In the spring of 1625, just a month or two after the accession of the king whose tragical fate was to be the original source of Milton's European fame and very nearly the cause of his mounting a scaffold himself, the future author of Paradise Lost went into residence at Cambridge where he remained for seven years. The college that can boast his name among its members is Christ's. Unlike so many poets he had a successful university career, took the ordinary degrees, and evidently made an impression on his contemporaries. No doubt the strong natural bias to a studious life which he had from a child made him apter for university discipline {29} than is usually the case with genius. From the beginning he had the passion of the student. He says of himself that from his twelfth year he scarce ever went to bed before midnight; and Aubrey reports much the same and says that his father "ordered the maid to sit up for him." And his studies were in the main the accepted studies of the time, not, like Shelley's, a defiance of them. All through his life he had a scholar's respect for learning, and for the great tradition of literature which it is the true business of scholarship to maintain. Radical and rebel as he was in politics and theology, contemptuous of law, custom and precedent, he was always the exact opposite in his art. There he never attempted the method of the tabula rasa, or clean slate, which made his political pamphlets so barren. The greatest of all proofs of the strength of his individuality is that it so entirely dominates the vast store of learning and association with which his poetry is loaded. Such a man will at least give his university a chance; and, though Milton did not in later life look back on Cambridge with great affection or respect, there can be no doubt that the seven years he spent within the walls of a college were far from useless to the poet who more than any other {30} was to make learning serve the purposes of poetry.
So strong, self-reliant and proudly virtuous a nature was not likely to be altogether popular either with the authorities or with his companions. Nor was he, at any rate at first. He had some difference with his tutor, had to leave Cambridge for a time, and is alleged, on very doubtful evidence, to have been flogged. But, whatever his fault was, it was nothing that he was ashamed of, for he publicly alluded to the affair in his Latin poems, and was never afraid to challenge inquiry into his Cambridge career. Nor did it injure him permanently with the authorities. He took his degrees at the earliest possible dates, and ten years after he left Cambridge was able to write publicly and gratefully of "the more than ordinary respect which I found, above many of my equals, at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the Fellows of that college wherein I spent some years: who, at my parting after I had taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways how much better it would content them that I would stay: as by many letters full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and long after, I was assured of their singular good affection towards me." The {31} Fellows were no doubt clerical dons of the ordinary sort: indeed, we know they were; but they could not have Milton among them for seven years without discovering that he was something above the ordinary undergraduate. Wood, who died in 1695 and therefore writes as a contemporary, says of Milton that while at Cambridge he was "esteemed to be a virtuous and sober person yet not to be ignorant of his own parts." Such young men may not be popular, but if they have the real thing in them they soon compel respect. By the undergraduates Milton was called "The Lady of Christ's." And it is plain, from his own references to this nickname in a Prolusion delivered in the college, that he owed it not only to his fair complexion, short stature and great personal beauty, but also to the purity, delicacy and refinement of his manners. He contemptuously asks the audience who had given him the nickname whether the name of manhood was to be confined to those who could drain great tankards of ale or to peasants whose hands were hard with holding the plough. He disdains the implied charge of prudery, and indeed his language is what could not have been used by an effeminate or a coward. No braver man ever held a pen. Wood says {32} that "his deportment was affable, his gait erect, bespeaking courage and undauntedness," and he himself tells us that "he did not neglect daily practice with his sword," and that "when armed with it, as he generally was, he was in the habit of thinking himself quite a match for any one and of being perfectly at ease as to any injury that any one could offer him." Evidently he owed his title of "Lady" to no weakness, but to a disgust at the coarse and barbarous amusements then common at the universities. He says of himself that he had no faculty for "festivities and jests," as indeed was to be witnessed by all his writings. The witticisms, if such they can be called, which occur in his poetry and oftener in his prose are akin to what are now called practical jokes, that is jokes made by the bodies of those whose minds are not capable of joking. This was partly the common fault of an age whose jests, as may be seen sometimes even in Shakspeare, appear to us to alternate between the merely obvious, the merely verbal, and the merely barbarous; but it was partly also the peculiar temperament of Milton, whose sense of humour, like that of many learned and serious men, was so sluggish that it could only be moved by a very violent stimulus. {33} But in the main with Milton there was no question of jests, good or bad. It is evident from his own proud confessions that he was always intensely serious, at least from his Cambridge days, always conscious of the greatness of life's issues, always uplifted with the noblest sort of ambition. He says of himself that, however he might admire the art of Ovid and poets of Ovid's sort, he soon learnt to dislike their morals and turned from them to the "sublime and pure thoughts" of Petrarch and Dante. And his "reasonings, together with a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness, and self-esteem either of what I was or what I might be (which let envy call pride) . . . kept me still above those low descents of mind beneath which he must deject and plunge himself that can agree to saleable and unlawful prostitutions." And in repudiating an impudently false charge against his own character he boldly announces a doctrine far above his own age, one, indeed, to which ours has not yet attained. "Having had the doctrine of Holy Scripture unfolding these chaste and high mysteries with timeliest care infused that 'the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body,' thus also I argued to myself,—that, if unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be {34} such a scandal and dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be much more deflowering and dishonourable. . . . Thus large I have purposely been that, if I have been justly taxed with this crime, it may come upon me after all this my confession with a tenfold shame."
Such was the man from the first, severe with others and with himself, conscious, almost from boyhood, in his own famous words, that "he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem"; a somewhat strange figure, no doubt, among the tavern-haunting undergraduates of the seventeenth century, a stranger still to be honoured, a hundred and fifty years later, in the rooms which then and now were remembered as his, by the single act of drunkenness in the long and virtuous life of Wordsworth. When he left the university in 1632 Milton had conquered respect, though probably not popularity. The tone of the sixth of the academic Orations, which he delivered at Cambridge and allowed to be published in his old age, shows that, being still aware that he was not popular, he was surprised and pleased at the applause with which a previous discourse of {35} his had been received and at the large gathering which had crowded to hear the one he was delivering. He says that "nearly the whole flower of the university" was present; and, after allowing for compliments, it is plain that only a man whose name aroused expectations could draw an audience which could be so described without obvious absurdity.
We may well then believe that there is no great exaggeration in his nephew's statement, substantially confirmed as it is by other evidence, that when Milton left Cambridge in 1632 he was already "loved and admired by the whole university, particularly by the Fellows and most ingenious persons of his House." He had, as Wood says, "performed the collegiate and academical exercises to the admiration of all." The power of his mind, the grave strength of his character, could not but be plain to all who had come into close contact with him, and even for those who had not he was a man who had distinction plainly written on his face. It is possible, even, that he was already known as a poet. Before he left Cambridge he had written several of the poems which we still read in his works: the beautiful stanzas On the Death of a Fair Infant, so like and so unlike the early poems of Shakspeare, the noble Ode {36} on the Nativity begun probably on Christmas Day 1629, though this is not certain; the pretty little Song on May Morning which one likes to fancy having been sung at some such Cambridge greeting of the rising May Day sun as those which are still performed on Magdalen Tower at Oxford; certainly the remarkable lines which are his tribute to Shakspeare: certainly also the beautiful Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester; and, to mention no more, the autobiographical sonnet on attaining the age of twenty-three. None of these except the lines on Shakspeare are known to have been published before they appeared in the volume of Milton's poems issued in 1645. But the fact that those lines were printed, though without Milton's name, among the commendatory verses prefixed to the 1632 Folio Edition of Shakspeare, may imply that Milton was already known as a young poet. There is also a story that the poem on the death of Lady Winchester was printed in a contemporary Cambridge collection. But whether this were so or not (and no such volume is known to have existed), it seems almost certain that some of Milton's poems would have got known by being passed about in manuscript copies. He himself from the first undervalued nothing he wrote, and was {37} not afraid to say publicly, in his Reason of Church Government, that, from his early youth, it had been found that, "whether aught was imposed me by them that had the overlooking, or betaken to of mine own choice in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly this latter, the style, by certain signs it had, was likely to live." He published these bold words in 1641, when he had given no public proof at all of their truth. Such a man was not likely to be unwilling that his verses should be seen: and in particular such poems as the epitaph on Lady Winchester, whose death aroused much public interest, or the Ode on the Nativity, plainly challenging the greatest of his predecessors by its high theme and noble art, are almost sure to have got about and won him some fame.
