Milton | Page 8

dons of the ordinary sort: indeed, we know they were; but they could not have Milton among them for seven years without discovering that he was something above the ordinary undergraduate. Wood, who died in 1695 and therefore writes as a contemporary, says of Milton that while at Cambridge he was "esteemed to be a virtuous and sober person yet not to be ignorant of his own parts." Such young men may not be popular, but if they have the real thing in them they soon compel respect. By the undergraduates Milton was called "The Lady of Christ's." And it is plain, from his own references to this nickname in a Prolusion delivered in the college, that he owed it not only to his fair complexion, short stature and great personal beauty, but also to the purity, delicacy and refinement of his manners. He contemptuously asks the audience who had given him the nickname whether the name of manhood was to be confined to those who could drain great tankards of ale or to peasants whose hands were hard with holding the plough. He disdains the implied charge of prudery, and indeed his language is what could not have been used by an effeminate or a coward. No braver man ever held a pen. Wood says {32} that "his deportment was affable, his gait erect, bespeaking courage and undauntedness," and he himself tells us that "he did not neglect daily practice with his sword," and that "when armed with it, as he generally was, he was in the habit of thinking himself quite a match for any one and of being perfectly at ease as to any injury that any one could offer him." Evidently he owed his title of "Lady" to no weakness, but to a disgust at the coarse and barbarous amusements then common at the universities. He says of himself that he had no faculty for "festivities and jests," as indeed was to be witnessed by all his writings. The witticisms, if such they can be called, which occur in his poetry and oftener in his prose are akin to what are now called practical jokes, that is jokes made by the bodies of those whose minds are not capable of joking. This was partly the common fault of an age whose jests, as may be seen sometimes even in Shakspeare, appear to us to alternate between the merely obvious, the merely verbal, and the merely barbarous; but it was partly also the peculiar temperament of Milton, whose sense of humour, like that of many learned and serious men, was so sluggish that it could only be moved by a very violent stimulus. {33} But in the main with Milton there was no question of jests, good or bad. It is evident from his own proud confessions that he was always intensely serious, at least from his Cambridge days, always conscious of the greatness of life's issues, always uplifted with the noblest sort of ambition. He says of himself that, however he might admire the art of Ovid and poets of Ovid's sort, he soon learnt to dislike their morals and turned from them to the "sublime and pure thoughts" of Petrarch and Dante. And his "reasonings, together with a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness, and self-esteem either of what I was or what I might be (which let envy call pride) . . . kept me still above those low descents of mind beneath which he must deject and plunge himself that can agree to saleable and unlawful prostitutions." And in repudiating an impudently false charge against his own character he boldly announces a doctrine far above his own age, one, indeed, to which ours has not yet attained. "Having had the doctrine of Holy Scripture unfolding these chaste and high mysteries with timeliest care infused that 'the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body,' thus also I argued to myself,--that, if unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be {34} such a scandal and dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be much more deflowering and dishonourable. . . . Thus large I have purposely been that, if I have been justly taxed with this crime, it may come upon me after all this my confession with a tenfold shame."
Such was the man from the first, severe with others and with himself, conscious, almost from boyhood, in his own famous words, that "he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem"; a somewhat strange figure, no doubt, among the tavern-haunting undergraduates of the seventeenth century,