Knowledge forbidden?
. . . Why should their Lord
Envy them that? Can it be a sin to know,
Can it be death? And do they [Adam and Eve] only stand
By ignorance? Is that their happy state,
The proof of their obedience and their faith?
. . . I will excite their minds
With more desire to know . . . 113
And so he argues with Eve like a rationalist attacking an obscurantist Church:
Why, then, was this forbid? Why but to awe,
Why but to keep you low and ignorant,
His worshipers? He knows that in the day
You eat thereof, your eyes, that seem so clear
Yet are but dim, shall perfectly be then
Open’d and clear’d, and ye shall be as gods . . . 114
The angel Raphael, however, bids Adam check his curiosity about the universe; it is not wise for man to desire to know beyond his mortal scope; 115 faith is wiser than knowledge.
We should have expected Milton to interpret the “first sin” not as desire for knowledge but as sexual intercourse. On the contrary, he sings a quite unpuritanic paean to the legitimacy of sexual pleasure, within the bounds of marriage; and he represents Adam and Eve as indulging in such tactile values while still remaining in the “state of innocence.” 116 But after the “fall”—eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge—they begin to feel shame in sexual congress. 117 Now Adam sees Eve as the source of all evil, “a rib crooked by nature,” and mourns that God ever created woman:
O why did God
. . . create at last
This novelty on Earth, this fair defect
Of Nature, and not fill the World at once
With men as angels without feminine,
Or find some other way to generate
Mankind? 118
Whereupon, so soon in the Biblical history of marriage, the first man makes a plea for the easier divorcing of the wife by the husband. Almost forgetting Adam, Milton here repeats in verse what he had said in prose about the proper subordination of woman to man. 119 He will return to that refrain in Samson Agonistes; 120 it is his favorite dream. And in his secret De Doctrina Christiana he pleaded for the restoration of polygamy. Had not the Old Testament sanctioned it, and had not the New Testament left that wholesome and manly law unrepealed? 121
However interpreted, “man’s first disobedience” proved too narrow a theme to fill twelve cantos. An epic required action, action, and action; but as the revolt of the angels is over when the story begins, its drama can enter the poem only through reminiscence, which is a fading echo. The battle scenes are well described, with due clash of arms and cleaving of heads and limbs, but it is hard to feel the pain or ecstasy of such imaginary blows. Like the French dramatists, Milton indulges a passion for oratory; everyone from God to Eve makes speeches, and Satan finds hellfire no impediment to rhetoric. It is disturbing to learn that even in hell we shall have to listen to lectures.
God, in this poem, is not the indescribable effulgence felt in Dante’s Paradiso; he is a Scholastic philosopher who gives long and unconvincing reasons why he, the omnipotent, allows Satan to exist, and allows him to tempt man, all the while foreseeing that man will succumb and bring all mankind to centuries of sin and misery. He argues that without freedom to sin there is no virtue, without trial there is no wisdom; he thinks it better that man should face temptation and resist it than not be tempted at all, quite unforeseeing that the Lord’s Prayer would beg God not to lead man into temptation. Who can help sympathize with Satan’s revolt against such an incredible sadist?
Did Milton really believe in this predestinarian horror? Apparently, for he expounded it not only in Paradise Lost, but in his secret essay De Doctrina Christiana; 122 long before the creation of man, God had determined which souls should be saved, and which should be damned. That secret essay, however, contained some heresies; Milton never published it; it was not discovered till 1823, and did not reach print till 1825.
It is a remarkable document. It begins piously enough by assuming, without argument, that every word in the Bible was inspired by God. Milton admits that the Biblical text has suffered from “corruptions, falsifications, and mutations,” but even in its present form it is the work of God. He will not allow any but a literal interpretation. If the Scriptures tell us that God rested, or feared, or repented, or was angry or grieved, these statements are to be taken at their face value, and not diluted as metaphors. Even the corporeal parts and qualities ascribed to God are to be accepted as physically true. 123 But in addition to this external revelation of himself in Scripture, God has given us an internal revelation which is the Holy Spirit speaking in our hearts; and this internal revelation, “the peculiar possession of each believer, is far superior . . . , a more certain guide than Scripture.” 124 However, in his arguments, Milton quotes the Bible as the final and clinching proof.
On the basis of Scripture he rejects orthodox Trinitarianism, and prefers the Arian heresy: Christ was literally the Son of God, but he was begotten by the Father in time; therefore he was not coeval with the Father, and never equal with Him. Christ is the agent created by God as the Logos through whom all else was to be created. Milton does not admit Creation ex nihilo, out of nothing; the world of matter, like the world of spirit, is a timeless emanation from the divine substance. Even spirit is a fine, ethereal matter, and should not be too sharply distinguished from matter; ultimately matter and spirit, and in man body and soul, are one. 125 These views bear considerable resemblance to those of Hobbes (1588–1679) and Spinoza (1632–77), both of whom died in the same decade with Milton (1608–74). Probably Milton knew the works of Hobbes, which were making considerable noise in the court of Charles II.
Milton’s personal religion remained a strange mixture of theism and materialism, of Arminian freedom of will and Calvinistic predestination. He seems in his writings to have been a profoundly religious man; yet he attended no church, even before his blindness, and practiced no religious rites in his home. 126 “In the distribution of his hours,” wrote Dr. Johnson, “there was no hour of prayer, either solitary or with his household; omitting public prayers, he omitted all.” 127 He scorned the clergy, and lamented Cromwell’s retention of a state-paid clergy as a form of “whoredom” injurious to both Church and state. 128 In one of his last pronouncements (Treatise of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and the Best Means to Prevent the Growth of Popery, 1673) he went directly counter to Charles II’s second Declaration of Indulgence (1672) by warning England not to tolerate Catholics, atheists, or any sect that did not recognize the Bible as the sole basis of its creed.
It was this man, bristling with heresy, anticlericalism, and nonconformity, who gave its noblest modern exposition to the Christian creed.
VIII. THE FINAL YEARS: 1667–74
As he passed into his seventh decade, Milton still retained, except for his blindness, the physical health and pride that had upheld him through so many conflicts of religion and politics. Aubrey describes him as “a spare man . . . of middle stature, . . . a beautiful and well-proportioned body,. . . complexion exceeding fair;. . . healthy and free from all diseases; seldom taking any physic [medicine]; only towards his latter end he was visited with the gout.” 129 His hair, parted in the middle, fell to his shoulders in curls; his eyes gave no sign of their blindness; his gait was still erect and firm. When he went out he dressed fastidiously and wore a sword, for he was proud of his swordsmanship. 130 A man made grave and humorless by too much certainty, yet pleasant enough in conversation if not crossed. He was not quite a Puritan: he had the Puritan consciousness of sin, hell, election, and infallible Scripture, but he relished beauty, enjoyed music, wrote a play, and wanted many wives; some echo of the Elizabethan élan lingered amid his humorless solemnity. He was egotistic, or revealed his natural egotism, to an unusual extreme; he was “not ignorant of his own parts,” as Anthony Wood put it; 131 and, said Johnso
n, “scarcely any man ever wrote so much and praised so few.” 132 Probably genius needs to be self-centered, buttressed with internal pride, in order to stand steadily against the crowd. What is hardest to accept in Milton is his capacity for hatred and his intemperate abuse of those who differed from him. He thought that we should pray for our enemies, but that we should also “call down curses publicly on the enemies of God and the Church, as also on false brethren, and on such as are guilty of any grievous offenses against God, or even against ourselves.” 133 The other side of this hot passion was the courage of the prophet denouncing his time. Instead of being silenced by the Restoration riot, he dared to hit at the “court amours” under Charles II, the “lust and violence” in palaces, the “bought smile of harlots,” the “wanton masque or midnight ball.” 134
As if flinging a last defiance at darkened time, he published in one day (September 20, 1670) two unrelentingly Miltonic works: Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. In 1665 Thomas Ellwood, having read the earlier epic, challenged Milton: “Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?” 135 Milton felt the point keenly, but he wondered how he could show Paradise regained at any point in history; even the death of Christ had not cleansed man of crime and lust and war. But he thought that in the resistance of Christ to Satan’s temptations he saw a promise that the God in man would someday overcome the Devil in him, and make man fit to live under the rule of Christ and justice on earth.
So in the four “books” of Paradise Regained Milton centered the life of Christ not on the Crucifixion but on the temptation in the wilderness. Satan offers Christ “stripling youths . . . of fairer hue than Ganymede,” then “nymphs . . . and Naiades . . . and ladies of the Hesperides,” 136 then wealth—all to no avail. Satan shows him Imperial Rome under a Tiberius exhausted, childless, and unpopular; would not Christ like to lead a revolution with Satan’s aid, and make himself emperor of the world? As this does not appeal to Jesus, Satan shows him the Athens of Socrates and Plato; would he not like to join them and be a philosopher? Satan and Christ then engage in a strange debate on the comparative merits of Greek versus Hebrew literature. Christ upholds the Jewish prophets and poets as far superior to the Greeks:
Greece from us these arts derived,
III imitated . . . 137
After two “books” of argument Satan acknowledges himself defeated and takes to his wings, while a chorus of angels gathers around the triumphant Christ and sings:
. . . now thou hast avenged
Supplanted Adam, and by vanquishing
Temptation, hast regained lost Paradise . . . 138
Milton tells the story not with the sonorous sublimity of the larger epic, but with his usual facility for verse and predilection for argument, all the while unfolding his erudition in geography and history. He does not continue the story to the Crucifixion; probably he did not agree with the view that it was Christ’s death that reopened the gates of Paradise. Happiness could be gained only by virtue and self-control. He could never understand why England refused to take seriously this absurd rewriting of the Gospels. He thought the later epic not inferior to the earlier except in scope. 139 “He could not bear to hear Paradise Lost preferred to Paradise Regained.” 140
The Miltonic fire flared up for the last time in Samson Agonistes. Having challenged Homer, Virgil, and Dante with his epic, now he challenged Aeschylus and Sophocles with a play that accepted all the restraints of Greek tragedy. The preface asks the reader to note that the drama obeys the classic unities, and that it avoids “the poet’s error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar persons”; here Milton turns his back upon the Elizabethans, and cleaves to the Greeks; nor does he fall far short of his Attic exemplars. Samson, his strength shorn with his hair by Delilah, and his eyes gouged out by his Philistine captors, does not merely echo Oedipus eyeless in Colonus; he is Milton himself, living in a world hostile and unseen:
Blind among enemies, O worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!
Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight
Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased . . .
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day! 141
Indeed, the whole play may be interpreted as a remarkably consistent allegory: Milton is Samson, agonizing in adversity; the defeated Jews are the Puritans, the chosen people, broken by the Restoration; the victorious Philistines are the triumphant pagan royalists, and the collapse of their temple is almost a prophecy of the “Glorious Revolution” that unseated the “idolatrous” Stuarts in 1688. Delilah is a treacherous Mary Powell, and the chorus repeats Milton’s arguments for divorce. 142 Milton almost purged himself of his furies by voicing them through Samson, who accepts his coming end:
My race of glory run, and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest. 143
In July, 1674, Milton felt himself failing. For reasons not known to us he omitted writing his will; instead, he delivered to his brother Christopher a “nuncupative”—merely oral—will, which Christopher reported as follows:
Brother, the portion due to me from Mr. Powell, my former wife’s father, I leave to the unkind children I had by her; but I have received no part of it; and my will and meaning is they shall have no other benefit of my estate than the said portion and what I have besides done for them, they having been very undutiful to me. And all the residue of my estate I leave to the disposal of Elizabeth, my loving wife. 144
This oral will was repeated to his wife and to others at various times.
He held on to life resolutely, but day to day his gout increased in pain, crippling his hands and feet. On November 8, 1674, fever consumed him, and that night he died. He had lived sixty-five years and eleven months. He was buried in the cemetery of his parish church, St. Giles, Cripplegate, beside his father.
Oral wills were recognized in English law till 1677, but were subject to close scrutiny by the courts. The daughters contested Milton’s will; the judge rejected it, gave two thirds to the wife, one third, totaling three hundred pounds, to the daughters. The “portion due” from Mr. Powell was never paid.
Though we know so much more about Milton than about Shakespeare, and so much must be recorded to picture him, we still do not know enough to judge him—if this is possible of any man. We do not know how much reason his daughters gave him for his resentment, nor how they treated that third wife who so comforted his old age; we can only regret that he failed to win their love. We do not know in full his reasons for acting as a censor of the press for Cromwell after arguing so eloquently for “unlicensed printing.” We may ascribe much of his abusiveness in controversy to the manners and standards of the time. We may pardon his vanity and egotism as the crutch on which genius leans when it gets little support from the applause of the world. We need not relish him as a man to admire him as a poet, and as one of England’s greatest writers of prose.
Those who resolve to read Paradise Lost from beginning to end are surprised to find how often it soars to high levels of imagination and utterance, so that in time we forgive the dull pages of argument, science, or geography as breathing spaces between exaltations; it would be absurd to expect those lyric flights to be continuously sustained. In the short poems they are sustained. And in Milton’s prose there are passages, especially in the Areopagitica, that are unsurpassed for vigor or splendor, for thought and music, in all the gamut of the world’s secular literature.
His contemporaries gave him only a grudging fame. During the ascendancy of his party he was a warrior writing prose, and his early lyrics were forgotten. He published his larger poems under that Restoration which scorned his tribe and reluctantly consented to let him live. When Louis XIV asked his ambassador in London to name England’s b
est living authors, the reply was that there were none of any worth except Milton, who, unfortunately, had defended the regicides who were now being hanged, alive or dead. Even in that riotous age, however, its most famous poet, John Dryden, whom Milton had reckoned as “a good rhymester but no poet,” 145 rated Paradise Lost as “one of the greatest, most noble and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced.” 146 After the overthrow of the Stuarts Milton came into his own. Addison praised him generously in The Spectator. 147 Thereafter the image of Milton grew in splendor and sanctity in the British mind, till Wordsworth, in 1802, could apostrophize him:
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; . . .
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea,
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free.
His soul was like a monument, and dwelt apart even from those nearest to him; but his mind spread like the majestic heavens over all the concerns of men, and his voice still sounds like Homer’s polyphloisboio thalasses, the “many-billowed sea.”
CHAPTER IX
The Restoration
1660–85
I. THE HAPPY KING
ON May 29, 1660, exactly thirty years after his birth, Charles II entered London amid such popular rejoicing as exceeded anything in England’s memory. Twenty thousand men of the city militia escorted him, flaunting their banners and brandishing their swords, through streets strewn with flowers, hung with tapestry, noisy with trumpets and bells and hailing cries, and lined with half the population of the town. “I stood in the Strand and beheld it,” wrote Evelyn, “and blessed God.” 1 It marked the temper of England, and the failure of Puritanism, that whereas six years of war and turmoil had been required to depose Charles I, not one drop of blood had been shed in restoring his son. All through that ecstatic summer Englishmen flocked to Whitehall to greet the King. “The eagerness of men, women, and children to see his Majesty and kiss his hands,” said one witness, “was so great that he had scarce leisure to eat for some days. . . . And the King, being as willing to give them that satisfaction, would have none kept out, but gave free access to all sorts of people.” 2 He said he wished to make his people as happy as himself.