Great Men as Prophets of a New Era

by Newell Dwight Hillis

The great poet was born in London, eight years before the death of Shakespeare. The first sixteen years of his life were the last sixteen of the reign of James I. In Cheapside, within a block of his father's house, stood the old "Mermaid" tavern of Marlow, Ben Jonson, Dekker and Philip Massinger. His father was a scrivener, who drew deeds, made wills, invested money for his clients, and, in general, fulfilled for many families the tasks that now devolve upon the modern trust company. The father's skill and probity won for him an increasing number of clients, and with money came leisure for study and travel. He was a musician, a man of culture, a composer of considerable note; and he made his home an all-round center for young artists and authors. From the beginning, he recognized the unique genius of his son, and made the development of that genius to be the chief object of his life. He never tired of telling the boy that his first duty was to make the most possible out of himself. He held to those ideals that were outlined in Plato's and Aristotle's books on education. Whatever development could come through music, art, lectures, books, teachers, travel, was given the young poet. Just as misers pursue the accumulation of gold, just as ambitious statesmen pursue office and honour, so this father, by day and by night, toiled upon the education of his son; first teaching the child in his own library; then calling to his aid wise and experienced tutors; then sending the boy to a great London grammar school and thence to Cambridge University. The boy showed promise from the first. His exercises, "in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly the latter," early attracted attention. He studied hard, at school and at home; often studying till twelve at night. He loved books, "and he loved better to be foremost." He was only fifteen years of age when he wrote:

"Let us blaze his name abroad,
For of gods, he is the God,
Who by wisdom did create
Th' painted heavens so full of state,
He the golden tressèd sun
Caused all day his course to run,
Th' hornèd moon to hang by night
'Mid her spangled sisters bright;
For his mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure."

Throughout his youth, Milton's enthusiasm for reading and learning burned like a fire, by day and by night. He was one of the few students outside of Italy who could think in Latin, debate in Latin, and write verse in Latin quite as readily as in English. "He was a profound and elegant classical scholar; he had studied all the mysteries of Rabbinical literature; he was intimately acquainted with every language of modern Europe from which either pleasure or information was then to be derived." He fulfilled his own definition of education:—"I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war." And he believed that culture and character should have an aggressive note. "I take it to be my portion in this life, by labour and intense study, to leave something so written to after time, that they should not willingly let it die." Faithfully did he seek to live up to these high ideals. He sowed no wild oats, cut no bloody gashes in his conscience and memory, dwelt apart from vice and sensualism, and, at last, left the university with the approbation of the good and with no stain upon his soul.

Upon entering Cambridge it had been his intention to become a clergyman, but that intention he soon abandoned. The reasons he gives us are "the tyranny that had invaded the church," and the fact that, finding he could not honestly subscribe to the oaths and obligations required, he "thought it better to preserve a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, begun with servitude and forswearing." His father, meantime, had retired from business, and taken a country house in a small village near Windsor, about twenty miles from London. Few fathers have ever been as generous in meeting and encouraging a son's desire to devote himself to literature. For the next five years and eight months, in that country quietude, within sight of the towers of Windsor, Milton describes himself as "wholly intent, through a period of absolute leisure, on a steady perusal of the Greek and Latin writers." His father, of course, had provided the funds. His biographer Masson says: "Not until Milton was thirty-two years of age, if even then, did he earn a penny for himself." Such a life would have ruined ninety-nine out of every hundred talented young men; but it is the genius of Milton that he put those years to good use. Believing himself to be one dedicated to a high purpose, he not only completed his studies in classical literature but produced, at the same time, those early immortal classics known as his "minor" poems. There he wrote the "Lycidas," one of the world's great elegies; there the "Comus," which alone of all the masques of that time and preceding time, "has gone in its entirety into the body of living English literature." And there he wrote those two exquisite, airy fancies known to every schoolboy under the titles of "L'Allegro," and "Il Penseroso."

It was in 1638, at the age of thirty, that Milton determined to broaden his views by study in foreign lands. Once more his father generously made possible the fulfillment of his ambition. The young scholar naturally turned his steps toward Italy, then the home of painting, letters and the newer learning. His biographer pictures him for us—"a slight, patrician figure, distinguished alike in mind and physique. . . . He carries letters from Sir Henry Wotton; he sees the great Hugo Grotius at Paris; sees the sunny country of olives in Provence; sees the superb front of Genoa piling up from the blue waters of the Mediterranean; sees Galileo at Florence—the old philosopher too blind to study the face of the studious young Englishman that has come so far to greet him. He sees, too, what is best and bravest at Rome; among the rest St. Peter's, just then brought to completion, and in the first freshness of its great tufa masonry. He is fêted by studious young Italians; has the freedom of the Accademia della Crusca; blazes out in love-sonnets to some dark-eyed signorina of Bologna; returns by Venice and by Geneva where he hobnobs with the Diodati, friends of his old school-fellow, Charles Diodati." In Rome again, we find him writing Latin poems, some of which, seen by learned Italians, stir these writers to amazement at the thought that a Briton could be so excellent a Latin poet. It was their praise, Milton says in one of his letters, that led to his renewed resolve to devote his life to literature. Then and there he determined to do for England what Homer had done for Greece, what Virgil had done for Rome, what Dante had done for Italy. Lingering in the Sistine Chapel and in the various galleries of the Vatican, he saw the religious dramas of Michael Angelo, and the paintings of Raphael, with the story of the temptation of Adam and Eve, culminating in the Last Judgment. And in those hours of leisure and contemplation he stored his memory with the glorious images that he was to use in later years for unfolding and unveiling the fall of man's soul in his Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

