Change of Kings.
But at last comes a new turn of the wheel to English fortunes. Cromwell is dead; the Commonwealth is ended; all London is throwing its cap in the air over the restoration of Charles II. Poor blind Milton[63] is in hiding and in peril. His name is down among those accessory to the murder of the King. The ear-cropped Prynne—who is now in Parliament, and who hates Milton as Milton scorned Prynne—is very likely hounding on those who would bring the great poet to judgment. ’Tis long matter of doubt. Past his house near Red Lion Square the howling mob drag the bodies of Cromwell and Ireton, and hang them in their dead ghastliness.
Milton, however, makes lucky escape, with only a short term of prison; but for some time thereafter he was in fear of assassination. Such a rollicking daredevil, as Scott in his story of Woodstock, has painted for us in Roger Wildrake (of whom there were many afloat in those times) would have liked no better fun than to run his rapier through such a man as John Milton; and in those days he would have been pardoned for it.
That capital story of Woodstock one should read when they are upon these times of the Commonwealth. There are, indeed, anachronisms in it; kings escaping too early or too late, or dying a little out of time to accommodate the exigencies of the plot; but the characterization is marvellously spirited; and you see the rakehelly cavaliers, and the fine old king-ridden knights, and the sour-mouthed Independents, and the glare and fumes and madness of the civil war, as you find them in few history pages.
Milton, meanwhile, in his quiet home again, revolves his old project of a great sacred poem. He taxes every visitor who can, to read to him in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Dutch. His bookly appetite is omnivorous. His daughters have large share of this toil. Poor girls, they have been little taught, and not wisely. They read what they read only by rote, and count it severe task-work. Their mother is long since dead, and a second wife, who lived only for a short time, dead too. We know very little of that second wife; but she is embalmed forever in a sonnet, from which I steal this fragment:—
“Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis from the grave;
…
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shin’d
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But oh, as to embrace me she inclined
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.”
The Miltonian reading and the work goes on, but affection, I fear, does not dominate the household; the daughters overtasked, with few indulgences, make little rebellions; and the blind, exacting old man is as unforgiving as the law. Americans should take occasion to see the great picture by Munkacsy, in the Lenox Gallery, New York, of Milton dictating Paradise Lost; it is in itself a poem; a dim Puritan interior; light coming through a latticed window and striking on the pale, something cadaverous face of the old poet, who sits braced in his great armchair, with lips set together, and the daughters, in awed attention, listening or seeming to listen.
I am sorry there is so large room to doubt of the intellectual and affectionate sympathy existing between them; nevertheless—that it did not is soberly true; his own harsh speeches, which are of record, show it; their petulant innuendoes, which are also of record, show it.
Into this clouded household—over which love does not brood so fondly as we would choose to think—there comes sometimes, with helpfulness and sympathy, a certain Andrew Marvell, who had been sometime assistant to Milton in his official duties, and who takes his turn at the readings, and sees only the higher and better lights that shine there; and he had written sweet poems of his own, (to which I shall return) that have kept his name alive, and that will keep it alive, I think, forever.
There comes also into this home, in these days, very much to the surprise and angerment of the three daughters, a third wife to the old poet, after some incredibly short courtship.[64] She is only seven years the senior of the daughter Anne; but she seems to have been a sensible young person, not bookishly given, and looking after the household, while Anne and Mary and Deborah still wait, after a fashion, upon the student-wants of the poet. In fits of high abstraction he is now bringing the “Paradise” to a close—not knowing, or not caring, maybe, for the little bickerings which rise and rage and die away in the one-sided home.
I cannot stay to characterize his great poem; nor is there need; immortal in more senses than one; humanity counts for little in it; one pair of human creatures only, and these looked at, as it were, through the big end of the telescope; with gigantic, Godlike figures around one, or colossal demons prone on fiery floods. It is not a child’s book; to place it in schools as a parsing-book is an atrocity that I hope is ended. Not, I think, till we have had some fifty years to view the everlasting fight between good and evil in this world, can we see in proper perspective the vaster battle which, under Milton’s imagination, was pictured in Paradise between the same foes. Years only can so widen one’s horizon as to give room for the reverberations of that mighty combat of the powers of light and darkness.
We talk of the organ-music of Milton. The term has its special significance; it gives hint of that large quality which opens heavenly spaces with its billows of sound; which translates us; which gives us a lookout from supreme heights, and so lifts one to the level of his “Argument.” There is large learning in his great poem—weighty and recondite; but this spoils no music; great, cumbrous names catch sonorous vibrations under his modulating touch, and colossal shields and spears clash together like cymbals. 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.
A bookish color is pervading; if he does not steal flowers from books, he does what is better—he shows the fruit of them. There are stories of his debt to Cædmon, and still more authentic, of his debt to the Dutch poet Vondel,[65] and the old Provençal Bishop of Vienne,[66] who as early as the beginning of the sixth century wrote on kindred themes. There is hardly room for doubt that Milton not only knew, but literally translated some of the old Bishop’s fine Latin lines, and put to his larger usage some of his epithets.
Must we not admit that—in the light of such developments—when the Puritan poet boasts of discoursing on
“Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,”
that it is due to a little lurking stimulant of that Original Sin which put bitterness into his Salmasian papers, and an ugly arrogance into his domestic discipline? But, after all, he was every way greater than his forerunners, and can afford to admit Cædmon and Vondel and Avitus, and all other claimants, as supporting columns in the underlying crypt upon which was builded the great temple of his song.