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Commons, "a beast not to be understood," because there were yet no definite parties, and because no machinery had yet been devised for securing co-operation between the executive and the legislative.

When Parliament met, the King yielded all the points at issue. He had already disbanded the newly raised forces; he now assented to the Bill appointing Parliamentary Commissioners to examine the public accounts (December 19, 1667), and permitted a searching enquiry into the naval miscarriage of the late war. But, though Charles promised never to employ Clarendon again, his enemies were not satisfied, and drew up articles of impeachment for high treason against the fallen Minister. The Lords refused to commit Clarendon, on the ground that the articles accused him of treason in general only, and did not specify any particular treason. There followed a complete breach between the two Houses. The commons voted that the refusal of the Lords was an obstruction of the public justice of the kingdom. In the meantime Clarendon, hearing that Parliament was to be prorogued, and that he was to be tried by a special Court erected for the purpose, took the King's advice and fled the kingdom. The two Houses ordered the vindication he left behind him be burnt, and passed an Act which banished him for life, and made his pardon impossible without their consent.

In dismissing Clarendon Charles had submitted to the will of Parliament-not for the first time, but more conspicuously than he had done before. But he did not feel that he had permanently surrendered any portion of his royal power. His concessions seemed to him, in his own words, rather "inconvenient appearances than real mischiefs." His new Ministers were his own choice, not imposed upon him by Parliament. The removal of Clarendon was the removal of a check upon his freedom of action; and in his heart Charles agreed with the courtier who told him that he was now King, which he had never been before. He began to meditate large projects at home and abroad, and initiated a policy of his own which was distinct from the official policy of his Government.

Clarendon lived until 1674 an exile in France. He spent the last years of his life in compiling a vindication of his political career, and in revising the exposition of constitutional royalism, which ultimately became the History of the Rebellion. The fundamental principle of that creed was the necessity of the union of Church and State. Clarendon's great political achievement had been the realisation of that principle by reuniting Parliamentary Government and the Anglican Church after they had been separated by the Civil War. One might almost say that the unconditional restoration of the old Church was the work of Clarendon, as the unconditional restoration of monarchy was the work of Monck. But, in achieving his purpose, Clarendon failed to perceive that toleration had become necessary to the peace of the nation, and his error led to the fall of the House of Stewart.

CHAPTER VI

THE LITERATURE OF THE ENGLISH RESTORATION,
INCLUDING MILTON

THE Renaissance did not bear its perfect fruit in England till late. Long after in Italy it had been defeated in its protracted struggle with the reactionary element in the Church, it continued in England to find fuller expression not only in the minds but in the characters of men. In the Florence of Milton's day the spirit of the Renaissance lingered only in the intellectual pastimes of the Academies. In England, where the study of the classics continued hand in hand with that of the Bible, the freedom won refused to stop short at the acquirement of mental elegance. It embraced the whole man, raising before him an ideal of life and conduct largely Hebraic in its consciousness of duty to a Deity who had selected a nation (and, according to some, here and there a person) for favour. At the same time, the chivalric ideals were not dead. The memory of Sir Philip Sidney, the Elizabethan perfect knight, was still active; Dante and Petrarch, "lofty fables and romances," and The Faerie Queene, were still consulted for moral guidance as well as for pleasure. And the study of the classics had encouraged certain notions of the Stoic philosophy, which were assimilated into the ideal. Of this ideal, the result of the joint action of Reformation and Renais sance, John Milton in his early years was the supreme example. That there were others, Mrs Hutchinson's record of the youth of her husband, who was born seven years after Milton, helps to show. There was little in it of what we now imply by the name Puritan. The arts were freely practised. Milton, who inherited a love of music from his father, preserved it to the end of his life and formed a friendship with Henry Lawes, a Court musician. And the great heritage And the great heritage as it had already come to be of Elizabethan imagination as lavished in the Elizabethan drama was in his youth still a matter of glory, not, as it became later, of shame. If Milton hissed academical comedies at Cambridge, he hissed them not because they were stage-plays, but because they were silly. If he wrote nothing for a theatre which had already begun to show signs of decadence and immorality, he wrote (and that not long after the publication of Histriomastix) two masques for performance, meditated

1630-7]

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for many years the composition of a Biblical or historical drama, and published, within three years of his death, a tragedy. His austerity was not that of a hatred, but of a severe choice, of pleasure. An intellectual and moral aristocrat, he disliked, not art, but vulgarity.

