Читать книгу Milton and the English Revolution - Christopher Hill - Страница 15
ОглавлениеI find it impossible for a prince to preserve the state in quiet unless he hath such an influence upon churchmen, and they such a dependence on him, as may best restrain the seditious exorbitances of ministers’ tongues.
J. Gauden, Eikon Bastlike (1649), pp. 147–8. Believed by contemporaries to be by Charles I
The conflict of cultures in England sprang from the appearance of new value systems. The rank and file of European Protestantism came from great cities – Strasbourg, Geneva, Amsterdam, La Rochelle, London – and from rural industrial areas like Essex, Somerset or the West Riding of Yorkshire. Great aristocrats used the movement; many gentlemen adhered to it from conviction or self-interest; but its mass support came from merchants and artisans, the middling sort. Economic developments – greater prosperity, better housing, more privacy – led to the household, the home emerging as the centre of a new middle-class culture. The recently invented craft of printing and Protestant translations of the Bible catered for the needs of this new culture: literacy, education and Protestantism expanded together. In England, Puritans especially concerned themselves with spreading London’s ways of thinking into the dark corners of the north, Wales and the south-west, the Catholic areas which were also to be Royalist areas during the Civil War. W. K. Jordan has studied the charitable foundations through which rich merchants tried to extend the civilization of London into the outlying areas – by providing schools and scholarships, preaching, apprenticeships for godly youths, marriage portions for virtuous spinsters, etc., etc. And William Haller has convincingly demonstrated the build-up by Puritan preachers over the fifty years before 1640 of a middle-class public convinced that God spoke directly to their consciences.1 Truth is in the inward parts: externals in religion were rejected, whether they took the form of sacred church buildings or of a mediating priesthood: all such things were forms of idolatry. Men brought up on Bible-reading reacted vehemently from anything that savoured of idol-worship, which distracts men and women from communion with God.2
The preachers were consciously organizing middle-class men and women against the concept of hierarchy, itself an import into Christianity that reflected the social realities of mediaeval agrarian society. For the middle-class Puritan God seemed a better lord than any peer of the realm; he spoke directly and familiarly to his dependants: the duty to obey God was greater than any traditional social obligation. The vehemence with which Elizabethan exponents of orthodoxy defend hierarchy shows that it is already under attack: as the vehemence with which gold is denounced shows that money is beginning to talk a newly authoritative language.
The young Milton was a sturdy Protestant, but we find him writing epitaphs on the high-flying Bishop Lancelot Andrewes and praising the sage and serious doctrine of virginity. Perhaps we should think of him at this stage not in association with a ‘Puritan’ opposition but with those like George Herbert, who left the court for a country living, or Nicholas Ferrar, who withdrew from the City to his Anglican nunnery at Little Gidding. Ferrar believed the Pope to be Antichrist no less than did Milton: George Herbert spoke of religion under Archbishop Laud as
on tiptoe in our land
Ready to pass to the American strand.
A man like Peter Sterry, later associated with Milton, resigned his Cambridge fellowship some time in the sixteen-thirties in order to take refuge in a private chaplainship to Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, soon to emerge as one of the leaders of the Parliamentarian radicals, much admired by Milton.3 Others emigrated to the Netherlands or to New England. At least one of the latter did so only after ‘having preached much’; but ‘seeing the danger of the times he changed his profession of divinity into physic’. Milton4 in retrospect spoke of himself as ‘church-outed by the prelates’, and biographers have recognized that he could never have ‘subscribed slave’ to the Laudian régime.5 But the depth of his revulsion calls for emphasis. It perhaps needed the crisis of the sixteen-forties to convince Milton that directly political solutions were both necessary and possible. Yet in the later thirties his Commonplace Book shows him aware of a religious, political and cultural crisis. It was already, its editor tells us, ‘pointedly anticipating’ the ‘revolutionary ideas of Areopagitica, the divorce pamphlets and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’.1
The court for Milton from the late sixteen-twenties suggested ‘the lusts of Kings’, the homosexual relationship of James I to Buckingham, to which the younger Gil had openly referred in the poem which got him into trouble.2 Buckingham continued to be a favourite of Charles I, although his family had papist associations. A major scandal of the early thirties concerned Lord Castlehaven, who was executed for buggery, for conniving at the rape of his wife by a servant who was also his lover, and for the prostitution of his daughter-in-law to another servant. Castlehaven was reputed to be a papist. Milton would certainly be aware of this cause célèbre; but it was brought forcibly to his notice when he was asked to write a masque for the Earl of Bridgwater, whose wife was Lady Castlehaven’s sister.
Milton’s Masque at Ludlow Castle, his most ambitious work so far, was produced in 1634, published in 1637. The occasion celebrated the reunion of the Egerton family at Ludlow, whither the head of the family, the Earl of Bridgwater, had in 1633 proceeded as President of the Council in the Marches of Wales. Lady Alice Egerton and her two brothers were already enthusiastic masquers. Why Milton was asked to write the script for the masque we do not know. He was an unknown young man of twenty-five, with no experience of writing in the genre. The occasion would seem to call for someone better known. But the Egertons had Puritan leanings, and were patrons of the Spenserian line of poets. Relations of the family borrowed money from the elder Milton, who seems to have known the Earl. In 1613 the scrivener had signed a presentation epistle to Bridgwater, prefixed to Sir William Leighton’s The Teares or Lamentations of a Sorrowfull Soule, and twenty-two years later he may have rented his house in Horton from the Earl.3 Other clients of the elder Milton’s were related to the Countess of Derby, who married the Earl of Bridgwater’s father. She too patronized the Spenserians. It was for her that the younger John wrote Arcades, performed (perhaps in 1633) at Harefield, only ten miles from Horton. The Egertons resided at Ashridge, Hertfordshire, a further fifteen miles north of Harefield. Alternatively, Milton may have received his invitation through Henry Lawes, who composed the music for the masque. Lawes was music teacher to Lady Alice Egerton, and would certainly have been known to the elder John Milton. Or the connection may have been made through the Diodatis.1
The masque is a simple fairy story. The Lady Alice gets separated from her two brothers in a ‘drear wood’ on the way to Ludlow. She is vainly tempted by the magician Comus, rescued, and the family is reunited. It is likely that the theme of the masque would either be given to Milton, or would be worked out by him in consultation with the family and Lawes. Even Ben Jonson did not have it all his own way when he wrote a masque: the young Milton certainly would not. In a fascinating article Barbara Breasted has suggested some reasons why the theme of resistance to temptation by a lady might have been chosen. The Castlehaven scandal of 1631–2 was still fresh in everyone’s memory. Lady Alice, who acted the Lady in Milton’s masque, was the niece of the raped Lady Castlehaven and cousin of the prostituted daughter. The theme of chastity, of virtue resisting temptation, may well have been suggested to Milton: one object of the masque would be to proclaim the spotless virtue of the Egerton ladies, unlike their too notorious relatives.2
But how much more than the general theme was suggested, how free a hand Milton was given, how far the Lady in Comus speaks for him, we do not know. In his Sixth Elegy he recommended chastity for a young epic poet. But at Cambridge he was on one occasion assigned the task of defending learning against ignorance when he would have preferred the other side: a scholar could argue either way.
One ingenious suggestion is that Milton was drawing on the imagery of Revelation 12, of the lady wandering in the wilderness, who figured in many mediaeval and early Protestant plays down to John Foxe.3 In these plays the Lady, who regularly has two attendants, personifies the true church, a virgin but a virgin destined for marriage to Christ.4 On this interpretation Comus represents Antichrist, who in Foxe’s Christus Triumphans seduces the whole world with his ‘Circean cups of luxury’.1 Circe, ‘daughter of the sun’, was Comus’s mother.2 Her chalice turned men into beasts: Antichrist put the mark of the Beast on the foreheads of his followers. The brothers, A.-L. Scoufos suggests, personify the clergy, who have neglected their duty of protecting the church. When mobilized by the good daemon their militant action secures a partial victory, but Comus escapes and the Lady remains immobilized (though her mind is free) until Sabrina releases her. Sabrina, who was deified after committing suicide in order to avoid rape, is a final rejection of the Castlehaven connection. She may, if we wish to stress the specifically Christian content of the masque, represent divine grace or the water of baptism, though the later Milton would not have wished to attach too much significance to the outward ceremony of baptism. Sabrina is also a necessary piece of machinery to bring the masque to a close by reuniting the children with their parents in the precise geographical location of Ludlow Castle by the Severn.
A masque appears at first sight rather a surprising thing for a Puritan to write – if we can properly call Milton a Puritan at this time. Masques were associated with the court, where they were costly and extravagant spectacles, the machinery often as important as the verse. And the expenditure was for one or very few performances: conspicuous waste was essential to a masque. So was social snobbery: the object of a masque was to flatter the great personages who deigned to participate. Ben Jonson tried to write masques with significant content, but he failed to educate his courtly audience.3 We recall his onslaught on Inigo Jones for killing poetry in the interests of spectacle:
Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque!
Pack with your piddling poetry to the stage!
This is the money-get mechanic age!4
We can guess where Milton would stand in that controversy. He may have intended in Comus to succeed where Johnson had failed. He never wrote another masque, and the genre itself did not survive the court which had brought it into existence.
There is another mystery about the poem. The masque was performed in 1634. In 1637 it was published by Henry Lawes, with no mention of Milton, though with some additions to his text, clearly made by him. Milton did not own the poem until 1645. He was not usually backward in such matters. Why was his name not given in 1637? Parker has speculated that John Milton senior objected to his son writing anything so courtly as a masque, and that Ad Patrem is the poet’s self-defence and attempt to convince his father of the propriety of this kind of poetry.1 If we had any real evidence of paternal hostility, this would be plausible: but we have none. Another suggestion is that between 1634 and 1637 some breach had occurred between Milton and the Egertons. It has even been argued from the passages added in 1637 that Milton had perhaps fallen in love with the Lady Alice and got a little above his station.2 Again this is not impossible: but a great many bricks have to be made with very little straw. Certainly the Egertons never again patronized Milton,3 though the fact that the masque was published suggests that it had not dissatisfied them. John Egerton, the younger brother in Comus, subsequently wrote on his copy of Milton’s Defensio ‘the book should be burnt, the author hanged.’ But that was after a civil war, in which the Egertons had been Royalists, and after the execution of their King, which Milton’s book was defending. It looks as though some disagreement occurred: perhaps Milton was snubbed, though not necessarily for raising his eyes to the Lady Alice. He would not be likely to take kindly to the role of hired hack writer, which is no doubt how his patrons saw him. But Milton would not have published the masque with his other poems in 1645 if he had changed his mind about the genre.
Comus is in one respect like Satan in the earlier books of Paradise Lost: his character is so well drawn that he steals the show from the Lady in a way that Milton may not have intended. The Lady is almost as unexciting as God in Paradise Lost. But we must not break butterflies on wheels. Whoever played Comus was almost certainly the best actor in the masque: the Lady and her brothers were amateurs, and children at that. Comus is a dramatic dialogue, recalling the debates in which Milton was accustomed to take part at Cambridge. In such a debate, as in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, one gave the best arguments one could find to both protagonists – as the prim Samuel Richardson was to make out a surprisingly good case for his Lovelace. Certainly Milton had conversed with libertines. ‘What hath night to do with sleep?’ ‘‘Tis only daylight that makes sin’ (lines 122, 126) are as accurately epigrammatic as anything Bunyan put into the mouth of his Mr. Badman, a recollection of the days when he moved in Ranter circles.
It may be right to hear some political overtones, provided we do not assert them too confidently. The suggestion that there is a covert attack on the courtly cult of Platonic love1 may be reinforced by the Castlehaven connection; Milton and his patrons would be anxious to differentiate their position from papist worship of the Virgin Mary or of Henrietta Maria, as well as from the practices of the papist Castlehaven. There is indeed a certain class-consciousness in Comus. The Lady’s aristocratic assumptions about the morals and manners of the ‘loose unlettered hinds’ (173) are rebuked by the subsequent action. Courtesy ‘oft is sooner found in lowly sheds … than … courts of princes’ (321–4). She ultimately goes out of her way to plead for greater economic equality:
If every just man that now pines with want
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pampered Luxury
Now heaps upon some few with vast excess …
The giver would be better thanked.
(767–74)
A masque is a light-hearted entertainment. Critics who warn us against over-reading the text, against worrying about pseudo-problems, may well be right.2 We should accept the magic as magic, and not try to press too deep allegorical meanings. We may be encouraged in this by the divergences among those scholars who think they have a key to the details of the allegory.3 But some things may be said about the spirit which informs the poem. It is, in James Maxwell’s words, about virtue rather than specifically about virginity.
Virtue may be assailed but never lost,
Surprised by unjust force but not enthralled.
That was the Elder Brother. The Lady herself tells Comus:
Fool, do not boast,
Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind.
‘Love virtue, she alone is free’ is the conclusion. When the poem was published in 1637, Milton drew special attention (line 996) to the addition glorifying marriage. This new passage (999–1011) celebrates both the earthly love of Venus and Adonis and the heavenly love of Christ for his eternal bride, who is both the church and the individual soul, Psyche. Together she and Cupid beget Youth and Joy. Pleasure is illusory without this freedom, is self-enthralled. The Lady’s apparently negative attitude was essential to the preservation of her freedom. In the eternal conflict of good and evil good must win.
If this fail
The pillared firmament is rottenness,
And earth’s base built on stubble.
(592–7)1
The true church cannot fail, and God will come to the help of men and women when they have done all they can to resist evil. This is a recurrent Miltonic theme. Christ on the pinnacle of the temple, Samson clutching the pillars, both receive a miraculous accession of power. They illustrate the conclusion of Comus:
Or if virtue feeble were
Heaven itself would stoop to her.2
In the masque there is no problem of moral choice, only confidence and exultation in being on the right side. Haller rightly links the theme of the Masque with the preachers’ exhortation to spiritual wayfaring and warfaring.3 The Lady in Comus never seems in the least likely to succumb to the wiles of the tempter; very different from Eve in Paradise Lost.4 Milton was not ready to write Paradise Lost in 1634. He too had been called ‘the Lady’ at Christ’s; and his mind was still filled with ideas of romantic chivalry, of knightly gallantry: his epic aspirations long circled round King Arthur. And yet there is continuity, for all the greater sadness of Milton’s later poetry: Paradise Regained lacks the gorgeous plenitude of Comus, the sense of the pulsing richness of nature; but its theme is analogous, the serene rejection of temptation, not a negative attitude but a sense of the irrelevance, the emptiness, of pleasure that is separated from virtue.5
In Comus Milton creates what I have called the Robinson Crusoe situation. The hero – or heroine – is isolated from society, to face an ordeal alone.1 This is characteristic of the Puritan-individualist tradition, from Milton to Clarissa Harlowe. Adam and Eve in Paradise, Jesus in the wilderness, Samson isolated by blindness and finally alone in the temple, Bunyan’s Christian deserting wife and children: all face their destiny alone with God. They are as solitary as Hobbist man before Leviathan set up a law-abiding community.
Milton used the occasion of Comus to try to bring order into what he saw as the moral chaos that court and papists were bringing upon England. As against the Inns of Court wits, who combined acceptance of sexual promiscuity with social sneers against the bourgeoisie, Milton aligned himself with the Puritan middle class, on aesthetic as well as moral grounds. It is this, rather than mere controversial opportunism, that made Milton in 1642 criticize Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem because it offered no vision of a better world in which evil would be eradicated: Milton specifically contrasted Utopia and New Atlantis with Hall’s book. Milton’s anti-episcopal tracts contain elements of his own Utopian ideals, which Haller has described as ‘a society ruled by public opinion, enlightened not only by preachers but by intellectual and moral leaders of all sorts, lay and cleric, above all by poet-prophets like himself’.2
Social concern is even more apparent in Lycidas. Its occasion was the death by drowning of Edward King on his way to Ireland in 1637. There is no reason to suppose that Milton was particularly fond of King, who had been made a Fellow of Christ’s in 1630 – the Fellowship which Milton might have hoped for. But Milton was by this time well known in Cambridge, and especially in his own college, as a poet: whilst still in residence he had turned his hand to elegies on ecclesiastical and university dignitaries. What more natural than that he should be invited to contribute to the memorial volume for his contemporary?
He did not perhaps produce quite what was expected. Lycidas is ostensibly a poem about the tragedy of youthful death. Why should Edward King be cut off in his prime whilst others live? The poem calls God’s justice in question, not for the last time in Milton’s career. But this leads the poet on to ask how important worldly success is, and to assess his own life in the light of King’s death. Lycidas turns into a tremendous denunciation of the dominant clique in the Church of England, the Laudians.
Here the pastoral tradition stood Milton in good stead. Fulke Greville made it clear that the allegorical form of works like Arcadia, ‘this representing of virtues, vices, humours, counsels and actions of men in feigned and unscandalous images, is an enabling of freeborn spirits to the greatest affairs of state.’1 Sidney himself in The Defence of Poesie had said ‘sometimes under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep [pastoral poetry] can include the whole considerations of wrongdoings and patience.’2 Spenser did just that in The Shepheardes Calendar and Colin Clouts come home again. Of The Faerie Queene Spenser admitted almost in so many words that ‘I chose the history of King Arthur as … furthest from the danger of envy and suspicion of present times.’ The Spenserians Browne and Wither made a similar use of pastoral. Browne directly anticipates Lycidas by his reference to ‘The prelate in pluralities asleep / Whilst that the wolf lies preying on his sheep.’3
The advantage of the pastoral mode, then, was that sharp criticisms could be made, and the key supplied to those in the know. The innocent would miss the point. The essence of pastoral was ambiguity, something perhaps forgotten by those who continue to labour at the mysteries of Lycidas. Thus everybody would know in general what Milton meant by ‘the grim wolf with privy paw’: it meant Rome, popery. But just because this is pastoral, is allegory, it need not mean only Rome. Archbishop Laud too perhaps has some wolfish characteristics? Similarly ‘the pilot of the Galilean lake’ sounds like St. Peter, the good bishop; but again we can read other things into it. If you object to bishops, the pilot can be the good pastor, the preacher, Jesus Christ even:4 there is only one identification – the Pope – that we are clearly not intended to make.
We have then to pick up clues as we read. In 1638 Lycidas lacked the full introductory note which alerts modern readers. The words ‘and by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then in their height’ could not be added until Lycidas was reprinted in 1645, after the fall of the bishops. The geographical references
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount [St. Michael’s Mount]
Looks towards Namancos and Bayonna’s hold
have a patriotic and anti-Spanish connotation which would not be missed by readers in 1638, when the government was on friendlier terms with Spain than with the Protestant Netherlands. The line
Look homeward Angel now and melt with ruth,
has been described as ‘a cry to St. Michael to look at the state of England’.1 It has even been suggested that the famous close of the poem,
At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new,
may refer to the fact that blue was the colour of the Scottish Covenanters, already in revolt against Charles I by November 1637 when Milton wrote.2
And then there is that ‘two-handed engine at the door’, which ‘stands ready to smite once and smite no more’. Critics who complain of Milton’s obscurity here forget the censorship. He could hardly say in plain terms either that Laud should be impeached (if the engine equals the two Houses of Parliament); or executed (if it is an axe, or Michael’s two-handed sword (P.L. VI. 250–1), or a two-handed sceptre, or the ‘twa-handed sweard’ given to John Knox by the martyr George Wishart (the Scottish emphasis again); or called to account by the two kingdoms of England and Scotland. The two-handed weapon might also be the Old and New Testaments, or the law and the gospel, or ‘the sword of his mouth’ (Revelation 1:16 2:10) or a shepherd’s rod and crook – all various ways of describing the Protestant preaching which Laud was thought to be trying to suppress.3 (But then why ‘smite once and smite no more’? Preaching is surely a cumulative activity?) The whole beauty of the pastoral mode, under a strict censorship, was that meanings could be multiple, slippery, conveying an attitude rather than a precise statement. It was an art of which Milton was to become a master.
Two things about this memorial poem to a clergyman are especially remarkable. First, its fierce anti-clericalism and its covert hostility to the state church.
That fatal and perfidious bark
Built in th’eclipse and rigged with curses dark
has plausibly been identified with the Laudian church.4 In Comus the true church of the faithful, though tempted in the wilderness, had the inner resources which enabled it to survive. But in Lycidas there is no hope for the visible church in England. Individual souls, like Lycidas, may be saved when the ship founders; but the institution is doomed. This might be the attitude of a radical sectary rather than that of the relatively moderate Puritan that Milton is assumed to have been until the mid-forties. So indeed might Comus’s reference to ‘the canon laws of our foundation’, added to the text in 1637 (line 807). Milton’s later virulent hatred for the clergy is anticipated in his passionate denunciation of ‘hirelings’ who are in the ministry for what they can get out of it, as contrasted with the true pastor:
such as for their bellies’ sake
Creep and intrude and climb into the fold.
Of other care they little reckoning make
Than how to scramble at the shearers’ feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest,
Blind mouths!
(Lycidas. 114–19)1
A second point to note is the rather perfunctory part that the consolations of immortality play in the poem (lines 165–81). The forthcoming vengeance on the Church of England and its unworthy pastors interests Milton far more. The poem ends, as so many of Milton’s greatest poems will, by reminding us that life on earth goes on. He was always more concerned with this world than the next.2 Lycidas was published in 1638 only over the initials J.M.; Milton owned it for the first time in 1645. By then times had changed.
