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 JOHN MILTON 
 
JOHN MILTON 
 
 A PAPER 
 
 READ BEFORE THE 
 
 CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB 
 
 MONDAY EVENING 
 
 DECEMBER 7, 1908 
 
 IN CELEBRATION OF THE 
 
 TERCENTENARY 
 
 OF THE POET'S BIRTH 
 
 BY 
 CHARLES JOSEPH LITTLE 
 
 CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB 
 1909 
 
v^^. 
 
 UBRARYotCONGptSsJ 
 Two Copies Received - 
 
 MAR 3 1809 
 
 Gup.-'M&.it Entry 
 
 Copyright, 1909 
 CHARLES JOSEPH LITTLE 
 
JOHN MI LTON 
 
 ** The work some praise, 
 And some the architect." 
 
 These are 
 Mulciber, 
 
 J 
 
 Milton's words concerning 
 
 ** Whose hand was known in Heaven 
 By many a towered structure high, 
 Where sceptred angels hold their residence.*' 
 
 Suffer me to praise the architect and 
 only incidentally the work. 
 
 The first edition of Milton's minor 
 poems appeared in 1645. The frontis- 
 piece was an engraved portrait of a morose 
 and rather stupid-faced Englishman, whose 
 long hair, parted in the middle, fell down 
 on both sides to the high collar around the 
 neck. Beneath the picture one could read 
 in Latin, '^John Milton, Englishman, in 
 his twenty-first year*'; and in Greek, four 
 lines furnished to the engraver in jest by 
 Milton himself. Roughly translated, the 
 poet's mischief reads: 
 
"That some uncunning hand this face had carved 
 Quickly you 'd say, the living features seen, 
 But finding here no trait of me, my friends 
 Laugh at the bungling graver's sorry botch." 
 
 This was the beginning only of a fate 
 that has pursued Milton down to our day. 
 Marshall, the engraver, though, sinned with- 
 out malice, while Samuel Johnson, most 
 illustrious of Milton's subsequent detrac- 
 tors, poured out upon the citizen a brew 
 of falsehood and spleen which no praise of 
 the poet could expiate. For the poet had 
 committed that greatest of crimes : he 
 had taken sides in an internecine political 
 struggle, and taken, too, what seemed to 
 Johnson and Hume and all the Tories 
 of England and of Europe, the side of 
 traitors and anarchists who had beheaded 
 statesmen and bishops, and finally a king, 
 and in their revolutionary frenzy enfeebled 
 for all time the sacredness of hereditary 
 privilege and the efficacy of consecrating 
 oil. 
 
 To understand Milton we must begin 
 here. He was known to most of his con- 
 temporaries, not as a poet, but as a writer 
 of political pamphlets at a time when, as 
 the publisher of these minor poems de- 
 clared, ^^the slightest pamphlet was more 
 vendible than the works of learnedest 
 men.'' Before this collection of poems 
 was published, Milton's tractates upon 
 
reformation and episcopacy, the tractate 
 upon divorce, and the Areopagiticdj the 
 speech for the Hberty of unhcensed print- 
 ing, had made their author notorious, 
 rather than famous; he had provoked the 
 wrath of EpiscopaUan and Presbyterian, of 
 royahsts and compromisers, in the days 
 when ears were cropped and the heads- 
 man's axe was not unfrequently the final 
 argument. 
 
 Not a few of his biographers declare 
 with lofty self-complacency that Milton's 
 pamphlets had scant influence upon the 
 direction of events. This is true of all 
 really great political writing ; as true of 
 Edmund Burke, of Wilhelm von Humboldt, 
 of Francis Lieber, as it is of John Milton. 
 For the really great political writer sees 
 things from that ampler ether into which 
 the lesser spirits never soar. His influence, 
 moreover, asserts itself rather in the assent 
 of the thinking few and in the resistance that 
 he provokes from the interests he assails, 
 than in the number of the admirers and 
 adherents that he attracts. Milton was an 
 independent of no narrow spirit, a Christian 
 who belonged to no sect, a patriot who 
 belonged to no party, a Puritan whose 
 conscience reaffirmed the laws of God, 
 often by defying the enactments and tradi- 
 tions of men. Independence like this can 
 never become popular; and if supported 
 
by unflinching courage and resplendent 
 genius, it is sure to be decried, denounced, 
 misrepresented, and maligned. That Mil- 
 ton never feared the face of man, these 
 pamphlets amply prove. That his genius 
 transcended that of his contemporaries, 
 Hobbes, Selden, Sir Thomas Browne, Jere- 
 my Taylor, to mention the immortals only, 
 leaps to the mind of every intelligent reader 
 of the Areopagitica, That he possessed the 
 prophetic quality which is the very eye of 
 inspiration, three succeeding centuries have 
 attested, for the principles that Milton 
 championed and defended, even the princi- 
 ple that penetrates and redeems his treatises 
 upon divorce, have become the common- 
 places of our modern political and social 
 creeds. Who believes to-day either in the 
 divine right of kings, as held by Laud the 
 bishop, or in the hereditary inalienability of 
 a kingly crown, as held afterward by Black- 
 stone the lawyer ? Who now refuses sanc- 
 tion to Milton's noble contention that a 
 /"true marraige must be something finer and 
 diviner than a union of two bodies, that it 
 must be a harmony of souls attuned to a 
 concord of thought and purpose, a com- 
 panionship of sorrow mitigated by love and 
 of delights intensified by mutual partici- 
 pation.'^ 
 
 Who does not share with Milton the 
 desire and hope for that nobler ministry of 
 
 10 
 
truth from which the hirelings shall be 
 driven by the lash of public scorn ? and 
 who, whatever be his belief or disbelief, 
 does not thrill at Milton's picture of the 
 coming of ' ' the King who shall put an end 
 to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming his uni- 
 versal and mild monarchy through heaven 
 and earth ; where they that by their labours, 
 counsels, and prayers have been in earnest 
 for the common good of religion and their 
 country shall in superabundance of beatific 
 vision progressing the dateless and irrevolu- 
 ble circle of eternity, clasp inseparable 
 hands with joy and bliss, in over-measure 
 forever?'' 
 
 Who would reinstate the censor now? 
 But if it were attempted, what better ar- 
 guments to defeat it than those of Milton ? 
 ^* As good almost kill a man as kill a good 
 book; who kills a man kills a reasonable 
 creature, God's image ; but he who destroys 
 a good book kills reason itself, kills the 
 image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many 
 a man lives a burden to the earth ; but a good 
 book is the precious life-blood of a master 
 spirit, embalmed and treasured up on pur- 
 pose to a life beyond life." ''Though all 
 the winds of doctrine were let loose to prey 
 upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we 
 do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting 
 to misdoubt her strength. Let her and 
 falsehood grapple ; who ever knew truth 
 
 II 
 
put to the worse on a free and open en- 
 counter? Who knows not that truth is 
 strong next to the Almighty; she needs no 
 poHcies, nor strategems nor Hcensings, to 
 make her victorious ; those are the shifts and 
 defenses that error uses against her power : 
 give her but room and do not bind her 
 when she sleeps, for then she speaks not 
 true, as . the old Proteus did who spake 
 oracles only when he was caught and 
 bound, but then rather she turns herself 
 into all shapes except her own, and tunes 
 her voice according to the time/' 
 
 The speech for the liberty of unlicensed 
 printing appeared in 1644, while the first 
 edition of his minor poems was in press. 
 But, as his publisher complained, the peo- 
 ple were in no mood for literature, least 
 of all for poetry like L' Allegro and II 
 Penseroso, or even for a work of perfect 
 art like Comus. Strafford had gone to the 
 block, and Laud's head was unsteady on 
 his shoulders ; King Charles was nearing 
 the battle-field of Naseby and the scaffold ; 
 an assembly of divines, meeting in the Jeru- 
 salem chamber at Westminster, were draw- 
 ing up a confession of faith which might 
 serve as an iron-clad test to separate the 
 band of Gideon from Jehovah's enemies; 
 sects were multiplying with diabolical rapid- 
 ity, sixteen of them flourishing in defiance 
 of the law. ''We detest and abhor the 
 
 12 
 
much endeavored toleration/' wrote the 
 London clergy. ' ' Parliament will gracious- 
 ly suppress all sects without toleration/' 
 petitioned the corporation of the city. Mil- 
 ton had already noted with his yet unblinded 
 eyes that ''New Presbyter was only old 
 priest writ large, ' ' while Cromwell had ut- 
 tered his noble and mighty words, ''He 
 that ventures his life for the liberty of his 
 country, I wish he would trust God for the 
 liberty of his concience.'' *'From breth- 
 ren in things of the mind we look for no 
 compulsion but that of light and reason. ' ' 
 
 Our self-complacent aftersight enables 
 us to see, now when three centuries have 
 elapsed, that Milton the poet soars far above 
 the pamphleteer ; accordingly, with solemn 
 arrogance we summon him to judgment for 
 wasting his genius in controversy, deploring 
 the loss of certain never-written poems. 
 This vaunted aftersight is blind misunder- 
 standing. Let us listen to the man him- 
 self ! ' ' As for the other points, what God 
 may have determined for me I know not ; 
 but this I know, that if He ever instilled 
 an intense love of moral beauty into the 
 breast of any man. He has instilled it into 
 mine : Ceres, in the fable, pursued not her 
 daughter with a greater keenness of inquiry 
 than I, day and night, the idea of perfection. 
 Hence, whenever I find a man despising 
 the false estimates of the vulgar, and daring 
 
 13 
 
to aspire, in sentiment, language, and con- 
 duct, to what the highest wisdom through 
 every age has taught us as most excellent, 
 to him I unite myself by a sort of necessary 
 attachment ; and if I am so influenced by 
 nature or destiny that by no exertion or 
 labours of my own I may exalt myself to 
 this summit of worth and honour, yet no 
 powers of heaven or earth will hinder me 
 from looking with reverence and affection 
 upon those who have thoroughly attained 
 this glory, or appear in the successful pur- 
 suit of it. You inquire with a kind of solici- 
 tude even into my thoughts. Hear, then, 
 Diodati, but let me whisper in your ear, that 
 I may not blush at my reply — I think (so 
 help me Heaven!) of immortality. You in- 
 quire, also, what I am about ? I nurse my 
 wings, and meditate a flight; but my Peg- 
 asus rises as yet on very tender pinions. 
 Let us be humbly wise." 
 
 He thinks of immortality! And yet he 
 accepts in early manhood ''the lot however 
 mean or high towards which Time leads 
 him and the will of Heaven. All is, if he 
 has grace to use it so, as ever in his great 
 Taskmaster's eye." '^For he was con- 
 firmed in this opinion, that he who would 
 not be frustrate of his hope to write well in 
 laudable things, ought himself to be a true 
 poem." A believer in the majesty of 
 man's free will, he was a believer, too, in 
 
 14 
 
that eternal spirit ' ' who can enrich with 
 all utterance and knowledge, and sends out 
 His seraphim, with the hallowed fire of His 
 altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom 
 he pleases : to this must be added industri- 
 ous and select reading, steady observation, 
 insight into all seemly and generous arts 
 and affairs/' Observation and insight he 
 sought in Italy, and would have sought 
 in Greece. But *'the melancholy intelli- 
 gence,'' he tells us, ** which I received of 
 the civil commotions in England made me 
 alter my purpose ; for I thought it base to 
 be traveling for amusement abroad while 
 my fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty 
 at home." He had no love for contro- 
 versy, especially in an age of brutal recrim- 
 ination and barbarous cruelty ; in fact, he 
 hated it for its own sake and for the abuse 
 and slander that it would surely bring upon 
 him. 
 
 Listen again: ^'For, surely, to every 
 good and peaceable man, it must in nature 
 needs be a hateful thing to be the displeaser 
 and molester of thousands; much better 
 would it please him, undoubtedly, to be the 
 messenger of gladness and contentment, 
 which is his chief intended business to all 
 mankind, but that they resist and oppose 
 their own true happiness. But when God 
 commands to take the trumpet and blow a 
 dolorous and jarring blast, it lies not in 
 
 15 
 
man's will what he shall conceal/' *' Which 
 might teach these times not suddenly to 
 condemn all things that are sharply spoken 
 or vehemently written, as proceeding out of 
 stomach, virulence, or ill-nature." 
 
 '*No man can be justly offended with 
 him that shall endeavour to impart or be- 
 stow, without any gain to himself, those 
 sharp and saving words which would be a 
 terror and a torment in him to keep back. 
 For me, I have determined to lay up, as the 
 best treasure and solace of a good old age, if 
 God vouchsafe it me, the honest liberty of 
 free speech from my youth, when I shall 
 think it available in so dear a concernment 
 as the church's good." Moreover, he im- 
 agined his Master saying, *^ When time was, 
 thou couldst not find a syllable of all thou 
 hast read or studied to utter in my behalf ? 
 Yet ease and leisure was given thee for thy 
 retired thoughts out of the sweat of other 
 men. Thou hast the diligence, the parts, 
 the language of a man, if a vain subject 
 were to be adorned or beautified ; but 
 when the cause of God and His Church 
 was to be pleaded, for which purpose that 
 tongue was given thee which thou hast, 
 God listened if He could hear thy voice 
 among his zealous servants, but thou wert 
 dumb as a beast; from henceforward be 
 that which thine own brutish silence hath 
 made thee." This believer in immortality 
 
 i6 
 
feared to be punished ''in the shape he 
 sinned/' with everlasting ''brutish si- 
 lence." 
 
 His prose inferior to his poetry ? Who 
 knew this better than Milton? Who de- 
 clared in the very moment of self-immola- 
 tion: "This manner of writing, wherein 
 knowing myself inferior to myself, led by 
 the genial power of nature to another task, 
 I have the use, as I may account, but of 
 my left hand." 
 
 Many in these later centuries have sym- 
 pathized with Milton in his blindness; all 
 the more because he 'lost his sight in the 
 service of his country, writing the defense 
 of the English people. But the left-handed 
 Milton is no less a patriot than the sight- 
 less bard listening to Archangel ruined, or 
 to the harpings and hallelujahs of the angels 
 that renew their strength in glimpses of 
 God's face. Nay, the sacrifice was even 
 greater. It consumed the best years of 
 his life ; he was thirty-three when he wrote 
 the first, and fifty-two when he wrote the 
 last, of his controversial pamphlets. They 
 cost him his eyes and the use for two 
 decades of the wonderful right hand that 
 wrote the Paradise Lost and the Samson 
 Agonistes. Does the history of poetry or 
 the history of patriotism anywhere record 
 a nobler sacrifice.'^ Milton was neither 
 poor nor greedy ; he was rich enough to 
 
 17 
 
write poems at his leisure; like i Socrates, 
 his wants were few. He was never phys- 
 ically strong; there was no guarantee, 
 human or divine, that he would escape cap- 
 tivity or the scaffold, or live to old age. Yet 
 he placed upon the altar of English liberty 
 all the poems teeming in his prolific brain, 
 all the thoughts that wandered through 
 eternity. But God, who in the ancient 
 story at once inspired and refused the sac- 
 rifice of Abraham's child of promise, the 
 God of Milton, gave back to him and to 
 literature the offered song, the guerdon 
 of his unshaken faith, and the poem lost in 
 the turmoil of the revolution was regained 
 amid the revels and the persecutions of the 
 Restoration. As the Stuarts remounted 
 for a brief space the throne of England, to 
 cover the stains of their father's blood with 
 darker stains of immorality and cruelty 
 then Milton soared serenely to the throne 
 of the immortals, to sit down with Homer 
 and Lucretius and Dante and Spenser, not 
 the least of that illustrious company who 
 brighten with celestial splendor and soften 
 with celestial melodies *'the smoke and 
 stir of this dim spot that men call earth." 
 
 Misread him not, however. His was no 
 unpremeditated sacrifice, made in ignorance 
 of consequences. It is Milton's glory that 
 he counted the cost correctly, even to the 
 slanders that would be heaped upon him, 
 
 i8 
 
and that he paid it notwithstanding. He 
 knew his age and its favorite methods of 
 reply, the prison and the pillory, and when 
 these were not possible, abusive lies and 
 slanders. Here is an early specimen. 
 ''Of late, since he was out of wit and 
 clothes, he is now clothed in serge and 
 confined to a parlour, where he blasphemes 
 God and the king as ordinarily erstwhile he 
 drank sack and swore. Hear him speak ! 
 Christian, dost thou like these passages.^ 
 Or doth thy heart rise against such un- 
 seemly beastliness ? Nay, but take this 
 head . . . Horrid blasphemy ! You that 
 love Christ, and know this miscreant wretch, 
 stone him to death, lest yourselves smart 
 for his impunity. ' ' 
 
