Life of John Milton

by Richard Garnett

WHEN THE ASSAULT WAS INTENDED TO THE CITY [NOVEMBER, 1642.]

Captain, or Colonel, or Knight in arms,
Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize,
If deed of honour did thee ever please,
Guard them, and him within protect from harms.
He can requite thee, for he knows the charms
That call fame on such gentle acts as these,
And he can spread thy name o'er lands and seas,
Whatever clime the sun's bright circle warms.
Lift not thy spear against the Muse's bower:
The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground; and the repeated air
Of sad Electra's poet had the power
To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.

If this strain seems deficient in the fierceness befitting a besieged patriot, let it be remembered that Milton's doors were literally defenceless, being outside the rampart of the City.

We now approach the most curious episode of Milton's life, and the most irreconcilable with the conventional opinion of him. Up to this time this heroic existence must have seemed dull to many, for it has been a life without love. He has indeed, in his beautiful Sonnet to the Nightingale (about 1632), professed himself a follower of Love: but if so, he has hitherto followed at a most respectful distance. Yet he had not erred, when in the Italian sonnet, so finely rendered in Professor Masson's biography, he declared the heart his vulnerable point:—

"Young, gentle-natured, and a simple wooer,
Since from myself I stand in doubt to fly,
Lady, to thee my heart's poor gift would I
Offer devoutly; and by tokens sure
I know it faithful, fearless, constant, pure,
In its conceptions graceful, good, and high.
When the world roars, and flames the startled sky;
In its own adamant it rests secure;
As free from chance and malice ever found,
And fears and hopes that vulgar minds confuse,
As it is loyal to each manly thing
And to the sounding lyre and to the Muse.
Only in that part is it not so sound
Where Love hath set in it his cureless sting."

It is highly probable that the very reaction from party strife turned the young man's fancies to thoughts of love in the spring of 1643. Escorted, we must fear, by a chorus of mocking cuckoos, Milton, about May 21st, rode into the country on a mysterious errand. It is a ghoulish and ogreish idea, but it really seems as if the elder Milton quartered his progeny upon his debtors, as the ichneumon fly quarters hers upon caterpillars. Milton had, at all events for the last sixteen years, been regularly drawing interest from an Oxfordshire squire, Richard Powell of Forest Hill, who owed him £500, which must have been originally advanced by the elder Milton. The Civil War had no doubt interfered with Mr. Powell's ability to pay interest, but, on the other hand, must have equally impaired Milton's ability to exact it; for the Powells were Cavaliers, and the Parliament's writ would run but lamely in loyal Oxfordshire. Whether Milton went down on this eventful Whitsuntide in the capacity of a creditor cannot now be known; and a like uncertainty envelops the precise manner of the metamorphosis of Mary Powell into Mary Milton. The maiden of seventeen may have charmed him by her contrast to the damsels of the metropolis, she may have shielded him from some peril, such as might easily beset him within five miles of the Royalist headquarters, she may have won his heart while pleading for her harassed father; he may have fancied hers a mind he could mould to perfect symmetry and deck with every accomplishment, as the Gods fashioned and decorated Pandora. Milton also seems to imply that his, or his bride's, better judgment was partly overcome by "the persuasion of friends, that acquaintance, as it increases, will amend all." It is possible, too, that he had long been intimate with his debtor's family, and that Mary had previously made an impression upon him. If not, his was the most preposterously precipitate of poets' marriages; for a month after leaving home he presented a mistress to his astounded nephews and housekeeper. The newly-wedded pair were accompanied or quickly followed by a bevy of the bride's friends and relatives, who danced and sang and feasted for a week in the quiet Puritan house, then departed—and after a few weeks Milton finds himself moved to compose his tract on the "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce."

How many weeks? The story seemed a straightforward one until Professor Masson remarked what had before escaped attention. According to Phillips, an inmate of the house at the period—"By that time she had for a month, or thereabouts, led a philosophical life (after having been used to a great house, and much company and joviality), her friends, possibly incited by her own desire, made earnest suit by letter to have her company the remaining part of the summer, which was granted, on condition of her return at the time appointed, Michaelmas or thereabout. Michaelmas being come, and no news of his wife's return, he sent for her by letter, and receiving no answer sent several other letters, which were also unanswered, so that at last he dispatched down a foot-messenger; but the messenger came back without an answer. He thought it would be dishonourable ever to receive her again after such a repulse, and accordingly wrote two treatises," &c. Here we are distinctly assured that Mary Milton's desertion of her husband, about Michaelmas, was the occasion of his treatise on divorce. It follows that Milton's tract must have been written after Michaelmas. But the copy in the British Museum belonged to the bookseller Thomason, who always inscribed the date of publication on every tract in his collection, when it was known to him, and his date, as Professor Masson discovered, is August 1. Must we believe that Phillips's account is a misrepresentation? Must we, in Pattison's words, "suppose that Milton was occupying himself with a vehement and impassioned argument in favour of divorce for incompatibility of temper, during the honeymoon"? It would certainly seem so, and if Milton is to be vindicated it can only be by attention to traits in his character, invisible on its surface, but plainly discoverable in his actions.

The grandeur of Milton's poetry, and the dignity and austerity of his private life, naturally incline us to regard him as a man of iron will, living by rule and reason, and exempt from the sway of passionate impulse. The incident of his marriage, and not this incident alone, refutes this conception of his character; his nature was as lyrical and mobile as a poet's should be. We have seen "Comus" and "Lycidas" arise at another's bidding, we shall see a casual remark beget "Paradise Regained." He never attempts to utter his deepest religious convictions until caught by the contagious enthusiasm of a revolution. If any incident in his life could ever have compelled him to speak or die it must have been the humiliating issue of his matrimonial adventure. To be cast off after a month's trial like an unsatisfactory servant, to forfeit the hope of sympathy and companionship which had allured him into the married state, to forfeit it, unless the law could be altered, for ever! The feelings of any sensitive man must find some sort of expression in such an emergency. At another period what Milton learned in suffering would no doubt have been taught in song. But pamphlets were then the order of the day, and Milton's "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," in its first edition, is as much the outpouring of an overburdened heart as any poem could have been. It bears every mark of a hasty composition, such as may well have been written and printed within the last days of July, following Mary Milton's departure. It is short. It deals with the most obvious aspects of the question. It is meagre in references and citations; two authors only are somewhat vaguely alleged, Grotius and Beza. It does not contain the least allusion to his domestic circumstances, nor anything unless the thesis itself, that could hinder his wife's return. Everything betokens that it was composed in the bitterness of wounded feeling upon the incompatibility becoming manifest; but that he had not yet arrived at the point of demanding the application of his general principle to his own special case. That point would be reached when Mary Milton deliberately refused to return, and the chronology of the greatly enlarged second edition, published in the following February, entirely confirms Phillips's account. In one point only he must be wrong. Mary Milton's return to her father's house cannot have been a voluntary concession on Milton's part, but must have been wrung from him after bitter contentions. Could we look into the household during those weeks of wretchedness, we should probably find Milton exceedingly deficient in consideration for the inexperienced girl of half his age, brought from a gay circle of friends and kindred to a grave, studious house. But it could not well have been otherwise. Milton was constitutionally unfit "to soothe and fondle," and his theories cannot have contributed to correct his practice. His "He for God only, she for God in him," condenses every fallacy about woman's true relation to her husband and her Maker. In his Tractate on Education there is not a word on the education of girls, and yet he wanted an intellectual female companion. Where should the woman be found at once submissive enough and learned enough to meet such inconsistent exigencies? It might have been said to him as afterwards to Byron: "You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph."

If Milton's first tract on divorce had not been a mere impromptu, extorted by the misery of finding "an image of earth and phlegm" in her "with whom he looked to be the co-partner of a sweet and gladsome society," he would certainly have rendered his argument more cogent and elaborate. The tract, in its inspired portions, is a fine impassioned poem, fitter for the Parliament of Love than the Parliament at Westminster. The second edition is far more satisfactory as regards that class of arguments which alone were likely to impress the men of his generation, those derived from the authority of the Scriptures and of divines. In one of his principal points all Protestants and philosophers will confess him to be right, his reference of the matter to Scripture and reason, and repudiation of the mediæval canon law. It is not here, nevertheless, that Milton is most at home. The strength of his position is his lofty idealism, his magnificent conception of the institution he discusses, and his disdain for whatever degrades it to conventionality or mere expediency. "His ideal of true and perfect marriage," says Mr. Ernest Myers, "appeared to him so sacred that he could not admit that considerations of expediency might justify the law in maintaining sacred any meaner kind, or at least any kind in which the vital element of spiritual harmony was not." Here he is impregnable and above criticism, but his handling of the more sublunary departments of the subject must be unsatisfactory to legislators, who have usually deemed his sublime idealism fitter for the societies of the blest than for the imperfect communities of mankind. When his "doctrine and discipline" shall have been sanctioned by lawgivers, we may be sure that the world is already much better, or much worse.

As the girl-wife vanishes from Milton's household her place is taken by the venerable figure of his father. The aged man had removed with his son Christopher to Reading, probably before August, 1641, when the birth of a child of his name—Christopher's offspring as it should seem—appears in the Reading register. Christopher was to exemplify the law of reversion to a primitive type. Though not yet a Roman Catholic like his grandfather, he had retrograded into Royalism, without becoming on that account estranged from his elder brother. The surrender of Reading to the Parliamentary forces in April, 1643, involved his "dissettlement," and the migration of his father to the house of John, with whom he was moreover better in accord in religion and politics. Little external change resulted, "the old gentleman," says Phillips, "being wholly retired to his rest and devotion, with the least trouble imaginable." About the same time the household received other additions in the shape of pupils, admitted, Phillips is careful to assure us, by way of favour, as M. Jourdain selected stuffs for his friends. Milton's pamphlet was perhaps not yet published, or not generally known to be his, or his friends were indifferent to public sentiment. Opinion was unquestionably against Milton, nor can he have profited much by the support, however practical, of a certain Mrs. Attaway, who thought that "she, for her part, would look more into it, for she had an unsanctified husband, that did not walk in the way of Sion, nor speak the language of Canaan," and by and by actually did what Milton only talked of doing. We have already seen that he had incurred danger of prosecution from the Stationers' Company, and in July, 1644, he was denounced by name from the pulpit by a divine of much note, Herbert Palmer, author of a book long attributed to Bacon. But, if criticised, he was read. By 1645 his Divorce tract was in the third edition, and he had added three more pamphlets—one to prove that the revered Martin Bucer had agreed with him; two, the "Tetrachordon" and "Colasterion," directed against his principal opponents, Palmer, Featley, Caryl, Prynne, and an anonymous pamphleteer, who seems to have been a somewhat contemptible person, a serving-man turned attorney, but whose production contains some not unwelcome hints on the personal aspects of Milton's controversy. "We believe you count no woman to due conversation accessible, as to you, except she can speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French, and dispute against the canon law as well as you." Milton's later tracts are not specially interesting, except for the reiteration of his fine and bold idealism on the institution of marriage, qualified only by his no less strenuous insistance on the subjection of woman. He allows, however, that "it is no small glory to man that a creature so like him should be made subject to him," and that "particular exceptions may have place, if she exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yield; for then a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser should govern the less wise, whether male or female."