He had earned distinction, then, and aroused expectation before the end of his university career. But what surprised his contemporaries was that for the next seven or eight years he appeared to do little or nothing to justify the one or fulfil the other. Leaving Cambridge when he was twenty-three, he entered no profession, but lived till he was past twenty-nine in studious retirement at his father's country house at Horton near Windsor. His father, and other friends, very {38} naturally remonstrated at this apparent inactivity. To them all the answer is the same. He cannot now enter the Church, as he had intended, because he would not "subscribe slave" and take oaths that he could not keep. He is not surrendering himself to "the endless delight of speculation," or to the pleasure of "dreaming away his years in the arms of studious retirement." No; he has other things in view than these: but for their performance he demands time for himself and patience from his friends: his own thought is not of being early or late but of being fit. And the work for which he is preparing is in his own mind a settled thing. It is literature, poetry, and, in particular, as will soon appear more definitely, a great poem to take its place among the great poems of the world.
The writing of poetry has never been a recognized and seldom a lucrative profession. Most poets, like other artists, have had to face family opposition and the danger of poverty in obeying their inward call. In this matter Milton is one of the great exceptions. Many poets have had fathers as rich as his, but it would not be easy to find one who resigned himself so cheerfully to the prospect of having a poetic son. The elder Milton was, however, as we have seen, no ordinary man. His sense {39} of the value of the things of the mind was almost as great as his faith in his son and far greater than his ambition for his son's visible success in the eyes of the world. He had naturally hoped that that son's evident abilities would be exhibited in the ordinary course in a recognized profession; and he evidently made some protest against the apparently objectless studies which, even after leaving Cambridge, Milton seemed to regard as his sole business in life. The record of this survives in the Latin poem Ad Patrem which is plainly a reply to some such remonstrance. It is an appeal, and one of very confident tone, to his father not to scorn the Muses to whom he himself owes his own great musical gifts. Why should he, a musician, be astonished to find that his son is a poet? Poetry more than any of man's other gifts is the proof of his divine origin: music and poetry rank together; may it not be that he and his father have divided between them the two great gifts of Apollo?
"Dividuumque Deum genitorque puerque tenemus."
The poem rings with the scorn of wealth, from which one must suppose that the old man of business had pointed out that the {40} scholar's life was not usually lived under the smiles of Fortune. How can you, of all men, replies his son, ask me to care much for that? You trained me from the first for learning, not for the City or the Bar; the father who had his son taught not only Latin, but Greek and Hebrew, French and Italian, astronomy and physical science, cannot ask him to regard money making as the object of life. I have chosen a better part than that: and you were the inspirer of my choice. And I know that at heart you agree with it and share it.
The poem is one of the most interesting of Milton's Latin poems, being rather less affected than most of them by that artificiality of classical allusion which is the bane of such productions. So far as we know, it was the last word on its subject. From henceforth no one questioned Milton's right to be a poet and himself. If he ever afterwards deserted his poetic vocation it was at what he believed to be a still higher call. For the present he lived on quietly at Horton, near the Church where his mother's grave may still be seen; walking often, as we may suppose, about that quietly beautiful country washed by the Thames and crowned by Windsor Castle; and sometimes, as we know from his own words, travelling the seventeen or eighteen miles to {41} London to buy books or learn "anything new in Mathematics or in Music, in which sciences I then delighted." Some of these visits to London evidently lasted days or weeks.
The interesting thing about these six years at Horton is that they are the only part of his life during which the least rural of our poets lived continuously in the country. And perhaps we may say that they bore their natural fruit; for it was while he was at Horton that Milton wrote L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, in which he touched rural life and rural scenes with a freshness and directness which he never again equalled. And the most important of the other poems written during these years, Arcades, Comus, and above all, Lycidas, show the same influence. Arcades and Comus point also to the effect of his visits to London and the musical world: for both of these were written for the music of his friend Henry Lawes, and probably at his suggestion; and, written as they were for entertainments given by members of the noble families of Stanley and Egerton, they show that Milton's plan of life did not involve cutting himself off from the great world, where they must have caused his name to be talked of. His life at Horton was evidently not that of a mere recluse, {42} forgetting the world outside and forgotten by it. Arcades and Comus, and still more the wonderful outburst At a Solemn Music, are visible links with the cultivated circles of the town, as Lycidas, which followed them in 1637 and was printed in 1638 at Cambridge with other poems to the memory of Edward King, is a visible link with his old university.