aspect of the Renaissance. Their co-operation had much to do with the essential greatness of our Elizabethan literature, in which, as in no other body of literature belonging to the same period, a passionate love of beauty is combined with religious fervour and a strenuous moral idealism. Yet, despite their common origin, it was inevitable that, as time went on, the spirit of the Renaissance and the spirit of the Reformation should come into conflict. This conflict opened as soon as, on the one hand, religion began to separate itself from humane culture, and, on the other hand, humane culture began to ignore the claims of religion; with the corresponding growth of Puritanism and of fashionable license, the breach widened; by the time we reach the reign of Charles I. the rupture is complete. In the foregoing paragraphs, as I need hardly say, no attempt has been made to trace the history of Puritanism in detail, or to give a full account of the consequences resulting from its development as the chief force in English life and thought during the second quarter of the seventeenth century. My slight sketch is intended only to prepare the way for the study of the great poet whose writings we are now to take up together. Milton has been described as "not only the highest, but the completest type of Puritanism.” How far, and with what qualifications, this description is to be accepted, will become apparent as we go on with our work. But let us at the outset note that his life extended from the period during which the Puritan cause was slowly but surely winning its way in England, through the whole period of its political ascendancy, and onward into the period of its overthrow with the Stuart restoration. As Green put it, Milton was born when "Puritanism began to exercise a direct power over English politics and English religion; he died when its effort to mould them into its own shape was over, and when it had again sunk into one of the many influences to which we owe our English character." We shall find that the recognition of these facts and a constant sense of the intimate relations between the poet and the large public movements of his time are essential to any proper understanding of Milton and his work. T II HOUGH, like Chaucer, Spenser, Ben Jon son, Pope, Gray, and Keats, a Londoner by birth, John Milton came of an Oxfordshire yeoman stock. His father, whose name also was John, had been disowned by his family upon his abandonment of Roman Catholicism for the reformed faith. He had thereupon settled in the metropolis, where he presently became a scrivener.1 A man distinguished by intellectual ability as well as by "the wonderful integrity of his life," he prospered in his calling, but, after 1 The profession of scrivener included, along with money-lending many of the functions now performed by solicitors. Milton's "Defensio Secunda" (Bohn's edition of his "Prose Works," vol. i.). the fashion of the time, continued to live over his place of business, at the sign of the Spread Eagle, in Bread Street, Cheapside. It was there, on December 9, 1608, that his eldest son, the future poet, first saw the light. It is interesting to remember that not far away, though on the other side of the street, stood the Mermaid Tavern, famous as the meeting-place of Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other wits of the day. Shakespeare left London for Stratford when Milton was only three or four years old; but it is just barely possible that in passing along Bread Street he may have seen the lovely child whose name was, in after-times, to stand second only to his own on the splendid bead-roll of our English poets. The elder Milton, though of pronounced Puritan proclivities, did not share the antipathy of the extremists of his party to literature and art; he was, in fact, an accomplished musician and a composer of some standing among his contemporaries; and his love of music embraced madrigals as well as psalms. Life in the Bread Street home, while characteristically sober and even a little austere, was by no means lacking in the influences of liberal culture and refinement; and it was thus in a singularly favourable atmosphere that Milton's nature began to expand. He grew up a wonderfully beautiful boy; as we look at his portrait, painted when he was ten by the skilful artist Cornelius Jansen, we instinctively feel that he must indeed have been the pride of his mother's heart. Like all other poets, he fell in after-life into the habit of transferring his own experiences to his dramatic characters, and there can, I think, be little question that he was recalling his childhood in the words which, as an old man, he put upon the lips of Jesus in "Paradise Regained": When I was yet a child, no childish play That the scrivener very early recognised his son's genius seems clear; my father," Milton records, "destined me from a child to the pursuit of literature." His education as a boy was the best that London afforded. At first he received private lessons from an excellent tutor, Thomas Young, afterwards well known as a Puritan divine; and when presently he was sent to St. Paul's School, his regular training there was still supplemented by instruction at home. From the beginning he devoted himself to his studies with tireless enthusiasm, thus as a boy laying the firm foundations of his immense erudition, and also unfortunately of that complaint of the eyes which was by-and-by to end in total blindness. "My appetite for knowledge," he says, "" was so voracious, that from 1 I. 201-207. twelve years of age I hardly ever left my studies, or went to bed before midnight. This primarily led to my loss of sight. My eyes were naturally weak, and I was subject to frequent headaches, which, however, could not chill the ardour of my curiosity, or retard the progress of my development." In this way, he tells us, "he acquired a proficiency in various languages.' The Latin and Greek classics were, of course, the chief subjects of his attention; but he probably made a beginning also with French and Italian, and even perhaps with Hebrew, for in 1625, just before he went to Cambridge, he wrote acknowledging a "desirable present of a Hebrew Bible," which he had "long since received" from his former tutor, Young. Nor was English neglected. Whether as yet he had read Shakespeare in the great first folio edition of 1623 is a matter of conjecture only; but he certainly knew Spenser, whom he afterwards praised as a better moral teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, and Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas' sacred poem, "Divine Weeks and Words." As this poem deals with the creation and the fall of man the interest of his early acquaintance with it is apparent. It is, of course, not in the least surprising that while still a schoolboy Milton also tried his hand at poetic composition. This is only what we should expect. But so far as we are able to judge, his first attempts gave no unusual promise. Two have been preserved; they are his "Defensio Secunda." |