John Milton's Character
Simplicity: Egotism; Want or Humour
"As a man he was, despite his disconcerting contradictions, of a fundamental simplicity. He possessed an undue share of sensitive, irritable, and vaunting egotism; the turn of poets, but concealed by some of them better than by this subjective, almost humourless great man, who saw himself as God's nursing, as his country's prophet, and at the last as a vanquished Titan; and always, conquering or conquered, in the right. Ye this view of himself he must have politely subdued in intercourse with friends, for his company was esteemed and found agreeable. 'I never', said one of his biographers, 'heard that he was by any called morose'."
Warm-heartedness
"Of course, he was violent in controversy, somewhat humourless, egotistical, not one to suffer fools gladly, and sometimes unforgiving. But on the evidence of his early biographers, who are a safer guide than legal documents to an understanding of his character, he was also warm-hearted and generous, and one who never lacked the affection of numerous friends. If he was unduly proud, he pilloried his pride in the portrait of Satan; he made sacrifice after sacrifice for the causes in which he believed; and his steadfastness and courage in adversity exemplified the 'better fortitude of Patience'."
Humanism; and Puritanism
"His intellectual and artistic greatness, if they came mainly from his humanist side, were also fostered by the moral earnestness and in-tenseness which came from his Puritanism, while in morals it was to this Puritanism that he owed alike his virtues and his defects. The hardness which did not spare his own children, the intolerance which could see but one road into the kingdom of heaven, the ferocity, the contempt for sinners and for weaklings, sprang from rebellion against the formalism which seemed to go hand in hand with levity; and from the same rebellion came the passion for virtue, the devotion to duty, the elevation of principle, the lofty hatred of sin, which place him among the greatest of mankind."
Resisted the Pleasures of Love
It was at first intended that he should take orders, but he gave up this plan when Laud was tyrannizing over the Church of England and exciting Puritan indignation by Romanizing Anglican ritual. Thereupon he devoted himself entirely to preparing for his poetic mission. Meanwhile, the young man, handsome and pure, knew the temptations of love and confided the first stirrings of his heart and senses to Latin verses-the charm of the fair young girls he saw in London parks, the disquieting voluptuousness of spring, the loves of the earth and the sun bearing fruit at the year's renewal. He could readily have yielded to the pleasures of love and to the joys of wine also, for he knew that it was Bacchus and Venus who had always inspired the Muses. But he also knew them fitted to inspire only ordinary poets. He who aspired to the highest poetry, whose ambition it was to be an epic poet, must drink only pure water and have a youth chaste like that of a priest. Such, he resolved, his own youth must be.
Dr. Johnson's Adverse View of Milton's Character
Dr. Johnson, who paid a glowing tribute to Paradise Lost, had nevertheless a very unfavorable opinion of Milton's character and personality. For instance, this is how he looked upon Mary Powell's** desertion of Milton: "Milton was too busy to much miss his wife........At last Michaelmas arrived; but the lady had no inclination to return to the sullen gloom of her husband's habitation.......In a man whose opinion of his own merits was like Milton's, less provocation than this might have raised violent resentment and, being one of those who could easily find arguments to justify his inclination, published The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce."! Dr. Johnson expressed the following view about Milton's second marriage: "About this time his first wife died in childbed. As he probably did not love her, he did not long continue the appearance of lamenting her but after a short time married Katharine, a woman doubtless educated in opinions like his own. She died within a year of childbirth, or some distemper that followed it; and her husband has honoured her memory with a poor sonnet."+
And here is Dr. Johnson's final estimate of Milton's character: "Milton's republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness and a sullen desire of independence; in petulance impatient of control, and pride disdainful of superiority. He hated monarchs in the slate and prelates in the church; for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be suspected that his predominant desire was to destroy rather than to establish, and that he felt not so much love of liberty as repugnance to authority. It has been observed that they who most loudly clamor for liberty do not liberally grant it. What we know of Milton's character and domestic relations is that he was severe and arbitrary. His family consisted of women; and there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings. He thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion."
[William Laud (1573-1645) became Archbishop of Canterbury. He was
beheaded in 1645 on charges of high treason.
**Mary Powell was Milton's first wife.
†This was a tract which Milton wrote to justify divorce.
Actually this is one of Milton's finest sonnets.]
