Milton was no shy recluse, no sexless scholar. F. W. Bateson, speaking of the poet’s letters to Alexander Gil in 1628, rightly describes their tone as ‘humorous and self-assured, … exactly that of “L’Allegro” and “II Penseroso”.’4 Milton’s First Cambridge Elegy celebrates the attractions of British girls. His Fifth Elegy is, in Tillyard’s words, ‘full of sex’, of lustful satyrs (‘a god half-goat, a goat half-god’), of beds and bared breasts, of nymphs as anxious for rape as the earth is ready for the embrace of the sun.5 When he published these elegies in 1645 Milton felt obliged to apologize for them, for reasons which we shall discuss later.6 The Seventh Elegy describes a hopeless passion, the Italian sonnets probably record an experience with a real but unidentified Italian girl – Emilia – which, however, came to nothing. Even in the Nativity Ode, Parker points out, Milton is ‘conspicuously and unnecessarily concerned about guilty passion’.1
We should not make too much of Milton’s erotic imagery. But we should not make too little of it either. It is in part neo-Platonic common form; in part it derives from the Song of Songs and from Revelation. ‘To be with Christ is to have the marriage consummated’, Sibbes had written.2 Nevertheless, Milton exploited to the full the sexual imagery which the Christian tradition had read into the Bible. Its recurrence, especially in his early writings, is remarkable, from the Muses in Prolusion VII who granted him ‘the supreme favour’ to the conclusion of Epitaphium Damonis which envisaged Diodati taking part ‘for ever in the immortal marriage rite, … where the festal orgies rave in Bacchic frenzy’.3 In his divorce tracts and in the De Doctrina Christiana Milton was to speak of ‘the accident of adultery’ as a relatively venial sin. Love, Milton thought, was ‘not in Paradise to be resisted’.4 ‘Without love no happiness’, as Raphael blushingly put it (P.L. VIII.621; cf. 365, 633). In Paradise Lost Milton suggested that ‘fierce desire’ which could not be satisfied was ‘not the least’ of the torments which Satan suffered (IV. 505–11).5 Even after his blindness Milton could still flirt with a girl whose singing voice impressed him so much that he swore she must be beautiful.6
Milton quotes God’s own example to justify man’s need of woman. ‘God himself conceals not his own recreations before the world was built. “I was”, said the Eternal Wisdom, “daily his delight, playing always before him.”’ Solomon ‘sings of a thousand raptures between those two lovely ones, far on the hither side of carnal enjoyment’. And in Areopagitica Milton asked ‘wherefore did he [God] create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue ?’7 As in so many other matters, Milton here appears far closer to the antinomian fringe than to the austerities of orthodox Puritanism, though his firm conception of self-discipline and personal dignity held him back from libertinism.8 But it is not surprising that this distinction escaped those of his contemporaries who called him a libertine. On the surface they had a point.
In the Seventh Prolusion Milton assumed that human society and human friendship offer the greatest earthly happiness. To Diodati in 1637 he spoke of taking chambers in one of the Inns of Court, ‘both for companionship, if I wish to remain at home, and as a more suitable headquarters if I choose to venture forth’.1 Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips tells us of the ‘gaudy day’ which in the early forties Milton used regularly to keep with ‘some young sparks of his acquaintance, the chief whereof were Mr. Alphry and Mr. Miller, two gentlemen of Gray’s Inn, the beaux of those times’. When in 1642 Milton was accused of haunting brothels and playhouses, he indignantly and at length refuted the first allegation: he did not deny the second, and three years later he published evidence of its truth in his First Elegy. He smoked, wore a sword whilst he retained his sight, and was skilled in using it. He seems to have been a betting man.2 Music and exercise always played an important part in his life: both are emphasized in Of Education. The sonnet to Harry Lawes springs from friendship as well as professional respect.
