Chapter II: Milton's Life and Character (2)

A few words may be said of his attitude towards men and measures during this political period of his life. His unqualified and immediate support of the King's execution had, of course, united him with the Cromwellian party who had brought it about. And his anti-Presbyterian views carried him in the same direction. So we are not surprised to find that, when Cromwell got rid of the Parliament by military force and soon {64} afterwards became Protector, Milton approved his action and gladly continued to serve under him. Nor was Milton the man to be disturbed by the Protector's rapid dissolution of his first Parliament, by the period of personal Government which followed, or by his angry breach with his second Parliament. Poets have seldom understood politics, and Milton, the most political of poets, perhaps less than any. No man ever had less of that sense of law and custom, of the need of continuity, which is the very centre and secret of politics. Few great statesmen have been able to maintain perfect consistency; but the least consistent have generally been aware that there was something in inconsistencies that needed explanation. Milton never shows any consciousness of the patent incongruity between his early exaltation of the indefeasible rights of Parliaments and his support of the Cromwellian attitude towards them: between his angry denunciation of Charles I for presuming to retain the ancient right of the kings to refuse their assent to Bills submitted to them and his approval of Cromwell's dismissal of a Parliament for attempting to deny the same right to the Protector: between the extreme doctrine of free printing claimed in the _Areopagitica_ and the fact that its author {65} was afterwards concerned in licensing books under a Government which vigorously suppressed "seditious" publications. But inconsistencies by themselves are of little importance, particularly in revolutionary times; they would be of none, in Milton's case, if he had ever admitted that he had learnt from experience and consequently changed his mind. But he never did. Parliaments remained sacred when they were for pulling down bishops, profane when they were for establishing Presbyterianism, and utterly detestable when they were for restoring Charles II. The fact is, of course, that Milton, like most men of much imagination and no political experience, saw a vision of certain things in the value of which he believed with all his soul, and saw none of the objections to them and none of the difficulties that stood in their way. At the very end, when the bonfires for Charles II were almost lighted in the streets, he could publish _A Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth_; and the title he chose for that book was typical of his whole attitude in all practical matters. He had to an extreme degree the man of vision's blindness to the all-important fact that the mass of men would not have what he aims at if they {66} could and could not if they would. At least in a free country the statesman knows that he has got to work through stupid people, with their consent, and with regard to the measure of their capacities. For such men as Milton stupid people either do not exist or are to be merely ignored. That is his attitude all through. Alike in the matter of divorce and in the matter of education, in the ecclesiastical problem and in the political, he was always eager to put forward a "ready and easy way" which entirely ignored the nature of the human material which was to walk in it. He simply chose not to see that in all these matters men had for centuries been walking in a way which was not his, a way which had in fact by now diverged many miles from his; and that they could not possibly, even if they would, transport themselves in a moment, at a mere wave of his wand, across the intervening bogs and forests which the lapse of years had rendered impassable. He never appears to have had a single glimpse of the truth that the essential business of the statesman is to be always moving from the past to the future without ever letting the bridge between them break down. The principal food of a political people is custom, and to break the bridge is to cut off the only source {67} of its supply. The greatest proof that Cromwell was really a statesman and not a mere political emergency man of unusual character and ability is that in his last years he was evidently seeing more and more plainly that the right metaphor for a statesman is taken from grafting and not from "root and branch" operations. It is clear that he had seen that political branches may be pruned away but roots can very seldom be safely disturbed; and that among the roots in English politics were a hereditary Monarchy and an established Church. Dynasty and formularies might perhaps be safely changed; but the things themselves were of the root, and the tree would not flourish if they were touched. It is characteristic of Milton that in both these matters he was strongly opposed to the policy towards which Cromwell was feeling his way. Ten years had taught him nothing, and the death of Cromwell found him as blind to political possibilities as the death of Charles I.

