MILTON: MAN AND THINKER

CHAPTER I

THE ELEMENTS OF MILTON'S CHARACTER
IN YOUTH

T

I. CHARACTER AND FAMILY

WO essential traits of character can be discerned

in Milton from his youth onwards. The first is

a varied, lively, and deep sensitiveness, such as is expected in a poet. The second is a sort of moral intractableness, which led Milton to sacrifice every practical or sentimental consideration to a high ideal of purity and truth, in private or public life.

This latter trait, generally referred to as Milton's puritanism of character, is the one which has most impressed the public and the majority of the biographers. It is at the basis of the ordinary conception of Milton as a rigid Puritan, upright no doubt, but on the whole unlovable, lacking in that good warm human feeling which creates sympathy in men — and in readers.

There is no doubt an element of truth in this popular conception of the poet; but there is also an element of exaggeration, and above all a large element of injustice in ignoring the human side of his character. Some critics, however and those most in sympathy with Miltonhave protested against the prejudices that mar the personal reputation of the poet. Richard Garnett, in his admirable preface to his extracts from Milton's prose,

compares him aptly to Rousseau and to Shelley. "The chief lesson," he says, to be drawn from Milton's prose works is the recognition of his position as the great idealist, the Rousseau or the Ruskin of his generation. The current view of his character does him great injustice, while in itself natural and almost inevitable. A man of strict and austere life, living in a Puritan age and siding with Puritanism in almost all the questions at issue between it and contending tendencies, can hardly be taken for anything but a Puritan. . . . It requires study to discover that, like the great Protestant cathedral, the great Protestant epic descends from the Renaissance. Even as his poetry reveals Milton in the character of a humanist, so the more important of his prose works display him as a revolutionist, eager to sweep away everything obstructive of an ideal existing solely in his own mind. . . . He took Puritanism up partly, no doubt, because it embodied his favourite virtues of fortitude and temperance, but also because it was the only organized force in that age which, by overthrowing the old order, would offer a chance for the realization of his ideals. . The spiritual kinship with Shelley would be more evident if the younger poet's exuberant fancy had not veiled his figure in a radiant mist, which conceals the real Shelley as the Genevan habit conceals the real Milton."1

Milton came from a family in which religious passion seems at first sight to run deep. But on looking more closely into the question, it appears that this passion was hardly as religious as one might expect. There was, at bottom, in Milton himself, very little religious fury; his vehemence was always directed against some form of reli

1 The Prose of Milton Selected (London, 1893), pp. xi-xiii.

gion he disapproved of, and never supported any precise religious dogma. He attacked; he never praised. He founded no sect; he followed none. And the passion he brought to the attack on Episcopalian or Presbyterian was not the zeal of the fanatic that wanted to destroy a rival sect, but that of the intellectual who was fighting for liberty of thought.

The poet's grandfather, Richard Milton, was a Catholic. In July, 1601, he was fined sixty pounds for not having attended service in the Established Church for more than three months, and in October of the same year, the fine was renewed for the same offense.2 Richard's son became a Protestant, and was consequently turned out of his home and disinherited. Both the father and the grandfather of our John Milton show thus the same intractableness as the poet himself in matters of conscience. But were these cases of fanaticism, or merely of the need of asserting personal opinion, a rebellion to conquer liberty for a Catholic in a Protestant community, for a Protestant in a Catholic family? Richard Milton had held some position in an Anglican church; his son, as we shall see, was never conspicuous for fanaticism. It seems probable that in both father and son a strong dose of pride and obstinacy mingled with religious feeling, if indeed the need to get one's own way was not the essential motive of rebellion for both. Thus in Milton himself the feeling for personal independence is much stronger than religious zeal.

3

We know the poet's father, John Milton, much better than his grandfather. There was nothing of the pedantic and narrow-minded Puritan about him. He had been 2 Masson, I, 17-18. 3 Ibid., I, 23.

given a liberal education, and had perhaps studied at Oxford. Love of music was in him already, and he was known as a composer, being one of twenty-five who set to music a series of madrigals in honor of Queen Elizabeth: The Triumphs of Oriana-essentially non-religious music. The scrivener had literary ambitions too, and a sonnet from his pen survives; his modesty and good taste are proved by the fact that he did not try to force the Muse's favors, and desisted after that attempt. His literary ambition centered in his son, and his discernment and disinterestedness cannot be overpraised. He was convinced from the first of the extraordinary merits of his son, and grudged no sacrifice to make him a great man. He had thought of the Church for him, but rather in order to give him an opportunity than out of religious zeal; in the dreams by the family fireside, the young Milton did not appear as a future Calvin, but as a second Homer; and surely here is the most intimate proof that there was nothing of the fanatic about John Milton the father: an over-religious family would have coveted the fame of a reformer for such a richly gifted son; Milton's family brought him up for poetical glory. When Milton decided he could not enter the Church, his father does not seem to have been hard to win over, and he went on allowing the young poet, for culture and travel, the use of a laboriously acquired fortune.

6

The retired business man had a calm and happy old age in his eldest son's house, " without the least trouble imaginable," says Phillips: " no sign of violent religious zeal, considering the fact that at the time there lived in the same house the royalist, and possibly Catholic, family • Ibid., I, 23. Ibid., I, 51-54. 6 Quoted by Masson, II, 508.