Byron May Clarissa Gillington
A Day with John Milton
Upon the mysterious and inscrutable decrees of Providence, which had laid in the dust what seemed to him the very cause of God, Milton sat and pondered, in a despondency so profound, a disappointment so poignant, that his own great lines had sought in vain to voice it:
"… I feel my genial spirits droop,
My hopes all flat: Nature within me seems
In all her functions weary of herself;
My race of glory run, and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest."
(Samson Agonistes).
Yet his indomitable spirit was by no means quenched in despair: and an outlet was now open to him at last, which for eighteen years he had foregone, – the outlet of poetic expression. He was conscious of his capacity to travel and to traverse the regions which none had dared explore save Dante. And with that tremendous chief of pioneers he was measuring himself, man to man.
He was able, above the turmoil of faction and the tumult of conflicting troubles, to weigh
"… his spread wings, at leisure to behold
Far off the empyreal Heaven, extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With opal towers and battlements adorned
Of living sapphire, once his native seat."
(Paradise Lost).
That Milton had been silent for so long a period was due, firstly to his preoccupation with political and polemical questions, into which he had thrown the whole weight of his mind; and, secondly, to the effect of his own firm resolve that the great epic, which, he had always secretly intended, should be the outcome of matured and ripened powers: the apotheosis of all that was worthiest in him: the full fruit of his strenuous life. He had long since arrived at that conclusion, never surpassed in its terseness and truth, that true poetry must be "simple, sensuous, impassioned," – words which might serve as the text and touchstone of art. "And long it was not after" when he
"was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem."
For poetry, to John Milton, was no sounding brass or tinkling cymbal; in his hand "the thing became a trumpet," apt to seraphic usages and the rallying of celestial cohorts.
Therefore, when he ceased to touch the "tender stops of various quills" that trembled into silence in Lycidas, it was not as one discomfited of his attainment. Rather it was as one convinced of a mighty purpose, and patiently awaiting the just time of its fulfilment. The "woodnotes wild" of Comus, the exquisitely stippled genre painting of Allegro and Penseroso, were mere childish attempts compared with that monumental work to which Milton firmly proposed to devote the fruition of his genius. And now, having become a man through mental and physical experience even more than through the passage of years, he had put away childish things. He had resolved at last upon, and had at last undertaken, the one subject most congenial to his taste, and most suitable to his style and diction. Paradise Lost was the triumphant offspring of his brain. It had sprung, like light, from chaos. Out of the darkness of poverty, blindness and defeat arose the poem which was to set him on the pinnacles of Parnassus.
"You make many enquiries as to what I am about" he wrote in bygone years to his old schoolfellow, Charles Diodati. "What am I thinking of? Why with God's help, of immortality! Forgive the word, I only whisper it in your ear. Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight." Nor was this the idle boasting of an egotist, the empty imagination of a dreamer.
Consumed by "the desire of honour and repute and universal fame, seated," as he put it, "in the breast of every true scholar," Milton sedulously and assiduously had prepared himself for the achievement of his aims. That he should "strictly meditate the thankless Muse" required a certain self-control. "To scorn delights and live laborious days" is not the customary delight of a handsome young scholar, expert in swordsmanship as in languages. To equip himself for his self-chosen task, still a misty, undefined prospect in the remotest future, required strenuous and disciplined study; and necessitated his forgoing too frequently the scenes of rustic happiness which he had pictured so charmingly in L'Allegro, – absenting himself from "The groves and ruins, and the beloved village elms … where I too, among rural scenes and remote forests, seemed as if I could have grown and vegetated through a hidden eternity."
And this, though Milton had neither the eye nor the ear of a born nature-lover, was in itself a sufficient deprivation and sacrifice. For beauty appealed to him with a most earnest insistence, – and the purer, the more abstract form it took, the more urgent was that appeal. "God has instilled into me, at all events," he declared, "a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labour is Ceres said to have sought Proserpine, as I am wont, day and night, to search for the idea of the beautiful through all forms and faces of things, and to follow it leading me on with certain assured traces."
Yet not alone among "forms and faces" was he predestined to discover that Absolute Beauty. The passionate love of music, so frequently characteristic of a great linguist, which led him into sound-worlds as well as sight-worlds, was fated to remain with him, an incalculable consolation, when "forms and faces" could be no more seen. And into the vocabulary of Paradise Lost, that incomparably rich vocabulary, with its infallible ear for rhythm, for phrase, for magnificent consonantal effects and the magic of great names that reverberate through open vowels, – into this he poured forth his whole sense of beautiful sound,
"as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid,
Tunes her nocturnal note."
Paradise Lost remains, as has been observed, "The elaborated outcome of all the best words of all antecedent poetry – the language of one who lives in the companionship of the great and the wise of all past time, equally magnificent in verbiage, whether describing man, or God, or the Arch-Enemy visiting" this pendent world, when
Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accursed, and in a cursed hour, he lives.
At seven o'clock the body-servant Greene re-entered, followed by Mrs. Milton, the poet's third wife, and by Mary Fisher, their maid-servant, bringing in his breakfast, a light, slight repast. Mrs. Milton, née Elizabeth Minshull, of Nantwich, was a comely, active, capable woman, "of a peaceful and agreeable humour," so far at least as her husband was concerned: for she shared the traditional destiny of a stepmother in not "hitting it off" with the first wife's daughters. Her golden hair and calm commonsense were in striking contrast, alike with the dark beauty and petulant spirit of Mary Powell, and with the fragile sweetness of Catherine Woodcock, Milton's former spouses. If she did not in her heart confirm her husband's celebrated theory of the relative position of man and wife, – "He for God only, she for God in him," – (which, it has been said, "condenses every fallacy about woman's true relation to her husband and to her Maker"), she managed very adroitly to convey an impression of entire acquiescence in the will of her lord. And at least she was entirely adequate as a housewife.