At Cambridge Milton had been invited to make bawdy speeches, and he accepted. Prolusion VI is a rumbustious playing to the gallery, a piece of knockabout undergraduate humour. Yet it was not just a lapse. Milton clearly enjoyed the bawdry in this speech; he printed it in 1674, and in the fifties he equally enjoyed the firework display of obscene puns in his Defences – to the considerable embarrassment of commentators ever since who cling to the ‘aloof Puritan scholar’.
About Milton’s literary tastes we have to guess. He told Dryden much later that Spenser was ‘his original’. The publisher of Milton’s Poems introduced them in 1645 as imitations of Spenser; and Milton himself referred to Spenser as ‘a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas’.3 Spenser, like Milton, was the son of a London citizen. Neither was a court poet. But in Spenser’s time national unity survived in face of the threat from Spain and Catholicism: Spenser was associated with the radical Protestant wing in government circles, with Leicester, Walsingham, Ralegh. Spenser, like Milton after him, saw the poet’s as a high calling, reserved for the elect. He was God’s chosen agent, responsible to God for his country: in return God would send him inspiration. Spenser too was anxious to justify God’s ways to men. In the cave of despair belief that God was the author of evil could lead men to suicide or murder.
Spenser had affinities with the Puritans. Virtue is perfected by trial, in The Faerie Queene as in Areopagitica. False truth offers herself; real truth (Una) has to be won. The destruction of the Bower of Bliss has been regarded as an act of iconoclasm,1 to which Spenser certainly had no aesthetic objection. But his Epithalamion is not in the later sense of the word a ‘Puritan’ poem.
Pour out the wine without restraint or stay
Pour not by cups but by the bellyful.
Spenser cultivated some bourgeois virtues – Idleness, Gluttony and Lechery are the first three vices encountered in the House of Pride: waste is what they have in common. Sloth is the height of wickedness, parent of poverty and dissipation.2 Spenser’s is a philosophy of hard work, verging on a morality of success. Like Milton, he stresses the victory of small things over great, and denounces over-spending, waste which leads to stagnation and decay.3 ‘The general end … of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline’ – note the profoundly Miltonic word (cf. ‘This wild man being undisciplined’ – VI. v. 1.). In The Shepheardes Calendar Spenser was almost Brownist in his praise of a primitive unpaid priesthood.
Milton’s headmaster at St. Paul’s used to praise Spenser especially (‘our Homer’), together with Sidney (‘our Anacreon’), Harington (‘our Martial’), Wither (‘our Juvenal’), Daniel (‘our Lucan’) as well as Edward Dyer, John Davies and Ben Jonson.4 (Similarly Quarles called Phineas Fletcher ‘the Spenser of this age’. For Abraham Holland Browne and Drayton recalled Spenser.)5 That good Parliamentarian Anne Bradstreet’s political heroine was Queen Elizabeth: her literary heroes Spenser, Sidney, Ralegh and Du Bartas.6 The Spenserians, it has been said, could equally well be called Bartasians.7 There is no need to revive the question of Du Bartas’s influence on Milton; but Milton was reading him as early as 1625, he breathed the same intellectual atmosphere, and some of Milton’s less orthodox points are anticipated by Du Bartas/Sylvester.1
Greatest of the Spenserians is Walter Ralegh, whom I shall mention from time to time because of his association with the unorthodox ideas of Hariot and his circle. Milton, like most English radicals, greatly admired Ralegh. Toland says that Milton published Ralegh’s Maxims of State in 1642; in 1658 he printed The Cabinet Council, attributing it to Ralegh, from a manuscript which had long been in his possession. ‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint’ echoes Ralegh’s ‘Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay.’ Ralegh’s biographer suggested that Ralegh’s influence on Milton’s style would repay further investigation. It ‘is greater … than that of any other English prose writer’. We might go further and speculate on the attraction of Ralegh’s whole mode of thought for the young man who copied him so copiously into his Commonplace Book. Ralegh’s