It was while he was in the midst of his studies in the libraries of Rome and Florence, that the news reached him of the civil war threatening at home. Charles the First had reaffirmed the doctrine of the divine right of kings—that iniquitous theory which long afterward was to be revived by Kaiser Wilhelm as an excuse for the Great War. Over against Charles stood the Parliament, representing the people, and led by John Eliot and John Pym, John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell. Milton, with instant decision, turned his steps toward England. "I thought it dishonourable," he tells us, "that I should be travelling at ease for amusement when my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for liberty." Back in London, he found the country rocking on a red wave—the Scotch marching over the border—the Long Parliament portending—Strafford and Laud on the verge of impeachment—city pitted against city; brother against brother. His own father, drawing near to the end of his life, was a strong Royalist. The storm had broken, and in that sea of trouble the King and the old leaders were to go down. It is the glory of Milton that in that hour he chose to ally himself with a great cause and abandoning, for the time, his dream of an immortal epic, threw himself into the struggle for intellectual and moral liberty.

For the next twenty years, he was engulfed in a maelstrom of politics, tossed on a feverish tide of political hatred. With his own father and brother on the side of the King, he could no longer live under their roof; and unwilling to surrender his convictions of freedom and self-government, he struck out for himself in London. He took lodgings, and for years earned a slender livelihood by preparing pupils for the university. He gave his mornings to his students, and spent his evenings in writing pleas, attacking the autocracy of the King, and supporting the Puritan Leaders who wished to found the new commonwealth. It was not only Milton's life that was so affected. The lives of almost all his English contemporaries suffered similarly. Through the twenty years, from 1640 to 1660, there was an eclipse of pure literature in England. When he wrote he wrote necessarily, in prose. "I have the use," he explains, "as I may account it, of my left hand." But never once did he lose sight of his ideal—poetry. "Neither do I think it shame," he explains in one of his pamphlets, "to covenant with any knowing reader, that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted,"—meaning the composition of some poem which "the world would not willingly let die." He kept his promise—in the fullness of time. But in the interval, he played his part in the great drama of the Civil War.

At the very outset he was forced to endure and triumph over a personal misfortune. Like Shakespeare and Goethe, and many other poets, John Milton was most unfortunate in his marital life. At thirty-five, after a month's rest in the country, he returned to London, bringing with him a wife. She was young and of a family virtually committed to the Royalist cause; she had a shallow mind, and no sympathy either for Milton's artistic aims or his political convictions. The Civil War was on, Milton was giving himself with intense application to important public topics, was away from home in consultation with public men the long day through, and often returned late at night. The poor girl was in despair. A stranger in a great city, with no gift for friendship, she slowly became conscious of the fact that she never could be interested in John Milton's life. Urging the necessity of a brief visit to her country home, she went away and later positively refused to return. Milton was first hurt, then angered and finally disillusioned; and after great mental distress and careful study of the whole question of marriage and divorce, he published his views, which have exerted a profound and lasting influence upon society.

John Milton held that divorce should be as easy as marriage, and that when two people, beginning their contract in good faith, discover after honest endeavour, that there can be no happiness in the home, and both decide that it is best and honourable to separate, then there should be no legal obstacle to prevent this, providing always that proper provision be made for the support and education of children, whose character and disposition could not fail to be injured by the daily spectacle of unhappiness. Years afterward, when his wife's family had been rendered homeless, he took them all back into his own house. When his wife died, he married again, and within a year he was left a widower. Six years later he married his third wife, but his home was embittered by endless warfare between his daughters and his third wife. One of his letters says plainly that his wife was kind to him in his blind, old age when his daughters were undutiful and inhuman.

The Civil War was scarcely begun before he issued the first of those thunderbolts of indignation and exhortation known as his pamphlets on church discipline, education, and the liberty of unlicensed printing. The years that followed were years of incessant labour. He began and completed during this period his History of England, written from the viewpoint of the common people and tracing the ills, the poverty, and rebellion of Britain to misgovernment and tyranny. When Parliament tried the King upon charges of treason, and executed Charles, it was John Milton who came forward to defend Parliament, in a treatise which bore this title upon the title page: