Great Men as Prophets of a New Era

by Newell Dwight Hillis

The Tenure of Kings and Magistrate
Proving that it is Lawful
To call to account a tyrant or wicked King
And, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death.

By
JOHN MILTON.

Milton was not only the greatest pamphleteer of his generation—"head and shoulders above the rest"—but there is no life of that time, not even Cromwell's, in which the history of the revolution, so far as the deep underlying ideas were concerned, may be better studied. He was the first Englishman of note outside of Parliament to attach himself thus openly to the new Commonwealth. And every one of his prose works had this great quality, that it struck a blow for liberty.

In beginning any study of Milton it must be remembered that his intellect was essentially athletic. If he was the great poet of his era, he was not a dreamer of the closet, but a man who plunged into the thick of the fight, and made his writing and his doing a vital and indestructible part of his time. In analyzing the scholar's influence, De Quincey speaks of "the literature of knowledge" and "the literature of power." The function of the first is to teach men, the function of the second is to move and persuade men to action. De Quincey wishes us to understand that Milton's writings entered almost immediately into the thinking and the doing of the British people, just as bread enters into the blood of the physical system. Milton cared nothing for learning for its own sake. Knowledge was important only to the degree in which it was vitally creative, inspiring men, correcting their blunders, rebuking their selfishness, enlightening their darkness, and lifting them into the realm of silence, peace, and mystery. After defining the true scholar and Christian, as a knight going forth to war against every form of ignorance and tyranny, he exclaims, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." Learning, with Milton, was a means of enlarging his being and doing. Mark Pattison has well said, "He cultivated not letters, but himself, and sought to enter into possession of his own mental kingdom. Not that he might reign there, but that he might royally use its resources in building up a work which should bring honour to his country and his native tongue."

The glory of the battle which he fought for freedom—the freedom of the human mind—is all his own. "Thousands and tens of thousands among his contemporaries raised their voices against ship-money and the Star Chamber; but there were few indeed who discerned the more fearful evils of moral and intellectual slavery, and the benefits which would result from the liberty of the press and the unfettered exercise of private judgment." Milton was determined that the people should think for themselves, as well as tax themselves. And that he might shake the very foundations of the corruptions which he saw debasing the state, he selected for himself the most arduous and dangerous literary service. "At the beginning he wrote with incomparable energy and eloquence against the bishops. But, when his opinion seemed likely to prevail, he passed on to other subjects, and abandoned prelacy to the crowd of writers who now hastened to insult a falling party." He pressed always into the forlorn hope. The very men who most disapproved of his opinions were forced to respect the hardihood with which he maintained them.

Milton's prose pamphlets deserve the close study of every writer who wishes to know the full power of the English language. They sparkle with fine passages; they ring with eloquence; they have the fire and the fervour of a great mind at white heat. For quotable sentences, they are "a perfect field of cloth of gold." And the fineness and stiffness of their texture is by no means their greatest splendour. Every one of these controversial pamphlets answers to its author's definition of a good book in that it contains "the precious life-blood of a master spirit."

By far the most popular, and probably the most eloquent of all his prose writings is the famous Areopagitica, his argument for the liberty of unlicensed printing. It appeared on the 25th of November 1664, deliberately unlicensed and unregistered, and was a remonstrance addressed to Parliament in the form and style of an oration to be delivered in the assembly. Nobly eulogistic of Parliament in other respects, it denounced their printing ordinance as utterly unworthy of them, and of the new era of English liberties. Admired to-day because its main doctrine has become axiomatic—at one blow it accomplished the repeal of the licensing system and established forever the freedom of the English press—it contains passages which for power and beauty of prose make the finest declamations of Edmund Burke sink into insignificance.

It was not, however, the Areopagitica, but his vindication of the execution of Charles the First that procured for Milton the office of Latin Secretary under Cromwell's government. His boundless admiration for Cromwell had shown itself already in his immortal sonnet on the great soldier. He considered Cromwell the greatest and the best man of his generation, or of many generations; and he regarded Cromwell's assumption of the supreme power, as well as his retention of that power with a sovereign title, "as no real suppression of the republic, but as necessary for the preservation of the republic." Cromwell, in turn, saw in Milton a most powerful defender of the new commonwealth. By 1651 it was generally conceded that "the reputation of the Commonwealth abroad had been established by two agencies, and only two:—the victories of Cromwell, and the prose pamphlets of John Milton." In the nature of the case, their friendship and mutual respect of the two men was inevitable.

After the death of Charles, new treaties had to be drawn between England and Spain, England and France and Italy and Holland. These state papers were all written in Latin, and the Secretary of Latin and of Foreign Relations was a great person in the cabinet of every country. Milton's knowledge of Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, as well as Latin and Greek, made him an important figure in the deliberations of Cromwell's Council of State. His special duty was the drafting in Latin of letters of state, but from the first, he was employed in every conceivable kind of work. The council looked to him for everything in the nature of literary vigilance in the interests of the struggling Commonwealth. He was employed in personal conferences, in the examination of suspected papers, in interviews with their authors and printers, agents of foreign towns, envoys, ambassadors. It was a period of intense and feverish activity, with cabinet meetings, conferences between the leaders of the government, necessarily held at night. In that era of candle-light and flickering torches, with oil and electricity both still unknown, Milton, with despatches to be translated, notes to be made at all hours, was soon imperilling his eyesight. He was forty years of age when he took the post; at forty-six, as a result of his continuous and indomitable activities, he had ruined his eyes and was totally blind.

Wonderful the fortitude with which he faced this affliction! Hear the lines he composed in the first of those dark days: