INTRODUCTION

On the eve of the Puritan revolution in August, 1639, Milton came back to London from his travels on the continent. He had turned homeward instead of going on to Sicily and Greece because, he said, he held it base to be amusing himself abroad while his fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty at home. His father and grandfather had been men of strong convictions. His grandfather had been a Catholic recusant. His father had turned Protestant, left home, come to London and made a competence for himself as a scrivener. John Milton Senior did not cease to find in the Puritan faith satisfying expression of the significance of life as he knew it. That belief assured him that no man could be saved except by his own faith, that knowledge and understanding were the best means to faith, that personal rectitude and temperate living were the best evidence of faith, and that to lead and instruct men in the faith by zeal and learning was the noblest calling to which he could rear the brilliant son who was born to him on December 9, 1608. But he conceived such rearing in no narrow spirit. He was himself a man of cultivation, a musician and composer. The future poet was trained to the faith of his father in the best and widest learning, in poetry and languages, music and mathematics. He was trained too to demand and to expect much of himself. At Cambridge, whither he went in 1625, his attainments and his independence were such that then as later he condemned the attention to metaphysics, the logic-chopping, the unreasoning deference to tradition which he thought were vitiating university edu

cation. In his seven years at Christ's College and in the ensuing six years at his father's house at Horton, he devoted himself rather to those humanistic studies in literature, history, politics, religion and philosophy which he deemed necessary for the true teacher of men.

But he had now also decided that true teaching could not be done in the church of Laud. Spenser, whom he calls a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, showed him that the poet had greater power to enlighten his fellowcountrymen than the priest. He had discovered the power of his own style, particularly in verse, Latin and English. He had composed his "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" in 1629. At Horton he wrote "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" (1632-1634), "Comus" (1634) and "Lycidas' (1637). "Comus," a mask written for his friend Henry Lawes's music, was a youthful and spirited affirmation of the moral self-dependence of the individual. "Lycidas," a pastoral elegy for a college friend, was made to blaze forth the young author's condemnation of the clergy, their corruption and their neglect of moral leadership. In the beautiful Latin poem, "Ad Patrem" (1635-1637), he besought his father's approval to fulfil as a poet the mission to which he had been reared. That approval, it would seem, was not withheld, and Milton went forward with his long preparation for the writing of a great heroic poem. By 1638, when he went abroad, he was certain that his business in life was to be a great man, a great teacher of the faith, and to that end a great poet. That man alone was worthy of the appellation of greatness "who either does great things, or teaches how they may be done, or describes them with a suitable majesty when they have been done; but those only are great things, which tend to render life more happy, which increase the innocent comforts and enjoyments of existence, or which pave the way to a state of future bliss more permanent and more pure.'

Milton's activities from 1639 to 1660 were the consequence of the resolution that made him a poet. Great deeds such as he meant to teach and celebrate were pressing to get done at once by any who dared. Parliament hovered upon the verge of abolishing the system of "blind mouths" in the church, and many voices clamored for an end to hesitation. Bishop Joseph Hall came forward on behalf of episcopacy with his "Humble Remonstrance." Milton's old tutor, Thomas Young, with four other ministers made reply to Hall under the anagram "Smectymnuus," and Milton himself then fell upon the prelates with "Of Reformation" (May, 1641) and four rapidly succeeding tracts. He aimed to leave nothing unsaid, nothing learned or plausible or sublime or scurrilous, which would help to destroy bishops. Consequently he drew upon himself a virulent personal attack from Hall which caused him in "The Reason of Church Government" and "An Apology for Smectymnuus" to describe the training and powers which in his case had been balked of fulfilment in the church and which qualified him to be the champion of reform. He had been "church-outed by the prelates”; let the prelates now be "church-outed" too. By July, 1643, this had been accomplished; the civil war had commenced; the Westminster Assembly had been convened to direct the re-constitution of the church. Milton had already suggested what should be the business of that body. "Real and substantial liberty" was "rather to be sought from within" than in removal or alteration of external forms. The church had long held power over the most important phases of the inner life, over marriage, over education, over the expression of opinion. Abuses had arisen in the exercise of that power. The Assembly should reform abuses and not devise a new uniformity of doctrine and government which should merely perpetuate the conditions which had rendered prelacy obnoxious.

Otherwise "new presbyter" might indeed be "but old priest writ large."

Milton's next ensuing tracts marked a crisis in his career and form a kind of unit in his work. "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," "Of Education" and "Areopagitica," intimately related as each is to Milton's personal life, make personal liberty a public concern. Each of these works in its own way formulates explicitly and buoyantly the central conviction to which their as yet undefeated author would adhere even in defeat. He had learned that essential freedom was the fruit of character, not of custom or law in church or state. It was manifested in the vigor of private judgment. The duty of society was to foster such judgment in its citizens. The duty of the citizen was to serve such a society. Custom and law were not authorities to be implicitly obeyed but instruments to be used and disused as need demanded. The people would be best off when the best minds were most free to shape and re-shape state and church for the satisfaction of the highest human wants. Whatever prevented freedom, whether king, law, priest, doctrine or belief, was slavish, and slaves begot tyranny since every tyrant was a slave in his own soul.

These convictions led Milton to address to Parliament and the Assembly his "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce" (August, 1643), supported by three shorter pamphlets within a year. The historic Christian position was that celibacy was more holy than matrimony and that woman was spiritually far inferior to man. Slowly and never completely the church had worn down the underlying popular morality which regarded betrothal the sufficient sanction for cohabitation and had imposed religious marriage as a sacrament by which the physical became a metaphysical union, essentially indissoluble. The social necessity for dissolving many marriages, how

ever, led to the practice of annulment in cases where the canon courts could be persuaded by litigious processes that a marriage could not sacramentally have occurred by reason of some bar such as consanguinity. The result was that, in the administration of the marriage law and in the manners and morals of society, corruption seemed so widespread as long since to have given cause for concern to reformers. Milton himself had before this given thought to the matter. He now proposed that marriage and divorce be permitted to all persons with the least possible cognizance on the part of public authority. Arguing, as he needs must, from scripture, he maintained that marriage is designed, not merely for procreation, but for spiritual companionship; that woman, though not except occasionally in special cases the equal of man, is spiritually of the same nature, capable of companionship with him in highest things; finally that no tyranny could be worse than that which kept man and woman together when their union failed to provide that spiritual comfort without which cohabitation was sin. Milton's proposals, if not his theories, have at all times been disapproved by Englishspeaking people. Yet they mark a step in the history of morals, in the emancipation of woman and the humanizing of marriage. The great Puritan poet does not rank woman a little lower than the angels, but neither does he rank her only a little higher than a domestic animal. He exalts marriage as the noblest human relation. His chief mistake is, so to speak, to think of other men as though they were all Miltons.

The enigma of Milton's own marriage taking place at the very time he chose to write upon divorce has lent a peculiar interest to what he says on the subject. After brief courtship he married (June, 1643) the eighteen-yearold daughter of a Royalist. After a few weeks in his household, she returned to her father's home in Oxford