The humanist and the Puritan are often spoken of as two elements at war in Milton. Rightly regarded, they would rather seem to be interdependent, forming together the peculiar and beautiful result of the interaction of Reformation and Renaissance. So early as 1630 we find the two wrought into perfect harmony in the poem, At a solemn musick. The time was to come when they would be forced into opposition. Meanwhile, the youthful Milton is almost, if not entirely, such a man as he has been declared to have been-one who would not unnaturally have sided with the Cavaliers against the Puritans. His disinclination to take Orders may have been due partly to his inherited Calvinism, and his dislike of the growing Arminianism which followed Laud's elevation to the archbishopric; the final motive seems to have been his desire to reserve himself for something higher. He retired to his father's house at Horton, and there, while preparing for a greater task, he wrote, among other things, two poems, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso (1633 c.), which bring back into a world of decadence and barren conceits (conceits which his manuscripts prove him to have been at pains to avoid) something of the freshness of the Spenserian time, but chastened, scholarly, and informed with the constant suggestiveness of classical allusion. The poems paint nature as seen through two moods in the mind of a young scholar; they foreshadow, too, the coming conflict between those moods as expressed in Cavalier and Roundhead. To the same years of preparation belong the two masques, Arcades (1663 c.) and Comus (1634). The former is a work of the Jonsonian type: the latter is more interesting, not only for its superior poetry, but for the vision of the age that shows through it. Comus has been described as a double allegory. If it represents the conflict between virtue and vice, it represents also the conflict, now growing yearly sharper, between the two parties in religion and politics. In Lycidas (1637) we have a still stronger sign of the cleavage. Here, into the perfect pastoral, the last expression of the Spenserian influence, comes the first genuine note of the sublime passion for order in liberty which inflamed the remainder of Milton's life. Laud's insist

ence on uniformity was filling the pulpits with obsequious and greedy hirelings. The "sacred office of speaking" was "bought and begun with servitude and forswearing"; and the prophet, who formed so large a part of the poet as Milton conceived him, speaks for the first time in direct reference to national affairs. This was before the final separation. There were many afterwards to be found upon the other side who must have agreed with the passage in Lycidas concerning St Peter; and the two voices are still one.

Milton's enthusiasm for freedom in religious matters was probably

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Milton's travels

[1638-41

intensified by what he saw and learned during his travels on the Continent (1638-9). He must have heard from his friend Charles Diodati (the descendant of a family of Lucca which had emigrated in the sixteenth century to escape conformity with the Church) of the vigilance of the Holy Office and the Jesuits; and that he started with an almost dangerous amount of Protestant feeling may be deduced from the story of Sir Henry Wotton's famous warning, “pensieri stretti ed il viso sciolto." Paris, the home of experimental science, could not hold him, and he moved on to Italy. The language he had already mastered; the country he doubtless regarded as still the home of culture and the arts. Here he found matter to inflame him still further. He left an England where the battle was still to come for an Italy where it was long over. Nearly a century before, the establishment of the Holy Office, the activity of the Jesuits, and the accession of Paul IV had driven the Protestants from Lucca, Siena, and elsewhere, to Geneva and other places north of the Alps, to be joined there by Huguenot refugees from France. The Catholic Reaction had come, and the Academies where Milton was made an honoured guest were little more than schools of superficial elegance, of "flattery and fustian." In Florence Milton contrived both to speak his mind and to remain unmolested; in return, his Italian friends told him their real thoughts on the state of learning and life under the sway of the Church. In Rome he was shunned; at Naples Manso was afraid to make too much of him; at Florence, on his way back, he visited Galileo; at Geneva he was the guest of the Diodati and was able to contrast the conditions of life in the capital of Protestantism with that of the cities under the rule of the Church. To Milton's foreign travels we owe, indeed, the beautiful Epitaphium Damonis, in which he laments, in strains of genuine grief though with ample use of the conventional classic machinery, the death in England of his friend Charles Diodati, and other poems in Latin and Italian which prove him to have been still extremely susceptible to influences of beauty; we owe to them also an increase of his bias against religious authority.

