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Comus and
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Lycidas arise at another's bidding, we shall see a casual remark beget
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Paradise Regained. He never attempts to utter his deepest religious convictions until caught by the contagious enthusiasm of a revolution. If any incident in his life could ever have compelled him to speak or die it must have been the humiliating issue of his matrimonial adventure. To be cast off after a month's trial like an unsatisfactory servant, to forfeit the hope of sympathy and companionship which had allured him into the married state, to forfeit it, unless the law could be altered, for ever! The feelings of any sensitive man must find some sort of expression in such an emergency. At another period what Milton learned in suffering would no doubt have been taught in song. But pamphlets were then the order of the day, and Milton's
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Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in its first edition, is as much the outpouring of an overburdened heart as any poem could have been. It bears every mark of a hasty composition, such as may well have been written and printed within the last days of July, following Mary Milton's departure. It is short. It deals with the most obvious aspects of the question. It is meagre in references and citations; two authors only are somewhat vaguely alleged, Grotius and Beza. It does not contain the least allusion to his domestic circumstances, nor anything unless the thesis itself, that could hinder his wife's return. Everything betokens that it was composed in the bitterness of wounded feeling upon the incompatibility becoming manifest; but that he had not yet arrived at the point of demanding the application of his general principle to his own special case. That point would be reached when Mary Milton deliberately refused to return, and the chronology of the greatly enlarged second edition, published in the following February, entirely confirms Phillips's account. In one point only he must be wrong. Mary Milton's return to her father's house cannot have been a voluntary concession on Milton's part, but must have been wrung from him after bitter contentions. Could we look into the household during those weeks of wretchedness, we should probably find Milton exceedingly deficient in consideration for the inexperienced girl of half his age, brought from a gay circle of friends and kindred to a grave, studious house. But it could not well have been otherwise. Milton was constitutionally unfit
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and his theories cannot have contributed to correct his practice. His
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He for God only, she for God in him, condenses every fallacy about woman's true relation to her husband and her Maker. In his Tractate on Education there is not a word on the education of girls, and yet he wanted an intellectual female companion. Where should the woman be found at once submissive enough and learned enough to meet such inconsistent exigencies? It might have been said to him as afterwards to Byron:
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You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.
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in her
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he would certainly have rendered his argument more cogent and elaborate. The tract, in its inspired portions, is a fine impassioned poem, fitter for the Parliament of Love than the Parliament at Westminster. The second edition is far more satisfactory as regards that class of arguments which alone were likely to impress the men of his generation, those derived from the authority of the Scriptures and of divines. In one of his principal points all Protestants and philosophers will confess him to be right, his reference of the matter to Scripture and reason, and repudiation of the mediæval canon law. It is not here, nevertheless, that Milton is most at home. The strength of his position is his lofty idealism, his magnificent conception of the institution he discusses, and his disdain for whatever degrades it to conventionality or mere expediency.
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His ideal of true and perfect marriage, says Mr. Ernest Myers,
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Here he is impregnable and above criticism, but his handling of the more sublunary departments of the subject must be unsatisfactory to legislators, who have usually deemed his sublime idealism fitter for the societies of the blest than for the imperfect communities of mankind. When his
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and the migration of his father to the house of John, with whom he was moreover better in accord in religion and politics. Little external change resulted,
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says Phillips,
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About the same time the household received other additions in the shape of pupils, admitted, Phillips is careful to assure us, by way of favour, as M. Jourdain selected stuffs for his friends. Milton's pamphlet was perhaps not yet published, or not generally known to be his, or his friends were indifferent to public sentiment. Opinion was unquestionably against Milton, nor can he have profited much by the support, however practical, of a certain Mrs. Attaway, who thought that
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and by and by actually did what Milton only talked of doing. We have already seen that he had incurred danger of prosecution from the Stationers' Company, and in July, 1644, he was denounced by name from the pulpit by a divine of much note, Herbert Palmer, author of a book long attributed to Bacon. But, if criticised, he was read. By 1645 his Divorce tract was in the third edition, and he had added three more pamphlets--one to prove that the revered Martin Bucer had agreed with him; two, the
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Tetrachordon and
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Colasterion, directed against his principal opponents, Palmer, Featley, Caryl, Prynne, and an anonymous pamphleteer, who seems to have been a somewhat contemptible person, a serving-man turned attorney, but whose production contains some not unwelcome hints on the personal aspects of Milton's controversy.
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We believe you count no woman to due conversation accessible, as to you, except she can speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French, and dispute against the canon law as well as you. Milton's later tracts are not specially interesting, except for the reiteration of his fine and bold idealism on the institution of marriage, qualified only by his no less strenuous insistance on the subjection of woman. He allows, however, that
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and that
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Areopagitica, much more for the high designs he had not ceased to meditate in verse? Enthusiasm, one would certainly say, only that it is impossible to tell to what extent his father's income, chiefly derived from money out at interest, may have been impaired by the confusion of the times. Whether he had done rightly or wrongly in taking the duties of a preceptor upon himself, his nephew's account attests the self-sacrificing zeal with which he discharged them: we groan as we read of hours which should have been devoted to lonely musing or noble composition passed in
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his knowledge of
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Frontinus his Stratagems, with the two egregious poets Lucretius and Manilius. He might also have been better employed than in dictating
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A tractate he thought fit to collect from the ablest of divines who have written on that subject of atheism, Amesius, Wollebius, &c. Here should be comfort for those who fear with Pattison that Milton's addiction to politics deprived us of unnumbered
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Comuses. The excerpter of Amesius and Wollebius, as we have so often insisted, needed great stimulus for great achievements. Such stimulus would probably have come superabundantly if he could at this time have had his way, for the most moral of men was bent on assuming a direct antagonism to conventional morality. He had maintained that marriage ought to be dissolved for mere incompatibility; his case must have seemed much stronger now that incompatibility had produced desertion. He was not the man to shrink from acting on his opinion when the fit season seemed to him to have arrived; and in the summer of 1645 he was openly paying his addresses to