One would like to know something of the relations between the two greatest men of the Commonwealth. But there is little or nothing to know. It is plain that in most matters they must have been in close agreement; and in a few, as in the business of the {68} Piedmont massacres, the two great hearts must have beaten as one, while the sword of Cromwell stood ready drawn behind the trumpet of Milton's noble prose and nobler verse. The only surviving act of personal contact between them is to be found in Milton's sonnet; and that is a public tribute with no suggestion of private intimacy in it. Indeed, as Masson has pointed out, it may easily be taken to mean more than it really does; for it was not written because Milton could not keep silence about his admiration of Cromwell, but rather, as its full title shows, as a petition or appeal to Cromwell to save the nation from parliamentary proposals for the setting up of a State Church and for limiting the toleration of dissent from it. The sonnet, then, proves less than it has sometimes been made to prove; and in any case it proves no intimacy. Perhaps after all, in the case of Milton as in that of most men who deal with public affairs, we are apt to exaggerate the importance in their daily lives of these visible official activities. The world thinks it knows men who fight battles, or make speeches, or write books; but it knows nothing of their private thoughts or studies and still less of their private loves and joys and sorrows which to themselves {69} and in truth are much the most real part of their lives. So with Milton during these years; his wife and little children may have been, his second wife and such friends as Cyriack Skinner and Henry Lawrence and Lady Ranelagh and the poet Marvell certainly were, much greater realities to him in his daily thoughts than either the hated Salmasius and Morus of the pamphlets or the admired Cromwell of the sonnet. The "weekly table" he is said to have kept, at the expense of the State, for foreign ministers, must have provided interesting talk; but the true Milton cannot have lived in these gatherings so fully at the time or remembered them afterwards so affectionately as those other more intimate parties of which he gives us a picture in the two sonnets to Lawrence and Skinner which, for lovers of poetry, look so pleasantly back to Horace and so pleasantly forward to Cowper and Tennyson.

"Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,
Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire,
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
From the hard season gaining? Time will run
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On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire
The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun.
What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?
He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise."

This is his own graver and older parallel to what his nephew tells us of his schoolmastering days when he would turn from "hard study and spare diet" to "drop once a month or so into the society of some young sparks of his acquaintance," and with them "would so far make bold with his body as now and then to keep a gawdy day." The sonnet shows that the poet is still the poet of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, no narrow fanatic, but a lover of company and the arts, and of the richness and fulness of life. Such occasions as that it describes must have been oases in the desert of controversy and public business abroad and of blindness and loneliness at home. He did not live long in Whitehall, {71} moving in 1652 to a house overlooking St. James's Park, near what is now Queen Anne's Gate. There his first wife died in 1653, or 1654, and her short-lived successor too; there he lived during the remaining years of the Commonwealth, working at his pamphlets and State papers, even beginning _Paradise Lost_, with young friends to read to him, write for him, lead their blind great man about in the Park or elsewhere, till the catastrophe of 1660 arrived and it was no longer safe for the defender of Regicide to be seen in the streets.

Why Milton was not hanged at the Restoration is still something of a mystery. His name must have been more hatefully known to the returning exiles than that of any one except the dead Cromwell whose death did not save his body from a grim ceremony at Tyburn. He had not only defended Charles I's execution before all Europe, and in a tone almost of exultation, but he had pursued the whole Stuart family with vituperation and contempt. Even in the very last weeks, when the bells were already almost ringing for Charles II, he had dared to raise his voice against the "abjured and detested thraldom of kingship"; declaring that he would not be silent though he should but speak "to trees and stones: and had none to cry to, but {72} with the prophet 'O Earth, Earth, Earth!' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to,"--a passage, if interpreted by its original context, of awful imprecation upon Charles I. A man so famous, so utterly unrepentant, so defiant to the very end, seemed to challenge to himself the gallows. That his challenge would receive its natural answer was the openly expressed opinion of his enemies. No doubt it was also the fear of his friends, who concealed him in Smithfield from May till August 1660. By the 24th of August the danger was over. The Act of Indemnity, which was a pardon to all political offenders not by name excepted in it, became law on that day; and Milton's was not one of the excepted names. How was that managed? There are various stories; perhaps each has some truth in it; many influences may have combined. One is that he had saved Davenant in his danger some years before and now the Cavalier poet in his turn saved the Puritan. But Davenant was not in Parliament, and the real work must have been done by a group of friends who were. The most important of them seem to have been Annesley (afterwards Lord Anglesey), Sir Thomas Clarges, who was Monk's brother-in-law, Monk's secretary Morrice, and the poet's less powerful but {73} still more devoted friend Andrew Marvell. Between them somehow they saved him, aided no doubt by the general pity for a blind man, the general respect for his learning which found expression even in that moment and even in Royalist pamphlets, and, one may hope, by the knowledge of a few of them that this was a man of genius from whom there might be great things yet to come. The names of those who thus made possible the greatest poem in the English language deserve lasting record; and a word of gratitude may be added to Clarendon and to Charles II for refraining from saying the easy and not unnatural word which would have been instantly fatal to their old enemy.

