Part 7

It was in 1638, at the age of thirty, that Milton determined to broaden his views by study in foreign lands. Once more his father generously made possible the fulfillment of his ambition. The young scholar naturally turned his steps toward Italy, then the home of painting, letters and the newer learning. His biographer pictures him for us--"a slight, patrician figure, distinguished alike in mind and physique. . . . He carries letters from Sir Henry Wotton; he sees the great Hugo Grotius at Paris; sees the sunny country of olives in Provence; sees the superb front of Genoa piling up from the blue waters of the Mediterranean; sees Galileo at Florence--the old philosopher too blind to study the face of the studious young Englishman that has come so far to greet him. He sees, too, what is best and bravest at Rome; among the rest St. Peter's, just then brought to completion, and in the first freshness of its great tufa masonry. He is fêted by studious young Italians; has the freedom of the Accademia della Crusca; blazes out in love-sonnets to some dark-eyed signorina of Bologna; returns by Venice and by Geneva where he hobnobs with the Diodati, friends of his old school-fellow, Charles Diodati." In Rome again, we find him writing Latin poems, some of which, seen by learned Italians, stir these writers to amazement at the thought that a Briton could be so excellent a Latin poet. It was their praise, Milton says in one of his letters, that led to his renewed resolve to devote his life to literature. Then and there he determined to do for England what Homer had done for Greece, what Virgil had done for Rome, what Dante had done for Italy. Lingering in the Sistine Chapel and in the various galleries of the Vatican, he saw the religious dramas of Michael Angelo, and the paintings of Raphael, with the story of the temptation of Adam and Eve, culminating in the Last Judgment. And in those hours of leisure and contemplation he stored his memory with the glorious images that he was to use in later years for unfolding and unveiling the fall of man's soul in his _Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_.

It was while he was in the midst of his studies in the libraries of Rome and Florence, that the news reached him of the civil war threatening at home. Charles the First had reaffirmed the doctrine of the divine right of kings--that iniquitous theory which long afterward was to be revived by Kaiser Wilhelm as an excuse for the Great War. Over against Charles stood the Parliament, representing the people, and led by John Eliot and John Pym, John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell. Milton, with instant decision, turned his steps toward England. "I thought it dishonourable," he tells us, "that I should be travelling at ease for amusement when my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for liberty." Back in London, he found the country rocking on a red wave--the Scotch marching over the border--the Long Parliament portending--Strafford and Laud on the verge of impeachment--city pitted against city; brother against brother. His own father, drawing near to the end of his life, was a strong Royalist. The storm had broken, and in that sea of trouble the King and the old leaders were to go down. It is the glory of Milton that in that hour he chose to ally himself with a great cause and abandoning, for the time, his dream of an immortal epic, threw himself into the struggle for intellectual and moral liberty.

For the next twenty years, he was engulfed in a maelstrom of politics, tossed on a feverish tide of political hatred. With his own father and brother on the side of the King, he could no longer live under their roof; and unwilling to surrender his convictions of freedom and self-government, he struck out for himself in London. He took lodgings, and for years earned a slender livelihood by preparing pupils for the university. He gave his mornings to his students, and spent his evenings in writing pleas, attacking the autocracy of the King, and supporting the Puritan Leaders who wished to found the new commonwealth. It was not only Milton's life that was so affected. The lives of almost all his English contemporaries suffered similarly. Through the twenty years, from 1640 to 1660, there was an eclipse of pure literature in England. When he wrote he wrote necessarily, in prose. "I have the use," he explains, "as I may account it, of my _left hand_." But never once did he lose sight of his ideal--poetry. "Neither do I think it shame," he explains in one of his pamphlets, "to covenant with any knowing reader, that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted,"--meaning the composition of some poem which "the world would not willingly let die." He kept his promise--in the fullness of time. But in the interval, he played his part in the great drama of the Civil War.

At the very outset he was forced to endure and triumph over a personal misfortune. Like Shakespeare and Goethe, and many other poets, John Milton was most unfortunate in his marital life. At thirty-five, after a month's rest in the country, he returned to London, bringing with him a wife. She was young and of a family virtually committed to the Royalist cause; she had a shallow mind, and no sympathy either for Milton's artistic aims or his political convictions. The Civil War was on, Milton was giving himself with intense application to important public topics, was away from home in consultation with public men the long day through, and often returned late at night. The poor girl was in despair. A stranger in a great city, with no gift for friendship, she slowly became conscious of the fact that she never could be interested in John Milton's life. Urging the necessity of a brief visit to her country home, she went away and later positively refused to return. Milton was first hurt, then angered and finally disillusioned; and after great mental distress and careful study of the whole question of marriage and divorce, he published his views, which have exerted a profound and lasting influence upon society.

