. . touching matrimony, there be three chief ends thereof agreed on: godly society; next, civil; and thirdly, that of the marriage bed. Of these the first in name to be the highest and most excellent, no baptized man can deny. . . . And out of question the cheerful help that may be in marriage towards sanctity of life, is the purest, and so the noblest end of that contract: but if the particular of each person be considered, then of those three ends which God appointed, that to him is greatest which is most necessary; and marriage is then most broken to him when he utterly wants the fruition of that which he most sought therein, whether it were religious, civil, or corporal society. . . . And having shewn that disproportion, contrariety, or numbness of mind may justly be divorced, by proving already the prohibition thereof opposes the express end of God's institution, suffers not marriage to satisfy that intellectual and innocent desire which God himself kindled in man to be the bond of wedlock, but only to remedy a sublunary and bestial burning, which frugal diet, without marriage, would easily chasten. Next, that it drives many to transgress the conjugal bed, while the soul wanders after that satisfaction which it had hope to find at home, but hath missed; or else it sits repining, even to atheism, finding itself hardly dealt with, but misdeeming the cause to be in God's law.

46

So, "when all conjecturing is done," I can see nothing but a plain avowal in this other perhaps decisive text:

Who doubts not but that it may be piously said, to him who would dismiss his frigidity, Bear your trial; take it as if God would have you live this life of continence? If he exhort this, I hear him as an angel, though he speak without warrant; but if he would compel me, I know him for Satan."

47

I have somewhat labored the point because careful examination of the divorce pamphlets seems to me to prove that Milton had been wrecked in what Meredith calls "the sensual whirlpools "; and this fact became all important in his conception of life.

46 Ibid., III, 205.

47 Ibid., III, 261.

The whole of his character predestined him to this catastrophe. His temperament was ardent, his chastity had been rigid. He was rushed into marriage by irresistible impulse. His high opinion of himself, his pride in his strength and intellect, naturally made him believe that he would master and elevate his wife, and allowed him no consideration before he took the step his whole being longed for. And no doubt Milton would not have found out his mistake had his wife's character been somewhat malleable. The illusion that made him marry would have lasted some time at least, and his natural generosity would probably have kept him thereafter from owning his wife's intellectual inferiority, even in his own mind. He would then have found in his first union the tranquil happiness of his last marriages.

48

But the young woman's refusal gave Milton the first great shock of his life. He saw at once his irreparable mistake. He found himself placed in a dilemma intolerable both to his purity and to his pride. Physical passion had been roused in him, and then thwarted; he was not really married, and he was now forbidden to get married. His highest ideal, that of love as a harmony between body and spirit, was at once shattered and soiled. And the cause of this painful degradation was the blind impulse of the flesh. Hence the anger against the mistrust of the flesh which remained, under his more liberal general ideas, all through his life. The flesh will play an essential part in the Fall.

No doubt all this remained half sentimental in him. Intellectually, as ever, he generalized; he never owned

48 I do not think that what Milton said in his rage ought to be reckoned against Mary Powell. She was very young at the time. She said afterwards her mother had urged her to do it; and we hear nothing further against her after she came back to Milton.

completely even to himself that the flesh had carried him away. He was too proud for that. Hence, in the divorce treatises, the many rebellions against the flesh, refusals to admit its power; passionate refusals which are really proofs of the sensual force in him. What had lured him became to him that "female charm" which lured Adam in Paradise Losť.

Desire had urged him to union, when there was no intellectual harmony between his wife and him (such is the central point of his argumentation in the treatises). Hence his larger conception of evil. Milton never quite forgot his grudge against the flesh, but he placed higher than that his great general idea. Evil will be to him Passion triumphant over Reason, Sentiment blinding the Intellect, or overruling it. This principle which he had acquired in the bitterness of personal despair will become for him a powerful instrument of philosophical explanation, which he will apply to politics and religion. For here intervenes again another characteristic of Milton's, his need of being not one single individual, but the norm, the rule, the law to all. What he has learned out of personal experience, that will become to him the experience of mankind. The lesson he has felt so deeply is valid for man in general. Milton will preach to the whole world the doctrine he has discovered in his own soul." He will bring salvation to all tortured men. He writes his treatises on divorce so that all shall profit by his misfortune. His peculiar pride makes him unsatisfied at being only one man, and naïvely and sincerely he carries his

49 Let it be understood once for all that I am not speaking of intellectual discovery, but of the intense realization of an idea, which made it in Milton a passionate conviction. The theories about reason and passion, love and lust, etc., were current at the Renaissance. What I investigate is how and why Milton came to adopt them. This remark applies to most of Milton's philosophy, which is at once original and current.

personal needs into the political world and into the City of God.

His high idea of himself, in another direction, will not let him admit that there is anything fundamentally bad in him. The sensual powers he feels so deep in him cannot be damnable. His sanity of mind shows him quite clearly that the normal instincts of human nature must be satisfied. Consequently, whereas the flesh is an evil power when it carries the mind away, when, on the contrary, its instincts are approved by reason, they are good and legitimate and must be listened to. The distinction appears in the divorce pamphlets. Milton's fundamentally sensual nature, on the one side, and his pride of intellect, on the other, came naturally to this compromise: sensual love is praiseworthy and sacred when it is made legitimate by the approval of reason; it is execrable, it is "the Fall," when it goes against reason; which means that when the minds are not in harmony, the union in the flesh is a degradation, even in marriage. Once again Milton generalized and formulated the rule, not only for sensual passion, but for all passion whatsoever.

Probably there took place also at this time the further development of another of Milton's great philosophical ideas. We shall see that for him the body and the soul came to be one. Was it not in the anguish of his first unhappy marriage that this conviction first sank deeply into him? Then it was that he conceived that degradation of the body was degradation of the soul, and that the harmony to be established was not between two different powers, but within the same power. Then he felt himself wholly one, moved in his entirety, and suffering in his entirety, body and soul together, from the same pain. Then probably he acquired, sentimentally at least, the

conviction of the unity of soul and body, which later made him reject altogether all dualistic doctrines.

Thus Milton, through sentimental experience, came to a vision of several great conceptions, which we shall see shaping in the divorce treatises: the conception of sensuality, which is the triumph of the flesh over reason; the conception of the Fall, which is the triumph of passion over reason, sensuality being only one incident - howbeit the most important one-of the Fall; the conception of normal human nature - man's instinct is good in itself: only its aberrations are to be condemned; and reason is the criterion.

The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, written in 1643, was completely rearranged and much augmented in 1644. This second edition is far more readable and interesting. It is clearly divided into chapters and the author's ideas are more developed.

The central idea of the book is that marriage, or love, must be based on intellectual harmony between man and woman. Where such harmony of feelings and thoughts does not exist, the marriage is null, and divorce should be pronounced on the husband's petition.

Milton is much too dignified to bring his own case forward. He therefore puts himself in a false position from the beginning; and this brings a strong element of unconscious humor- for he is in such deadly earnest — into the treatise. What drives him to plead for divorce is in reality his wife's refusal. But he cannot own that. Therefore he launches into the abstract thesis, and feels

the pride of legislating for the universe, without

he

thinks being influenced by his own case. But his personal situation is visible all the time, first by his preoccu

pation with writing down sensual passion, while in all his