is evident above all in his friendship with Charles Deodati, a school friend from pre-university days, a precious comrade till his death in 1639, Milton's most intimate friend, it would seem. Their correspondence, in turns gay or serious, is normally in the tone of affectionate banter. The Latin elegy sent to Deodati in 1626 reveals the lighter side of Milton's soul: his love for the stage, and also his intense susceptibility to feminine charm. The poet was good-looking and elegant in his dress; it was in the order of things that he should be himself attracted by beauty. Thus he duly went into raptures over the charms of the London girls. In May 1628 (he was twenty) he was violently in love -so he says in his seventh Latin elegy - with a young girl he had seen by chance in a crowd and would never see again. These two productions are no doubt, partly at least, literary exercises, full of cold rhetoric and false mythological allusions. Yet they contain some lively traits. First of all, a young Puritan would have avoided the subject altogether. Then the second poem is based on a true incident: the young man caught sight in the street of a beautiful woman, lost as soon as seen; this ordinary happening must have been real, since many less thin subjects were at hand for artificial love poetry. But we have even better proof of Milton's feelings at this period, since the keenest of Milton's biographers, Dr. Smart of Glasgow, has set in their true light the Italian sonnets.10 These were probably written about Milton's twenty-third year. They are "a record of his first love"- that is, if we leave out of count the unknown young London girl. "The person addressed in these poems was a lady of Italian 10 The Sonnets of Milton, by John S. Smart (Glasgow, 1921), pp. 133 ff. descent, having a foreign type of beauty, new to the poet, with a dark complexion and dark eyes. . . . His regard for her was something more than a passing admiration. It is also evident that she was aware of his feelings, and was not unwilling to make some response; for the sonnets were composed in Italian, rather than English, at her own request, she having said: 'It is the language of love."" But there is more in these earliest poems of Milton. With the rise of amorous feeling, there awakens in Milton a marvellous sympathy with Nature, in which he feels and recognizes immense forces of well-nigh voluptuous desire. This feeling was later developed in some of Comus's speeches and fully expressed in the Creation book of Paradise Lost; it then became a sort of sense of universal fruitfulness, which gives life to lines like Reptile with spawn abundant, living soul. No other poet has been so close to a feeling of Nature's fecundity, and, as we shall see later, this conception has a high philosophical importance in Milton's subsequent work." Already in his In Adventum Veris (1629) we find the promise of future splendor: Look, Phœbus; loves, easy to reach, call to thee; the breezes of Spring send forth their prayers sweet as honey. . . . Not without presents does the Earth seek thy love. . . . If precious things, dazzling offerings touch thy soul (for love is often bought with presents), she spreads before thee all the wealth she keeps hidden under the vast seas and inside the mountains." United to this exquisite sensibility, from youth through the whole of life, is the mastery of self, especially in that form which appeals most to the imagination of a pure 14 though passionate young man: chastity. Milton had been called by the Cambridge students the "lady of Christ's "; this homage to his good looks was also a sarcasm on his purity."3 But he was proud of his chastity. He boasts of it in the epistle to Deodati we have quoted above: "Shunning far on my path false Circe's infamous mansions." We shall find this pride again in the Apology for Smectymnuus. Let us note here the chief reason for this chastity. It is not religious in our sense, though it is in a more fundamental meaning; like the great ascetics of primitive magic, Milton was chaste in order to acquire supernatural powers. He explains it quite clearly, both in verse and prose: "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things "— for the powers he wishes to acquire are those of the bard ought to be chaste. And in the sixth elegy: Additur huic scelerisque vacans, et casta juventus, Et rigidi mores, et sine labe manus. Comus was to be the glorification of the magic powers of chastity. We discern several feelings that uphold Milton's purity. No doubt there comes first his hatred of all compromise when an ideal is at stake, the clear, hard domination of intelligence over passion; but there comes also pride: moral pride, as a sense of his own worth which is not to be degraded; intellectual pride also- Milton thinks so highly of his reason, has such trust in his intellect, that he wants his reason to be mistress absolute in himself. He takes himself too seriously-he takes his genius and his mission too seriously- to allow passion to rule in him. His amorous tendencies, real and deep as they are, 18 Masson, I, 311. 14 See below, pp. 45-46. remain, for the time being, well in hand, reasonable and obedient almost to the sovereign will. Literary ambition and pride of intellect are the dominant factors in Milton's youth. Meanwhile, great plans were being meditated. At nineteen, in a college exercise, the poet rises for one moment above grotesque Latin and buffoon English, and binds himself by his first oaths to his future Muse: Yet I had rather, if I were to choose, Thy service in some graver subject use, How he before the thunderous throne doth lie, ... The subject of Paradise Lost is not yet found, but the plans are drawn: the poet foresees vaguely a universal epic, describing the origin of the world and revealing the secret aims and occupations of divinity. In any religion, Milton would have sung, and his poem would have been substantially what it is. Here we see him ready to write Paradise Lost out of Greek mythology. His subject is inevitable; he is driven by the great force of his sublime pride to the largest and deepest theme imaginable: what else can he sing but the All, the World, the Gods? The compass of his genius is that of the whole Cosmos; he cannot choose a smaller subject. In 1632, he retired to Horton, where, with the full approval of his father, he devoted himself to deliberate preparation for his high mission. A few years later he wrote to Deodati: "Do you ask what I am meditating? By the help of Heaven, an immortality of fame." 15 Milton's pride and his plans naturally went together with an imperious need for personal liberty; and that, naturally also, kept him out of the Church his father had meant him to enter. We know well enough what his opinions were about 1632: he was a liberal Anglican, probably without any very definite convictions on points of dogma.1 Thus he remained for many years still. It was neither fanaticism nor even deep religious feeling that kept him out of orders; it was his need to be free to think and do as he liked. His pride would not be curbed under the yoke of the Church. Years later, in the Reason of Church Government he wrote: 17 17 coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the church, that he who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that would retch, he must either straight perjure, or split his faith; I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing. From this time onward there entered into his very soul the hatred of priesthood. The Roman Catholic religion, in particular, seemed to him the very type of intolerance and priestly domination. Rome was to him, during the whole of his life, the Whore of Babylon; even in 1673, in his last pamphlet in favor of toleration, he excluded Catholicism from it "as being idolatrous, not to be tolerated, either in public or in private." This attitude is all the more characteristic as on many points, as we shall see, Milton came quite near to Roman Catholic 15 Prose Works, Bohn ed., III, 495. 16 Cf. Masson, I, 323, 326. " 18 17 Prose Works, II, 482. |