John Milton held that divorce should be as easy as marriage, and that when two people, beginning their contract in good faith, discover after honest endeavour, that there can be no happiness in the home, and both decide that it is best and honourable to separate, then there should be no legal obstacle to prevent this, providing always that proper provision be made for the support and education of children, whose character and disposition could not fail to be injured by the daily spectacle of unhappiness. Years afterward, when his wife's family had been rendered homeless, he took them all back into his own house. When his wife died, he married again, and within a year he was left a widower. Six years later he married his third wife, but his home was embittered by endless warfare between his daughters and his third wife. One of his letters says plainly that his wife was kind to him in his blind, old age when his daughters were undutiful and inhuman.

The Civil War was scarcely begun before he issued the first of those thunderbolts of indignation and exhortation known as his pamphlets on church discipline, education, and the liberty of unlicensed printing. The years that followed were years of incessant labour. He began and completed during this period his _History of England_, written from the viewpoint of the common people and tracing the ills, the poverty, and rebellion of Britain to misgovernment and tyranny. When Parliament tried the King upon charges of treason, and executed Charles, it was John Milton who came forward to defend Parliament, in a treatise which bore this title upon the title page:

The Tenure of Kings and Magistrate Proving that it is Lawful To call to account a tyrant or wicked King And, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death.

By JOHN MILTON.

Milton was not only the greatest pamphleteer of his generation--"head and shoulders above the rest"--but there is no life of that time, not even Cromwell's, in which the history of the revolution, so far as the deep underlying ideas were concerned, may be better studied. He was the first Englishman of note outside of Parliament to attach himself thus openly to the new Commonwealth. And every one of his prose works had this great quality, that it struck a blow for liberty.

In beginning any study of Milton it must be remembered that his intellect was essentially athletic. If he was the great poet of his era, he was not a dreamer of the closet, but a man who plunged into the thick of the fight, and made his writing and his doing a vital and indestructible part of his time. In analyzing the scholar's influence, De Quincey speaks of "the literature of knowledge" and "the literature of power." The function of the first is to teach men, the function of the second is to move and persuade men to action. De Quincey wishes us to understand that Milton's writings entered almost immediately into the thinking and the doing of the British people, just as bread enters into the blood of the physical system. Milton cared nothing for learning for its own sake. Knowledge was important only to the degree in which it was vitally creative, inspiring men, correcting their blunders, rebuking their selfishness, enlightening their darkness, and lifting them into the realm of silence, peace, and mystery. After defining the true scholar and Christian, as a knight going forth to war against every form of ignorance and tyranny, he exclaims, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." Learning, with Milton, was a means of enlarging his being and doing. Mark Pattison has well said, "He cultivated not letters, but himself, and sought to enter into possession of his own mental kingdom. Not that he might reign there, but that he might royally use its resources in building up a work which should bring honour to his country and his native tongue."

The glory of the battle which he fought for freedom--the freedom of the human mind--is all his own. "Thousands and tens of thousands among his contemporaries raised their voices against ship-money and the Star Chamber; but there were few indeed who discerned the more fearful evils of moral and intellectual slavery, and the benefits which would result from the liberty of the press and the unfettered exercise of private judgment." Milton was determined that the people should think for themselves, as well as tax themselves. And that he might shake the very foundations of the corruptions which he saw debasing the state, he selected for himself the most arduous and dangerous literary service. "At the beginning he wrote with incomparable energy and eloquence against the bishops. But, when his opinion seemed likely to prevail, he passed on to other subjects, and abandoned prelacy to the crowd of writers who now hastened to insult a falling party." He pressed always into the forlorn hope. The very men who most disapproved of his opinions were forced to respect the hardihood with which he maintained them.

Milton's prose pamphlets deserve the close study of every writer who wishes to know the full power of the English language. They sparkle with fine passages; they ring with eloquence; they have the fire and the fervour of a great mind at white heat. For quotable sentences, they are "a perfect field of cloth of gold." And the fineness and stiffness of their texture is by no means their greatest splendour. Every one of these controversial pamphlets answers to its author's definition of a good book in that it contains "the precious life-blood of a master spirit."

By far the most popular, and probably the most eloquent of all his prose writings is the famous _Areopagitica_, his argument for the liberty of unlicensed printing. It appeared on the 25th of November 1664, deliberately unlicensed and unregistered, and was a remonstrance addressed to Parliament in the form and style of an oration to be delivered in the assembly. Nobly eulogistic of Parliament in other respects, it denounced their printing ordinance as utterly unworthy of them, and of the new era of English liberties. Admired to-day because its main doctrine has become axiomatic--at one blow it accomplished the repeal of the licensing system and established forever the freedom of the English press--it contains passages which for power and beauty of prose make the finest declamations of Edmund Burke sink into insignificance.

It was not, however, the _Areopagitica_, but his vindication of the execution of Charles the First that procured for Milton the office of Latin Secretary under Cromwell's government. His boundless admiration for Cromwell had shown itself already in his immortal sonnet on the great soldier. He considered Cromwell the greatest and the best man of his generation, or of many generations; and he regarded Cromwell's assumption of the supreme power, as well as his retention of that power with a sovereign title, "as no real suppression of the republic, but as necessary for the preservation of the republic." Cromwell, in turn, saw in Milton a most powerful defender of the new commonwealth. By 1651 it was generally conceded that "the reputation of the Commonwealth abroad had been established by two agencies, and only two:--the victories of Cromwell, and the prose pamphlets of John Milton." In the nature of the case, their friendship and mutual respect of the two men was inevitable.

After the death of Charles, new treaties had to be drawn between England and Spain, England and France and Italy and Holland. These state papers were all written in Latin, and the Secretary of Latin and of Foreign Relations was a great person in the cabinet of every country. Milton's knowledge of Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, as well as Latin and Greek, made him an important figure in the deliberations of Cromwell's Council of State. His special duty was the drafting in Latin of letters of state, but from the first, he was employed in every conceivable kind of work. The council looked to him for everything in the nature of literary vigilance in the interests of the struggling Commonwealth. He was employed in personal conferences, in the examination of suspected papers, in interviews with their authors and printers, agents of foreign towns, envoys, ambassadors. It was a period of intense and feverish activity, with cabinet meetings, conferences between the leaders of the government, necessarily held at night. In that era of candle-light and flickering torches, with oil and electricity both still unknown, Milton, with despatches to be translated, notes to be made at all hours, was soon imperilling his eyesight. He was forty years of age when he took the post; at forty-six, as a result of his continuous and indomitable activities, he had ruined his eyes and was totally blind.

Wonderful the fortitude with which he faced this affliction! Hear the lines he composed in the first of those dark days:

"When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one talent, which is death to hide, Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he, returning, chide; 'Dost God exact day-labour, light denied?' I fondly ask: But Patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies--'God doth not heed Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed And post o'er land and ocean without rest; They also serve, who only stand and wait.'"

And hard upon this catastrophe came a new turn in the wheel of fortune. Cromwell died; the Commonwealth came to an end; all London threw its cap in the air at the Restoration. The leaders of the Commonwealth had to flee for their lives. Some fled to America for safety and some were caught and executed. Cromwell's body was taken from its grave in Westminster Abbey, suspended from the gallows, and left to dangle there. Past Milton's house, near Red Lion Square, the howling mob went by, dragging the body of his old leader. Milton himself, blind and in hiding, narrowly escaped execution. His head was forfeit, his pamphlets burned by public order. Only chance, and the exertion of influential friends, saved him from discovery and death. His escape from the scaffold is a mystery now, as it was a mystery at the time.

In the evil days that followed--the days of the Restoration, with its revenges and reactions, its return to high Episcopacy and suppression of every form of dissent and sectarianism, its new and shameless royal court--Milton, blind and forgotten by the public, turned to his long-cherished dream of a great poem. For twenty years, through all the storm and stress of political agitation, it had never been banished wholly from his thoughts. In the library of Cambridge University there may be seen to-day a list of over one hundred possible subjects, written in his own hand during some leisure-hour when he was pondering the great project of his heart. Living in retirement, visited only by a few close friends, he now proceeded to compose the masterpiece planned as a young man. Unable to see a book, forced to beg every friend who visited him to read aloud to him, dependent upon the assistance of three rebellious daughters, none of whom understood the many languages he knew so well, he nevertheless drove forward, determined to finish his task. _Paradise Lost_, begun and brought to completion in the face of every sort of discouragement, was finished in 1665 and published in 1667.

