CHAPTER VI. · Milton. 1. General idea of his mind and character-Family- Education-StudiesTravels-Return to England. II Effects of a concentrated and solitary character-Austerity-Inexperience— Marriage-Children-Domestic Troubles. III. Combative, energy-Polemic against the bishops-Against the king-Enthusiasm and sternness-Theories on government, church, and education -Stoicism and virtue-Old age, occupations, person. IV. Milton as a prose-writer-Changes during three centuries in appearances and ideas-Heaviness of his logic-The Doctrine and Discipline of DivorceHeavy humour-Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence-Clumsiness of discussion--Defensio Populi Anglicani—Violence of his animositie -The Reason of Church Government-Eikonoklastes-Liberality of doctrines -Of Reformation-Areopagitica-Style-Breadth of eloquence-Wealth of imagery-Lyric sublimity of diction. V. Milton as a poct-How he approaches and is distinct from the poets of the Renaissance-How he gives poetry a moral tone-Profane poems-L'Allegro and Il Penseroso-Comus-Lycidas-Religious poems-Paradise LostConditions of a genuine epic-They are not to be met with in the age or in the poet-Comparison of Adam and Eve with an English family-Comparison of God and the angels to a monarch's court-The rest of the poem -Comparison between the sentiments of Satan and the republican passions -Lyrical and moral character of the scenery-Loftiness and sense of the moral ideas-Situation of the poet and the poem between two ages—Com· position of his genius and his work. ON N the borders of the licentious Renaissance which was drawing to a close, and of the exact school of poetry which was springing up, between the monotonous conceits of Cowley and the correct gallantries of Waller, appeared a mighty and superb mind, prepared by logic and enthusiasm for eloquence and the epic style; liberal, Protestant, a moralist and a poet; adorning the cause of Algernon Sidney and Locke with the inspiration of Spenser and Shakspeare; the heir of a poetical age, the precursor of an austere age, holding his place between the epoch of unbiassed dreamland and the epoch of practical action; like his own Adam, who, entering a hostile earth, heard behind him, in ́ the closed Eden, the dying strains of heaven. John Milton was not one of those fevered souls, void of self-com. mand, whose rapture takes them by fits, whom a sickly sensibility drives for ever to the extreme of sorrow or joy, whose pliability prepares them to produce a variety of characters, whose inquietude condemns them to paint the insanity and contradictions of passion. Vast knowledge, close logic, and grand passion: these were his marks. His mind was lucid, his imagination limited. He was incapable of disturbed emotion or of transformation. He conceived the loftiest of ideal beauties, but he conceived only one. He was not born for the drama, but for the ode. He does not create souls, but constructs arguments and experiences emotions. Emotions and arguments, all the forces and actions of his soul, assemble and are arranged beneath a unique sentiment, that of the sublime; and the broad river of lyric poetry streams from him, impetuous, with even flow, splendid as a cloth of gold. I. This dominant sense constituted the greatness and the firmness of his character. Against external fluctuations he found a refuge in himself; and the ideal city which he had built in his soul endured, impregnable to all assaults. It was too beautiful, this inner city, for him to wish to leave it; it was too solid to be destroyed. He believed in the sublime with the whole force of his nature, and the whole authority of his logic; and with him, the cultivated reason strengthened by its tests the suggestions of the primitive instinct. With this double armour, man can advance firmly through life. He who is always feeding himself with demonstrations is capable of believing, willing, persevering in belief and will; he does not turn aside to every event and every passion, as that fickle and pliable being whom we call a poet; he remains at rest in fixed principles. He is capable of embracing a cause, and of continuing attached to it, whatever may happen, spite of all, to the end. No seduction, no emotion, no accident, no change alters the stability of his conviction or the lucidity of his knowledge. On the first day, on the last day, during the whole time, he preserves intact the entire system of his clear ideas, and the logical vigour of his brain sustains the manly vigour of his heart. When at length, as here, this close logic is employed in the service of noble ideas, enthusiasm is added to constancy. Man holds his opinions not only as true, but as sacred. He fights for them, not only as a soldier, but as a priest. He is impassioned, devoted, religious, heroic. Rarely is such a mixture seen; but it was clearly seen in Milton. He was of a family in which courage, moral nobility, the love of art, were present to whisper the most beautiful and eloquent words around his cradle. His mother was a most exemplary woman, well known through all the neighbourhood for her benevolence.1 His 1 Matre probatissimâ et eleesmosynis per viciniam potissimum nota.- De fensio secunda. Life of Milton, by Keightley. father, a student of Christ Church, and disinherited as a Protestant, had alone made his fortune, and, amidst his occupations as a scrivener or writer, had preserved the taste for letters, being unwilling to give up his liberal and intelligent tastes to the extent of becoming altogether a slave to the world;' he wrote verses, was an excellent musician, one of the best composers in his time; he chose Cornelius Jansen to paint his son's portrait when in his tenth year, and gave lis child the widest and fullest literary education.' Let the reader try to picture this child, in the street inhabited by merchants, in this citizenlike and scholarly, religious and poetical family, whose manners were regular and their aspirations lofty, where they set the psalms to music, and wrote madrigals in honour of Oriana the queen, where music,{ letters, painting, all the adornments of the beauty-loving Renaissance, decorated the sustained gravity, the hard-working honesty, the deep Christianity of the Reformation. All Milton's genius springs from this; he carried the splendour of the Renaissance into the carnestness of the Reformation, the magnificence of Spenser into the severity of Calvin, and, with his family, found himself at the confluence of the two civilizations which he combined. Before he was ten years old he had a learned tutor, a Puritan, who cut his hair short;' after that he went to Saint Paul's School, then to the University of Cambridge, that be might be instructed in 'polite literature;' and at the age of twelve he worked, in spite of his weak eyes and headaches, until midnight and even later. His John the Baptist, a character resembling himself, says: 'When I was yet a child, no childish play In fact, at school, then at Cambridge, then with his father, he was strengthening and preparing himself with all his power, free from all blame, and loved by all good men; traversing the vast fields of Greek and Latin literature, not only the great writers, but all the writers, down to the half of the middle-age; and simultaneously the ancient I brew, Syriac and rabbinical Hebrew, French and Spanish, the old English literature, all the Italian literature, with such zeal and profit that he wrote Italian and Latin verse and prose like an Italian or a Roman; beyond this, music, mathematics, theology, and much besides. A serious thought regulated this great toil. 