After the description given of the second edition of the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and its differences from the first, it seems necessary to quote only some passages from Milton's opening address in it to the Parliament and the Westminster Assembly:—
… Error supports Custom, Custom countenances Error; and these two between them would persecute and chase away all truth and solid wisdom out of human life, were it not that God, rather than man, once in many ages, calls together the prudent and religious counsels of men deputed to repress the encroachments, and to work off the inveterate blots and obscurities wrought upon our minds by the subtle insinuating of Error and Custom: who, with the numerous and vulgar train of their followers, make it their chief design to envy and cry down the industry of free reasoning, under the terms of "humour" and "innovation"; as if the womb of teeming Truth were to be closed up if she presume to bring forth aught that sorts not with their unchewed notions and suppositions. Against which notorious injury and abuse of man's free soul to testify, and oppose the utmost that study and true labour can attain, heretofore the incitement of men reputed grave hath led me among others; and now the duty and the right of an instructed Christian calls me through the chance of good or evil report to be the sole advocate of a discountenanced truth: a high enterprise, Lords and Commons, a high enterprise and a hard, and such as every seventh son of a seventh son does not venture on…. You it concerns chiefly, worthies in Parliament, on whom, as on our deliverers, all our grievances and cares, by the merit of your eminence and fortitude, are devolved: me it concerns next, having with much labour and diligence first found out, or at least with a fearless and communicative candour first published to the manifest good of Christendom, that which, calling to witness everything mortal and immortal, I believe unfeignedly to be true…. Mark then, Judges and Lawgivers, and ye whose office it is to be our teachers, for I will now utter a doctrine, if ever any other, though neglected or not understood, yet of great and powerful importance to the governing of mankind. He who wisely would restrain the reasonable soul of man within due bounds must first himself know perfectly how far the territory and dominion extends of just and honest liberty. As little must he offer to bind that which God hath loosened as to loosen that which He hath bound. The ignorance and mistake of this high point hath heaped up one huge half of all the misery that hath been since Adam. In the Gospel we shall read a supercilious crew of Masters, whose holiness, or rather whose evil eye, grieving that God should be so facile to man, was to set straiter limits to obedience than God had set, to enslave the dignity of Man, to put a garrison upon his neck of empty and over-dignified precepts: and we shall read our Saviour never more grieved and troubled than to meet with such a peevish madness among men against their own freedom. How can we expect him to be less offended with us, when much of the same folly shall be found yet remaining where it least ought, to the perishing of thousands? The greatest burden in the world is Superstition, not only of ceremonies in the Church, but of imaginary and scarecrow sins at home. What greater weakening, what more subtle stratagem against our Christian warfare, when, besides the gross body of real transgressions to encounter, we shall be terrified by a vain and shadowy menacing of faults that are not! When things indifferent shall be set to overfront us, under the banners of Sin, what wonder if we be routed, and, by this art of our Adversary, fall into the subjection of worst and deadliest offences! The superstition of the Papist is "Touch not, taste not!" when God bids both; and ours is "Part not, separate not!" when God and Charity both permits and commands. "Let all your things be done with charity," saith St. Paul; and his Master saith "She is the fulfilling of the Law." Yet now a civil, an indifferent, a sometime dissuaded Law of Marriage must be forced upon us to fulfil, not only without Charity, but against her. No place in Heaven or Earth, except Hell, where Charity may not enter; yet Marriage, the ordinance of our solace and contentment, the remedy of our loneliness, will not admit now either of Charity or Mercy to come in and mediate or pacify the fierceness of this gentle ordinance, the unremedied loneliness of this remedy. Advise ye well, Supreme Senate, if charity be thus excluded and expulsed, how ye will defend the untainted honour of your own actions and proceedings. He who marries intends as little to conspire his own ruin as he that swears allegiance; and, as a whole people is in proportion to an ill Government, so is one man to an ill marriage…. Whatever else ye can enact will scarce concern a third part of the British name; but the benefit and good of this your magnanimous example [should they restore liberty of Divorce] will easily spread far beyond the banks of Tweed and the Norman Isles. It would not be the first nor the second time, since our ancient Druids, by whom this Island as the cathedral of philosophy to France, left off their Pagan rites, that England hath had this honour vouchsafed from Heaven—to give out reformation to the world. Who was it but our English Constantine that baptized the Roman Empire? Who but the Northumbrian Willibrod and Winifrid of Devon, with their followers, were the first Apostles of Germany? Who but Alcuin and Wicklif, our countrymen, opened the eyes of Europe, the one in Arts, the other in Religion? Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live….