The odd thing is that he was arrested after all. There had been an order of the House of Commons for his arrest and for the burning of his books, possibly, as Masson thinks, obtained by his friends to make it seem unnecessary to except him in the Indemnity Bill. The books were duly burnt, or such copies of them as came to the hands of the hangman; and ultimately, at some uncertain date, Milton himself was got into the custody of the Sergeant-at-Arms. He was soon released, and the story would not be worth relating but for a curious proof it gives of the {74} obstinate courage of the poet. The House ordered his release on December 15; and one would have supposed that he would have been glad to escape into obscurity and safety again on any terms. But no; the Sergeant-at-Arms demanded high fees which Milton thought unreasonable; and even then, when he had almost felt the hangman's rope on his neck, he would not be bullied by any man. He refused to pay: and though the Solicitor-General ominously remarked that he deserved hanging, his friends got the fees referred to a committee and presumably reduced. Before the beginning of 1661 he was definitely a free man to live his final fourteen years of political defeat, isolation and silence, of unparalleled poetic fertility, and, before the end, of acknowledged poetic fame.

He did not return any more to the fashionable and therefore dangerous neighbourhood of Whitehall, but lived the rest of his life in a succession of houses in or near the city, ending in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, where he died. His friends must for years have feared that he might be attacked and perhaps murdered by some drunken Cavalier revellers accidentally coming across the old regicide. And in spite of the Act of Indemnity he can hardly have felt absolutely comfortable on {75} the side of the law when so late as 1664 his _Tenure of Kings_ was denounced by the censor as still extant and an unfortunate printer was hanged, drawn and quartered for issuing a sort of new version of it. Misfortunes without and fears within might be the summing up, if not of the poet's, at least of the man's life during these first years after the Restoration. To begin with, he was a much poorer man. His salary as Secretary was, of course, gone. But besides that he had lost 2000 pounds, equal to about 7000 pounds now, which he had invested in Commonwealth Securities, as well as some confiscated property he had bought of the Chapter of Westminster; and he was soon to lose, at least temporarily, the rent he received from his father's house in Bread Street which was destroyed by the Fire of London. Masson calculates that he was left after the Restoration with an income about equal to 700 pounds of our money which his further losses and outlay on his daughters had reduced to 300 pounds or 350 pounds before his death; not quite poverty even at the end, but something very different from what the eldest son of a rich man had been accustomed to. A graver misfortune was the gout which afflicted him for the rest of his life and gave him so much pain that he made little of his blindness in {76} comparison with it. Worst of all was his unhappy relation to his daughters. That is the ugliest thing in the story of his life. How things might have gone with his son, if the baby boy had lived, one does not know; but his oriental views of the moral and intellectual inferiority of women, which doubled the dangers of their fascinations, made him certain to be a despotic father to three motherless girls. And so he was. He had plenty of young men eager for the privilege of reading to him: but of course they could not be always with him, and the result was that dreadful picture which comes to us from his nephew, no unfriendly witness, of the daughters "condemned to the performance of reading and exactly pronouncing of all the languages of whatever book he should at one time or other think fit to peruse; viz. the Hebrew (and, I think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the Italian, Spanish and French," none of which languages they understood. Nor did he show any desire that they should; saying grimly that one tongue was enough for a woman. History and fiction are alike full of the tragedies that result from the blindness of extraordinary minds to ordinary duties; and Milton's case is one of the saddest. The daughters cheated him and made away with {77} his books; he spoke of them gravely and repeatedly as his "unkind children"; one of them is even reported, on very good evidence, to have said, at his third marriage in 1663, that "that was no news to hear of his wedding but, if she could hear of his death, that was something." At last it was thought better that he and they should part; and they were put out, at considerable expense to their father, to learn embroidery work and other "curious and ingenious manufactures" for their living. It is pleasant to hear that the youngest, Deborah, who was visited by Addison not long before he died, and received fifty guineas from Queen Caroline, was "in a transport" of delight when shown a portrait of her father, crying out "'Tis my father, 'tis my dear father, I see him; 'tis him; 'tis the very man! here, here!" as she pointed to some of the features. So one likes to be told, on her authority, that he was delightful company and "the life of the conversation, full of unaffected cheerfulness and civility" when he had his little parties of friends. And to us, if not to her, it is a pleasant story that she could still repeat many lines from Homer, Euripides and Ovid, though she said she did not understand Greek or Latin. The wife of a Spitalfields weaver must at last have felt {78} some pride in these survivals of her childish drudgery, proof audible to all men, if to her unintelligible, that she was the daughter of Mr. Milton, the great scholar and poet.

No more need to be said of sorrow or failure. The rest is a serene and productive old age. _Paradise Lost_ was published in 1667, _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson_ in 1671. Besides these there was, in 1673, a new edition of his earlier poems reprinted, with additions from that of 1645; and many publications of prose works mostly written in earlier years but never printed, such as his _History of Britain_, and little books on Education, Logic and Grammar. He kept up his strenuous life of study and composition apparently to the end. He is said to have got up at four or five in the morning, and, after hearing a chapter or two from the Hebrew Bible and breakfasting, to have passed the five hours before his midday dinner dictating or having some book read to him. In the afternoon he would walk a little in his garden; all his life a garden had been one of the things he would not do without. Then music and more private study carried him on to an Horatian supper of olives or other "light things"; and so to a pipe of tobacco, a glass of water and bed. He drank but little wine, and that only with his meals. {79} Such a way of life deserved a healthful old age, which, but for that healthy man's disease the gout, he had, and a death such as he had, so easy as to be imperceptible to the bystanders. That was on November 8, 1674. Four days later his body was buried in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where his grave may still be seen; the funeral being accompanied by "all his learned and great friends in London, not without a concourse of the vulgar."

By that time the battle of his life had been won. The astonishing achievements of his last years had more than fulfilled the high promise and proud words of his long distant youth. Perhaps no seven years in all literary history provide a finer record of poetic genius triumphing over difficulties external and internal than these last seven of Milton's life from 1667 to 1674. They had their reward and not only from posterity. There is a still lingering delusion, based chiefly on the five pounds paid for the first edition of _Paradise Lost_, that Milton's greatness was little recognized in his lifetime. The truth is the exact reverse. He had far more chance of hearing his own praises, if he cared for that, than most of the great English poets: than Keats and Shelley, for instance; than Wordsworth, {80} at least till he was old; nay, in all probability than Shakspeare himself. Which of them heard the most popular poet of their day say of them anything at all like Dryden's famous and generous "This man cuts us all out and the ancients too"? It is not even true that _Paradise Lost_ sold badly. On the contrary, in a year and a half from the day of publication over thirteen hundred copies had been sold, from which the author received 10 pounds and the publisher, it is believed, 50 pounds or 60 pounds. He would be a sanguine publisher to-day who would be quite certain of making in eighteen months the modern equivalent of this sum, say 180 pounds, out of a new epic, even if it were as great as Milton's.

But the money question was not of the first importance to Milton and is of none to us. The interesting thing is the almost immediate recognition of the greatness of the poem. Nothing in the world could be more alien to the tone of the society and literature of the London of Charles II than this long Biblical Puritan poem with its scarcely veiled attacks on the revived Monarchy and Episcopacy and its entirely unveiled attacks on the fashionable men of Belial. Yet it was from the very high priests of this society that the most unstinted praise came. Of its professional men of {81} letters Dryden was already rapidly advancing to the unquestioned primacy which was soon to be his, and to remain his for his life; of its amateurs Lord Dorset had perhaps the most brilliant reputation. It was these two men who, more than any others, made the town recognize the greatness of Milton. Both were as unlike Milton as men could be, and Dryden had just committed himself to a strong championship of rhymed verse as against blank. There is nowhere a finer proof of the compelling power of great art upon those who know it when they see it than the unbounded praise with which Dryden at once saluted Milton. The fact that his admiration at first took the absurd form of turning Milton's epic into a "heroic opera" in rhyme does not detract from the significance of his writing publicly within a year of Milton's death that the blind old regicide's poem was "one of the greatest, most noble and sublime which either this age or nation has produced," and to this he was to add, thirteen years later, the still bolder tribute of the well-known epigram about "three poets in three distant ages born" which gives Milton a place above Homer and Virgil. The lines are in detail absurd; but their absurdity does not destroy the fact that the intellectual life of England was never {82} keener, or more eager to welcome talent in art or letters, than in the reign of Charles II; and nothing is clearer proof of it than the honours received by the rebel Milton from a Court composer like Henry Lawes, a Court physician like Samuel Barrow, a statesman and minister like Lord Anglesey, and a poet laureate like Dryden.

So we may think of him happily enough in these last years. He had now done the work which from his early manhood he had felt it was his task in life to do. When he was not much over thirty he had boldly written in public of what his mind, "in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse and the book of Job a brief model . . . or whether those dramatic constitutions, wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign, shall be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a nation." For the moment nothing seemed to come of these high words; but before he died not one only, but both of his dreams, the drama as well as the epic, were accomplished facts. _Paradise Lost_, begun as a drama, had become the greatest of modern {83} epics; and the abandoned drama had reappeared in _Samson_, not the greatest of English tragedies, but the one which best recalls the peculiar greatness of the drama of Greece. Self-confident young men have always been common enough, but there are two differences between them and Milton: their performance falls far short of their promise instead of exceeding it; and neither promise nor performance is marked by this exalting and purifying sense of a thing divinely inspired and divinely aided. Such work can wait, as his did, being such as is "not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine; like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite; nor to be obtained by the invocation of dame memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases."

Now the task is done; and he can sit alone in his upstairs room in Artillery Walk and thank God that in spite of blindness, private sorrows and public disappointments, he had been enabled at last to bear the witness of a work of immortal beauty to the high truth {84} that had been in him even from a boy. So it may have been in the graver moments of solitude; while, as we know from several sources, there were other times, when he would enjoy the companionship of friends and the homage of learned strangers by whom we are told he was "much visited, more than he did desire." The picture suggested to us is that of a man who at sixty-five, then a greater age than now, retained all his powers of mind and much of the physical beauty which had been so remarkable in his youth; who was gracious but somewhat reserved and dignified with strangers; a delightful companion to friends and especially to younger men; full of literature, especially of poetry, and with a memory that enabled him to recite long passages from Homer and Virgil; above all, an ardent lover of music, making a practice, so far as possible, of hearing some, whether vocal or instrumental, every afternoon. His ears were eyes to him; and when he heard a lady sing finely he would say: "Now will I swear this lady is handsome." All kinds of music, and not only the severer, were delightful to the "organ-voice of England."

That is not the least interesting thing about him. The greatest of England's Puritans {85} was also the greatest of her artists. He had nothing in him of the morbid scrupulosity which is such an inhuman feature in French Jansenism and some of the English sects. His was a large nature which demanded a free expansion of life. Lonely figure as he is in our literary history, with no real predecessors or followers, his mighty arch yet bridges the gulf between Elizabeth and the Revolution, and is of nearer or less distant kin to Shakspeare than to Pope. His prose is the swan song of the old eloquence, as inspired and as confused as an oracle. To read it when it is at its best is to soar on wings through the empyrean and despise Swift and Addison walking in neat politeness on the pavement. There as everywhere, in his verse, in his character, in his mind, in his life, he has the strength and the weakness of an aristocrat. The youth who in his Cambridge days was "esteemed a virtuous person yet not to be ignorant of his parts" did not belie the opinion formed of him in either of those respects. His Republicanism was of the proud Roman sort, and at least as near Coriolanus as Gracchus; a boundless faith in the State and a boundless desire to spend and be spent in its service, a total and scornful indifference to the opinions of all {86} those, though they might be five-sixths of the nation, who did not desire to be served in the way which he had decided to be for their good. The modern way of deciding matters of State by counting heads may very likely be the best of many unsatisfactory ways of accomplishing a very difficult business; but it has always been peculiarly exasperating to men of genius who see their way plainly and cannot understand why a million blind men are to keep them out of it. Milton liked the voice of the majority well enough when he could plead it against Charles I; but when he found it calling for Charles II he treated it as a mere impertinent absurdity; the vain babble of a "misguided and abused multitude" with whom wise men have nothing to do except to keep them in their place. And it is in the latter attitude that he is most really himself. His is, of course, an aristocracy of mind and character, not of birth and wealth; but the self-sufficient scorn which was almost a virtue in Aristotle's eyes, and is in ours the besetting sin of even the noblest of aristocrats, is too frequent a note in all his prose, and even in his poetry; and it is sometimes poured out upon those who are fitter subjects for tenderness than for contempt. One can scarcely imagine a child {87} or an ignorant man being quite at ease in Milton's company.

But these are the penalties that greatness has too often to pay for being itself. So long as we remain human beings and not divine, it will be found hard to unite humility, ease of manner, and the glad sufferance of fools with a mind struggling in a storm of sublime thoughts, with powers that are and know themselves to be far above those of ordinary men. It will never be easy for men of supreme genius to behave to their inferiors as if they were their equals. But that is not the side of Milton of which we ought to think most often now. It is more just as well as more merciful to him, and it is of more use to ourselves, to fix our eyes on his strength, and not on the weakness that more or less inevitably accompanied it. The ancients admired strength more than the moderns have, at least until lately. But no one can refuse to admire such strength as Milton's, so continuous, so triumphant over exceptional obstacles, so disdainful of all petty or personal ends. There is a majesty about it to which one scarcely knows any real parallel. Strength implies purpose and art implies unity of conception; the instinct of art was only less strong in Milton than the resolute will; so that it {88} is not surprising that scarcely any life has such unity as his. It is itself a perfect work of art. If we put aside, as we may fairly, the partial political inconsistencies, the rest is absolutely of one piece; a great building, nobly planned from the beginning and nobly executed to the last harmonious detail of the original design. We men are, most of us, weak creatures who accomplish but the tiniest fragments of even such poor designs as we make for our lives. There is something that uplifts us in the spectacle of the triumphant completion of so great a plan as the life of Milton. We are exalted by the thought that, after all, we are of the same flesh and blood, nay, even of the same breed, as this wonderful man. To read the _Paradise Lost_ is to realize, in the highest degree, how the poet's imagination can impose a majestic order on the tumultuous confusion of human speech and knowledge. To read its author's life is to realize, with equally exalting clearness, how a strong man's will can so victoriously mould a world of adverse circumstances that affliction, defeat--nay, even the threatening shadow of death itself--are made the very instruments by which he becomes that which he has, from the beginning of his years, chosen for himself to be.

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