MILTON'S LIFE AND CHARACTER
We know far more about Milton than about any other English poet born so long ago. There are three reasons for this. One is that from his earliest years he was very much interested in himself, was quite aware that he was a man above the stature of ordinary men, and had the most deliberate intention and expectation of doing great things. Consequently he is not only, like most good poets, fond of bringing more or less concealed autobiography into his poetry, but still more in his prose works he inclines often to insert long passages about himself, his studies, travels, projects, friends and character. It is these more than anything else which now keep those works alive: and, coming from a man so proudly truthful as Milton evidently was, they are of the greatest interest and value. The second reason why we know so much about him is that he played an active part in politics, a far more certain way of {24} attracting contemporary attention in England than writing Hamlet or building St. Paul's Cathedral. And the third is that his life has been made the subject of perhaps the most minute and elaborate biography in the language. Mr. Masson's labours enable us to know, if we choose, every fact, however insignificant, which the most laborious investigation can discover, not only about Milton himself but, one may almost say, about everybody who was ever for five minutes in Milton's company.
From this mass of material, all that can be touched here is a few of the most salient facts of the life and the most striking features of the character.
Milton's life is naturally divided into three periods. The first is that of his education and early poems. It extends from his birth in 1608 to his return from his foreign travels in 1639. The second is that of his political activity, and extends from 1639 to the Restoration. The third is that of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson. It concludes with his death, on November 8, 1674.
Milton was born on December 9, 1608, at a house in Bread Street, Cheapside. The house is gone, but the street is a very short one, and it is still pleasant to step out of the {25} roar of Cheapside into its quietness, and think that there, on the left, close by, under the shadow of Bow Church, was born the greatest poet to whom the greatest city of the modern world has given birth. London ought to hold fast to the honour of Milton, for his honour is peculiarly hers. He was not only born a Londoner but lived in London nearly all his life. And his mind is throughout that of the citizen. Neither agriculture nor sport means much to him; and, much as he loves the sights and sounds of the open country, his allusions to them are those of the delighted but still wondering alien, not those of the native. None is more often quoted than the passage in the ninth book of Paradise Lost—
"As one who, long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight—
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound—
If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,
What pleasing seemed for her now pleases more,
She most, and in her look sums all delight."
{26} And the secret of its charm obviously lies partly in the note of a personal experience. Just in that way must Milton, as boy and man, have often issued forth from the weariness of his studies and the noise and confinement of the streets, for a walk among the open fields that then lay so close at hand for the Londoner. And perhaps, as the inhabitants of towns often do, he took a pleasure in the very hedgerows unknown to those who saw them every day. The present Poet Laureate, who has spent most of his life in the country, has asked a question to which it is not easy for the countryman to give the answer he would like—
"Whose spirit leaps more high,
Plucking the pale primrose,
Than his whose feet must fly
The pasture where it grows?"
If the town-dweller never attains to that mystical communion with the secret soul of Nature which Wordsworth and such as Wordsworth owe to a life spent in the "temple's inmost shrine," yet his eye, undulled by familiarity, commonly sees more in trees and flowers than the eyes of nearly all those who live every day among them. At its highest familiarity breeds intimacy, but more often what it breeds is indifference. A man who {27} reads the Bible for the first time in middle life will never live inside it as some saints have lived; but he will see much that is hidden from most of those who have been reading it every day since they could read at all.
Milton remained in London, so far as we know, for the first sixteen years of his life. He was educated at St. Paul's School by a private tutor, one Thomas Young, who was later a conspicuous Presbyterian figure, and by his father, to whom he owed far more than to any one except himself. The elder John Milton was a remarkable man. He had, to begin with, deserted the religious views of his family and taken a line of his own, a course which may not always indicate wisdom, but always indicates force of character. The poet's grandfather, who lived in the Oxford country, had adhered very definitely to Roman Catholicism and is said to have cast off his son for becoming a Protestant and something of a Puritan. The son went to London, set up in business as a scrivener, that is, as something like a modern solicitor, and prospered so much that by 1632 he was able to retire and live in the country. He had considerable musical talents, and his compositions are found in collections of tunes to which such {28} men as Morley, Dowland and Orlando Gibbons contributed. His house was no doubt full of music, as were, indeed, many others in that most musical of English centuries, and it must have been primarily to him that the poet owed the intense delight in music which appears in all his works. No poet speaks of music so often, and none in his poetry so often suggests that art. The untaught music of lark or nightingale he has not; but no poet has so much of the music which is one of the most consciously elaborate of those arts by which man expresses at once his senses, his mind and his soul.