THE LIFE OF MILTON

I

YOUTH AND COLLEGE LIFE, 1608-1632

WE are aided in the study of Milton's life by the sharpness of line which separates the three main epochs of his history: his life of student ease, during which he was preparing himself with consecration for his poetic vocation; his life of public service, when he put behind him his poetic ambitions and threw himself 11 with fanatical ardor into the struggle for liberty; and his old age, when, blind and discredited, he sat down amid the wreck of everything for which he had given his best twenty years, to write the poem which from early youth he had felt it his mission to leave to the nation.

Milton's youth was singularly sweet and sheltered. He was born in London on the 9th of December, 1608, the son of John Milton, a scrivener or solicitor doing business at the sign of the Spread Eagle in Bread Street. It is worth noting that for two generations at least the Miltons had exhibited intense partisanship in the religious disputes which agitated the nation. Richard Milton, the poet's grandfather, had been a stubborn Catholic recusant under Elizabeth, and John Milton, the poet's father, had broken with his family in order to join the Puritans. The Puritanism of the home in Bread Street was not, however, of an ascetic or unlovely type. The father was an accomplished musician, of some note as a composer, and could even on occasion try his hand at poetry. This mellow atmosphere of taste and cultivation, spiritualized by a sincere piety, united with larger circumstances to enrich life for the young poet. We must remember that in Milton's childhood Shakespeare was still alive, that at the Mermaid Tavern, probably in the very treet where the scrivener's house stood, Ben Jonson held his " 'merry meetings," and that most of the stalwart figures which had made the reign of the Virgin Queen illustrious were still to be seen about the streets of London. There was as yet hardly a hint of the passing away of those "spacious times," of the spirit of romance and adventure, which had filled Elizabethan England. His nature, therefore, was in no danger of being starved at the outset, as it must have been if his birth had fallen a few decades farther on in the struggle between the old and the new, when Puritanism had narrowed and hardened itself in order to project itself more forcibly against its enemies.

Yet perhaps it is not fanciful to see an adumbration of the new spirit soon to England, in the unchildlike devotion with which the boy Milton gave himself to his studies. First under a private tutor, one Thomas Young, a Presby

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terian curate, whom he reverenced tenderly in later life, and afterwards at St. Paul's School, he applied himself so eagerly to his studies that, as he himself says, from his twelfth year on he rarely left his books before midnight. Besides reading the classical authors necessary for admission to the university, he was allowed to wander freely through the literature of his own tongue; the poets who have left the most distinct trace on his early work are Spenser and Sylvester, the latter in his translation of the Divine Weeks and Works of the French moralistic poet Du Bartas. In Milton's earliest verses, the paraphrases of Psalms CXIV and cxxxvi, written at fifteen, commentators have discerned traces of reading from such diverse authors as Chaucer, Drayton, Drummond, Fairfax (the translator of Tasso) and Buchanan. A portrait by the Dutch painter Jansen which has been preserved to us, painted, it is true, before this passion for study began, but doubtless representing faithfully enough the features which Milton retained through boyhood, shows a reassuringly healthy little face. The gaze is frank and level, though with a sweet after-seriousness; the form under the black braided dress betrays a delicate vigor, and the firm lines of the head are emphasized by the close-cropping of the auburn hair.

The one event worth chronicle in his school life is his friendship with Charles Diodati, a young Anglo-Italian whom he met at St. Paul's school. It was full of boyish generosity and emulation, and was perhaps the warmest human relationship which Milton ever experienced. It continued to grow in spite of their separation. Diodati went to Oxford, and Milton, at the age of sixteen, entered Christ's College, Cambridge.

The routine of a seventeenth-century college, with its fixed tasks and small tutorial methods, could hardly fail to be irksome to a spirit like Milton's, just awakening to the first arrogant consciousness of power. He complains that he is "dragged from his studies," and compelled to employ himself in "composing some trivial declamation." Whether on this or some other score, he got into trouble with his tutor Chappell, was rusticated for a time, and on his return was transferred to another tutor. A Latin verse-epistle (Elegy I) addressed to Diodati, recounting gaily his visits to the theatres and parks of London, marks the date of his temporary suspension. The same epistle contains a rapturous eulogy of the girls of London, the tone of which, with its youthful hyperbole and ardor, is particularly pleasant in his case.

For already he had begun to lay the foundations of that "conscious moral architecture" which was to be the dominant ideal of his life and to mark him out sharply among the spontaneous and desultory race of poets. His college companions, noting his fresh-colored oval face, his flowing auburn hair, his slender frame, his fastidiousness in manners and in morals, nicknamed him, with the happy offhand criticism given to undergraduates, the "Lady of Christ's." What they interpreted as feminine in him was really the expression of a deep conviction on his part, a conviction virile enough, since it was to determine his whole conscious existence, but so far removed into the realm of ideality that it may well have seemed

a little wan to his boisterous companions, even if they had taken the trouble to understand it. This conviction was that he was appointed to some great work of poetic creation, and that such a work could come only as the outgrowth of a life of austerity. As yet it was merely the delicate austerity, the fastidious abstention, of an Elizabethan; but it was of a kind to turn easily into something sterner. That this double conviction had taken complete possession of Milton's mind before he left college, two passages from his verse of this period testify. One we find imbedded in a Latin epistle to Diodati (Elegy VI), who, sending him some verses, has excused himself for their lightness of tone by the fact that they were composed in the midst of country merry-making. Milton accepts the excuse, but declares that the poet who would sing of great themes, "of wars, and of Heaven under adult Jove, and of pious heroes, and leaders half-divine, singing now the holy counsels of the gods above, and now the realms profound where Cerberus howls, —such a poet must live sparely, after the manner of the Samian teacher. Herbs must furnish him his innocent food; clear water in a beechen cup, sober draughts from the pure spring, must be his drink. His youth must be chaste and void of offence; his manners strict; his hands without stain. He shall be like a priest shining in sacred vestment, washed with lustral waters, who goes up to make augury before the jealous gods. . . . .. Yea, for the bard is sacred to the gods: he is their priest. Mysteriously from his lips and breast he breathes Jove." There is in this perhaps an element of convention and of boyish bombast, but it is nevertheless the same thought which he expressed twenty years later, when he declared his early belief that "he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem. . . not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy."

Again, in the fragment entitled At a Vacation Exercise in the College, after singing the praises of English speech, he goes on to speak of the kind of subject upon which he longs to try its powers. He would take his hearers,

"Where the deep transported mind may soar

Above the wheeling pole, and at Heaven's door
Look in, and see each blissful deity

How he before the thunderous throne doth lie
List'ning to what unshorn Apollo sings."

It is a side illustration of the remarkable unity of Milton's purpose, that, translating the pagan terms here given into Biblical ones, this subject is the one to which, in old age, he reverted for his supreme effort.

He did not content himself with theory alone. During the seven years which he spent at Cambridge, he wrote, besides much Latin verse, a number of English poems. Of these only three or four are remarkable enough to have singled Milton out from the crowd of young poets and poeticules who then swarmed at the universities. First among these is of course the Hymn on the Nativity, written in the fifth year of his college residence, when he was twenty-one years old. The

opening stanzas are disfigured by the conceits and ingenuities which had been made fashionable in England by the extraordinary poems of John Donne, seconded by the example of the Italian poet Marini. But as the poem progresses, Milton's imagination takes fire, the images gain in majesty and richness, and the language gathers a kingly confidence of rhythm and phrase, a shadowed but triumphant music, like the chanting of young seraphs awe-struck at their theme, - which were altogether new in English verse. One has to know with some minuteness what poetry had been under Elizabeth and James, to realize the unique quality of voice in this Hymn. Taking the poem as a whole, one can scarcely agree with Hallam that it is "perhaps the finest ode in the English language," but again and again in its unequal lines Milton sends a herald voice into the wilderness, announcing in no dubious tones the advent of a master of song.

Clearly as we can now see Milton's gift announced in these early college efforts, they by no means stilled their author's restless desire to make that announcement more signal. The sonnet on his twenty-third birthday breathes deep dissatisfaction with his accomplishment up to that time. He grudges the "hasting days" which leave him songless, and thinking perhaps, as Mr. Gosse suggests, of young Abraham Cowley, whose marvellously precocious productions had already made him famous in his thirteenth year he speaks enviously of those "more timely happy spirits," the blossoming of whose genius had been seasonable. From this grudging mood he rises at the end into a tone of large resignation to the conditions under which he shall be called to work out his desires. When we consider what those conditions were to be, the words fall upon the ear with a special accent,:

"Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow,

It shall be still in strictest measure even

To that same lot, however mean or high,

Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven.

All is, if I have grace to use it so,

As ever in my great Task-master's eye."

It was in such a mood that Milton left Cambridge, after seven years' residence there. His father had intended him for the church, but such a career, although not yet rendered impossible by his broadening opinions, was distasteful because of the trammels it imposed. An academic career was no more alluring, even if it had been possible without taking orders. His discontent with the Cambridge tons comes out several times in his Latin verses and elsewhere. In his first elegy, alluding to his rustication from college, he exclaims, "How ill does that place suit with poets!" and in one of his pamphlets he makes disdainful allusion to the young graduates who "flutter off all unfledged into theology, having gotten of philology or philosophy scarce so much as a smattering," and who for theology are content with just what is enough to enable them to patch up a paltry sermon." Upon Cambridge, therefore, and its "turba legentium prava " he turned his back, not however, to return to the house in Bread Street. His father, having acquired a competency, had retired to the little village of Horton in Buckinghamshire, seven

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