Says Mrs. Ogi: “From the title of this chapter I judge that we here begin our long-anticipated debate with H. L. Mencken!”
“No,” replies her husband, “we shall hew to the line of John Milton; but of course, if one of the chips happens to hit Mencken in the eye—”
“He will let us know,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“First we have to have some of the despised sociology. We have to mention that human institutions arise, and serve their day, and then degenerate. The shell which at one time protects the crab becomes an encumbrance and has to be split and cast off. The English monarchy once served to break the power of the rebellious nobles, and to give the country unity; but now came Parliament, pushing the kings aside. The people who brought about that change were the Puritans: and for a century they represented such freedom of conscience and freedom of intellect as England had. Incidentally, they settled the North American continent, cleared out the savages, and made a civilization. We owe them more than we owe to any other single group; and if nowadays we identify Puritanism with the Society for the Prevention of Vice, we shall be just as narrow and as bigoted as Anthony Comstock himself.”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “There goes a chip straight for Mencken’s eye!”
The society in which John Milton grew up was very much like the Harding-Coolidge era which we know. There was the same raffish crew in control of government, selling everything in sight, and trampling civil rights. Men were thrown wholesale into prison, they were beaten and tortured for their opinions’ sake. A small handful stood out, and suffered martyrdom; they appealed to the public, and the public seemed dead and indifferent—exactly as it seems today.
John Milton had a fortunate and happy youth. His father was prosperous, and gave his son the best guidance and education. At Christ’s College they called the boy “the lady,” because he was beautiful and refined. He returned to his father’s home to live a life of quiet study, and to write poems of imperishable beauty. If “art for art’s sake” degenerates care to know how poetry can have all the graces and sensuous charms, and still be clean, they are referred to these early poems of the young English Puritan. It is worth while to point out explicitly how little his creed meant narrowness and contempt for art. All that came later, as a result of the civil war. But Milton in his youth acquired all the culture of his time; he was a thorough-going humanist, personally graceful and attractive; he traveled in Italy and met the leading men of his age, including the old blind Galileo, who had been forced under threat of torture to recant his belief that the earth moves around the sun.
The efforts of the most Catholic King Charles I to break the parliament of England brought Milton home from Italy. The parliament resisted, and civil war broke out, and he put aside his poetry and teaching, and plunged into the work of saving free government. Even today we find leisure-class critics bewailing the fact that a great poet should have wasted himself in a political career. But I venture the opinion that John Milton has given us more great poetry than we take time to appreciate; and it was worth while also to give us a life, and demonstrate that a poet can be a man.
For twenty years John Milton was the world voice of the Republican cause. In order to defend it he made himself master of the finest English prose style known up to that time. He defended his cause also in Latin, in French, and in Italian; he defended it so well that it now prevails over most of the world, and so we fail to realize what it seemed in the poet’s day. The parliamentary army met the king in battle, and took him prisoner, held him for three years, and then, because of his infinite and incurable treachery, tried him and cut off his head. To the orthodox respectability of the seventeenth century this was the most horrible thing that had happened since the crucifixion of Christ.
You know how Bolsheviks and Socialists are reputed to practice free love, and worse yet, to preach it. John Milton was that kind of wicked person, also. He married a giddy young Royalist wife, and she left him; whereupon he wrote two pamphlets in favor of divorce. When he could not get permission to print such diabolical documents, he printed them without license; and when he was attacked for this, he published another pamphlet, maintaining the unthinkable theory that men should be free to print what they pleased. I have seen, within a few miles of my own home, bookstores and printing offices raided, and their contents smashed and burned, both by mobs and by officers of the law; I have seen one of my friends fined thirty thousand dollars for publishing a book in favor of the atrocious idea that human beings should not shed one another’s blood; so I believe that I can understand how this Puritan poet was regarded by the cultured world of his time.