Europe Comes to Mr Milton's Door, and Other Kinds of Visitation

Abstract

Using various meanings of “visit” and “friend” this essay freely explores connections between Milton's cultivation of fame in Europe, leading to reports in the early lives of visits of scholarly foreigners to his door, and the extraordinary concentration on scenarios of human and divine visitation in the late poems. Social, political and religious strands are followed, from humanist self-presentation in the sonnets through to prophetic isolation in the late poems. Codes of friendship are rehearsed concerning confidentiality and betrayal, and attention is paid to the effect of blindness on the activities of the humanist writer, the need for supporting visits, and an increasing interiority and preoccupation with the responsibilities of those engaged with God's special causes. The proto-humanist visit of Raphael to Adam in Paradise Lost and the many guiding visitations in that poem are contrasted with the situation in Samson Agonistes, where divine guidance is presented as clearer in the past than the present, and the reader is invited to share difficulties of discernment in the Restoration world, prefigured in Judges. The essay ends with the simultaneous publication of Milton's humanist legacy and sale of many of his foreign-language books.

Notes

1. This exploratory essay relates to a long-term book project on the discourses of friendship exchange in seventeenth century England, in which Milton is one of several cases studied. Materials may appear in some form in the monograph.

2. The Early Lives of Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1932), 7. Hereafter, the many references to the early lives are given by page number only in the text.

3. Gordon Campbell, “The Life Records,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 483–98.

4. On the importance of this mix of hospitable gift-acts, see my chapter “John Milton and Charles Diodati: Reading the Textual Exchanges of Friends,” in Young Milton, ed. Edward Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 105–34; also in Milton Quarterly 45.2 (2011): 73–94. For a review of all Milton's epistolary and gift-texts, see “Letters, Verse Letters, and Gift-Texts,” in Milton in Context, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 35–45.

5. Cedric Brown, “John Milton and Charles Diodati,” 129. There is an issue as to whether the privately printed text was sent to Dati or to the group of academicians.

6. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2.763, hereafter cited as CPW. The letter was written on 21 April 1647, and was a reply to a letter from Dati, now lost. Originals of Milton's letter, taken to Italy by a bookseller friend, and Dati's reply are in the New York Public Library.

7. Quotations from the poems follow the Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1997), and Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1998).

8. On seldom initiating epistolary exchange, see Brown, “Letters, Verse Letters, and Gift-Texts,” 40.

9. William Poole, “Theology,” in Milton in Context, 479. For a full review of Milton's doctrine, see Gordon Campbell, “The Theology of the Manuscript,” in Gordon Campbell, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona J. Tweedie, Milton and the Manuscript of “De Doctrina Christiana” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 89–120.

10. John Smith, Select Discourses (London, 1660), 262–63. I use Smith because of the clarity and comprehensiveness of his survey.

11. ‘Paqad’: Biblical Hebrew verb: attend to visit, muster, appoint; further meaning; observe (with care, practical interest). A Hebrew and English Dictionary of the Old Testament, based on the lexicon of William Genesius (London: Oxford University Press, 1907; rpt., 1959); a late form for ‘episkopéo’: to look at, inspect, examine; to watch over (of tutelary goods); to review (military); to visit (the sick etc.). Greek-English Lexicon, compiled by H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, revised by H. S. Jones, 9th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940; rpt., 1961).

12. On caring oversight, compare Marvell, “Bermudas,” 15–16: “And sends the fowls to us in care, / On daily visits through the air.” Milton uses “visit” also in impersonal situations, as when the “crisped brooks” “Ran nectar, visiting each plant” (4.240). Such uses may reflect other sources than the biblical.

13. Smith, Select Discourses, 210–28, devotes a whole chapter to demonstrating this out of Jewish authorities.

14. R. W. Serjeantson, “Samson Agonistes and ‘Single Rebellion’,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicolas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 613–31.

15. Lana Cable, “Secularizing Conscience and Republican Community,” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 277.

16. Mal. 2.16, quoted at CPW, 2.454.

17. Jeremy Taylor, A Discourse of the Nature, Offices, and Measures of Friendship (1657), 71–72.

18. Francis Finch, Friendship, n.d. [1654], Wing 2666:10, 9–10.

19. See Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 208), 362–63.

20. Darbishire, The Early Lives of Milton, 275; also the remark of John Toland at 192–93: “Towards the latter part of his time he contracted his Library, both because the Heirs he left could not make a right use of it, and that he thought he might sell it more to their advantage than they could be able to do themselves.” See Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 352 and 441.

21. Thomas Ellwood, The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood, 2nd ed. (London, 1714), 154–58 on reading; on the genesis of Paradise Regained, 246–47. See Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 320–21, 326–28.

22. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 364; Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658–1667 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 151.