'The church, to whose 1 My father destined me while yet a little child for the study of humane letters.'-Life, by Masson, 1859 i 51. 'Queen Elizabeth. The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Cleveland, 1865, Paradise Re Faned Book i. v. 201–206 service, by the intentions of my parents and friends, I was destined of a child, and in mine own resolutions: till coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the church, that he who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which unless he took with a conscience that would retch, he must either straight perjure, or split his faith; I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing.'' He refused to be a priest from the same feelings that he had wished it: the desire and the renunciation all sprang from the same source-a fixed resolve to act nobly. Falling back into the life of a layman, he continued to cultivate and perfect himself, studying with passion and with method, but without pedantry or rigour; nay, rather, after his master Spenser, in L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, he set forth in sparkling and variegated dress the wealth of mythology, nature, and fancy; then, sailing for the land of science and beauty, he visited Italy, made the acquaintance of Grotius and Galileo, sought the society of the learned, the men of letters, the men of the world, heard the musicians, steeped himself in all the beauties stored up by the Renaissance at Florence and Rome. Everywhere his learning, his fine Italian and Latin style, secured him the friendship and attachment of scholars, so that, on his return to Florence, he was as well received as if he had returned to his native country.' He collected books and music, which he sent to England, and thought of traversing Sicily and Greece, those two homes of ancient letters and arts. Of all the flowers that opened to the Southern sun under the influence of the two great Paganisms, he gathered freely the sweetest and the most exquisite of odours, but without staining himself with the mud which surrounded them. 'I call the Deity to witness,' he wrote later, that in all those places in which vice meets with so little discouragement, and is practised with so little shame, I never once deviated from the paths of integrity and virtue, and perpetually reflected that, though my conduct might escape the notice of men, it could not elude the inspection of God.'" Amid the licentious gallantries and inane sonnets such as those of the Cicisbei and Academicians lavished forth, he had retained his sublime idea of poetry: he thought to choose a heroic subject from ancient English history; and as he says, 'I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities, unless he have in himself the 1 Milton's Prose Werks, ed. St. John, 5 vols., 1848, The Reason of Church Government, ii. 482. Ibid., Second Defence of the People of England i. 257 See also his Ita. ian Sopnets, with their religious sentiment. Amidst experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy.' all, he loved Dante and Petrarch for their purity, telling himself that ‘it unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be such a scandal and dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be much more deflouring and dishonourable.'* He thought that every free and gentle spirit, without that oath, ought to be born a knight,' for the practice and defence of chastity, and he kept himself virgin till his mar. riage. Whatever the temptation might be, whatever the attraction cr fear, it found him equally opposed and equally firm. From a sense of gravity and propriety he avoided all religious disputes; but if his own creed were attacked, he defended it 'without any reserve or fear,' even in Rome, before the Jesuits who plotted against him, within a few paces of the Inquisition and the Vatican. Perilous duty, instead of driving him away, attracted him. When the Revolution began to threaten, he returned, drawn by conscience, as a soldier who hastens to danger at the noise of arms, convinced, as he himself tells us, that it was a shame to him leisurely to spend his life abroad, and for his own pleasure, whilst his fellow-countrymen were striving for their liberty. In battle he appeared in the front ranks as a volunteer, courting danger everywhere. Throughout his education and throughout his youth, in his profane readings and his sacred studies, in his acts and his maxims, already a ruling and permanent thought grew manifest-the resolution to develop and unfold within him the ideal man. II. Two special powers lead mankind-impulse and idea: the cne influencing sensitive, unfettered, poetical souls, capable of transformations, like Shakspeare; the other governing active, combative, heroic souls, capable of immutability, like Milton. The first are sympathetic and effusive; the second are concentrative and reserved. The first give themselves up, the others withhold themselves. These, by reliance and sociability, with an artistic instinct and a sudden imitative comprehension, involuntarily take the tone and disposition of the men and things which surround them, and an immediate counterpoise is effected between the inner and the outer man. Those, by mistrust and rigidity, with a combative instinct and a quick reference to rule, become naturally thrown back upon themselves, and in their narrow retirement no longer feel the solicitations and contradictions of their surroundings. 1 Milton's Works, Apology for Smectymnuus, iii. 117. Ibid, 122. See also his Treatise on Divorce, which shows clearly Milton s meaning. Though Christianity had been but slightly taught me, yet a certain reservedness of natural disposition, and moral discipline, learnt out of the noblest philosophy, was enough to keep me in disdain of far less incontinences than this of the bordello.'-Apology for Smectyranuus, iii. p 122. |