinance as not really the offspring of an honest though mistaken concern for religion and morality, but as a device of Presbyterianism to restrain this outpouring of the spirit and silence Independents as well as Royalists.

Presbyterianism had indeed been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and Milton's pamphlet was the handwriting on the wall. The fine gold must have become very dim ere a Puritan pen could bring itself to indite that scathing satire on the "factor to whose care and credit the wealthy man may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs; some divine of note and estimation that must be. To him he adheres; resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys into his custody; and, indeed, makes the very person of that man his religion--esteems his a.s.sociating with him a sufficient evidence and commendation of his own piety. So that a man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual movable, and goes and comes near him according as that good man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him, his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped and sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted; and after the malmsey or some well-spiced brewage, and better breakfasted than He whose morning appet.i.te would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his religion." This is a startling pa.s.sage. We should have p.r.o.nounced hitherto that Milton's one hopeless, congenital, irremediable want, alike in literature and in life, was humour. And now, surely as ever Saul was among the prophets, behold Milton among the wits.

CHAPTER IV.

Ranging with Milton's spirit over the "fresh woods and pastures new,"

foreshadowed in the closing verse of "Lycidas," we have left his mortal part in its suburban dwelling in Aldersgate Street, which he seems to have first inhabited shortly before the convocation of the Long Parliament in November, 1640. His visible occupations are study and the instruction of his nephews; by and by he becomes involved in the revolutionary tempest that rages around; and, while living like a pedagogue, is writing like a prophet. He is none the less cheris.h.i.+ng lofty projects for epic and drama; and we also learn from Phillips that his society included "some young sparks," and may a.s.sume that he then, as afterwards--