Milton's idea of the greatness of his enterprise, it will be seen from these passages, had grown and grown the more he had brooded on it. What if in this Doctrine of Divorce he were to be the discoverer or restorer of a new liberty, not for England alone, but actually for all Christendom? Meanwhile what opposition he would have to face, what storms of scurrilous jest and severer calumny! Might it not have been better to have written his treatise in Latin? This thought had occurred to him. "It might perhaps more fitly have been written in another tongue; and I had done so, but that the esteem I have for my country's judgment, and the love I bear to my native language, to seive it first with what I endeavour, made me speak it thus ere I assay the verdict of outlandish readers." Yet there might have been a propriety, he feels, in addressing such an argument in the first place only to the learned.
And what, after all, and in precise practical form, was this tremendous proposition of Milton respecting Divorce? Reduced out of large and cloudy terms, it was simply this,—that marriage, as it respected the continued union of the two married persons, was a thing with which Law had nothing whatever to do; that the two persons who had contracted a marriage were the sole judges of its convenience, and, if they did not suit each other, might part by their own act, and be free again; at all events, that for husbands the Mosaic Law on the subject was still in force: viz. (Deut. xxiv. 1) "When a man hath taken a wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her [interpreted as including any moral or intellectual incompatibility, any unfitness whatever], then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house." Milton avoids as much as possible such reductions of his proposition to harsh practical form, and would have disowned such brief popular summaries of his doctrine as Divorce at pleasure, or Divorce at the Husband's pleasure; but, in reality, it came to this. The husband, in modern times, had still, he maintained, the old Mosaic right of giving his wife a "bill of divorcement," if she did not satisfy him, and sending her back to her father's house. The right was a purely personal one. Friends, indeed, might interfere with their good offices; nay it would be fitting, and perhaps necessary, that there should be a solemn formality "in presence of the minister and other grave selected elders," who should admonish the man of the seriousness of the step he was about to take. But, if he persisted in taking it—if "he shall have protested, on the faith of the eternal Gospel and the hope he has of a happy resurrection, that otherwise than thus he cannot do, and thinks himself and this his case not contained in that prohibition of divorce which Christ pronounced (Matth. v. 31-32), the matter not being of malice, but of nature, and so not capable of reconciling"—then the Church had done her part to the full, and the man was to be left to his own liberty. This passage, proposing a kind of public oath on the man's part, as a formality to be required in every case of dissolution of marriage, occurs near the end of the treatise in both editions; and it indicates, I think, Milton's recoil from any rough or free and easy version of his doctrine, and his desire to temper it as much as he could. Essentially, however, the proposal mattered little. The husband was still left sole judge of his wife's fitness or unfitness for him, and whether he should exercise his right of putting her away was a matter finally for his private conscience.
With reference to Milton's own case, it is worth observing that the causes of divorce on which he still rings the changes throughout the second edition of his treatise, as throughout the first, are the unmatchableness of dispositions, the unfitness of the wife for rational conversation, her intellectual and moral insufficiency or perverseness. There is no word of desertion. I cannot but think that this confirms the view that it was not the absence of Milton's wife that caused his dissatisfaction with his marriage, but that the dissatisfaction preceded the absence and had helped to occasion it.
Narration, rather than criticism, is my business in this work; and we have not yet done with Milton's Divorce speculation. At this point, however, I may venture on three remarks:—
(1.) What is most noticeable in Milton, underneath his whole conduct here, as in so many other matters, is his intellectual courage. Among men of thought there are, I should say, two grades of honesty. There is passive honesty, or the honesty of never saying, or appearing to say, what one does not think; and it is a rare and high merit to have attained to this. But there is the greater honesty of always saying, or indeed asserting and proclaiming, whatever one does think. The proportion of those who have disciplined themselves to this positive or aggressive honesty, and are at the same time socially sufferable by reason of the importance of what they have to say, has always been wonderfully small in the world. Now, Milton was one of this band of intellectual Ironsides. Even within the band itself he belonged to the extremest section. For he dared to question not only the speculative dogmas and political traditions of his time, which others round him were questioning, but even some of the established "moralities," which few of them were questioning. It is not at all uncommon for men the most free- thinking in matters of religious belief to be immoveably and even fanatically orthodox in their allegiance to all customary moralities. They abide by tradition, and think with the multitude, in ethical questions, if in nothing, else. But on Milton, it appears from his Address to the Parliament and the Assembly, there had dawned the idea that, as there had come down in the bosom of society misbeliefs in science, imperfect views of theology, and conventions of political tyranny, so there had come down things even worse, in the form of cobwebbed sacramentalisms and sanctities for private life, factitious restrictions of individual liberty pretending themselves to be Christian rules of holiness. Among the greatest burdens and impediments in man's life, he says, were such pseudo-moralities, such "imaginary and scarecrow sins," vaunting themselves as suckers and corollaries from the Ten Commandments. This was a daring track to be upon, but Milton was upon it. He did not believe that the world had arrived at a final and perfect system of morals, any more than at a perfect system of science. He believed the established ethical customs of men to be subject to revision by enlarged and progressive reason, and modifiable from age to age, equally with their theories of cosmology, their philosophical creeds, or anything else. There was no terror for him in that old and ever-repeated outcry about "sapping the foundations of society." He believed that the foundations of society had taken, and would still take, a great deal of "sapping," without detriment to the superstructure. He believed that, as we may read in Herodotus of ancient communities established on all sorts of principles, or even whim-principles, and yet managing to get on, and as these crude polities had been succeeded by other and better ones, to the latest known in the world, so these last need not look to be permanent. Of a tendency to this state of feeling Milton had given evidences from early youth; but I do not think I am wrong in fixing on the year 1643 as the time when it became chronic, nor in tracing the sudden enlargement of it then beyond its former bounds to the wrench in his life caused by his unhappy marriage. At all events, henceforward throughout his career we shall see the continuous action of this now avowed Miltonism among others. We shall see him henceforward continually acting on the principle that, in addition to the real sins forbidden to man by an eternal law of right and wrong, revealed in his own conscience and authenticated by the Bible (for Milton did believe in such an eternal law, and, however it is to be reconciled with what we have just been saying, was a transcendental or a priori moralist at his heart's core), the field of human endeavour was overstrewn by a multiplicity of mere "scarecrow sins," one's duty in respect of which was simply to march up to them, one after another, and pluck them up, every stick of them individually, with its stuck-on old hat and all its waving tatters.
