them and his approval of
Cromwell's dismissal of a Parliament for attempting to deny the same
right to the Protector: between the extreme doctrine of free printing
claimed in the _Areopagitica_ and the fact that its author {65} was
afterwards concerned in licensing books under a Government which
vigorously suppressed "seditious" publications. But inconsistencies by
themselves are of little importance, particularly in revolutionary
times; they would be of none, in Milton's case, if he had ever admitted
that he had learnt from experience and consequently changed his mind.
But he never did. Parliaments remained sacred when they were for
pulling down bishops, profane when they were for establishing
Presbyterianism, and utterly detestable when they were for restoring
Charles II. The fact is, of course, that Milton, like most men of much
imagination and no political experience, saw a vision of certain things
in the value of which he believed with all his soul, and saw none of
the objections to them and none of the difficulties that stood in their
way. At the very end, when the bonfires for Charles II were almost
lighted in the streets, he could publish _A Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth_; and the title he chose for that book
was typical of his whole attitude in all practical matters. He had to
an extreme degree the man of vision's blindness to the all-important
fact that the mass of men would not have what he aims at if they {66}
could and could not if they would. At least in a free country the
statesman knows that he has got to work through stupid people, with
their consent, and with regard to the measure of their capacities. For
such men as Milton stupid people either do not exist or are to be
merely ignored. That is his attitude all through. Alike in the matter
of divorce and in the matter of education, in the ecclesiastical
problem and in the political, he was always eager to put forward a
"ready and easy way" which entirely ignored the nature of the human
material which was to walk in it. He simply chose not to see that in
all these matters men had for centuries been walking in a way which was
not his, a way which had in fact by now diverged many miles from his;
and that they could not possibly, even if they would, transport
themselves in a moment, at a mere wave of his wand, across the
intervening bogs and forests which the lapse of years had rendered
impassable. He never appears to have h