Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/28

 xx THE LIFE OF MILTON

Milton's visit to Forest Hill was on this business, or whether he knew Mary Powell previously, we shall probably never know. Precipitancy in such a matter on the poet's part will surprise no one who has studied his character with attention. A great part of the stern self-control which belongs to the Milton of tradition was an outcome of the bitter consequences of this very marriage. He was from youth more than ordinarily susceptible to the charm of women ; boyishly, as we see in the first and seventh Latin elegies ; with a youth's wistful expectancy, as in the Sonnet to the Nightingale ; with a young man's chivalrous ardor, as in the Italian sonnets : and this susceptibility was greatly heightened by the austerity of a life which left the springs of concrete emotion untouched. Mary Powell was probably the first young woman with whom he came into intimate contact ; the freedom of a large household and the beguiling influences of country life were fuel to the fire ; and if a doubt arose concerning the parity of their taste and temper, it was natural both to the lover and to the idealist to believe in the power of masculine will to shape a helpmeet to its own image. He succeeded so well that before the honeymoon was over, the girl-wife returned to her home, ostensibly on a visit, but really in lasting rebellion against her husband's authority ; and the husband sat down in a white passion to write the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, on the thesis that a man has the right to put away his wife for incompatibility of temper. The majority of Milton's biographers, catching at certain phrases of this tract,

"a mute and spiritless mate," " bound fast to an image of earth and phlegm,"

have laid the rupture to the girl's hebetude. Others, notably Mr. Saintsbury, throw the weight of blame on the other side, pointing out that Milton held in the most uncompromising form the doctrine of the inferiority of woman, and that, as Dr. Garnett says, " his famous ' He for God only, she for God in him,' condenses every fallacy concerning woman's relation to her husband and to her Maker." The truth doubtless lies between. She, accustomed to the gaiety of a large house- hold near a Cavalier garrison, was terror-stricken at the silence which fell about her in her husband's sober Puritan house. He, twice her age and full of thoughts which she could not even guess at, was at no pains to fondle and coax her into con- tentment with this twilight life. If he did not go so far as an anonymous pam- phleteer charged him with going, to consider " no woman to due conversation accessible, except she can speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French, and dispute against the canon law," he was doubtless unwisely exigent and perhaps cruelly in- tolerant of the unfurnished mind which he had found in the place of that " sweet and gladsome society " of his love-dream.

The first pamphlet on divorce bears evidence of being written at a white heat. Both in its qualities and its defects it is a peculiarly Miltonic utterance. As in his Tractate on Education he had " legislated for a college of Miltons," here he legis- lates for a society of seraphim. Every man is to have power to loose and bind. No law shall have authority to " force a mixture of minds that cannot unite," nor make irremediable " that melancholy despair which we see in many wedded per- sons." It is the positive side of his doctrine, however, which is most eloquently

�� �