An Introduction to the Prose and Poetical Works of John Milton / Comprising All the Autobiographic Passages in His Works, the More Explicit Presentations of His Ideas of True Liberty.

by John Milton

SAMSON AGONISTES

'The intensest utterance of the most intense of English Poets'

In his 'Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty,' Milton makes the following remarkable allegorical application of the story of Samson to a king and his prelates. It is contained in 'The Conclusion. The Mischief that Prelaty does to the State':

'I shall shew briefly, ere I conclude, that the prelates, as they are to the subjects a calamity, so are they the greatest underminers and betrayers of the monarch, to whom they seem to be most favourable. I cannot better liken the state and person of a king than to that mighty Nazarite Samson; who being disciplined from his birth in the precepts and the practice of temperance and sobriety, without the strong drink of injurious and excessive desires, grows up to a noble strength and perfection with those his illustrious and sunny locks, the laws, waving and curling about his godlike shoulders. And while he keeps them about him undiminished and unshorn, he may with the jawbone of an ass, that is, with the word of his meanest officer, suppress and put to confusion thousands of those that rise against his just power. But laying down his head among the strumpet flatteries of prelates, while he sleeps and thinks no harm, they wickedly shaving off all those bright and weighty tresses of his law, and just prerogatives, which were his ornament and strength, deliver him over to indirect and violent counsels, which, as those Philistines, put out the fair and far-sighted eyes of his natural discerning, and make him grind in the prison house of their sinister ends and practices upon him; till he, knowing this prelatical razor to have bereft him of his wonted might, nourish again his puissant hair, the

golden beams of law and right; and they, sternly shook, thunder with ruin upon the heads of those his evil counsellors, but not without great affliction to himself. This is the sum of their loyal service to kings; yet these are the men that still cry, The king, the king, the Lord's anointed! We grant it; and wonder how they came to light upon anything so true; and wonder more, if kings be the Lord's anointed, how they dare thus oil over and besmear so holy an unction with the corrupt and putrid ointment of their base flatteries; which, while they smooth the skin, strike inward and envenom the lifeblood. What fidelity kings can expect from prelates, both examples past, and our present experience of their doings at this day, whereon is grounded all that hath been said, may suffice to inform us. And if they be such clippers of regal power, and shavers of the laws, how they stand affected to the lawgiving parliament, yourselves, worthy peers and commons, can best testify; the current of whose glorious and immortal actions hath been only opposed by the obscure and pernicious designs of the prelates, until their insolence broke out to such a bold affront, as hath justly immured their haughty looks within strong walls.'

'The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty' was published in 1641, nearly eight years before Charles I. was beheaded, and just thirty years before the publication of 'Samson Agonistes.' He little dreamed that the reigning king would, in less than eight years, be put to death, and that he should play such a rôle in the subsequent state of things, should have such experiences and such disappointments and sorrows as would make the fortunes of Samson the prototype of a great final creation embodying allegorically his own strangely similar fortunes.

In Milton's MS. jottings of subjects for a tragedy or an epic poem, in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, made in 1640 and some time following, and occupying seven pages of folio-sized paper, is included (No. 19 of the list of Old Testament

subjects) 'Samson Pursophorus or Hybristes' [i.e. Samson the Firebrand-bringer or Violent, as Masson explains], 'or Samson Marrying, or Ramath-Lechi: Judges xv.'

Nothing, of course, could have been more remote from Milton's mind than that thirty years after this jotting, his swan-song would be given to the world, in which Samson, blind and among the Philistines, would allegorically reflect his own condition, in the last years of his life.

'The parallelisms in the fortunes of Samson and Milton have been noticed by almost every editor and every critic of the 'Samson Agonistes.' They are too obvious to escape the notice of the most careless reader who knows anything of the life of Milton. Samson is Milton in the polemic and in the post-Restoration period of his life. In all literature there is not a nobler, more exalting and pathetic egotism, than the 'Samson Agonistes' exhibits—an egotism for which every lover of the great poet must be abundantly thankful. 'How very much,' Walter Savage Landor justly remarks, 'would literature have lost, if this marvellously great and admirable man had omitted the various references to himself and his contemporaries!'

Of the numerous autobiographical passages in the 'Samson Agonistes,' which editors have noted, those most distinctly so are the following: vv. 40, 41; 67-109; 191-193; 219-226; 241-255; 268-276; 563-572; 590-598; 695-702; 760, 761; 1025-1060; 1418-1422; 1461-1471; 1687-1707.

These passages show that the allegorical significance of the 'Samson Agonistes' bears not only upon Milton's individual life and experiences, but also upon the backsliding of the English people, in their restoration of monarchy. The misgivings to which Milton gave expression in his 'Ready and easy way to establish a free commonwealth, and the excellence thereof, compared with the inconveniences and dangers of readmitting kingship in this nation,' were realized in less than three months

after its publication late in February or early in March, 1660. Charles II. entered London May 29, 1660. These misgivings are expressed, or, at least, implied, in the following passage of 'The ready and easy way.' The involved construction of the language in this pamphlet shows that it must have been very hastily dictated by the blind poet:

'After our liberty and religion thus prosperously fought for, gained, and many years possessed, except in those unhappy interruptions, which God hath removed; now that nothing remains, but in all reason the certain hopes of a speedy and immediate settlement for ever in a firm and free commonwealth, for this extolled and magnified nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed from heaven, to fall back, or rather to creep back so poorly, as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship, to be ourselves the slanderers of our own just and religious deeds, though done by some to covetous and ambitious ends, yet not therefore to be stained with their infamy, or they to asperse the integrity of others; and yet these now by revolting from the conscience of deeds well done, both in church and state, to throw away and forsake, or rather to betray, a just and noble cause for the mixture of bad men who have ill-managed and abused it (which had our fathers done heretofore, and on the same pretence deserted true religion, what had long ere this become of our gospel, and all protestant reformation so much intermixed with the avarice and ambition of some reformers?), and by thus relapsing, to verify all the bitter predictions of our triumphing enemies, who will now think they wisely discerned and justly censured both us and all our actions as rash, rebellious, hypocritical, and impious; not only argues a strange, degenerate contagion suddenly spread among us, fitted and prepared for new slavery, but will render us a scorn and derision to all our neighbours.'