(2.) One notes in Milton's first Divorce Tract, as in much else of his controversial writing, a preference for the theoretical over what may be called the practical style of argument. The neglect of practical details in his reasoning throughout this particular Tract amounts to what might be called greenness or innocence. What are the questions with which an opponent of the "practical" type would have immediately tried to pose Milton, or which such an one would now object to his doctrine? No one can miss them. In a case where divorce is desired by the man only, what is to become of the divorced wife? Is not the damage of her prospects by the fact that she has once been married, if but for a month, something to be taken into account? It is not in marriage as it may be in other partnerships. The poor girl that has been once married returns to her father or her friends an article of suddenly diminished value in the general estimation. What provision is to be made for this? Then, should there be children, what are to be the arrangements? Or again, suppose the case, under the new Divorce Law, of a man who has a weakness for a succession of wives—a private Henry the Eighth. He marries No. 1, and, after a while, on the plea that he does not find that she suits him, he gives her a bill of divorcement; No. 2 comes and is treated in like manner; and so on, till the brutal rascal, undeniably free from all legal censure, may be living in the centre of a perfect solar system of his discarded wives, moving in nearer or farther orbits round him, according to the times when they were thrown off, and each with her one or two satellites of little darlings! To be sure, there is the public oath which, it is supposed, might have to be taken in every case of divorce; but what would such a blackguard care for any number of such oaths? Besides, you put it to him by his oath to declare that in his conscience he believes the incompatibility between himself and his wife to be radical and irremediable, and that he does not find that he comes within Christ's meaning in that famous passage of the Sermon on the Mount in which he Christianized the Mosaic Law of Divorce. What does such a fellow know of Christ's meaning? He will swear, and according to your new Law he need only swear, according to his own standard of fitness; which may be that variety is a sine quâ non for him, or that No. 2 is intolerable when No. 3 is on the horizon. How, in the terms of the new Law, is such licence to sheer libertinism to be avoided? These and other such questions are suggested here not as necessarily fatal to Milton's doctrine: in fact, in certain countries, since Milton's time, the most thorough practical consideration of them has not impeded modifications of the Marriage Law in the direction heralded by Milton. They are suggested as indicating Milton's rapidity, his impatience, or, if we choose so to call it, his dauntless faith in ideas and first principles. It is remarkable how little, in his first Divorce Tract, he troubles himself with the anticipation of such-like objections of the practical kind. The reason may partly be that, in his own case, some of them, if not all, were irrelevant. There were no children in his case to complicate the affair; Mary Powell was probably as willing to part from him as he to part from Mary Powell; and, if she were to relapse into Mary Powell again and he to be free as before, the social expense of their two or three months' mismatch would hardly be appreciable! Doubtless, however, Milton foresaw many of the practical objections. He foresaw cases, that would be sure to arise under the new law, much more complicated than that of himself and Mary Powell. That he did not discuss such cases may have, therefore, been partly the policy of a controversialist, resolved to establish his main principle in the first place, and leaving the details of practical adjustment for a future time or for other heads. On the whole, however, the inattention to those practical details which would have formed so much of the matter of most men's reasonings on the same subject was very characteristic.
(3.) My last remark is that Milton, in his tract, writes wholly from the man's point of view, and in the man's interest, with a strange oblivion of the woman's. The Tract is wholly a plea for the right of a man to give his wife a bill of divorcement and send her home to her father. There is no distinct word about any counterpart right for a woman who has married an unsuitable husband to give him a bill of divorcement and send him back to his mother. On the whole subject of the woman's interests in the affair Milton is suspiciously silent. There is, indeed, one passage, in Chap. XV. of the Tract, bearing on the question; and it is very curious. Beza and Paræus, it seems, had argued that the Mosaic right of divorcement given to the man had been intended rather as a merciful release for afflicted wives than as a privilege for the man himself. On this opinion Milton thinks it necessary to comment. He partly maintains that, if true, it would strengthen his argument for the restoration of the right of divorce to husbands; but partly he protests against its truth. "If divorce wore granted," he says, "not for men, but to release afflicted wives, certainly it is not only a dispensation, but a most merciful law; and why it should not yet be in force, being wholly as needful, I know not what can be in cause but senseless cruelty. But yet to say divorce was granted for relief of wives, rather than for husbands, is but weakly conjectured, and is manifest the extreme shift of a huddled exposition … Palpably uxorious! Who can be ignorant that woman was created for man, and not man for woman, and that a husband may be injured as insufferably in marriage as a wife. What an injury is it after wedlock not to be beloved, what to be slighted, what to be contended with in point of house-rule who shall be the head, not for any parity of wisdom (for that were something reasonable), but out of a female pride! 'I suffer not,' saith Saint Paul, 'the woman to usurp authority over the man.' If the Apostle could not suffer it, into what mould is he mortified that can? Solomon saith that 'a bad wife is to her husband as rottenness to his bones, a continual dropping: better dwell in a corner of the house-top, or in the wilderness, than with such a one: whoso hideth her hideth the wind, and one of the four mischiefs that the earth cannot bear.' If the Spirit of God wrote such aggravations as these, and, as it may be guessed by these similitudes, counsels the man rather to divorce than to live with such a colleague, and yet, on the other side, expresses nothing of the wife's suffering with a bad husband, is it not most likely that God in his Law had more pity towards man thus wedlocked than towards the woman that was created for another?" [Footnote: This passage occurs in the second edition. There is but the germ of it in the first sentence, "If Divorce were granted … senseless cruelty." The inference is that Milton, when he wrote the first edition, was rather pleased with the idea of Beza and Paræus that divorce had been given for the relief of the wife, and that his dissatisfaction with the idea, as promoting the woman too much at the man's expense, came afterwards.] Here was doctrine with a vengeance. Man being the superior being, and therefore with the greater capacity of being pained or injured, God had pitied him, if unhappily married, more than the woman similarly situated. For him, therefore, and not for the woman, there had been provided the right of divorce! This is not positively asserted, but it seems to be implied. The woman's relief, in the case of a marriage unhappy for her, consisted apparently, according to Milton, not in her power to cut the knot, but in the likelihood that her husband, finding the marriage unhappy also for him, would desire for his own sake to cut the knot, or might be driven by her management to that extremity. In short, we have here, as another consequence of Milton's unfortunate marriage, the beginning of that peculiarly stern form of the notion of woman's natural and essential inferiority to man which ran with visible effects through his whole subsequent life. If not his ideal of woman, at least his estimate of what was to be expected from actual women, and what was on the average to be accorded to them, had been permanently lowered by a bad first experience.
All this while, what of the poor girl whose hard fate it was to occasion this experience in the life of a man too grandly and sternly her superior? One is bound to think also of her, and to remember, in so thinking, how young she was at the time when her offended husband first theorized his feeling of her defects, and published his theorizings, with her image and memory, though not with her name, involved in them, to the talkative world. She had not been seventeen years and a half old when she had married Milton; she was of exactly that age when she left him, and the first edition of his Divorce Treatise was ready; she was just eighteen when the second and fuller edition appeared. Surely, but for that fatal visit back to Forest Hill, contrived by her or her relatives, matters would have righted themselves. As it was, things could not be worse. Restored to her father's house at Forest Hill, amid her unmarried brothers and sisters, and all the familiar objects from which she had parted so recently on going to London, the young bride had, doubtless, her little pamphlets to publish in that narrow but sympathising circle. In particular, her grievances would be poured into the confiding ears of her mother. That lady, as we can see, at once takes the lead in the case. Never with her will shall her daughter go back to that dreadful man in Aldersgate Street! Mr. Powell acquiesces; brothers and sisters acquiesce; Oxford Royalism near at hand acquiesces, so far as it is consulted; the bride herself acquiesces, happy enough again in the routine of home, or perhaps beginning to join bashfully again in such gaieties of officers' balls, and the like, as the proximity of the King's quarters to Forest Hill made inevitable. And is not the King's cause on the whole prospering, and is not that in itself another reason for being at least in no hurry to make it up with Milton? What if it never be made up with him? It is some time since his letters to Forest Hill by the carrier ceased entirely, and since the foot-messenger he sent down expressly all the way from London with his final letter was met at the gate by Mrs. Powell and told her mind in terms which were doubtless duly reported. And now, they hear, he is going about London as usual, and visiting at Lady Margaret Ley's, and giving his own version of his marriage story, and even printing Tracts in favour of Divorce! People generally, they say, are not agreeing with him on that subject; but there is at least one respectable English family that is tempted to agree with him and to wish him all success!