Many people entering
college are impatient to leave it and get on with the "serious business" of
making a living, often in some merely profitable, not truly rewarding,
occupation. They imagine themselves already mature,
with all the skills and faculties they will ever need, lacking only money.
Occasionally, however, one of these students takes a Milton course
and discovers that growing up is the "serious business"
of life and that it is a lifelong endeavor.
When Milton was ten, he often sat up by candle light until
after midnight, "as well in voluntary improvements of
his own choice, as the exact perfecting of his school exercises." Such diligence,
of course, bore fruit in the form of poems and academic
honors, but he did not think himself prepared to achieve
anything truly significant even after receiving his M.A. from Cambridge.
At twenty-three, therefore, lamenting his lack of "inward
ripeness," he embarked on a program of self-education that lasted
the rest of his life.
The goal of all this preparation was only vaguely defined
in Milton's mind. Of course, being a poet, he hoped
to "leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let
it die," but he had no definite career plans. He
knew only that God had given him a mind to develop; his duty was to be
ready to use it when the call came. He felt no urgency
to accomplish great things all at once. So he bided
his time, teaching for a living, marrying at the ripe age of thirty-three, and
writing political and ecclesiastical treatises--serving
God with his "left hand," as he put it, while his right hand gained strength.
This left hand's greatest test was to serve Oliver Cromwell
as Secretary of the Foreign Tongues. To this service,
being master of at least seven languages, he was well suited, but in it, "o'erplied
in liberty's defense," he lost his sight--and with it,
for a time, his hopes of writing an epic poem. Yet he was not persuaded
that his service to God was complete while there was breath in him, and so,
resigning himself to "stand and wait" for his opportunity,
whatever it might be, he continued to prepare himself for some great
service, writing a complete system of theology as a necessary preliminary step!
Now almost fifty, he was still only waiting--but waiting
actively--to begin his real life's work.
The moment he had awaited came well disguised, for when the
Commonwealth crumbled in 1660, he was hunted down and
imprisoned for having defended the beheading of King Charles I. Although
he escaped death, narrowly, the liberty of thought and
expression for which he had labored was a ruin; even pamphleteering
was now a crime. His political service to God was over.
Nothing was left, then, but to try the right hand, even in
blindness, and try to write Paradise Lost. This
was a long and difficult task for a blind man, but diligence and patience again
served him well. After an evening of artistic relaxation
(listening to poetry or playing his organ or bass viol), his mind would
be refreshed and receptive, and he would go to bed early in anticipation of
the "nightly visitation" of his Muse, "who dictates to
me slumbring." After the release of imaginative energy in sleep, he would
rise early and prepare his mind to impose form on this "inspiration."
His method was to have the Greek or Hebrew Bible read
to him for an hour and then to compose about forty lines of his poem, which
he would later reduce to twenty. Thereafter this
iron discipline would relax, and he would devote the rest of
the day to mundane affairs and to readying his mind for yet another creative
dream. He never forced the Muse; he patiently awaited
her, confident that his years of preparation would enable him to respond
to the call when it came.
Impatient people who expect "to burst out into sudden blaze"
as soon as they have paid lip service to "Education" may
be cheating themselves of true success, which is found only by patience, by
"Suffering, abstaining, quietly expecting / Without distrust
or doubt" "that lot, however mean or high / Toward which
Time leads [them] and the will of heaven." Some few have made this discovery
thanks to the example of John Milton.