|
 The life of
the second great English poet almost exactly coincides with the
rise, development, and decline of the great outburst of English
Puritanism, which followed the authorized version of the Bible
in 1611.
John Milton was a descendant of a family of substantial yeomen
long settled inn Oxfordshire. His father, John Milton, having
been disinherited as a Protestant, came to London and established
himself as a scrivener in Bread Street, Cheapside. There the
poet was born, December 9, 1608, ten years after the death of
Spenser, and eight years before the death of Shakespeare.
He received a most careful education, being from early boyhood
an impetuous devourer of books. He was a scholar of St. Paul's
School at the age of 10, and entered at 16 as a pensioner at
Christ's College, Cambridge, where he remained seven years, taking
his degree of M.A. at the age of 24. At school and at college
he was distinguished by his passion for classical poetry, by
independence and reserve of spirit, a pure and simple life, and
strong love for one or two chosen friends. He left Cambridge
in 1632, eight years before the Long Parliament met, a master
of Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Hebrew, skilled in fencing
and other exercises of a gentleman. He then retired to his father's
rural retreat at Horton, near Windsor, resolved to devote his
whole life to poetry, and filled with the grand projects and
ideals which he rehearses in his noble second sonnet. It was
the peculiar fortune of Milton to find in his excellent father
a man of rare sense and much culture, a parent who was quite
willing to aid the aspirations of his son towards a life of self-training
for high art. For six years the poet remained in profound retirement,
absorbed in study, meditation, and poetry.
It has been well said by Mark Pattison that "Milton's
life is a drama in three acts. The first discovers him in the
calm and peaceful retirement of Horton, of which L'Allegro,
Il Penseroso, and Lycidas are the expression. In the
second act he is breathing the foul and heated atmosphere of
party passion and religious hate, generating the lurid fires
which glare in the battailous canticles of his prose pamphlets.
The three great poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and
Samson Agonistes, are the utterance of his final period
of solitary and Promethean grandeur, when, blind, destitute,
friendless he testified of righteousness, temperance, and judgment
to come, alone before a fallen world." His six years at
Horton were spent, as he tells us, in "turning over the
Latin and Greek authors," in systematic study of poetry,
history, Hebrew and modern languages, the cultivation of music,
and in writing the exquisite lyrics. These in Lycidas
touch the highest point of lyrical perfection that the English
language has ever reached, so that therein the spiritual passion
of Puritanism seems transposed into the melancholy music of Petrarch.
At the age of thirty, in 1638, the poet set forth on a journey
through France and Italy to Rome. He was absent about sixteen
months, and visited Grotius, Manso, the patron of Tasso,
Diodati, and Galileo; and was
received with delight by the most cultured and learned societies
of France, Italy, and Geneva. He was home in 1639 by the sad
prospect of imminent civil war. "I thought it base,"
he said, "whilst my countrymen were fighting for liberty,
that I should be travelling abroad to improve my mind."
For twenty years (1640-1660), from the opening of the Long Parliament
until the restoration of the monarchy, the poet was absorbed
in the advocate and then in the servant of the Commonwealth.
First, he dedicated his time to education and political pamphleteering;
in 1649 he was made "Secretary for Foreign Tongues"
under the Commonwealth government, a post in which he laboured
regularly for ten years till the downfall of the Protectorate.
He was there in close relation with Cromwell and other leaders
of the Republic; but his services were purely literary, and nothing
is known of any closer intercourse.
It is the last fourteen years of his life, when the republican
poet, blind, deserted, ruined, and broken-hearted, had withdrawn
into austere retirement, that we owe the two great epics and
Samson. Since the age of 43, the insatiable student of
books had been totally without sight. He had buried his first
wife, Mary Powell, an uncongenial spouse, in 1652; his second
wife, Katherine Woodcock, died after a short term of married
life in 1658; and the poet in 1663, then 55, with three little
girls, married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, a very worthy
woman, who survived him. The last thirty years of his life were
passed in London, except for a visit, during the plague, to Chalfont
St. Giles, where the only house which he inhabited that remains
is still to be seen unaltered. Here partly, and in his residences
in the city, in Bunhill Fields, the later poems were composed.
Paradise Lost was published in 1667, but it had been
completed some years earlier; it was seriously begun nearly ten
years before, and it had haunted the mind of the poet for at
least thirty years. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes
were published together in 1670, and were completed in the five
years preceding. The poet lived four years more; but he wrote
no more verse. He died in 1674, at the age of nearly 66, and
was buried in St. Giles, Cripplegate, revered by his intimates,
and even already famous, in the spot where his grave--long (alas!)
desecrated--is still marked and often visited. With all his sorrow,
afflictions, and disappointments, both public and private, his
life was one of absolute dedication to his great purpose and
high calling.
Both the Lyrics and the Paradise Lost were included
by Comte in the Positivist Library; and, with reference to the
revolutionary and critical storm which gave it inspiration, he
does not scruple to speak of "the inimitable epic"
as "the highest measure of Man's poetic powers." The
three chief lyrics have almost every quality of poetry in literal
perfection. No other 500 lines in English soar to so lofty and
faultless a level, without a jarring note or a feeble phrase:
so that they have become part of the very thought and language
of all cultured Englishmen. The Paradise Lost has music
and conceptions even more sustained and enthralling, such as
Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer alone
can match. It is evident, however, that the epic has not the
incomparable perfection of the lyrics. There are in it incongruities,
vagueness, monotony, limitations of human types, which are never
felt in presence of the three masters, and seldom even in Virgil, Ariosto, Calderon,
or Goethe.
It is plain that Puritanism and an abortive revolution forced
this consummate poet to turn away both from Past and Present,
and to search for the subject of his epic in his own meditations
on the Hebrew Bible. He treated this withh extreme freedom, and
not without a disputatious dogmatism; but even Milton could not
shake himself free from its obsolete theology and its barren
cosmogony. That a great poet, under such conditions and in such
an age, should have done so much with the Hebrew Pentateuch as
his inspiration is one of the noblest triumphs of human genius.
At the same time, this great citizen and heroic soul, being
forced back upon his own heart for his ideal of Man in presence
of Nature and its Creator, produced from the depths of his pure
and rich imagination a marvellous picture of Humanity in all
its naked essentials, before History had loaded its memories,
or civilization had clothed its life with conventions. The aim
of Milton is thus analogous to Dante; and, in simple majesty
and unity of scheme, for a time it seems even superior; until
the rigid limits of Scripture and inevitable want of varied human
interest compel us to admit that the close of the Paradise
Lost is hardly equal to its sublime exordium and the earlier
acts in the great drama of Man's Creation, Fall, and Salvation.
Yet the originality, power, and eternal meaning of Milton's poem
gain fresh significance as civilization advances; and we see
that since the work of Dante there has been no such approach
to the ideal epic of Humanity. Like Dante, like Homer, Milton
has given us a living, and not a literary, Epic.
It is Dante amongst the moderns, and Virgil amongst the ancients,
whom, in sustained moral purpose and in religious consciousness
of being the inspired voice of his age, Milton most nearly resembles,
as also he resembles these in lifelong dedication to his task
as prophet of a social regeneration to be. It is the lasting
glory of English Puritanism that it could join in one work such
a creative statesman as Cromwell with so supreme a poet as Milton.
Purchase books
by John Milton
| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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