London booksellers – one of whom might have been George Thomason, to whom Milton presented copies of his pamphlets in the early sixteen-forties.3
In Paris Milton managed to meet Grotius, another correspondent of Galileo’s, who had been a contemporary of Charles Diodati’s father for several years at Leiden University, and may have maintained contact with him. Milton was to quote Grotius later, and almost certainly read and was influenced by his Adamus Exul.4 He would be aware of his reputation as a suspect Socinian. During his Italian journey Milton paused at Siena, where Faustus Socinus was born, and may have discussed him with his Florentine friends. He spent several days at Lucca, the town from which the Diodatis originated and in whose academic life they were deeply involved.5
It has been suggested that the Italian academies, or some of them, acted as secret societies, preserving vestiges of the spirit of intellectual inquiry which had led men like the Diodatis to emigrate. The spirit of Galileo still ruled over Florence, where Milton felt most at home; and Naples, where Campanella was not forgotten, had a reputation greater than that of any other Italian city for propagating Galileo’s views.1 The academies preserved something of the neoplatonist/humanist tradition: J. V. Andreae received a new sense of mission from his Italian journey of 1612 no less than did Milton a quarter of a century later.2 Some such suggestion would help to account for the enthusiasm with which a young liberal Englishman with the right introductions was received. It would also explain Milton’s favourable reaction to Italy, unexpected since for over a dozen years he had expressed the strong anti-papal sentiments which he was never to abandon. He clearly felt a close intellectual and spiritual kinship with some at least of those whom he met. He must indeed have been especially at home among the Apatisti and Svogliati in Florence – recently founded small private academies, pietistic yet liberal and humanist.
Consider the analogous Italian journey of another English intellectual, John Cook. Cook, like Milton, made the Italian tour ‘in his younger years’. Like Milton, he spoke at Rome with so much ‘liberty and ability against the corruptions of that court and church’ that he had to beat a speedy retreat. Cook then ‘resided some months in the house of signior Gio. Diodati’ at Geneva.3 He returned to England to become a leading Independent and legal reformer, prosecutor at Charles I’s trial.
Milton recorded later how his learned Italian friends counted him ‘happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought’. Such conversations must have started up many lines of thought. In The Reason of Church Government Milton announced that if England missed her chance of winning freedom, at least it would not be for lack of his speaking out: he had no intention of merely ‘bemoaning’ a servile condition, but of fighting against it.4 When he came to write Areopagitica he remembered that he had been greeted in Italy as a citizen of a country of greater intellectual freedom, who had something to give Italian intellectuals as well as to take from them. His contempt for the ‘prelatical duncery under which no free and splendid wit can flourish’ would be reinforced by contact with men who chafed under an even stricter censorship, and under the corruption of youth and good learning which was attributed by ‘many wise and learned men in Italy’ to the Jesuits.1 Milton already knew of the two worlds from the Diodatis, who had kept their faith so pure of old in the Italian fields where popery still ruled.2 Milton’s visit to Lucca followed by the news of Charles’s death must have brought the contrast much more directly home to him. He would feel the same sort of obligation to his Italian friends as a West European socialist to-day feels towards dissident socialist intellectuals in Czechoslovakia. It strengthened his sense of England’s international responsibilities to radicals of other nations, Catholic as well as Protestant.
Critics have expressed scepticism about the motives which Milton attributed to himself in the passage cited as epigraph to this chapter. So far from hurrying back to England in 1639, Milton spent several months on the return journey. But for our purposes what Milton believed in 1654 is no less important than his unascertainable motives in 1639. The Bishops’ War of that year brought Charles I’s first defeat, and opened up the possibility of fundamental changes in England too.
The Italian visit must have intensified Milton’s cultural hatred of popery and absolutism, which had reduced Italian writing to ‘flattery and fustian’, and stiffened his hatred of the Laudian régime, which seemed to him to be dragging England down to the Italian level. He thought that his Italian friends had illusions about English liberty; but his interest and pride in English history seem to have been excited, and he set about writing a fulldress History of Britain from the earliest times.3 When freedom really was established after 1640, Milton was equipped and eager to play his part in politics. In 1641 he wanted to see Parliament stimulating ‘the learned and affable meeting of frequent academies’, in order to ‘civilize, adorn and make decent our minds’.4 One of the eight authors most frequently cited in Milton’s Commonplace Book was Paolo Sarpi, whose History of the Council of Trent he seems to have been reading in 1643. He quotes and echoes him regularly, especially in Areopagitica and Eikonoklastes.5
Milton’s Italian journey, combined with his historical reading, no doubt helped him to get English affairs into perspective. His studies of the early church had fortified all his prejudices against popery, acquired at home and at school; but Italian intellectuals still had much to offer – the new astronomy of Galileo, the neo-Hermeticism of Bruno and Campanella, the mortalism of Padua, the libertinism of Vanini, who denied the divinity of Christ and affirmed the eternity of nature, and of Malatesti. Malatesti was a friend and possibly pupil of Galileo. He dedicated to Milton a series of mildly indecent sonnets, La Tina. Biographers have shaken their heads over Malatesti’s stupidity in not knowing his Milton better, but perhaps the laugh is on them. Certainly in 1647 Milton sent good wishes to Malatesti via Carlo Dati, which he need not have done if he disapproved of him. He may even have studied Malatesti’s sonnets carefully enough to adopt some of his tricks of word-play in the Second Defence of the People of England.1
It still seems to be necessary to combat the view that Milton was a gloomy Puritan. This is part of a general misunderstanding, arising from reading back into the seventeenth century the characteristics, or alleged characteristics, of nineteenth-century nonconformity, and adding the idea that Milton was a ‘misogynist’, though in fact, as we shall see, his views were on the whole more favourable to women than those of most of his articulate contemporaries. The ‘nonconformist’ interpretation is quite inappropriate to Milton, the poet and musician who regarded elegance as one of the virtues.2 All who knew him stressed his ‘Very cheerful humour’, his ‘sweet and affable nature’, his ‘unaffected cheerfulness and civility’; he was ‘delightful company, the life of the conversation’ and ‘very merry’.3
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.
