personal needs into the political world and into the City of God. His high idea of himself, in another direction, will not let him admit that there is anything fundamentally bad in him. The sensual powers he feels so deep in him cannot be damnable. His sanity of mind shows him quite clearly that the normal instincts of human nature must be satisfied. Consequently, whereas the flesh is an evil power when it carries the mind away, when, on the contrary, its instincts are approved by reason, they are good and legitimate and must be listened to. The distinction appears in the divorce pamphlets. Milton's fundamentally sensual nature, on the one side, and his pride of intellect, on the other, came naturally to this compromise: sensual love is praiseworthy and sacred when it is made legitimate by the approval of reason; it is execrable, it is "the Fall," when it goes against reason; which means that when the minds are not in harmony, the union in the flesh is a degradation, even in marriage. Once again Milton generalized and formulated the rule, not only for sensual passion, but for all passion whatsoever. Probably there took place also at this time the further development of another of Milton's great philosophical ideas. We shall see that for him the body and the soul came to be one. Was it not in the anguish of his first unhappy marriage that this conviction first sank deeply into him? Then it was that he conceived that degradation of the body was degradation of the soul, and that the harmony to be established was not between two different powers, but within the same power. Then he felt himself wholly one, moved in his entirety, and suffering in his entirety, body and soul together, from the same pain. Then probably he acquired, sentimentally at least, the conviction of the unity of soul and body, which later made him reject altogether all dualistic doctrines. Thus Milton, through sentimental experience, came to a vision of several great conceptions, which we shall see shaping in the divorce treatises: the conception of sensuality, which is the triumph of the flesh over reason; the conception of the Fall, which is the triumph of passion over reason, sensuality being only one incident - howbeit the most important one-of the Fall; the conception of normal human nature - man's instinct is good in itself: only its aberrations are to be condemned; and reason is the criterion. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, written in 1643, was completely rearranged and much augmented in 1644. This second edition is far more readable and interesting. It is clearly divided into chapters and the author's ideas are more developed. The central idea of the book is that marriage, or love, must be based on intellectual harmony between man and woman. Where such harmony of feelings and thoughts does not exist, the marriage is null, and divorce should be pronounced on the husband's petition. Milton is much too dignified to bring his own case forward. He therefore puts himself in a false position from the beginning; and this brings a strong element of unconscious humor- for he is in such deadly earnest into the treatise. What drives him to plead for divorce is in reality his wife's refusal. But he cannot own that. Therefore he launches into the abstract thesis, and feels the pride of legislating for the universe, without - he thinks being influenced by his own case. But his personal situation is visible all the time, first by his preoccupation with writing down sensual passion, while in all his other works he stands for the legitimacy of physical love - and often in these treatises also; then by his evident interest in the means of curbing the flesh; and most of all by the intensely passionate nature of his argument, which throws the glamor of poignant and intimate poetry over splendid passages scattered here and there among the waste of scholastic argument. The lyrical accent is unmistakable. Milton was too much the poet to keep it down, even had he suspected that it betrayed him. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (if we join with it Tetrachordon, which is but a sequel and a repetition) is the most interesting, the most living work Milton produced in prose - if we are willing to skip over the waste places. The man, the thinker, the poet are visible and active under the polemist. Milton first addresses Parliament, with a hope of getting into civil law his ideas on divorce. His repeated appeals to Parliament, and their utter lack of any sort of result, in the end led him to apply a destructive philosophy to that institution. Milton insists on the mission of England. His ideas, once adopted by England, will conquer the world: Whatever else ye can enact, will scarce concern a third part of the British name: but the benefit and good of this your magnanimous example, will easily spread far beyond the banks of Tweed and the Norman isles. It would not be the first or second time, since our ancient druids, by whom this island was the cathedral of philosophy to France, left off their pagan rights, that England hath had this honour vouchsafed from heaven, to give out reformation to the world. Who was it but our English Constantine that baptized the Roman empire? Who but the Northumbrian Willibrode, and Winifride of Devon, with their followers, were the first apostles of Germany? Who but Alcuin and Wickliff, our countrymen, opened the eyes of Europe, the one in arts, the other in religion? Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live.50 Then he vindicates the rights and necessities of nature: It was for many ages that marriage lay in disgrace with most of the ancient doctors, as a work of the flesh, almost a defilement, wholly denied to priests, and the second time dissuaded to all, as he that reads Tertullian or Jerome may see at large. Afterwards it was thought so sacramental, that no adultery or desertion could dissolve it; and this is the sense of our canon courts in England to this day, but in no other reformed church else: yet there remains in them also a burden on it as heavy as the other two were disgraceful or superstitious, and of as much iniquity, crossing a law not only written by Moses, but charactered in us by nature, of more antiquity and deeper ground than marriage itself; which law is to force nothing against the faultless proprieties of nature. . . .51 Here is the ideal sought by Milton, fixed by God himself with contempt for the body and means of curbing the flesh; but is not physical passion glowing in the page? - First, we know St. Paul saith, "It is better to marry than to burn." . . . but what might this burning mean? Certainly not the mere motion of carnal lust, not the mere goad of a sensitive desire: God does not principally take care for such cattle. What is it then but that desire which God put into Adam in Paradise, before he knew the sin of incontinence; that desire which God saw it was not good that man should be left alone to burn in; the desire and longing to put off an unkindly solitariness by uniting another body, but not without a fit soul to his, in the cheerful society of wedlock?.. Whereof who misses, by chancing on a mute and spiritless mate, remains more alone than before, and in a burning less to be contained than that which is fleshly, and more to be considered; as being more deeply rooted even in the faultless innocence of nature. As for that other burning, which is but as it were the venom of a lusty and over-abounding concoction, strict life and labour, with the abatement of a full diet, may keep that low and obedient enough. . . . This is that rational burning that marriage is to remedy, not to be allayed with fasting, nor with any 50 Prose Works, III, 178. 51 Ibid., III, 181-82. ... penance to be subdued: which how can he assuage who by mishap hath met the most unmeet and unsuitable mind? Who hath the power to struggle with an intelligible flame, not in Paradise to be resisted, become now more ardent by being failed of what in reason, it looked for; and even then most unquenched, when the importunity of a provender burning is well enough appeased; and yet the soul hath obtained nothing of what it justly desires. Certainly such a one forbidden to divorce, is in effect forbidden to marry, and compelled to greater difficulties than in a single life; for if there be not a more humane burning which marriage must satisfy, or else may be dissolved, than that of copulation, marriage cannot be honourable for the meet reducing and terminating lust between two; seeing many beasts in voluntary and chosen couples live together as unadulterously, and are as truly married in that respect.62 And the following slur on poor Mary Powell is too well known to be omitted: when he shall find himself bound fast to an uncomplying discord of nature, or, as it oft happens, to an image of earth and phlegm, with whom he looked to be the copartner of a sweet and gladsome society, and sees withal that his bondage is now inevitable; though he be almost the strongest Christian, he will be ready to despair in virtue, and mutiny against Divine Providence. . . .63 Nor does he think humbly of his subject and did he ever of anything he undertook? to be wise and skilful in these matters, men heretofore of greatest name in virtue have esteemed it one of the highest arcs, that human contemplation circling upwards can make from the globy sea whereon she stands. . . .54 The second part of the Doctrine and Discipline is made up of repetitions which have little interest. Milton launches into an endless and baseless- criticism of innumerable Biblical texts. He brings at times undeniable ingenuity, but oftener mere lumbering awkwardness, to 52 Ibid., III, 191–92. - |