History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne

by Andrew Lang

We need not dwell on his "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," written, it seems, a few weeks after his hapless marriage in 1643. If all men were Miltons and all women worthy of them, his doctrine of freedom of divorce would not have thorny consequences.

His "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates" was published in February, 1649; Charles I had been slain on 30 January of that year. It is desirable, in a history of Literature, to "keep King Charles's head out of the Memorial".

In the "Areopagitica" (1644) Milton, defending freedom of printing against these friends of liberty, the then dominant Presbyterians, in many passages gives us the prose of a great poet. Here is a passage which must have irritated the Puritans who were not so after the manner of Milton.

"If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must rectify our recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what by their allowance shall be thought honest: for such Plato was provided of. It will ask more than the work of twenty licensers to examine all the lutes, and violins, and the guitars in every house; they must not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must be licensed what they may say. And who shall silence all the airs and madrigals, that whisper softness in chambers? The windows also, and the balconies must be thought on; there are shrewd books, with dangerous frontispieces, set to sale; who shall prohibit them? shall twenty licensers? The villages also must have their visitors to inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebeck reads, even to the ballatry, and the gamut of every municipal fiddler, for these are the countryman's Arcadias and his Monte Mayors." The famous sentence "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue" is familiar to all memories, but such things are not common in his prose: the search for the limbs of slain and mutilated Truth compared to the search for the fragments of "the good Osiris" by Isis, might not have been written had Milton remembered the details of that savage fable, common to ancient Egypt and the Australian Arunta. His cause has triumphed, as triumph it must, in a world where no all-wise and infallible Licenser of Books can be found.

"The defence of the people of England" in answer to Salmasius's "Defence of the King," had not, perhaps, the right client. It was not the People of England who slew the King. Milton tells his own story of that unhappy reign (in "Eikonoklastes," his reply to "Eikon Basilike," attributed to Charles, really, as is believed, by Gauden) it may be read with more profit in the history of Mr. S. R. Gardiner. Milton declares the charge against the Scots of "selling their king" to be "a foul infamy and dishonour". The Scots, every soul of them who had a touch of chivalry, took up the sword to cleanse the blot, died on the field, or on the scaffold, or were sold as slaves, or were starved to death in Durham Cathedral. There are, in short there could not but be, noble and harmonious and stirring passages in Milton's prose; but poetry was his native language, and his themes were such as to place sobriety of view, and delicate discrimination of good and evil almost beyond his power. For, as Argyll said, of himself, he was "a distraught man in distraught times". Otherwise Milton, the proudest of men, would not have answered railing with railing.

Jeremy Taylor.

Among the pulpit orators of the seventeenth century, none has left a name more fragrant than Jeremy Taylor. His devotional works, such as "Holy Living," and still more "Holy Dying," are still in the hands of the devout. But it is not easy to suppose that many readers who are not profound students of style in prose often read the many volumes of sermons, works of casuistry, and works of controversy which Jeremy has left. He is not of our world or way of thinking; he dwells, for example, on "special" and easily distinguishable "providences". Now when a tempest flooded a river, so that Montrose's men could not cross and despoil the lands of a contemporary of Jeremy's, Brodie of Brodie, that devout Covenanter confided to his journal the occurrence of this "special providence". But when the river fell, and Montrose crossed and drove the kye, Brodie remarks in his journal that we ought not to interpret the Divine Will, for we may be mistaken. Jeremy insists on his own interpretations. "From Adam to the Flood, by the patriarchs were eleven generations; but by Cain's line there were but eight, so that Cain's posterity were longer lived: because God, intending to bring the flood upon the world, took delight to rescue his elect from the dangers of the present impurity and the future deluge." In the same way Abraham lived five years less than his son Isaac, and Jeremy knows why. "The Jewish doctors" inform him that the idea was to prevent Abraham from seeing "the iniquity of his grandchild, Esau". Later, speaking of other times and lands, Jeremy says that "such fancies do seldom serve either the ends of truth or charity,"—for which he has the highest Authority in the Gospel.

We are no longer apt to reason as Taylor does about the Patriarchs, or on hundreds of other points, and this cannot but diminish our pleasure in reading his books. But he pleases us, exactly as Burton does in "The Anatomy of Melancholy," by illustrations drawn from his amazing knowledge of books. Thus, immediately after the passage last cited, he says "Pierre Cauchon died under the barber's hand: there wanted not some who said it was a judgement upon him for condemning to the fire the famous Pucelle of France, who prophesied the expulsion of the English out of the kingdom. They that thought this believed her to be a prophetess" (as she certainly was), "but others that thought her a witch, were willing to find out another conjecture for the sudden death of the gentleman." "The sudden death of the gentleman" is a courteous phrase to apply to Cauchon; and very unexpected in "The History of the Life and Death of the Holy Jesus". But whence did Jeremy get his story of Cauchon? From the Latin hexameters of Valerandus, a book so entirely out of the common way that perhaps not three persons in the England of to-day have read it.

So our author runs on, telling of "that famous person and of excellent learning, Giacchettus of Geneva," whose morals were not Genevan, while his death was, in an extreme degree, remarkable. Jeremy more than once insists that many thousand men were slain, in one night, in the Assyrian camp, for committing the offence of that famous person, Giacchettus. Nobody has ever found out his authority for his statement; he may have learned it "from the Jewish doctors". In any case, however entertaining and instructive his divine works may be, he often raises a smile which he never dreamed of provoking. Other times, other tastes!