Some remnants of grace and dignity are visible in a sort of apology to the reader, at the end:

I have now done that which for many causes I might have thought could not likely have been my fortune, to be put to this underwork of scouring and unrubbishing the low and sordid ignorance of such a presumptuous losel. Yet Hercules had the labour once imposed upon him to carry dung out of the Augean stable. . . . But as for the subject itself . . . if any man equal to the matter shall think it appertains him to take in hand this controversy, . . . let him not, I entreat him, guess by the handling, which meritoriously hath been bestowed on this object of contempt and laughter, that I account it any displeasure done me to be contradicted in print, but as it leads to the attainment of anything more true, shall esteem it a benefit; and shall know how to return his civility and fair argument in such a sort, as he shall confess that to do so is my choice, and to have done thus was my chance.73

Thus did Milton suffer, and meditate upon the cause of his suffering. His ideas are no longer philosophical abstractions, but the hard and poignant lessons driven by despair into his very flesh. His conception of the Fall takes shape, and the notion that the Fall occurs generally, and most painfully, through woman. He is thus again predestined to the theme of Paradise Lost: the fall of man because of woman.

Meantime, however, he forgave his wife. Surely this pardon is a safe sign of his good sense, independence, and generosity. He had gone all lengths in favor of divorce; for so proud a man, the greatest obstacle to a reconciliation should have been his published words. A sect of "Divorcers" followed him; he was going to regenerate mankind. But Milton did not quake before the laughter his retraction indeed was sure to bring upon him; once again he defied public opinion, that of his few friends this time. He took back his wife.

78 Ibid., III, 460–61.

Milton had learnt that reality does not shape itself upon abstract ideas. His struggle and his little success had shown him that man is but little corrigible - and woman still less. He took back his wife and never tried to lift her to that degree of intellectual eminence that would have made her a fit mate. He thus accepted compromise. The cycle of his first disillusion was complete. His idea of human nature was lowered. He was prepared for the second and greater disillusion which came gradually from 1650 to 1660; even as in his marriage trials he had lost his faith in woman and probably a little of his faith in himself, in the political struggle he was to lose his faith in human nature in the masses. There will be left to him only his faith in God, but in that he will center all hopes lost on Earth, and take a glorious compensation for all his disillusions. For Milton in his pride and strength could never come to ultimate despair.

IV. THE SECOND CRISIS: THE BREAK WITH THE PRESBYTERIANS

Another disillusion had come to Milton from this whole controversy. He had rather expected to be greeted as a great reformer; he thought he had but to write and Parliament would be convinced, the law changed and mankind saved. His whole character and career disposed him to this illusion: his natural and naïve pride, the full consciousness of his power, the high opinion all his acquaintances had of him; the very soul of the times, which was full of high dreams and seemed ripe for great changes all that carried him away, all that deceived him. A storm of insult and reprobation greeted his divorce tracts, and the complete silence of Parliament was a severe blow.

He discovered then, in a personal adventure, what the history of the Commonwealth was going to confirm: men care little for abstract ideas; it is not sufficient to be in the right, or to believe one is, to be listened to. Two sonnets in 1645 give vent to his anger:

ON THE DETRACTION WHICH FOLLOWED UPON
MY WRITING CERTAIN TREATISES

A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon,
And woven close, both matter, form, and style;
The subject new: it walked the town a while,
Numb'ring good intellects; now seldom pored on.
Cries the stall-reader, "Bless us! what a word on
A title-page is this!" and some in file

Stand spelling false, while one might walk to Mile-
End Green. Why, is it harder, Sirs, than Gordon,
Colkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp?

Those rugged names to our like mouths grow sleek
That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp.
Thy age, like ours, O Soul of Sir John Cheke,
Hated not learning worse than toad or asp,
When thou taught'st Cambridge, and King Edward, Greek.

ON THE SAME

I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs:
As when those hinds that were transformed to frogs
Railed at Latona's twin-born progeny,

Which after held the sun and moon in fee.
But this is got by casting pearl to hogs;
That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry Liberty;
For who loves that, must first be wise and good;
But from that mark how far they rove we see,
For all this waste of wealth, and loss of blood.

Milton is looking for the cause of his failure. He finds it in the ambition and avarice of the Presbyterians. They, as well as the prelates, are “blind mouths." The political test of "passion triumphing over reason" is not yet formulated (it will be at the end of the Defensio secunda and will give him the light whereby to see and judge the failure of the Commonwealth), but it is clearly realized, and, in 1647, applied to the Presbyterians in another sonnet:

ON THE NEW FORCERS OF CONSCIENCE UNDER
THE LONG PARLIAMENT

Because you have thrown off your prelate lord,
And with stiff vows renounced his liturgy,
To seize the widowed whore Plurality
From them whose sin ye envied, not abhorred,
Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword.

To force our consciences that Christ set free,
And ride us with a classic hierarchy
Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rutherford?
Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent
Would have been held in high esteem with Paul,
Must now be named and printed heretics
By shallow Edwards and Scotch what d'ye call:
But we do hope to find out all your tricks,
Your plots and packing worse than those of Trent,
That so the Parliament
May, with their wholesome and preventive shears,
Clip your phylacteries, though balk your ears,

And succour our just fears,
When they shall read this clearly in your charge,
New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large.

Thus did Milton find out his friends the Presbyterians: they are no better than the Bishops; as he condemned the ones, he now condemns the others.

But not only will not men follow reason, they try to

muzzle her. Milton is once more on the walls: he attacks censorship and publishes the Areopagitica, appealing again to Parliament, in 1644. He is still young and full of hope. He has received heavy blows, but he has not lost his trust that the Kingdom is coming and that the Saints will presently set things to rights. Parliament, it is true, has taken no notice of the Doctrine and Discipline. But, on the other side, the House of Lords does not at all encourage the Presbyterian plans against the liberty of the press. Milton has been left unmolested. Therefore he has not yet given up hope. Tetrachordon will again be addressed "To the Parliament."

The Presbyterians show themselves to be enemies of liberty, "Forcers of Conscience." But what of that? They will not belong to the Kingdom. The hope of England is no longer in them. Cromwell's power is growing. His army is being organized, and he is beginning to speak firmly to the Presbyterians. After Marston Moor, he has the right and the power to do so. And his voice is in favor of liberty. The Independents, all men who needed liberty, like Milton, are gathering round the new chief. The Areopagitica is therefore full of hope and ardor. Milton opens fire upon the Presbyterians.

The Areopagitica is admittedly the best sustained of Milton's pamphlets. But it is less interesting for us here than the last pamphlets against the Bishops, than the divorce treatises, than the Defensio secunda. It teaches us less about the man Milton or his ideas; it is rather, as its name indicates, a fine piece of eloquence than a personal or even strictly polemical effort. Also the most sublime passages in Milton's prose are not here; the tone is more sustained, but hardly rises to the greatest heights

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