As we made ready for supper this same evening, I said, off-hand, in a railing speech to my sister Zara upon her unkindness to me: “By the bye, I shall require you for my bridemaid in about a month’s time. I hope you will not disgrace me in the church, nor put stale crumbs between the sheets when you deck my bridal bed.”
She laughed at me, for as yet she knew nothing of the match, nor of the purpose of my ride to Sandford. “Oh, yes, indeed,” she drolled. “I suppose you are to marry your sweetheart, Mr. Tiresias Milton.”
“Whom else?” I asked tartly. “You have so persistently linked us together with your idle quips these twelve months or more, and made such a coil of the matter that you have brought it at last to sober earnest. The man dotes on me.”
“Pooh,” she said, “I hate your jests; they have no bottom to them. You could never gull even little Betty with such extravagant nonsense as that.”
“Nay, Sister,” said I, “there you are at fault. It is no nonsense, I assure you upon my word.”
“I do not accept your word,” she said; “you have forsworn yourself too often for that. However, I will accept a fair wager upon the point.”
“What will you wager?” I asked her. “Come, you doubting she-Thomas, I am ready for you.”
“My jasper locket against your pearl locket that I have long coveted,” she cried at once. “Now strike hands upon it, if you dare!”
“I am not loath,” said I.
We struck hands and at once she caught me by the arm and lugged me downstairs to my brother James and, said she: “Here’s Marie has accepted a wager of her pearl locket against my jasper; she declaring that she is to marry Mr. Milton this coming month, and I that it is a nonsensical lie.”
For answer James reached over and unhooked the locket from Zara’s chain and then, putting it into my hand, clasped my fingers over it. Zara screamed at him for a base, cowardly confederate and tried to snatch the locket from me again, but I kept it. When she saw that she could do nothing by main force she ran off to make a complaint against me to my father, who laughed in her face; and she concluded that the whole household had entered into conspiracy to rob her. I presented the locket to my sister Ann, who had no trinket of her own at all, not even a ring; but she pitied Zara and after a time restored it to her.
On the third day we saw Mr. Milton again, which was the Sunday that the banns were asked in Church for the first time; and he sat beside my father to hear them. There was a great stir when my name was read out in accouplement with Mr. Milton’s, and a buzz of talking, and everyone craned his neck for a closer sight of the gentleman seated in our pew. At sermon-time the Reverend Proctor was kind enough to make amends to my parents and myself, for his injuries to us, by enlarging on the Scripture of the woman taken in adultery: “Where are now they that condemn thee? Neither do I condemn thee. Go and sin no more.”
My mother drew a sharp breath, clamped her teeth and bristled up her crest when she heard him read out the text; but he continued very prudently with his discourse and no scandal ensued. For now that this fine gentleman had dropped out of the sky (as the people whispered) to make an honest woman of me, the Reverend Proctor would do nothing in hindrance of his project. Indeed, he split his text very easily and charitably, his conclusions being that since God can condone neither fornication nor adultery, which are deadly sins, worthy of hell-fire everlasting; and since also our Lord, being God, had more perfect knowledge of the woman’s case than the Jews, her accusers—then, either we must believe that she had lain with a man who was, in truth, her husband, though this was not commonly known; or else that she had not lain with him, but that these Jews mistook culpable but silly frivolity for filthy copulative intercourse. The moral with which he bound up this edifying faggot was that careless women, using familiar words and gestures to men who are neither their husbands nor their kinsfolk; or timorous women who marry in hugger-mugger (for fear of their kinsfolk) and continue to pass for virgins—that all such foolish hussies must expect to be reproached for whores when they are catched.
As we came out of Church Mr. Milton complained to my father, who inquired of him, why did he not seek Church preferment, that though he had from childhood been intended for Holy Orders by his father, he was prevented in this by his conscience from taking them, because of the Bishops and the Liturgy; he also said that he who would take Orders must subscribe “slave” and take an oath withal, which would be, for himself, rank perjury. Yet if this were true (as my brother James said, after Mr. Milton had departed the house), how came it that his conscience had not kecked at the customary oath, when he became a Master of Arts at Cambridge University, and later when he was admitted to a degree at Oxford? For there he willingly and ex animo confessed that the King’s Majesty, under God, was the sole spiritual authority in his Dominions; that the Book of Common Prayer and of Ordering of Bishops contained nothing in it contrary to the Word of God; and that the whole Thirty-Nine Articles (with their ratification) made in the year 1562 were agreeable to the Word of God.
On that afternoon Mr. Milton proposed to my mother that he and I should go out riding together and become better acquainted, but asked that for decency’s sake my brother James should ride with us. My mother pleasantly agreed to this and the horses were fetched. When we were already mounted and come to the gate by the road my brother James inquired whither we were bound. Mr. Milton answered: “To Wheatley, to see the lands of my inheritance, which I sold to your father, but which are mortgaged to me since two years ago.”
I said nothing, though this matter was new to me; my father, I suppose, not having wished to confess to me that he had mortgaged to Mr. Milton an estate already mortgaged to Mr. Ashworth. This mortgage to Mr. Milton was doubtless made in confirmation of his old debt under statute-staple; but doubtless also Mr. Ashworth still had a claim upon the land until the interest due to him by his mortgage should be paid; which interest, reckoned at 8 per centum, must be now risen to near £300, which was the amount of the original loan.
For awhile we three walked or trotted our horses side by side; and it was a cold, dull day with more of November in it than May. At first Mr. Milton discoursed to James upon the Latin and Greek poets, commending this one and condemning that, until James said: “I confess, sir, that though, for my studies, I must needs acquaint myself with these old Greeks and Romans, yet I love better by far the poets of our own tongue and century. I regret often that I am not of an age to have assisted at the gatherings held at the Devil Tavern by Temple Bar in the days when old Ben Jonson held court there. Since, sir, I learn that you dwelt in a house not far from The Devil and that you wrote verses precociously, I expect to hear from you that you were ‘sealed of the tribe of Ben’; and that you were familiarly acquainted with many of those whom I hold in reverence, as, among dramatic poets, John Ford and John Webster and, among satirists—”
Mr. Milton interrupted him: “Nay, Boy James, you have mightily mistaken your brother-to-be, who was never sealed of any man’s tribe, but is as truly his own priest and ancestor as Adam was. I deny not that once or twice I was a visitant at the Apollo Room at The Devil, drawn there by the hope of meeting with some particular person with whom I desired discourse; but there were many several things that I disliked in the management of the society that gathered there. First, the idolatrous adulation paid to that rugged-faced canary-swilling monster Ben Jonson, who, though learned enough and a skilful contriver of plays, was neither omniscient nor civil, and could not bear to come off second-best in any amicable trial of wit; did any young man dare to contradict this Polyphemus in a point of learning, there rose up minions ready to huff and hustle him out of the room as though he were a vulgar church-brawler. Second, the familiar manner of address in use in the Apollo Room, with every Thomas a Tom, and every Robert a Robin; since I have never answered to any name but my baptismal name of John, I would not be a Jack to please them. Third, that by the rules of the society learned women were admitted; I hold learning not to be a requisite in a woman and dangerous when it cocks her up to argue rationally with men upon such questions of art and science as were there debated. Fourth, that of old Ben’s favorite sons, the most were drunkards and many were raddled with the pox (as his now-laureate successor, William Davenant, one of your Oxford she-men, yet perhaps inheriting something of the wit of his godfather, William Shakespeare, whose bastard he is commonly said to be); or else they stank of the claps so that I could not relish then-company. Indeed, ‘The greater part, beasts were in life and women were in heart.’ Fifth, that they bandied across the tables, where they sat, boorish and fescennine jests, mingled with vain interjections of God’s name. Sixth, that old Simon Wadloe, the host, charged for wine above the legitimate price and every night called for a collection of money that palsied old Ben might fuddle himself into insensibility at the common cost. Seventh—let me roundly conclude with a seventh—that on the few occasions when I was present I heard nothing, either spoken or recited or sung, that was worth a wise man’s crossing the street to hear; why, at my last visit all the praise was for the swinish rough rhymes of one John Skelton, a scandalous buffoon, by our Eighth Henry in merriment styled his Vicar of Hell, and for the amatory poems of evil John Donne, sometimes Dean of St. Paul’s, whom, most crack-patedly, Ben cried up as ‘the first poet of the Age in some things, above Edmund Spenser even’—which put me into so great a choler that I went out.”
James tried Mr. Milton with another question, saying: “Yet, sir, since I believe that poets are wont to seek out the company of poets, doubtless you made one of the select company that met often, a few years since at my Lord Falkland’s house of Great Tew, which lies beyond Woodstock, where no man presided magisterially over his fellows, not even my Lord himself—”
“Nay, for how could he have so presumed upon the accident of his birth?” cried Mr. Milton. “A little black-eyed, flaggy-haired, scurvy-visaged poetaster with an ill-attuned voice in which he smatters of many sciences, having mastery of none. He did at one time indeed make a handsome show of throwing open his house to men of eminent parts and faculties who might study there in his well-stocked library; but either he had poor judgment in his choice of whom he called thither, or else they abused his hospitality; for upon my word, scarce one came to Tew whose parts or faculties I could admire. I remember that there was a great session, or convivium of London Wits once held there (an overflow from the Devil Tavern). Old Ben himself was somehow conveyed to the house, drunk as a wheelbarrow, dressed in his old slit coat, like a coachman’s, and all untrussed, with a rabble of Carews and Wallers and Sucklings and Montagues and such trash following after. I myself was not bidden to come; the which I accepted for a compliment rather than resented as a slight; for Ben’s way was ever to engross the whole stage, vapouring only of himself. Lately, I hear, the Lord Falkland has thrown over these pretended poets and dabbles with philosophy instead, putting himself under the discipline of one Chillingworth, a saturnine Oxford man, who preens himself as a theologian (having, forsooth, been godson to that little red-faced crop-head, Archbishop Laud) and who was, for a while, a Papist, and is now, on account of a foolish book he has written, cried up as a second Richard Hooker—as though one Ecclesiastical Polity were not idol enough for the time! This is the same man who turned spy and informer to the Archbishop when my former schoolmaster, Mr. Gill, spoke some sharp words against the King in your College buttery of Christ Church.”
“I am well acquainted with Mr. William Chillingworth,” said James, “who is my godfather, as the Archbishop was his, and shows an extraordinary kindness towards me.”
Yet Mr. Milton paid no heed, and ran on: “Besides this Chillingworth, the Lord Falkland called in Dr. Sheldon of All Souls College, a shrewd man of business, who jests at religion except as it be used as an instrument of State, and pretty Jack Hales who is so tenderhearted that he has avouched that he would renounce the Church to-morrow if he were obliged by it to believe that any other Christian should be damned for holding a contrary view to his own! Like his master the Lord Falkland, he is suspected to be a Socinian, after the detestable school of Racow in Poland, now happily broken up. Out upon the little short-arsed ninny-hammer!”
“Nevertheless, sir,” said James, “I understand that the learned antiquary John Selden, before he was elected to this Parliament, was so long a guest at Great Tew that almost it became his domicile.”
“Ay, true,” Mr. Milton answered. “Mr. Selden is a most indefatigable plodder and searcher of obscure records, from whose discourse I have profited; but I argue from the strange company which he customarily keeps, dwelling so much in the imagined society of outlandish and long-deceased barbarians, that he has grown callous and indurated to the faults of living men. Or it may be that, being born in a nasty hovel, of mean parents, he was never choice in company from childhood forward.”
My brother James continued: “And what of Mr. George Sandys, who has translated a work of Grotius—”
“For Grotius I confess a profound reverence,” interrupted Mr. Milton. “I had the honour of his acquaintance when I went travelling abroad three years ago, and deplore that any work of his pen should be barbarously Englished by Georgie Sandys! Have you perhaps read his inept translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid? Ovid, though a paltry, whining wretch, was tunable at least; and Sandys unkindly denies him even his tunableness and leaves plain beastly what was beastliness disguised. And his versifying of the Scripture—it is indeed nothing decent! I believe that your Lord Falkland has complimented him in verse upon his rendering of the Psalms, writing that ‘he shakes the dust from David’s solemn lyre.’ ‘Shakes the dust’ quotha! The dust on David’s lyre lies golden like the pollen in the lily; but Sandys, with no more knowledge of Hebrew than an ass has of brewing beer, and not the least awe or respect for David’s immortal verse, puffs off this golden dust with his insensate bellows, and shakes on, instead, the dust of coal and fallen soot from a smooty hearth-basket.”
Since he found that he could make no headway in this conversation, my brother James excused himself and asked leave to gallop across a wide, rough field on our right hand; to weary his horse, he said, which dragged at the bridle too freshly.
Thus Mr. Milton was left alone with me, for the first time in our acquaintance; but said nothing for a long while, and neither did I. I had decided to reserve my thoughts and opinions from him, so far as that were possible, until he chose to enquire for them. At last he said: “Your hair delights my eye, pretty Child. Without doubt, Eve had tresses like yours.”
I answered ingenuously: “Indeed, sir, your delight contents me. Every morning I quicken my hair with my brush.”
Then he said: “After I had seen you for the first time, your hair became an obsession of my mind: for it wreathed itself between my eye and what book soever I studied, though it might be the Holy Bible itself, coming with a gadding or serpentine motion until it choked the sense of my reading.”
“I am sure that I am heartily sorry if I inconvenienced you,” said I, playing the simpleton.
“Yours was neither the first nor the only hair that ensnared my eye,” he said, “but certainly, it drew its snare the tightest; however, when I found experimentally that by no act of ratiocination, nor any ascetic exercise, could I circumvent or remove this strange affection of the eye, and also that only the hair of virgins had the same grand compulsion for me, I was no longer dismayed. I concluded it to be God’s will that I should render humble submission to Him, and so enter into wedlock, wherefrom for certain choice reasons I had conscientially refrained: for thus I should be able to gloat upon your hair legitimately, and soon (because of its daily and nightly familiarity) I would be no more plagued with it, in my visionary sense, than I am now by my own ears.”
“I am but ill instructed in the ways of the world,” said I, “but confess that this sounds as a queer reason for a man to come courting. Now perhaps you will answer me fairly: what were your consciential reasons for avoiding marriage?”
Then speaking to me in simple language, without his customary convolutions of oratory, he answered: “Since you are to be the wife of my bosom, I will now disclose to you what I have never broken to any other person living. I made a private vow of chastity when I became a poet, as other men have made this vow upon their entry into a monastic order. To be a complete poet, a man needs a pleasant and secure life, without the cares attendant on commerce or the Law of husbandry—and in such a life my wise and generous father has ever indulged me. Also he must seek out and gather up for his use a huge store of various learnings, with all the arts and sciences linked together philosophically in a commodious and comprehensive system; and music he must have in sufficiency; and foreign travel. Yet all this, I said, is nothing without perfect chastity, for in chastity resides a magical power of compelling words to subservience; without which no poet may hope for immortal fame, lively to flit from mouth to mouth of men,’ as Lucretius wrote.
“Now, as you may know, there are two main branches of the Tree of Poesy, namely the lyric and the epic (but with the lyric goes the pastoral poem, the ode and the hymn; and with the epic goes the grand dramatic poem); and a complete poet, as Homer, Virgil and Dante, is found excellent in both branches. Lately, when I considered that I had attained to a certain perfection in the lyrical art, I resolved (though tempted to write a few odes and hymns before passing on) at last to undertake the epical. However, I bethought me that as there are two kinds of poetry, so also there are two kinds of chastity, namely the chastity of the unmarried, which is perfect abstinence; and the chastity of the married, which is neither to commit adultery, nor to be greedy of the sensual pleasures by Nature permitted to a married man. I concluded that as lyrical perfection is conformable with the chastity of the unmarried, so is epical perfection with that of the married; and that, before he may write a noble and immortal epic, or grand dramatic poem, a man must first achieve the satisfaction of his natural flesh. That I have never known a woman carnally is, I believe, the cause why I am now so greatly delayed in the task which I have set myself—for no sooner did I set my lips to those new pipes, than they burst their bands and flew in sunder. My conscience tells me: ‘Marry.’ And in that opinion I was confirmed when, having offered up a prayer to God, I opened the Bible at a venture and looked, and read the text where my eye rested, which was this, from the one-and-twentieth chapter of Leviticus:
“‘And he shall take a wife in her virginity.’
“‘A widow, or a divorced woman, or profane, or an harlot, these shall he not take; but he shall take a virgin of his own people to wife.’
“My own people, as you know, Mistress, have resided upon this same ridge of hill that we now ride upon, for generations out of mind.”
“You have answered my question so freely,” said I, “that I am emboldened to ask you yet another. Why was it that, when I first saw you, at Woodstock Town End, you gave your alias as ‘Tiresias’?”
“This question too,” said he, “is pertinent to my discourse, and I will answer it. As a child, I was at first bold and vigorous, but one day, when I was about eight years old, a playfellow of mine died very suddenly as we tumbled together in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He was suspected to be dead of the plague and when I came home they stripped all my apparel off me and burned it in the bakehouse oven, and shaved off my hair close to the poll, and enclosed me in a room where sulphur burned like Fogo so that I was nearly choked. I did not take the plague, and I believe now that my playfellow died from some other cause; yet from that time forward for many years, until my hair had grown again to its full natural length, I was feeble and womanish, with headaches, megrims, and ill vapours ascending from the stomach to the brain, and also I conceived strange amatory fancies for persons of my own sex. Indeed to one friend, who was of Italian blood and died not long ago, I was in my affections more like a solicitous wife than a trusty comrade. I can yet remember how a woman’s heart longs for a man, but because of a sense of decency, common to us both, I was never catamite to this friend, and therefore my remembrance is void of shame.
“Doubtless, the poet Tiresias who, as the Greeks allege, killed a sacred serpent, and so became for a while a woman in body was, when at last he was restored to masculinity, the better poet for his long unmanning; for the power to put apt speeches in the mouths of women is necessary for the complete poet. I am assured that the Greeks in this legend made reference not to serpents slain, but to serpentine locks unluckily shorn off. For in the man’s hair resides the holy masculine virtue of man: as the Lord said unto Moses, speaking of the priestly sons of Aaron: ‘They shall not make baldness upon their heads.’ This same mystery was understood of Samson and the Hebrew Nazarites; and may also be apprehended from the history of the Romans, who (by a foolish glabrification of their heads) sheared away the original Republican virtue which was their glory and became, first effeminate factionists, then slavish worshippers of an Emperor, and at last a prey to the lusty, long-haired barbarian. Remark, also, the effect of the priestly and monastic tonsure upon wisdom and learning: how the glorious locks of ancient Greece are cropped and depilated, and true religion debauched! Moreover, as we read in ancient histories, the powerful bards of our own island would not suffer their locks to be shorn, and thereby kept their prophetic power unimpaired.”
Mr. Milton paused, in the expectation that I would say something. I said, to soothe him (for he had told his tale in a very passionate and pathetic manner), that this single clipping of his young hair had perhaps served to make it shoot the stronger; as had happened with Samson’s love-locks while he was in the prison-house at Gaza.
My observation evidently pleased him. He told me that whenever he was busy with a poem he, like a Nazarite, or like Tiresias and Homer, drank nothing but pure spring water the while. Then boldly he asked me, did I not consider that he had a fine head of hair?
I replied merely: “Yes, sir. I have no fault to find with it.” Whereat he appeared more than a little dashed in his pride, yet said nothing. I could not lie: for Mun’s hair was the longer, the silkier, the more thick-set, the more curling, the nobler beyond comparison. However, I covered what was in my mind, by saying: “I have been accorded so much undeserved praise on account of my own hair, and so little on account of the rest of my person and whatever deserts I may have, that I cannot readily admire fine hair in another.”
He replied: “Yet you must learn to admire mine, for I am to be your husband. Now to tell you another thing. Between women and men almost all things go by contraries; and when a woman cuts off all her hair, which is her crowning glory, she becomes unwomanly, a lusty, swearing virago of a muscular strength equal to a man’s, and falls into unnatural inclinations. Therefore since a man requires docility and humility of heart in his wife, I have in my prudence marked you down as mine, being assured that your copious hair bespeaks perfect femininity.”
“I trust you are right, sir,” said I, giving him a grave look. “For though I may be simple and unlearned, yet I hope you will not find me saucy.”
James had been coursing a hare, which he lost when his hound started another; and presently giving up the chase for weariness he rejoined our company. He persuaded Mr. Milton to speak about the poems which he was writing or had in mind; who spoke so largely and eloquently that the discourse took us to Wheatley (where he viewed the estate very attentively) and halfway back again. He told us of his grand and solemn drama, divided into five Acts, to be titled Adam Unparadised.
“Before the First Act,” said he, “Moses prologizes, recounting how he assumed his true body after his disappearance from common sight upon Mount Pisgah—how this body corrupts not, because of certain pure winds, dew and clouds that preserve it, since it was once made wholesome by his being with God upon the Mount. Then, because it is not convenient to present a naked man (much less a naked woman) upon a public stage, he acquaints the audience that Adam and his newly created wife, Eve, are with him upon the stage, yet cannot be seen, because they are yet in their state of innocence, and no gross eyes may look upon them.”
“That is a very sly and circumspect avoidance of a difficulty,” said James. “Pray tell me, sir, how does the First Act go?”
“Why in the First Act,” he answered, “the Archangel Gabriel appears and gives some account of Paradise, and explains that since this Earth was created he is as frequent here as in Heaven. A chorus of Angels inquires why he is so often seen, and he replies that since Lucifer rebelled he must keep his watch upon this excellent new creature Man, lest Lucifer seduce him. Then enter Justice, Mercy, Wisdom (resplendent figures) and debate what will become of Man if he fall. The Chorus then sing a tremendous Hymn of Creation with strophe and antistrophe; but of this Act as yet only scattered lines have been communicated to me and none at all of the Second. However, I know that in the Second Act Lucifer appears, after his overthrow by the Archangel Michael, and bemoans himself and seeks revenge on man; when the Chorus, who prepare resistance at his first approach, inform him that since a woman has been found to keep man from loneliness, and a beautiful one, Lucifer can hope for no success. Yet this he denies and tells them that his task is now, contrary to their opinion, made easier. Then, after discourse of enmity on either side, he departs and the Chorus sing another great hymn of the battle and victory in Heaven against Lucifer and his accomplices.”
“Have you written anything of the Third Act?” asked James.
He answered: “I have indeed, and though this is not above five-and-twenty lines it would be ungrateful in me to God to pretend that it is not sublime work. First Lucifer appears and insults. Then Adam and Eve, having by this time been seduced by the Serpent, appear confusedly, dressed in garments of leaves. Conscience, in a shape, follows after Adam and accuses him, and Justice cites Man to appear for God’s examination; in the meantime the Chorus entertains the stage and is informed by some Angel of the manner of his Fall.”
I asked: “Does not Conscience also follow after Eve? Is she not also cited to appear?”
Mr. Milton did not answer me, but raised his voice a little as if in warning against needless interruption, as he proceeded: “This Act closes, as I said, with the Angel’s account of Adam’s fall. The Fourth Act, which is not yet ripened and come to any degree of digestion, will show Adam and Eve again, who accuse one another; but especially Adam casts the blame upon his wife, is stubborn in his offence. Then Justice appears again, reasons with him, convinces him, and the Chorus admonishes Adam, offering Lucifer’s impenitence as an ill example. In the Fifth and last Act comes an Angel with a sword to banish the guilty pair from Paradise; but, before, presents Adam with a masque of all the evils of this life and world, which he horrifically names (as he also named the brute creation) with the new names of Labour, Grief, Hatred, Envy, War, Famine, Pestilence, Sickness, Fear—as being shapes not before known. He is humbled, relents, despairs. At last appears Mercy, comforts him, promises the Messiah, then calls in Faith, Hope and Charity, who instruct him. He repents, glorifies God, submits to his penalty. The Chorus briefly concludes.”
“Pray tell me more of our mother Eve,” said I. “Was she indeed untroubled by Conscience, and thereafter unrepentant, as seems from this account?”
“The title of my drama,” said Mr. Milton sternly, “is not The Famous History of Adam and Eve, as you would make it, but Adam Unparadised. Adam, being of the perfecter sex, is the protagonist, and Eve is but the incidental instrument, or accessory, of his crime against God. She suffers with him, since she originally was his rib taken from him while he slept; and being his wife she is, on this account also, one flesh with him; she has not dividual standing before God, but is included in her husband’s penalty, and not more particularly itemized in the indictment than those other guilty ribs which were still joined to his breastbone. Nay, indeed, it was Adam’s foolishness, when he pleaded that Eve sinned and not he, which exasperated God. He was as a froward child who cries when he has broken a cup or platter: ‘It was not I who broke it, Mammy, it was my hand!’”
“Does this mean,” I asked, “that a woman can do no wrong, except as her husband does wrong too?”
“That is an ill-considered question,” he answered. “A woman’s whole duty and knowledge should be attentive obedience to her husband, and this, if he does not enforce, so much the worse for both of them. Certain is it that a woman cannot be any better conditioned, as to her soul, than the man with whom she is united in flesh—if he sink to hell, necessarily he will drag her with him—whereas a man who is bound to an evil woman may yet save his soul by separating himself from her, in like manner as the Scripture requires him to pluck out an eye that offends him, or hew off an offensive hand.”
“That is a hard conclusion,” I said, “and a rough warning to fathers to marry their daughters to men of good principle.”
To give the conversation a shove in another direction, James then asked for what stage Mr. Milton had designed the play; for the managers of the common playhouses would look down their noses at a play in which they found no modernity of incest, murder or bawdry: for those were the only get-penny themes of the day. Besides, as was well known, the new Parliament—in vengeance of Presbyterial Mr. William Prynne, M.P., who by the King’s order had been close-cropped of his ears and long imprisoned for his book Histriomastix, written against players and play-goers—Parliament was resolved to close the theatres altogether, as being beyond hope of reformation. This play which Mr. Milton had described, said James, being in five Acts, was drawn out in time beyond the customary length of a masque or interlude, even were a nobleman found both devout enough to approve the theme and rich enough to bear the expense of staging it.
Mr. Milton rode on pensively for a while and then he said: “I have hopes that, with the alteration of the times, Parliament will be persuaded to act upon a design which I have in mind: which is to borrow from the Attic Greeks their custom of solemn dramatic panagories upon holy days—such as indeed were once presented in this country under the title of ‘mysteries,’ but then indiscriminately and lewdly by companies of tradesmen, not with noble and considered magnificence by command of a sovereign parliament. What I have in mind is, that tragedies of stateliest and most regal ornament should be performed in such places as Westminster Hall or the Great Hall of Christ Church at Oxford, and that stale comic hodgepodges or villainous ranting exhibitions of blood and brutishness should be everywhere by Law forbidden. To a theatre thus renewed and reformed, a millenniary phœnix, I design to bequeath my play.”
This sentiment closed our conversation, and being now arrived again at Shotover, by common consent we spurred our horses forward and were soon riding in at the Manor-house gate.
Mr. Milton came up from Oxford to our house twice or thrice before the wedding and discoursed a great deal. We were all mighty busy in the house with the making of wedding clothes and fitting me out with necessaries. I was promised two black silk gowns, but received only one, and a pink-coloured gown to be married in. The expense of the clothes alone cost my father above £60. I loved Mr. Milton neither better nor worse as I came to know him. I had already deduced his character and stature from my first sight of him—ex pede Herculem,4 as the saying is. Mr. Milton’s stature (to write figuratively) was not above the middling; yet he hoped, by taking religious thought, to add four or five cubits to it and straddle across any hall or court like a Colossus of Rhodes. In agreeing to marry him, I had reasoned that he would hold himself in such haughty superiority that I could live, in a manner, apart from him; as I could not hope to do with any man of lesser pretensions or earthier inclinations. Only thus could I preserve unhurt that true and enduring love that bound me to Mun. How nicely or how mistakenly I thus reasoned, my consequent story will show.
Meanwhile, to tell of our marriage, which was performed on a morning so wet that I had to be carried by my brothers all the way from our coach to the church porch, because the path between the hollies was a rushing torrent. The old wives prognosticated from this flood that the marriage would be a fruitful one.
However, the rain abated as soon as ever the jangling bells ceased—they jangled so in my ears that morning that they drove me nearly out of my wits. Not a great many of our kinsfolk and acquaintances were gathered in Church, for the notice given them had been but a short one. It was also on this very day, as it happened, that Mun’s little sister Cary, who had been wedded to Sir Thomas Gardiner the Younger, came with him from London to his house at Cuddesdon; and much company was drawn thither to congratulate not only his marriage, but also the enlargement from prison of his father, the elder Sir Thomas.5
Mr. Milton had at first made difficulties about the use of a ring in our marriage, holding it no less idle and superstitious than the cross in baptism. My mother declared that he might please himself about the baptismal cross when he had begotten children on me, but “no ring, no wedding,” said she, for without a ring she would not consider me truly wedded—neither would I myself; and I must not have my conscience forced in this. Let him say what he might say, she would not tolerate the omission of the ring. So he yielded to her, for though the curate seemed willing enough to let him have his way, my father was the rector and had the last word.
In acknowledgment of Mr. Milton’s suppleness in so “bowing his knee in the House of Rimmon” (as he expressed it), my father at his request forbade the customary tilting at the quintain. For this old sport was still in use among us in Oxfordshire, and the man who, riding at the board with a stave for a lance, could first break it, wore the gay garland and was accounted the Best Man at the wedding. He had for his reward the privilege of carrying home the bride with her legs about his neck, and when she was fairly over the threshold, of pulling off her garters to wear in his hat. This Mr. Milton held a rude and nasty custom; but that children should strew flowers as we walked from the Church door to our house, he accepted as jolly; as also that there should be rustic gitterning and horn-blowing before us and a scrambling for halfpence by the boys, and comfits of honey and almond bestowed upon the girls.
In the Church porch, where my brother Richard was brideman at the spousals, I played my ceremonial part in a sort of trance; and when the ring was drawn upon my finger and I solemnly plighted my troth, I heard my voice proceed as it were from another mouth than mine, and concluded from the strangely-worded undertaking, to which I engaged myself, that it was not myself who spoke.
All the country sent us in presents—a brace of bucks from the Tyrrells, and from others wine, fish, wild fowl, fruit and all good things; and in return my father gave or sent out a score and a half of bridelaces, and three-score pairs of coloured trimmed gloves for wedding tokens, of Oxford make. It had been agreed that the celebration of our marriage should be in several parts: a breakfast at the Manor-house, whither all the tenants should come and drink ale and eat tarts and pies—which they had already done, very voraciously; next the spousals at the Church door and the blessing given in the Church; next, a banquet in our hall, for the nobility and gentry, with bumpers and speeches. After this, our whole family would take horse or coach to London, to conclude the merry-making there at Mr. Milton’s house: for my husband held it indecent for a woman, on the first night of her marriage, to be under her father’s roof. He railed against the vicious and frantic fashion of dancing in use at country weddings. He said there was such running and leaping and capering, against all tune and measure, such obscene, naughty language, such rude tumbling of the women’s apparel by the young men and shameless lifting up of their skirts, as he would never suffer in his own house; and he detested that his bride should be required to keep foot with all dancers and refuse none, however drunken, scabbed, bepoxed, rude, awkward or stinking-breathed one might be. Moreover, he intended on his bridal night to be where he could set a guard at the door of the chamber, that no mannerless louts and hussies might stand outside, to sing smooty ballads and take turns at the keyhole, as the base custom was.
Of the banquet in our hall I remember little, for I was in such a confusion of mind, which I increased by drinking a great deal of cherry cordial, that I scarce knew who was who, confounding my Godmother Moulton with my Aunt Archdale (to the disgust of both) and returning distracted answers to simple questions. Only, I know that Mr. Milton, in his plain black suit with very fine lace and crystal buttons set in silver, was called upon for a speech; which he delivered not in the halting, grinning, stumbling manner that seems hereditary with bridegrooms, but, being stark sober, stood for three-quarters of an hour or more, with modulated voice and graceful gesture tracing the honourable history of matrimony from the most ancient times to the present; and for conclusion recited a stanza or two of his own composition—which I think were intended for his play, to be sung by the Chorus of Angels in honour of Adam and Eve. My Uncle Jones and one or two others afterwards declared that he had spoken seraphically and raised them to a sort of ecstasy; but upon the light spirits of the company almost a gloom descended, as though they said to themselves: “We hoped that we had done with Church for to-day, yet here we must sit through a second thunderous sermon.” However, they buried their faces in their tankards and drank themselves merry again.