Milton reached home in August, 1639. He had intended to include Sicily and Greece in his travels, but was recalled, as he himself records, by a sense of duty to his country, where lovers of liberty were preparing to strike a blow. His journey bore no immediate fruit; it was not till two years later that he put forth the first of his pamphlets.

The resolve to lay aside poetry to a more fitting time was not yet definitely formed; but the publication of the first pamphlet, Of Reformation touching Church discipline in England (1641) raises the question how far Milton deserted his first ambition in order to write his controversial prose works. More than any other man of his time, he had the consciousness of being dedicated. In his view, all men were dedicated to the service of the great Taskmaster; himself in particular was chosen for "the accomplishment of greatest things." He abstained

1641-60]

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from trade or profession, mainly in order to be free for more exalted work. His task was to be a poet; and his view of the office differed widely from that current in his own day and in the age that followed. A poet, in Milton's eyes, was not merely a sweet singer, but a prophet. The poet must be in himself a true poem; a man of knowledge, wisdom, and religion; and he must sing, not for gain or pleasure, or even "with God's help, for immortality" for himself, but for the service of God and of his country. There was, then, no renunciation, certainly no betrayal, of his high calling in the postponement of the great epic or drama for which he had been preparing himself since youth. God and his country had needs more pressing than poetry could satisfy, and, if the inception of the pamphlets shows a change in his methods, it shows no change of final aim.

It is not within the province of this chapter to discuss the pamphlets in detail. It will be enough to refer briefly to one or two general characteristics of Milton's prose works. His argument is not clearly conducted, nor is it truly philosophic. A constant discrepancy is to be noticed between the aspiration that possesses him and the theorem that he has to advance. The Areopagitica, for instance, shows no special knowledge and advances no practical schemes; in the Tractate on Education there is a deep fall from the principle to the scheme proposed. Of rhetoric there is plenty, sometimes magnificent, at others merely tinkling, at others tawdry. To read Milton's prose is to find frequent cause for wonder how the poet who chastened and solidified English blank verse after it had fallen into decay, could run so wild in working without the restrictions of metre. The want of arrangement, of construction, and of order, is almost as remarkable in the uncontroversial as in the controversial works. And the grossness, the malignity of the vituperation in which he occasionally indulged cannot be wholly excused even by a remembrance of the age in which he wrote, the enemies he was attacking, or the life and death struggle in which he engaged them.

In Milton's prose we find, it has been said, the poet in the politician. If the arguments are weak and the practical value small, the prose works are aglow with the highest purposes of the greatest mind of his time. The vision of the poet breaks through the question of the moment to the expression of a vast idealism inherited from the less hampered aspirations of the Elizabethans. However much this enthusiasm may be superficially affected in Milton's case by party spirit or the need of the moment, personal or political, it renders his prose more passionate and, at its best, more lofty than any other prose in the language. In arrangement and style we must mark a decline from the ordered dignity of Hooker; it is not so rich as Jeremy Taylor; for tempestuous passion, striving to force expression from an insufficiently developed medium, it has no equal. The passion at the root of it is the passion of liberty liberty always conditioned by the Divine Law as revealed in the "double Scripture" of the Bible and the Spirit that is given to each man as a