This amazing poem--the glory of English literature--is one of the few monumental works of the world. The English language possesses no other epic poem, nor a poem of any other kind, which approaches it in sustained sublimity. Nothing in modern epic literature is comparable to it save only the _Divine Comedy_ of Dante. It is impossible, in a single page or chapter, to call the roll of the beauties of Milton's poetic style. Much has been written of the organ-music of his verse, its magical, mysterious influence. Speaking generally, the terms mean little; but applied to Milton, both have significance. For his melody, his verse-structure, the very names he employs act like an incantation, with an almost occult power.

James Russell Lowell emphasizes this quality: "It is wonderful how, from the most withered and juiceless hint gathered in his reading, his grand images rise like an exhalation; how from the most battered old lamp, caught in that huge drag-net with which he swept the waters of learning, he could conjure up a tall genii to build his palaces." His words, says Macaulay, in another brilliant summary, "are words of enchantment. No sooner are they pronounced, than the past is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial places of the memory give up their dead. Change the structure of the sentence; substitute one synonym for another, and the whole effect is destroyed. There is large learning in the poem--weighty and recondite; but this spoils no music; great cumbrous names catch sonorous vibrations under his modulating touch, and colossal shields and spheres clash together like symbols. The whole burden of his knowledges--Pagan, Christian, or Hebraic, lift up and sink away upon the undulations of his sublime verse, as heavy-laden ships rise and fall upon some great ground swell making in from outer seas."

Fully to comprehend the peculiar sublimity of _Paradise Lost_, one must understand the peculiar character of the age in which Milton was living. It was a theological era, as the next century was a political era. In their reaction from the absolutism of Rome, the Puritans hated everything that reminded them of the Roman excesses, and that revulsion extended not only to the ecclesiastical autocracy of Rome, but to the lesser things, the clouds of incense, stained glass and the rich dresses of the clergy, the ecclesiastical holidays. These Puritans are called by Macaulay the most remarkable body of men that the world has ever produced. They had a contempt for all terrestrial distinctions. Confident of the favour of God, they despised the dignities of this world. "Unacquainted with the works of philosophers and poets they were deeply read in the oracles of God. If their names were not found in the registers of heralds, they were recorded in the Book of Life. If their steps were not accompanied by a splendid train of menials, legions of ministering angels had charge over them. Their palaces were houses not made with hands; their diadems crowns of glory which shall never fade away. On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles and priests they looked down with contempt; for they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious treasure, and eloquent in a more sublime language, nobles by right of an earlier creation and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand. Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men--the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker; but he set his foot on the neck of his King."

It is only to be expected that the literature of such an age--both prose and poetry--should be to a large degree theological. Milton's _Paradise Lost_ is an epic of war between good and evil. Not that, strictly speaking, Milton belonged to the class just described. He was not a Puritan, any more than he was a Freethinker, or a Royalist. In his character the noblest qualities of all three groups were combined. "From the Parliament and from the Court, from the conventicle and from the Gothic cloister, from the gloomy circles of the Roundheads and the Christmas revels of the Cavalier, his nature selected and drew to itself whatever was great and good." But the peculiar religious note that is in his great epic, the serious note, the note of dignity, is the distillation of an atmosphere charged and aquiver with the most intense theological convictions.

Numerous accounts have come down to us of Milton's personal appearance and habits toward the end of his life. By nature a patrician, reserved, clothed with a gentle dignity, he was not without a certain haughty, defiant self-assertion such as Lowell ascribes to Dante and Michael Angelo. He came to be a familiar figure in the neighbourhood of his residence, "a slender figure, of middle stature or a little less, generally dressed in a grey cloak or overcoat, and wearing sometimes a small silver-hilted sword, evidently in feeble health, but still looking younger than he was, with his lightish hair, and his fair, rather than aged or pale, complexion."

He was a very early riser, and regular in the distribution of his day, "spending the first part, to his midday dinner, always in his own room, amid his books, with an amanuensis to read for him and write to his dictation. Usually there was singing in the late afternoon, when there was a voice to sing for him; and instrumental music, when his, or a friendly hand touched the old organ." He loved the out-of-door life, walked much in the fields, loved his garden and his flowers, made his library to be the world of the open air.