 True, we owe to this abuse those radiant 
 bits of autobiography, imbedded like jewels 
 in the controversial pamphlets. Milton 
 never skulked, as many do even in our 
 time, behind the plea that a man's charac- 
 ter has nothing to do with his opinions. 
 For Milton, a man's bad character discred- 
 ited his opinions, especially where moral 
 issues were involved. Skilled musician as 
 he was, he would have scoffed at those 
 who, albeit music-deaf, chatter glibly of the 
 concord of sweet sounds. Apostates from 
 liberty, tyrants and sycophants, hirelings 
 and bribe-takers, he believed, were not in- 
 spired to instruct free Englishmen in civil 
 
 19 
 
or religious duty. To unmask them was, 
 therefore, to refute them. If he himself 
 were such, he had no duty, nay, not even 
 the right to speak. Therefore he replied 
 to his slanderers with noble self-revelation, 
 an example followed in our day by John 
 Henry Newman in his powerful and suc- 
 cessful Apologia. 
 
 And what manner of man did he reveal 1 
 The loving son of a very noble father, 
 himself an outcast from the paternal home 
 for his opinion's sake. Trained to knowl- 
 edge and music and independence by this 
 same father, who had acquired wealth 
 by intelligence and industry, and sent by 
 him to Cambridge that he might prepare to 
 serve the Church. 
 
 A Puritan in his youth, but not of the 
 kind sculptured by Saint Gaudens, or even 
 of the Cromwell kind, but one that loved 
 Shakespeare and adored Spenser, who de- 
 lighted in music and in the friendship of 
 noble souls, whose strength was as the 
 strength of ten because his heart was pure. 
 A shallow critic of Milton's Comus declares 
 that Milton could not draw ugliness : *'It 
 turns into beauty or majesty in his hands. '' 
 He could draw it easily enough, but never 
 with love, always with loathing. Comus, 
 like Satan, the Serpent, tempts chastity 
 with beauty, and only at that entrance was 
 Milton himself exposed to evil. Ugly 
 
 20 
 
wickedness repelled him; meanness and 
 cowardice enraged him. A born poet, he 
 was also a born artist; like Dante, taking 
 infinite pains to acquire technical perfec- 
 tion. Like Galileo and Pascal, rebelling at 
 the pedants who controlled the learning of 
 his time, he was none the less a student, 
 w^hose prodigious memory was the ready 
 servant of a puissant and far-ranging intel- 
 ligence. Not tall, but lithe and erect; his 
 slender frame carrying a shapely head 
 crowned with light brown hair, which clus- 
 tered about an oval face beautiful in form 
 and color, and luminous dark-gray glittering 
 eyes whose glitter changed to glow when 
 thoughts were surging in his brain or feel- 
 ing rising in his heart. A sweet and tuneful 
 voice made his speech and song attractive, 
 while a playful irony blended with a seri- 
 ous cheerfulness to brighten all his talk. 
 After fourteen years of preparation for it 
 and witness of its administration, he re- 
 fused to enter the Church. ''He who 
 would take orders must subscribe himself 
 slave and take an oath withal.'' God's 
 servant he would be most willingly, and 
 man's too, for that matter. But long before 
 the German poet Arndt had written it, 
 Milton felt that God who made the iron 
 grow in the hillsides had little love for 
 slaves. His noble father, one of the no- 
 blest in human annals, although reluctant, 
 
 21 
 
yielded to the scruples of his beloved son, 
 who spent six years more in quiet study 
 and fifteen months in foreign travel. The 
 lad who had criticised the University 
 pedants made friends in Paris with Hugo 
 Grotius and in Italy with the wisest 
 Italians of that gloomy period. Even 
 where Galileo then languished a prisoner, 
 Milton would not hold his peace when his 
 religious views were called in question. 
 Indeed, his interview with the ^ ^Tuscan 
 artist, ' ' the sightless victim of ecclesiastical 
 tyranny, made him the more eager to 
 preserve the envied liberty of England 
 from the reign of ** thorough, " begun by 
 Laud and Strafford, and supported by King 
 Charles and his intriguing queen. 
 
 Galileo was then in his seventy-fifth year, 
 old, blind, bereft of his beloved daughter, 
 yet indomitably determined to defy his per- 
 secutors with the last and greatest of his 
 dialogues, that upon the New Sciences. 
 
 Did the young poet, rejoicing in the 
 vigor of early manhood, have some fore- 
 boding of his own destiny as he looked upon 
 those rugged features and talked with the 
 sightless ** Columbus of the skies?" Did 
 he feel the darkness gathering about his 
 own head, and the prison walls enclosing 
 him, and see in the ministries of Galileo's 
 pupils the one remaining comfort of his 
 own last days ? Galileo had two daughters, 
 
 22 
 
one of whom was sour, peevish, morose, and 
 selfish, the other a ministering angel while 
 she lived, and more than ministering an- 
 gel: a companion for her father's mind, 
 the greatest then blazing in all earth's gal- 
 axy; but a companion taken from him all 
 too soon, though still ''calling to him con- 
 tinually.'* Milton was to have three 
 daughters, of whom one only should be any 
 comfort to him, and she rather in love and 
 good intention than in intellectual sympa- 
 thy. Did Milton hear from Galileo's own 
 lips the story of that strange retraction, not 
 yet wholly free from mystery, and did he 
 swear on hearing it never to fling a stone 
 at the wonderful old man, who was even 
 then redeeming his defeat and revenging 
 his humiliation by the defiant publication 
 of the principles that underlie our modern 
 dynamics, and now flash their splendor to 
 us from every triumph of m.odern engineer- 
 ing } I never read Milton's allusions to Gal- 
 ileo in his prose and in his poetry without a 
 vision of that meeting: the last of the 
 giants of the older Italy, the herald of an 
 intellectual method that was to change the 
 face of the world and transform the reason- 
 ing of mankind ; and the last of the Eliza- 
 bethan poets, the one born out of due time, 
 as he himself declared, but destined to com- 
 pose a poem of enduring sublimity, and to 
 live a poem of heroic and thrilling majesty. 
 
 23 
 
Perhaps the noblest passage in Schiller's 
 Don Carlos is that in which the Queen begs 
 Posa to tell the Prince to reverence the ideals 
 of his youth. Ah me ! How few of us at- 
 tain to it. In the dire struggle for existence, 
 in the rush of competition, tempted by ava- 
 rice or ambition or the pride of life, weak- 
 ened by strife or by the persuasions of timid 
 friends, the ideals that charmed us in the 
 golden dawn fade away like the splendors 
 of the morning, returning at dusk only as 
 reminders of what we might have been. 
 
 John Milton stands forever in the history 
 of English politics and of English literature 
 as a man who reverenced in mature man- 
 hood and in age the ideals of his youth, 
 ^' never * bating jot of heart of hope, but 
 steering right onward.'' I shall not defend 
 him from the charges made against him, 
 some — and the most — of which are false 
 and foolish, and many of which betray a 
 signal ignorance of his writings, of his 
 history, and of the age and the England in 
 which he lived. In Italy he might have 
 written a masterpiece of controversy like 
 Galileo's Saggiatore; in France he might 
 have written letters like Pascal's Provin- 
 cials; in England he used the club of Her- 
 cules, not the stiletto of the Italian master, 
 or like the wonderful French genius, the 
 shafts of merciless ridicule and the flaming 
 sword of an angry archangel. 
 
 24 
 
True to his ideals, he looked with fore- 
 boding at Cromwell's encroachments upon 
 liberty, warning whilst praising him, and 
 he closed his defense of the people of 
 England with these courageous words: 
 **If, as you have been valiant in war, you 
 should grow debauched in peace, you that 
 have had such visible demonstrations of 
 the goodness of God to yourselves and of 
 his wrath to your enemies; if it should fall 
 out that you have not learned by so ancient 
 an example before your eyes to fear God 
 and work righteousness ; — then for my part 
 I shall easily grant and confess (for I can- 
 not deny it) whatever ill man may speak or 
 think of you to be very true. And you 
 will find in a little time that God's displeas- 
 ure against you will be greater than it has 
 been against your adversaries, greater than 
 his grace and favour have been to your- 
 selves, which you have had larger experi- 
 ence of than any other nation under 
 heaven.'' ''Milton, thou shouldst be liv- 
 ing at this hour," and writing for Amer- 
 ica! 
 
 ''No one," wrote Milton, "ever saw me 
 going about, no one ever saw me asking 
 anything among my friends, or stationed at 
 the doors of the court with a petitioner's 
 face or haunting the entries of lesser 
 assemblies. I kept myself entirely at 
 home, contriving, though burdened with 
 
 25 
 
taxes in the main rather oppressive, to lead 
 my frugal life, when lo ! Charles' kingdom 
 having been formed into a republic, the 
 Council of State invited me, dreaming of 
 nothing of the sort, to give the use of my 
 services chiefly in foreign affairs/' Thus 
 he became Latin Secretary in the new 
 republic, an office which, if not conferred 
 by Cromwell, brought his future panegyrist 
 and intrepid counsellor into close relations 
 with him. But the man that sacrificed his 
 eyes to defend the people of England was 
 not the man to sacrifice his conscience to 
 any ruler, however powerful. Much as he 
 admired the Protector, he feared and fore- 
 boded the downfall of a republic so depend- 
 ent upon a single overmastering mind. 
 His fears and forebodings soon turned 
 to facts. There were, upon Cromwell's 
 death, among England's five millions, not 
 men enough to save it from the returning 
 Stuarts. Puritanism, as Milton foresaw and 
 foretold, had made itself hateful by political 
 and social tyranny; even Cromwell came 
 to see before his death that Puritanism 
 *' had missed its aim." Intellectual forces 
 abounded; they were soon to appear, not 
 so much in poets like Butler and Dryden, or 
 in statesmen like Clarendon, but in the 
 Royal Society, and afterwards in Isaac 
 Newton. Bacon's skepticism, amplified 
 and emboldened, would assert itself in 
 
 26 
 
Thomas Hobbes, his favorite secretary, 
 and theology was to give place to the New 
 Philosophy, *^ which from the times of 
 Galileo at Florence and Sir Francis Bacon 
 in England hath been much cultivated in 
 Italy, France, Germany, and other parts 
 abroad, as well as in England." Mean- 
 while men like Hales and Chillingworth 
 were seeing that the Church of England 
 might possibly be saved by mitigating and 
 simplifying its doctrine, and by a noble 
 comprehension of all who lived a righteous 
 life, thus hoping vainly (as the sequel 
 proved) to gain by tolerance and reason 
 what Milton had vainly hoped to gain by 
 independence. But in one of those spasms 
 which sweep over a nation, all hope of mod- 
 eration perished. The corpse of Cromwell 
 was torn from its grave and gibbeted at 
 Tyburn ; that of Pym cast out of West- 
 minster Abbey; Howe and Baxter, the 
 ablest preacher and that noblest parish 
 priest in England were driven from their 
 churches ; John Bunyan was sent to Bedford 
 jail while John Milton was imprisoned and 
 impoverished. His sight was gone, but his 
 spirit was unbroken. True, he had yielded to 
 the urging of his friends and gone into hiding 
 when his enemies were hoping to see him 
 carried to Tyburn in a cart. Mr. Masson 
 declares quite truly that there is no greater 
 historical puzzle than the complete escape 
 
 27 
 
of Milton from the scaffold after the Resto- 
 ration. * * It was thought a strange omis- 
 sion/' wrote Burnet. But to Milton it 
 was no puzzle ; it was an act of God, in 
 whom he had put his trust, and who would 
 not see him put to shame. But whither to 
 go and what to do.? Home he hardly 
 possessed, for his beloved second wife was 
 dead, and the only one of his three daugh- 
 ters that loved the blind father, the young- 
 est, Deborah, was but nine years old. His 
 great Taskmaster, however, had work for 
 which he had saved him . Already, in 1658, 
 Milton had begun the elaboration of the 
 great poem which he had laid aside when 
 duty called him to sacrifice his strong right 
 arm. He now regained its use. A fee- 
 bler soul would have succumbed in such 
 surroundings. Evil indeed were the times ; 
 his friends dragged to prison or the scaf- 
 fold ; the causes for which he had made his 
 sacrifices lost apparently forever ; his old 
 antagonist, the hypocrite Morus, preach- 
 ing in London to the King and his courtiers; 
 all the scum of literary England floating to 
 the surface ! What an hour for such an 
 undertaking! His 'Mate espoused saint'* 
 coming to him in dreams only; his oldest 
 daughters stealing and selling his books to 
 gratify their whims; and his little Deborah 
 trying in vain to keep pace with her great 
 father's rapid mental stride so as to read 
 
 28 
 
to him his books of divers tongues. Then, 
 to use his own words, 
 
 ** Though blind of sight, 
 Despised, and thought extinguished quite, 
 With inward eyes illuminated, 
 His fiery virtue roused 
 
 From under ashes into sudden flame, he like an eagle 
 His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads. 
 So virtue given for lost. 
 Depressed and overthrown, as seemed. 
 Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most 
 When most unactive deemed, 
 And though her body dies, her fame survives.** 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson remarked jaun- 
 tily that we cannot all enjoy Paradise Lost. 
 He meant to say that we cannot all or any 
 of us enjoy all of it, any more than we can 
 enjoy all of Dante's Commedia, or all of 
 Shakespeare's Hamlet, or all of Browning's 
 Ring and the Book. Poe was nearer right 
 when he contended that every long poem 
 is really a cluster of short ones, Paradise 
 Lost being the chief example. 
 
 Let me consider three points only, points 
 that have to do with Milton's character. 
 First, the frequent objection that Satan is 
 the hero of the poem. Of course he is. 
 Why not? The essence of tragedy, as 
 every great dramatist from ^schylus to 
 Ibsen has perceived, lies in wrong-doing, 
 the righteous sufferers being victims always 
 of another's unrighteousness, whether, as in 
 Prometheus Bound, the wrong-doer be Zeus 
 
 29 
 
himself, or, as in the Agamemnon, all are 
 wrong in different degree. Now, Milton 
 at first intended to compose a tragedy. 
 The ancient story and his own defect of 
 dramatic power made that seem unwise. 
 But the tragic elements in the story of the 
 fall of Lucifer and of Adam filled his 
 mind; the study of Shakespeare, especially 
 of the characters of Wolsey and of Lady 
 Macbeth, had revealed to him quite early 
 the havoc wrought in great natures by 
 ambition; while the career of his great 
 contemporary Strafford had shown him a 
 colossal character ruined by greed and 
 pride, and wanton use of giant strength. 
 Wolsey's ^^ Cromwell, I charge thee fling 
 away ambition, by that sin fell the angels, " 
 might be taken as his text. 
 
 Wolsey's wail, ^' If I had served my God 
 with half the zeal I served my king, he 
 would not in mine age have left me naked 
 to mine enemies,'' made Milton doubt his 
 other saying that when he fell ''he fell 
 like Lucifer." Strafford, however, whose 
 trial Milton must have followed spell- 
 bound, — Strafford, indeed, resembled an 
 archangel ruined, witness his fascination 
 for every historian of that momentous 
 period. Not Pym, not Hampden, not even 
 Cromwell, stirs us as does the haughty, 
 brilliant, mentally massive, upward-climb- 
 ing Wentworth, struggling in heroic splen- 
 
 30 
 
dor to avert his doom. I never recall the 
 famous passage, 
 
 ** Thrice he essayed, and thrice in spite of scorn. 
 Tears such as Angels weep burst forth, '^ 
 
 without a vision of Strafford in the presence 
 of his judges, he, too, in spite of scorn, help- 
 less to check the gushing tears that wet his 
 iron cheeks. Precisely here lay all the 
 tragedy to Milton, that men like Wolsey 
 and Bacon and Strafford should rank with 
 the apostates. His scorn for Belial and 
 for Mammon, the one ''who seemed com- 
 posed for dignity and high exploit, though 
 all was false and hollow, ' ' the other expect- 
 ing to find even in the desert-soil of hell 
 gems and gold, and expecting to exercise 
 angelic skill and art in raising even there 
 magnificence; — Milton's scorn for both 
 of them gleams and stabs like lightning in 
 the words of Beelzebub, ''than whom, 
 Satan except, none higher sate; who stood 
 with Atlantean shoulders fit to bear the 
 weight of mightiest monarchies." Milton 
 felt his own kinship with these colossal 
 spirits, together with his abhorrence at their 
 apostasy. That weaklings should go wrong 
 in great affairs matters little; but when 
 giants waste their strength against the eter- 
 nal laws, and thereby involve the living and 
 the yet unborn in misery, then these laws 
 of God must be followed to their final con- 
 
 31 
 
sequence, never even in Holy Writ more 
 terribly depicted than in those words of 
 Satan, whose accompanying shudder trem- 
 bles through all the regions of despair: 
 
 ** Whither I go is hell ; myself am hell! '* 
 
 We moderns chuckle fondly as ghosts 
 and devils and the damned fade from the 
 imagination — as though there vanished 
 with them the decrees of God — and so 
 we fail to read aright our works of genius. 
 The grim button-moulder of the Norwegian 
 dramatist makes us shiver for a moment 
 only with his threat to throw us to the scrap 
 pile, but the merry mood succeeds him 
 soon. Accordingly on every side of us we 
 see colossal powers wasted in daring yet 
 unworthy and diabolical enterprises, and in 
 competition for that bad eminence which 
 ends inevitably in the devastation of all 
 that makes men and angels sons of God. 
 
 Again, it is this hatred of evil that dis- 
 colors Milton's image of the deity. To 
 be sure, the harsher features of the medie- 
 val theology had not been softened in the 
 bitter doctrinal conflicts of the seventeenth 
 century, while the framework chosen by the 
 poet for his epic, the story of the fall, com- 
 pelled him to attempt the impossible and 
 miss. For in his treatise upon Christian 
 Doctrine, he declared that to the finite 
 mind God must be forever incomprehen- 
 
 32 
 
sible. But there was in Milton none of that 
 jaunty, jesting, sympathy with the incorrigi- 
 ble wrong-doer that inspired Burns in his 
 farewell to Auld Nickie Ben, and made him 
 '^wae to think upon yon den e'en for his 
 sake/' Milton, on the contrary, was glad 
 to think upon ^'yon den"; and his joy 
 seemed to him but a drop from the over- 
 flow of God's delight in the condign pun- 
 ishment of evil-doers. 
 
 Nothing in Dante's Inferno is more 
 terrible than the picture of Satan returning 
 triumphantly from Eden and standing ex- 
 pectant of the universal shout and high 
 applause to fill his ear; when contrary, he 
 hears on all sides from innumerable tongues 
 a dismal universal hiss, the sound of public 
 scorn. 
 
 *' His arms clung to his ribs, his legs intwining 
 Each other, till supplanted down he fell 
 A monstrous serpent on his belly prone. 
 Reluctant, but in vain, a greater power 
 Now ruPd him, punishM in the sliape he sinnM. 
 According to his doom; he would have spoke, 
 But hiss for hiss return'd with forked tongue 
 To forked tongue, for now were all transformed 
 Alike, to serpents all as accessories 
 To his bold riot.*' 
 
 '' Punish'd in the shape he sinn'd!" 
 There was the lesson learned from Dante. 
 And the power displayed in the description 
 is no greater than the poet's exultation, 
 which he believes himself to share with 
 God and all his loyal angels. 
 
 33 
 
And yet, our milder conceptions of deity- 
 have given us nothing loveHer, and nothing 
 wiser, than the words of Adam persuading 
 Eve to penitence : 
 
 '* He will instruct us praying, and of grace 
 Beseeching him . . . 
 
 What better can we do, than to the place 
 Repairing where he judg'd us, prostrate fall 
 Before him reverent, and there confess 
 Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears 
 
 Undoubtedly he will relent and turn 
 From his displeasure; in whose look serene. 
 When angry most he seem'd, and mo^t severe^ 
 What else but favour, grace, and mercy shone? ** 
 
 Or have these milder conceptions given 
 us anything nobler than the lament of Adam 
 for the lost epiphanies of God and the 
 benignant reply of the Archangel so sweet 
 with truth and comfort ? 
 
 ** On this mount he appear'd, under this tree 
 Stood visible, among these pines his voice 
 I heard, here with him at this fountain talk*d.** 
 
 This is the voice of humanity yearning 
 for the great companion ; the voice of Schil- 
 ler lamenting the vanished gods of Greece, 
 the voice of Musset crying in the October 
 night for God to bow the heavens and 
 come down, the voice of Leopardi scanning 
 in vain the Orient sky for tokens of His 
 presence, the voice of Wordsworth com- 
 plaining: 
 
 34 
 
*' Great God! I 'd rather be 
 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 
 
 But what says Michael, with regard 
 benign? 
 
 " Adam, thou know'st heav'n His, and all the earth, 
 Not this rock only; His omnipresence fills 
 Land, sea, and air, and every kind that lives, 
 Fomented by His virtual pow'r and warm'd: 
 
 Yet doubt not but in valley and in plain 
 God is as here, and will be found alike 
 Present, and of His presence many a sign 
 Still following thee, still compassing thee round 
 With goodness and paternal love.'* 
 
 And finally, how innane are the gibes so 
 often flung at the converse of Adam and 
 Eve in Paradise. For the nobler gentle- 
 women of the seventeenth century that 
 Milton knew, English and Italian alike, 
 spoke a language far more stately than that 
 of our fluent and often flippant dames and 
 maidens. Even Romeo and Juliet hardly 
 talked like modern sweethearts. How, in 
 sooth, were the parents of all the living to 
 address each other.'* Was Adam to greet 
 Eve with some such song as Herrick's 
 Cherry Ripe.^ 
 
 ** Cherry ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry. 
 If so be you ask me where 
 They do grow, I answer, there 
 
 35 
 
Where my Eva*s lips doe smile, 
 There's the land or cherry isle 
 Whose plantations fully show 
 All the year where cherries grow/* 
 
 And was Eve to reply, as Dryden made her 
 reply in his never-acted opera, the State of 
 Innocence, in which he ''tagged Milton's 
 verses'' and sullied them with an impure 
 fancy ? Shall we chide the poet who made 
 the mother of all the living speak with the 
 gracious dignity of Vittoria Colonna, or of 
 Margaret Roper, the charming child of Sir 
 Thomas More? Were our first parents in 
 their innocence to indulge in raptures of 
 self-abandon rather than to face each other 
 in the joy of chaste surprise ? 
 
 Consider the stupendous difficulty of 
 Milton's task. An adult pair with no ex- 
 perience of childhood ; without society ex- 
 cept each other ; with naught to talk about 
 until they fell, except the flowers and the 
 fruits, and the creatures of the garden, and 
 the aspects of earth and sky, and the 
 walks and talks with their creator. Milton 
 could not pour the riches of his vast and 
 varied knowledge into their speech; he 
 shows his power by its utter absence. He 
 would have made their conversation ludi- 
 crous and himself a laughing-stock by 
 freighting it with anachronisms and allu- 
 sions to things beyond their ken. 
 
 Nor are the critics either very subtle or 
 
 36 
 
very profound who discover in these scenes 
 the persistent shadow of Mary Powell, 
 Milton's truant wife, and his supposed 
 notions of woman's inferiority. Indeed, 
 Milton's conception of the conjugal relation 
 here illustrated is nobler than any to be 
 found, not merely in contemporary English, 
 but in contemporary European literature. 
 How mean is the Adam of the Bible story ! 
 How tame and cowardly are his recorded 
 words! *^The woman thou gavest to be 
 with me, she gave me of the tree, and I 
 did eat." But Milton endows Adam with 
 his own fine courage, and a self-sacrifice 
 that verges itowards the sublime. Adam 
 disobeys, indeed, but disobeys, not for 
 knowledge : he disobeys for love ! 
 
 *' With thee 
 Certain my resolution is to die ; 
 How can I live without thee, how forego 
 Thy sweet converse and love so dearly join'd, 
 To live again in these wild woods forlorn ? 
 Should God create another Eve, . 
 
 . yet loss of thee 
 Would never from my heart: No ! No ! I feel 
 The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh. 
 Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state 
 Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.'* 
 
 The notion that the wife should be the 
 husband's slave, so universal in the seven- 
 teenth century, has by no means disap- 
 peared in the twentieth. But Milton, 
 rejecting the absurd belief that every 
 woman is inferior to any man, boldly 
 
 37 
 
affirmed that whenever the wife proved 
 superior, she ought to bear rule according 
 to the law of nature that subjects the 
 lower to the higher being. No! Eve is 
 not the illustration of a thesis; to be de- 
 picted at all she must be depicted within the 
 limit of the ancient story. Neither is she 
 Mary Powell. Happy indeed had Milton 
 been, if Mary Powell had been another 
 Eve, for then she would have inspired in 
 him a love like that which triumphed in the 
 Garden. Then, like Adam, he might have 
 found in her that which 
 
 ** Argued in her something more sublime 
 And excellent than what her mind contemned.*' 
 
 Unfortunately for him, there was in his 
 first wife no such fathomless depth of af- 
 fection as Eve disclosed when about to 
 leave the places that she loved. 
 
 "But now lead me on; 
 In me is no delay ; with thee to go 
 Is to stay here; without thee here to stay 
 Is to go hence unwilling; thou to me 
 Art all things under Heaven, all places thou 
 Who for my wilful crime art banished hence.** 
 
 Nor was it any recollection of Mary Powell 
 that inspired the picture of love triumphant 
 amid the havoc of wrong-doing, so touch- 
 ing in its quiet beauty, with which the 
 poem closes. 
 
 **Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped 
 them soon; 
 The world was all before them, where to choose 
 
 38 
 
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide, 
 They hand in hand, with wandering steps and 
 
 slow 
 Through Eden took their solitary way.** 
 
 Do you remember the music of the eighth 
 
 book's opening lines? 
 
 **The angel ended, and in Adam's ear 
 So charming left his voice, that he awhile 
 Thought him still speaking, still stood fix'd to hear/' 
 
 Dryden, Addison, Wordsworth, thought 
 Milton still speaking, and each of them 
 stood fixed to hear. 
 
 ''Milton, thou shouldst be living at this 
 hour!'' was Wordsworth's invocation, audit 
 befits every time that needs a voice whose 
 sound is like the sea that can be heard afar. 
 If, then, I have chosen to write rather of 
 the architect than of his work, it is because 
 Milton stood for every ideal that we in 
 America are called to realize. He stood 
 for a republic, in which the wisest and best 
 should rule ; he stood for a free church in 
 a free state, for sane and rapid methods of 
 education, for unchecked research and lib- 
 erty of speech, for pure literature and noble 
 art, for the people and not for irresponsible 
 rulers or privileged classes, for the laws of 
 God to which all constitutions and statutes 
 must conform, for sublimity of life, for 
 righteousness of conduct, for that universal 
 and mild monarchy that shall put an end 
 to every earthly tyranny. For these he 
 stood, for these he fought undauntedly, 
 
 39 
 
and at the last alone. '^I was ever a 
 fighter/' sings Mr. Browning. Grant it 
 freely. But when I contrast the blind 
 Samson of the Revolution and the Restora- 
 tion with the elegant poet of the Victorian 
 age, I cannot be altogether deaf to a touch 
 of brag in Browning's words. That strong 
 right arm of John Milton held useless 
 behind his back while with the left he fights 
 his battles, those beautiful but sightless 
 eyes, all ^^ knowledge at one entrance 
 quite shut out, ' ' — they are the marks of the 
 greatest literary fighter in English history, 
 a fighter never more wonderful and never 
 more triumphant than when he organized 
 his mightiest victory, his immortal poem, 
 from the wreck of a republic and the ruin 
 of his hopes. 
 
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