by Will Durant
The language of their public documents is stuffed with piety; the style of Cromwell or his tribunes is to match; it would move anyone’s bile and bitter laughter to mark with what impudence the secret rogues and open robbers mask their wickedness with a pretext of religion . . . Verily an egg is not liker an egg than Cromwell’s like to Mahomet. 82
And the anonymous author, like Salmasius, appealed to the Continental powers to invade England and restore the Stuart monarchy. The book closed with an address “To the Bestial Blackguard John Milton, Advocate of Parricides and Parricide,” and a hope that he would soon be mercilessly flogged:
Round this perjured head
Ply well the stick; lard every inch with weals,
Till you have thonged the carcass to one jelly.
Cease you already? Lay on, till he shed
Gall from his liver through his bleeding eyes. 83
The Council of State urged Milton to reply to this fury. He waited a while, expecting a blast from Salmasius, and hoping to impale both antagonists upon one pen. But Salmasius died (1653), leaving his rebuttal unfinished. Milton was misled into believing that the author of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor was Alexander Morus, a pastor and scholar at Middelburg. He asked his correspondents in the United Provinces to send him data about Morus’ public and private life. 84 Adrian Ulacq, the printer of the book, wrote to Milton’s friend Hartlib, assuring him that Morus was not the author, 85 but Milton refused to believe this, and Amsterdam gossip agreed with him. In April, 1654, John Drurie wrote to Milton warning him that he was mistaken in ascribing the Clamor to Morus; Milton ignored the warning. On May 30 he published Joannis Miltoni pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda.
The eloquence of these 173 pages is remarkable, for they were dictated in Latin by a man completely blind. His enemies had described that blindness as a divine punishment for egregious sins; Milton replies that this cannot be, for he has led an exemplary life. He rejoices that his first Defensio
so routed my opponent . . . that he yielded at once, broken alike in spirit and reputation, and in the whole three years of his subsequent life, though threatening and fuming much, gave us no further trouble, save that he called to his aid the obscure labor of some utterly despicable person, and suborned I know not what silly and extravagant adulations to repatch by their eulogies, as far as might be, the unexpected and recent ruin of his character. 86
Turning upon his new enemy, Milton notes that morus in Greek meant fool; he accuses him of heresy, profligacy, and fornication, of getting Salmasius’ maidservant with child and then abandoning her. Even the printer of the Clamor gets a lashing; everyone knows that he is a “notorious cheat and bankrupt.” 87
In better humor Milton reviews the career of Cromwell. He defends the campaigns in Ireland, the dissolutions of Parliament, the assumption of supreme power. He addresses the Protector:
We all yield to your insuperable worth . . . Go on, therefore, in your magnanimous course, O Cromwell, . . . the liberator of your country, the author of its freedom, . . . you who have excelled by your actions hitherto not only the exploits of kings, but even the legendary adventures of our Heroes. 88
But after this obeisance he does not hesitate to advise the Protector on policy. Cromwell should surround himself with men like Fleetwood and Lambert (radicals); he should establish freedom of the press; he should leave religion entirely separate from the state. No tithes should be collected for the clergy; these men are already overfed; “all in general is fat about them, even their intellects not excepted.” 89 Milton warns Cromwell that “if he, than whom none among us is reckoned more just, more saintly, or a better man, should afterwards invade that Liberty which he has defended . . . , the result would be disastrous and deadly, not only to himself but also to the universal interests of virtue and piety.” 90 By “Liberty” Milton makes plain that he does not mean democracy. He asks the people:
Why should anyone assert for you the right of free suffrage, or the power of electing whom you will to the Parliament? Is it that you should be able . . . to elect in the cities men of your faction, or that person in the boroughs, however worthy, who may have feasted yourselves most sumptuously, or treated the country people and boors to the greatest quantity of drink? Then we should have our members of Parliament made for us not by prudence and authority, but by faction and feeding; we should have vintners and hucksters from city taverns, and graziers and cattlemen from the country districts. Should one entrust the Commonwealth to those to whom nobody would entrust a matter of private business? 91
No, such universal suffrage would not be freedom.
To be free is the same thing exactly as to be pious, wise, just, temperate, self-providing, abstinent from the property of other people, and in fine, to be magnanimous and brave. To be the opposite of all this is the same as being a slave. And by the judgment of God it comes to pass that a nation that cannot rule and govern itself, but has surrendered itself in slavery to its own lusts, is surrendered also to other masters . . . and made a slave both with and against its own will. 92
In October, 1654, Ulacq reprinted Milton’s Defensio Secunda at The Hague, with an answer by Morus entitled Fides publica (Public Testimony). In a preface the printer asserted that Morus was not the author of the Clamor; that the manuscript had been given him (Ulacq) by Salmasius, who had refused to reveal the author’s name. Morus solemnly denied his authorship, affirmed that Milton had been repeatedly informed of this, and charged that Milton had refused to alter the Defensio, since very little of it would have remained if all the abuse of Morus had been taken out. In August, 1655, Milton issued a volume of 204 pages, Pro se Defensio (A Self-Defense); he refused to believe Morus’ denial; he repeated the scandal about Salmasius’ maid, and added that the maid, in a fair fight, had beaten Morus, knocked him down, and almost scratched his eyes out. 93 In a sequel it appeared that a French Protestant theologian, Pierre de Moulin, had written the Clamor, and that Morus had edited it and written its dedication. 94 When Morus was invited (1657) to become the minister of a Reformed church near Paris, the poet sent several copies of his Defensio Secunda to the parish to prevent the appointment. 95 The parish consistory accepted Morus nevertheless, and he ended his troubled career (1670) as the most eloquent Protestant preacher in or about Paris.
Milton appears in a softer light in his powerful sonnet on the Piedmont massacre of 1655.* It was probably he who wrote the letters by which Cromwell appealed to the Duke of Savoy to end the persecution of the Vaudois, and to Mazarin and the rulers of Sweden, Denmark, the United Provinces, and the Swiss cantons to intercede with the Duke.
In 1656, after four years of widowhood, Milton married, sight unseen, Katharine Woodcock. She proved a blessing to him, serving as patient nurse to a blind and tempestuous husband, and mothering his three daughters; but she died in 1658 in giving birth to a short-lived child. That was a bitter year for Milton, since it took Cromwell too, and left the Latin secretary to keep his post as best he could amid the chaos of factions that reduced Richard Cromwell to a benevolent nonentity. Though Milton must have known that England was now moving toward a Stuart restoration, he issued a new edition (October, 1658) of his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, justifying the execution of Charles I in terms that almost courted martyrdom. In a characteristic preface he described this first Defense as “a monument . . . not easily to perish,” claimed for it divine inspiration, and ranked it only next to Cromwell’s deeds as having saved England’s liberty. 96
He resisted with blind bravery the movement for recalling Charles II. When Monck’s army reached London, and Parliament hesitated between a republic and a monarchy, Milton published (February, 1660), as an address to Parliament, an eighteen-page pamphlet, The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and the Excellence Thereof Compared with Inconveniences and Dangers of Readmitting Kingship in this Nation; and he boldly signed it “The author, J.M.” He pleaded with Parliament not to make
vain and viler than dirt the blood of so m
any thousand faithful and valiant Englishmen who left us this liberty, bought with our own lives . . . What will they [our neighbors] at best say of us, and of the whole English name, but scoffingly, as of that foolish builder mentioned by our Saviour, who began to build a tower, and was unable to finish it? Where is this goodly tower of a commonwealth, which the English boasted they would build to overshadow kings, and be another Rome in the West? . . . What madness is it for them who might manage nobly their own affairs themselves, sluggishly and weakly to devolve all in a single person! . . . How unmanly must it needs be, to count such a one the breath of our nostrils, to hang all our felicity on him, all our safety, our wellbeing, for which, if we were aught else but sluggards and babies, we need depend on none but God and our own counsels, our own active virtue and industry! 97
He predicted that all “the old encroachments” of monarchy on the freedom of the people will return soon after restoration. He proposed to replace Parliament with a “General Council” of ablest men, elected by the people, its members to serve till death, subject to removal only by conviction of some crime, and replenished by periodical elections. This Council, however, is to allow the greatest possible freedom of speech and worship, and of local autonomy. “I trust,” Milton concluded, “I shall have spoken persuasion to abundance of sensible and ingenuous men—to some perhaps whom God may raise of these stones to become Children of Liberty, and may enable and unite in their noble resolutions to give a stay to these our ruinous proceedings, and to this general defection of the unguided and abused multitude.” 98
Parliament ignored this plea to destroy itself. Attacks on Milton appeared in print; one pamphlet recommended hanging him. The Council of State, now royalist, ordered the arrest of Milton’s printer, and discharged Milton from his post as Latin secretary. Milton replied by publishing a second and enlarged edition of The Ready and Easy Way (April, 1660). He warned Parliament that promises now made by Charles II could easily be broken after the consolidation of the new royal power. He admitted that the majority of the people desired the restoration of Charles II, but he urged that the majority had no right to enslave a minority. “More just it is . . . if it come to force, that the less number compel a greater to return . . . their liberty than that a greater number . . . compel a less most injuriously to be their fellow slaves.” 99 Attacks upon Milton multiplied; one called upon Charles II, then at Breda, to remember the insults that Milton, in Eikonoklastes and elsewhere, had heaped upon Charles I, and suggested that Milton should be joined with the actual regicides as meriting death. 100
Before this pamphlet could reach Charles, he had already sailed for England. On May 7 Milton, having taken leave of his children, disappeared into hiding with a friend. He was discovered and imprisoned. For three months his fate hung in the balance of the royalist Parliament. Many members argued that he, if anyone, should be hanged. The general expectation was that he would be; but Marvell, Davenant, and others pleaded his age and blindness. Parliament contented itself with ordering that certain of his books, wherever found, should be burned. On December 15 he was released. He took a house in Holborn, moved into it with his children, and passed, after eleven turbulent years of prose, into the second and noblest period of his poetry.
VII. THE OLD POET: 1660–67
He found some solace in playing the organ and singing; he had, Aubrey tells us, “a delicate, tuneable voice.” 101 In 1661 he moved again, and again in 1664, this time to his final home on Artillery Walk, where a private garden allowed him to stroll without other guides than his hands and feet. His nephews, their beatings forgotten, came often to see and aid him; friends dropped in to read to him or take his dictation. His three daughters served him impatiently but arduously. Anne, the oldest, was lame and deformed, and had a defect of speech. Deborah was his amanuensis. She and Mary were taught to read to him in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish, though they could not understand what they read. 102 Indeed, none of them had ever gone to school; they had had some private tutoring, but they were poorly educated at best. Milton sold most of his library before he died, as his children cared little for books. He complained that they clandestinely sold his books, that they neglected him in his need, that they conspired with the servants to rob him in household purchases. 103 They were unhappy in that somber home, under a stern, demanding, irritable father. When daughter Mary heard that he was planning another marriage, she said “that there were no news to hear of his wedding; but if she could hear of his death, that were something.” 104 In 1663 Milton, aged fifty-five, took a third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, aged twenty-four. She served him faithfully to the end of his days. After seven years with this stepmother, whom Aubrey describes as “a gentle person, a peaceful and agreeable humor,” 105 the three daughters left the paternal home and went out, at Milton’s expense, to learn various trades.
The Restoration had cost him much—almost his life; but it made Paradise Lost possible. Without it he might have exhausted himself in embattled prose, for the fighter in him was as strong as the poet. Nevertheless, amid his campaigns, he had never quit hope of writing something that England would cherish for centuries to come. In 1640 he made a list of possible subjects for an epic or a drama; the story of Adam’s fall was in that list, along with the legends of King Arthur. He wavered between Latin and English as the language he would use; and even when he had decided on Paradise Lost as his theme, he thought of writing it in the form of a Greek tragedy or a medieval mystery play. At various times he composed lines or passages which were later fitted into the poem. Not till Cromwell was dead did Milton have the leisure to work upon the epic daily; and then (1658) he was altogether blind—
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compass’d round. 106
Lines came to him as he lay helpless and sleepless in bed; bursting with them he would call for an amanuensis, saying that he “wanted to be milked.” 107 A fever of composition would come upon him; he would dictate forty lines “in a breath,” and then laboriously correct them as they were reread to him. Probably no poem was ever written with such toil and courage. Milton found strength in his consciousness that he was playing both Homer and Isaiah to England, for he believed that the poet is the voice of God, a prophet divinely inspired to teach mankind.
In 1665, when plague struck London, an imprisoned Quaker friend, Thomas Ellwood, arranged that Milton should be guided to Chalfont St. Giles in Buckinghamshire, and occupy Ellwood’s ten-room “cottage” there. In this “Pretty Box” the poet completed Paradise Lost (June, 1665). But who would publish it? London was in turmoil in 1665–66, with fire coming on the heels of plague; and what joy remained was largely Restoration roistering, in no mood for 10,558 lines on original sin. Milton had received a thousand pounds for his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio; now (April 27, 1667) he sold all rights to Paradise Lost to Samuel Simmons for five pounds down and an agreement for additional payments of five pounds each, contingent on sales; all in all he received eighteen pounds. 108 The poem was published in August, 1667. In its first two years thirteen hundred copies were sold; in its first eleven years, three thousand. Probably not that many readers, in any year, read it through today. We have so little leisure now that we have invented so many labor-saving devices.
The poem shares with the Aeneid the drawback that it came after “Homer”; so its battle scenes and supernatural warriors lose force by being imitations. Doubtless Homer too followed earlier models, but we have forgotten them. Johnson thought that Paradise Lost, “by the nature of its subject, has the advantage, above all others, that it is universally and perpetually interesting”; but he confessed that “none ever wished it longer than it is.” 109 The subject,
Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
was timely enough in Milton’s youth, when the Book of Genesis was received as history, and
heaven and hell, angels and devils, were in the fabric of daily thought. Today the subject is the poem’s greatest handicap, a fairy tale recited to adults in twelve cantos; and a sustained effort is now required to accompany from beginning to end so long an exposition of so harsh and antiquated a theology. But never has nonsense been made more sublime. The grandeur of the scene, embracing heaven, hell, and the earth; the solemn, stately march of the blank verse, the manipulation of the complicated plot, the fresh and tender descriptions of nature, the successful effort to give reality and character to Adam and Eve, the frequent passages of majestic power—these are some of the reasons why Paradise Lost remains the greatest poem in the English language.
The story opens in hell, where Satan, pictured as a bird of “mighty stature” and “expanded wings,” exhorts his fallen angels not to despair:
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
. . . To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power
. . ., that were low indeed,
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall; . . .
the mind and spirit remains
Invincible . . . 110
This sounds like Cromwell defying one Charles, and Milton another. Several passages describing Satan remind us of Milton:
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. 111
In the early cantos Milton’s eloquence lured him into drawing an almost sympathetic picture of the Devil as the leader of a revolt against established and arbitrary power. The poet saved himself from making Satan the hero of the epic by representing him later as the Father of Lies, who “squat like a toad,” or as a serpent sliding sinuously in the slime. 112 But in that same canto Satan stands forth as the defender of knowledge:
