When it was said of Robespierre, cet homme ira bien loin, car il croit tout ce qu'il dit, it was probably meant that he would attain the chief place in the State. It might have been said of Milton in the literal sense. The idealist was about to apply his principles of church polity to family life, to the horror of many nominal allies. His treatise on Divorce was the next of his publications in chronological order, but is so entwined with his domestic life that it will be best to postpone it until we again take up the thread of his personal history, and to pass on for the present to his next considerable writings, his tracts on education and on the freedom of the press.
Milton's tract on Education, like so many of his performances, was the fruit of an impulse from without. "Though it be one of the greatest and noblest designs that can be thought on, and for want of which this nation perishes, I had not at this time been induced but by your earnest entreaties and serious conjurements." The efficient cause thus referred to existed in the person of Samuel Hartlib, philanthropist and polypragmatist, precursor of the Franklins and Rumfords of the succeeding century. The son of a Polish exile of German extraction, Hartlib had settled in England about 1627. He found the country behindhand both economically and socially, and with benign fervour applied himself to its regeneration. Agriculture was his principal hobby, and he effected much towards its improvement in England, rather however by editing the unpublished treatises of Weston and Child than by any direct contributions of his own. Next among the undertakings to which he devoted himself were two of no less moment than the union of British and foreign Protestants, and the reform of English education by the introduction of the methods of Comenius. This Moravian pastor, the Pestalozzi of his age, had first of men grasped the idea that the ordinary school methods were better adapted to instil a knowledge of words than a knowledge of things. He was, in a word, the inventor of object lessons. He also strove to organize education as a connected whole from the infant school to the last touch of polish from foreign travel. Milton alludes almost scornfully to Comenius in his preface to Hartlib, but his tract is nevertheless imbued with the Moravian's principles. His aim, like Comenius's, is to provide for the instruction of all, "before the years of puberty, in all things belonging to the present and future life." His view is as strictly utilitarian as Comenius's. "Language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known." Of the study of language as intellectual discipline he says nothing, and his whole course of instruction is governed by the desire of imparting useful knowledge. Whatever we may think of the system of teaching which in our day allows a youth to leave school disgracefully ignorant of physical and political geography, of history and foreign languages, it cannot be denied that Milton goes into the opposite extreme, and would overload the young mind with more information than it could possibly digest. His scheme is further vitiated by a fault which we should not have looked for in him, indiscriminate reverence for the classical writers, extending to subjects in which they were but children compared with the moderns. It moves something more than a smile to find ingenuous youth referred to Pliny and Solinus for instruction in physical science; and one wonders what the agricultural Hartlib thought of the proposed course of "Cato, Varro, and Columella," whose precepts are adapted for the climate of Italy. Another error, obvious to any dunce, was concealed from Milton by his own intellectual greatness. He legislates for a college of Miltons. He never suspects that the course he is prescribing would be beyond the abilities of nine hundred and ninety-nine scholars in a thousand, and that the thousandth would die of it. If a difficulty occurs he contemptuously puts it aside. He has not provided for Italian, but can it not "be easily learned at any odd hour"? "Ere this time the Hebrew tongue" (of which we have not hitherto heard a syllable), "might have been gained, whereto it would be no impossibility to add the Chaldee and the Syrian dialect." This sublime confidence in the resources of the human intellect is grand, but it marks out Milton as an idealist, whose mission it was rather to animate mankind by the greatness of his thoughts than to devise practical schemes for human improvement. As an ode or poem on education, Milton's tract, doubtless, has delivered many a teacher and scholar from bondage to routine; and no man's aims are so high or his thoughts so generous that he might not be further profited and stimulated by reading it. As a practical treatise it is only valuable for its emphatic denunciation of the folly of teasing youth, whose element is the concrete, with grammatical abstractions, and the advice to proceed to translation as soon as possible, and to keep it up steadily throughout the whole course. Neglect of this precept is the principal reason why so many youths not wanting in capacity, and assiduously taught, leave school with hardly any knowledge of languages. Milton's scheme is also remarkable for its bold dealing with day schools and universities, which it would have entirely superseded.
The next publication of Milton's is another instance of the dependence of his intellectual workings upon the course of events outside him. We owe the "Areopagitica," not to the lonely overflowings of his soul, or even to the disinterested observation of public affairs, but to the real jeopardy he had incurred by his neglect to get his books licensed. The Long Parliament had found itself, in 1643, with respect to the Press, very much in the position of Lord Canning's government in India at the time of the Mutiny. It marks the progress of public opinion that, whereas the Indian Government only ventured to take power to prevent inopportune publication with many apologies, and as a temporary measure, the Parliament assumed it as self-evident that "forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed papers, pamphlets, and books" had no right to exist, and should be nipped in the bud by the appointment of licensers. Twelve London ministers, therefore, were nominated to license books in divinity, which was equivalent to enacting that nothing contrary to Presbyterian orthodoxy should be published in England.[2] Other departments, not forgetting poetry and fiction, were similarly provided for. The ordinance is dated June 14, 1643. Milton had always contemned the licensing regulations previously existing, and within a month his brain was busy with speculations which no reverend licenser could have been expected to confirm with an imprimatur. About August 1st the "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce" appeared, with no recognition of or from a licenser; and the second edition, published in the following February, equally infringed the Parliamentary ordinance. No notice appears to have been taken until the election of a new Master of the Stationers' Company, about the middle of 1644. The Company had an interest in the enforcement of the ordinance, which was aimed at piracy as well as sedition and heresy; and whether for this reason, or at the instigation of Milton's adversaries, they (August 24th) petitioned Parliament to call him to account. The matter was referred to a committee, but more urgent business thrust it out of sight. Milton, nevertheless, had received his marching orders, and on November 24, 1644, appeared "Areopagitica; a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing": itself unlicensed.
The "Areopagitica" is by far the best known of Milton's prose writings, being the only one whose topic is not obsolete. It is also composed with more care and art than the others. Elsewhere he seeks to overwhelm, but here to persuade. He could without insincerity profess veneration for the Lords and Commons to whom his discourse is addressed, and he spares no pains to give them a favourable opinion both of his dutifulness and his reasonableness. More than anywhere else he affects the character of a practical man, pressing home arguments addressed to the understanding rather than to the pure reason. He points out sensibly, and for him calmly, that the censorship is a Papal invention, contrary to the precedents of antiquity; that while it cannot prevent the circulation of bad books, it is a grievous hindrance to good ones; that it destroys the sense of independence and responsibility essential to a manly and fruitful literature. We hear less than might have been expected about first principles, of the sacredness of conscience, of the obligation on every man to manifest the truth as it is within him. He does not dispute that the magistrate may suppress opinions esteemed dangerous to society after they have been published; what he maintains is that publication must not be prevented by a board of licensers. He strikes at the censor, not at the Attorney-General. This judicious caution cramped Milton's eloquence; for while the "Areopagitica" is the best example he has given us of his ability as an advocate, the diction is less magnificent than usual. Yet nothing penned by him in prose is better known than the passage beginning, "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation;" and none of his writings contain so many seminal sentences, pithy embodiments of vital truths. "Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth." "A dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil doing. For God more esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person than the restraint of ten vicious." "Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making." "A man maybe a heretic in the truth." Towards the end the argument takes a wider sweep, and Milton, again the poet and the seer, hails with exultation the approach of the time he thinks he discerns when all the Lord's people shall be prophets. "Behold now this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with His protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers working to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching reformation." He clearly indicates that he regards the licensing ordinance as not really the offspring of an honest though mistaken concern for religion and morality, but as a device of Presbyterianism to restrain this outpouring of the spirit and silence Independents as well as Royalists. Presbyterianism had indeed been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and Milton's pamphlet was the handwriting on the wall. The fine gold must have become very dim ere a Puritan pen could bring itself to indite that scathing satire on the "factor to whose care and credit the wealthy man may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs; some divine of note and estimation that must be. To him he adheres; resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys into his custody; and, indeed, makes the very person of that man his religion—esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and commendation of his own piety. So that a man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual movable, and goes and comes near him according as that good man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him, his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped and sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted; and after the malmsey or some well-spiced brewage, and better breakfasted than He whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his religion." This is a startling passage. We should have pronounced hitherto that Milton's one hopeless, congenital, irremediable want, alike in literature and in life, was humour. And now, surely as ever Saul was among the prophets, behold Milton among the wits.
CHAPTER IV.
Ranging with Milton's spirit over the "fresh woods and pastures new," foreshadowed in the closing verse of "Lycidas," we have left his mortal part in its suburban dwelling in Aldersgate Street, which he seems to have first inhabited shortly before the convocation of the Long Parliament in November, 1640. His visible occupations are study and the instruction of his nephews; by and by he becomes involved in the revolutionary tempest that rages around; and, while living like a pedagogue, is writing like a prophet. He is none the less cherishing lofty projects for epic and drama; and we also learn from Phillips that his society included "some young sparks," and may assume that he then, as afterwards—
"Disapproved that care, though wise in show,
That with superfluous burden loads the day,
And, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains."
There is eloquent testimony of his interest in public affairs in his subscription of four pounds, a large sum in those days, for the relief of the homeless Protestants of Ulster. The progress of events must have filled him with exultation, and when at length civil war broke out in September, 1642, Parliament had no more zealous champion. His zeal, however, did not carry him into the ranks, for which some biographers blame him. But if he thought that he could serve his cause better with a pamphlet than with a musket, surely he had good reason for what he thought. It should seem, moreover, that if Milton detested the enemy's principles, he respected his pikes and guns:—