MILTON AND LEONORA BARONI.
The Marquis Manso of Naples, who in his early youth had entertained Tasso in his palace, had cherished and honoured him when that great but unhappy man was wandering, brain-struck with misery, from one court to another,—was, in his old age, the host and admirer of Milton; thus, by a singular good fortune, allying his name to two of the most illustrious of earth's diviner sons: while theirs, linked together by the recollection of this common friend, follow each other in our memory by a natural transition. We can think of them as pressing, though at an interval of many years, the same friendly hand, and gracing the same hospitable board with "colloquy sublime." Tasso, from the romance of his story, and his personal character, is the most interesting of the two; yet Milton, besides standing highest in the scale of moral dignity, sits nearest to our hearts as an Englishman, whose genius, speaking through our native accents, strikes upon our sense,
Like the large utterance of the early gods.
We rise from reading Johnson's Biography of Milton, either with the most painful and indignant feeling of the malignity of the critic,[137] or with an impression of Milton's character, as false as it is odious. Of moral inconsistency and weakness, blended with splendid genius, we have proofs lamentable and numerous enough: to be obliged to regard the mighty father of English verse,—him "who rode sublime upon the seraph wings of ecstasy,"—him, whose harmonious soul was tuned to the music of the spheres, though when struck in evil times, and by an adverse hand, it sent forth a crash of discord,—him, who has left us the most exquisite pictures of tenderness and beauty—to think of such a being as a petty domestic tyrant, a coarse-minded fanatic, stern and unfeeling in all the relations of life, were enough to confound all our ideas of moral fitness. When we figure to ourselves the author of Rasselas trampling over the ashes of Milton, lending his mighty powers to degrade the majestic, to disfigure the beautiful, and to darken the glorious, it is with the same feeling of concentrated disgust with which we recall the violation of the poet's grave, some years ago, when vulgar savages defaced and carried off his sacred and venerable remains piece-meal.[138] Let us for a moment imagine our Milton descending to earth to assert his injured fame, and confronted with his great biographer—
Look here upon this picture, and on this—
The one, like his own Adam, with fair large front and hyacinthine locks, serene and blooming as his own Eden; in all the dignified graces which temperance and self-conquest lend to youth,[139] in all the purity of his stainless mind, radiant like another Moses, with the reflected glories of the Empyreum,—and then look upon the other!—But it is an awful thing for little people, to meddle with great and sacred names; and so leaving the Hippopotamus of literature in his den—proceed we.
It relieves the heart from an oppressive contradiction to behold Milton, such as he is represented by his other biographers, and such as undoubtedly he really was. It is well known, that in his youth, and even at a late age, he had an uncommonly fine person, almost to effeminacy; and was as gracefully endowed in form and manners, as he was highly and holily gifted in mind. His natural mildness, cheerfulness, and courtesy, are commemorated by all who knew him, or lived near his time.[140] He whom Johnson accuses of a "Turkish contempt of females, as inferior beings," and whom he represents in a light so ungentle and gloomy, that we cannot imagine him under the influence of beauty, was early touched by the softest passions, and during his whole life peculiarly sensible to the charm of female society: witness his successive marriages, and his friendship and intercourse with Lady Margaret Ley, and the all-accomplished Countess of Ranelagh, who supplied to him, as he says, the place of every friend:[141]—witness, too, a thousand most lovely and glorious passages scattered through his works, which women may quote with triumph, as proofs that we had no small influence over the imagination of our great epic poet. What but the most reverential and lofty feeling of the graces and virtues proper to our sex, could have embodied such an exquisite vision as the Lady in Comus? or created his delightful Eve? on whom, "as on a queen, a pomp of winning graces waited still."
All higher knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded; wisdom, in discourse with her,
Loses discountenanc'd, and like folly shows;
Authority and reason on her wait,
As one intended first, not after made
Occasionally; and to consummate all,
Greatness of mind and nobleness their seat,
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard angelic plac'd.
And this is the being whom a lady-author calls a "great overgrown baby, with nothing to recommend her but her submission, and her fine hair!"[142]—two things, be it observed, among the most graceful of our feminine attributes, mental and exterior. The poet who conceived and wrote this description, most assuredly had not a "Turkish contempt" for the female character.
Milton was in love, as he tells us himself, at nineteen; but the object cannot even be guessed at. He has celebrated this boyish passion very beautifully in one of his Latin elegies. One of the passages in this poem, in which he compares the effect produced on him by the first momentary view of his mistress, followed by her immediate absence to the Theban Œclides,[143] swallowed up by the abyss which opens beneath him, and gazing back upon the parting light of day, is admired for its classic sublimity and appropriate beauty.
There is a tradition mentioned by all his biographers, that while Milton was a student at Cambridge, an Italian lady of rank, who was travelling in England, found him sleeping one day under the shade of a tree, and, struck with his beauty, wrote with her pencil on a slip of paper, the pretty madrigal of Guarini, which Menage translated for Madame de Sevigné, "Occhi, stelle mortali," and leaving it in his hand, pursued her journey. This fair unknown is said to have been the cause of Milton's travels into Italy; but the story rests on no authority: and it is clear, that the "foreign fair" to whom the Sonnets are addressed, was neither imaginary nor unknown. During his stay at Rome, he was received with particular distinction by the Cardinal Barberini, the nephew of the reigning Pope, and at his palace had frequent opportunities of hearing Leonora Baroni, the finest singer in Italy. She was the daughter of Adriana of Mantua, surnamed, for her beauty, La Bella Adriana, and the best singer and player on the lute of her time. Leonora inherited her mother's extraordinary talent for music, and conquered all hearts by the inexpressible charm of her voice and style. She was also a poetess, frequently composing the words of her own songs. Though not a regular beauty, she had brilliant eyes, and a captivating countenance and manner. Count Fulvio Testi, in a Sonnet addressed to her, celebrates the union of so many charms:
Tra il concento e 'l fulgor, dubbio è se sia
L'udir più dolce, o il rimirar più caro.
Deh fammi cieco, o fammi sordo, amore!
M. Maugars, himself a musician, who saw and heard Leonora at Rome, praises her talents generally, and adds, that she was no coquette; that she sang with confidence, but with modesty; that there was nothing in her manners that could be censured; that the effect she produced on those who heard her, was owing, not only to the wonderful rapidity and delicacy of her execution, but to the care with which she gave the exact sense and proper expression of the words she sang. He tells us, that on one occasion, she favoured him by singing with her mother and her sister, each accompanying herself on a different instrument (in those days pianos were not, and Leonora's favourite instrument was the Theorbo, on which she excelled). This little concert so enraptured our musician, that, to use his own words, he forgot his mortality, "et crut être dejà parmi les anges, jouissant des contentemens des bienheureux."
It is no wonder that the charms and talents which exalted this prosaic Frenchman almost into a poet, should turn the heads of poets themselves. The verses addressed to Leonora were collected into a volume, and published under the title of "Applausi poetici alle glorie della Signora Leonora Baroni."—"Poetical eulogies to the glory of Signora Leonora Baroni." A similar homage had been paid to her mother, Adriana, who reckoned Tasso among her panegyrists. This may seem too high a distinction for a species of talent, which, however admirable, can leave behind no durable monument, and therefore can claim no interest with posterity. Yet is it just, that those whom heaven has enriched with the gift of melody, and who have cultivated that delicious faculty to its height, until with angel-skill they can suspend the dominion of pain in aching hearts,[144]—that such should ravish with delight a whole generation, and then perish from the earth, they and their memory, with the pleasure they bestowed, and gratitude be voiceless and tuneless in their praise? The gift of song is fleeting as that of beauty; but while the painter fixes on his canvas
The vermeil-tinctur'd lip,
Love-darting eyes, and tresses like the morn,
what shall immortalise the tones which "turned sense to soul?" what but poetry, which, while it preserves the memory of such excellence, gives back to the fancy some reflection of the delight we have felt, when the full tide of a divine voice is poured forth to the sense, like wine from an enchanted cup, making us thrill "with music's pulse in every artery." Leonora Baroni had her poets, and her name, linked with that of Milton, shall never die.
It is a curious circumstance, and one but little consonant with the popular idea of Milton's austerity, that the object of his poetical homage, and even of his serious admiration, was an Italian singer; but it must be remembered, that Milton, the son of an accomplished musician,[145] was, by nature and education, peculiarly susceptible to the power of sweet sounds. Next to poetry, music was with him a passion; and the profession of a singer in those days, when the art was in its second infancy, was more highly estimated, in proportion as excellence was more rare and less publicly exhibited. I cannot find that either Leonora Baroni, or her mother Adriana, ever appeared on a stage; yet their celebrity had spread from one end of Italy to the other. Milton joined the crowd of Leonora's votaries at Rome, and has expressed his enthusiastic admiration, not only in verse but in prose.[146] He addressed her in Latin and Italian, the languages she understood, and which he had perfectly at command. In one of his Latin poems, "To Leonora, singing at Rome," the allusion to Leonora d'Este,
Another Leonora once inspired
Tasso, by hopeless love to phrenzy fired, &c.
is as happy as it is beautiful, and shows the belief which then prevailed of the real cause of Tasso's delirium.
Two of Milton's Italian sonnets are very beautiful, and have been translated by Cowper with singular felicity. All his biographers agree that Leonora Baroni is the subject of both; the first, addressed to Carlo Diodati, describes the lady, whose dark and foreign charms are opposed to those of the blonde beauties he had admired in his youth.
SONNET.
Diodati! e te 'l diro con maraviglia, &c.
Charles,—and I say it wondering,—thou must know
That I, who once assumed a scornful air,
And scoffed at Love, am fallen into his snare;
(Full many an upright man has fallen so.)
Yet think me not thus dazzled by the flow
Of golden locks, or damask rose; more rare
The heartfelt beauties of my foreign fair!
A mien majestic, with dark brows, that show
The tranquil lustre of a lofty mind,—
Words exquisite, of idioms more than one;
And song, whose fascinating power might bind,
And from her sphere draw down the lab'ring moon;
With such fire-darting eyes, that should I fill
Mine ears with wax, she would enchant me still!
In this translation, though elegant and faithful, the lines
A mien majestic, with dark brows, that show
The tranquil lustre of a lofty mind,
have much diluted the energy of Milton's
Portamenti alti onesti, e nelle ciglia
Quel sereno fulgor d'amabil nero.
In the other Sonnet, addressed to Leonora, he gives, with all the simplicity of conscious worth, this lofty description of himself, and of his claims to her preference.
SONNET.
Giovane, piano, e semplicetto amante, &c.
Enamour'd, artless, young, on foreign ground,
Uncertain whither from myself to fly,
To thee, dear lady, with an humble sigh,
Let me devote my heart, which I have found,
By certain proofs not few, intrepid, sound,
Good, and addicted to conceptions high:
When tempests shake the world, and fire the sky,
It rests in adamant, self-wrapt around,
As safe from envy and from outrage rude,
From hopes and fears that vulgar minds abuse,
As fond of genius and fixt solitude,
Of the resounding lyre and every muse.
Weak you will find it in one only part,
Now pierc'd by Love's immedicable dart.
Milton was three times married. The relations of his first wife, (Mary Powell,) who were violent Royalists, and ashamed or afraid of their connection with a republican, persuaded her to leave him. She absolutely forsook her husband for nearly three years, and resided with her family at Oxford, when that city was the head-quarters of the King's party. "I have so much charity for her," says Aubrey, "that she might not wrong his bed; but what man (especially contemplative,) would like to have a young wife environed and stormed by the sons of Mars, and those of the ennemie partie?"
Milton, though a suspicion of the nature hinted at by Aubrey never rose in his mind, was justly incensed at this dereliction. He was on the point of divorcing this contumacious bride, and had already made choice of another[147] to succeed her, when she threw herself, impromptu, at his feet and implored his forgiveness. He forgave her; and when the republican party triumphed, the family who had so cruelly wronged him found a refuge in his house. This woman embittered his life for fourteen or fifteen years.
A remembrance of the reconciliation with his wife, and of his own feelings on that occasion, are said to have suggested to Milton's mind the beautiful scene between Adam and Eve, in the tenth book of the Paradise Lost.
She ended weeping; and her lowly plight,
Immoveable, till peace obtained for faults
Acknowledged and deplored, in Adam wrought
Commiseration; soon his heart relented
Tow'rds her, his life so late and sole delight,
Now at his feet submissive in distress,
Creature so fair, his reconcilement seeking;
As one disarmed, his anger all he lost, &c.
Milton's second and most beloved wife (Catherine Woodcock) died in child-bed, within a year after their marriage. He honoured her memory with what Johnson (out upon him!) calls a poor sonnet; it is the one beginning
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis from the grave;
which, in its solemn and tender strain of feeling and modulated harmony, reminds us of Dante. He never ceased to lament her, and to cherish her memory with a fond regret:—she must have been full in his heart and mind when he wrote those touching lines in the Paradise Lost—
How can I live without thee? how forego
Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart!
After her death,—blind, disconsolate, and helpless—he was abandoned to petty wrongs and domestic discord; and suffered from the disobedience and unkindness of his two elder daughters, like another Lear.[148] His youngest daughter, Deborah, was the only one who acted as his amanuensis, and she always spoke of him with extreme affection:—on being suddenly shown his picture, twenty years after his death, she burst into tears.[149]
These three daughters were grown up, and the youngest about fifteen, when Milton married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull. She was a gentle, kind-hearted woman,[150] without pretensions of any kind, who watched over his declining years with affectionate care. One biographer has not scrupled to assert, that to her,—or rather to her tender reverence for his studious habits, and to the peace and comfort she brought to his heart and home,—we owe the Paradise Lost: if true, what a debt immense of endless gratitude is due to the memory of this unobtrusive and amiable woman!