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Updated: May 13, 2025
We may say, and doubtless it is so, that Hawthorne could never have written such magnificent pamphlets as the "Eikonoklastes," the "Apology," the "Tetrachordon": I grant that his refinement, though bringing him something which Milton did not have, has cost him something else which Milton possessed.
His Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and his Tetrachordon are the arguments to justify his position; but they aroused a storm of protest in England, and they suggest to a modern reader that Milton was perhaps as much to blame as his wife, and that he had scant understanding of a woman's nature.
Finally, as though the very spirit of parody danced in the company of this strange poem, Wordsworth himself chronicled its ill-fate in a sonnet imitated from Milton's defence of "Tetrachordon," singing how, on the appearance of Peter Bell, a harpy brood On Bard and Hero clamourously fell.
Once and again, in the course of his Tetrachordon, he expresses his contempt for the grubbing literalists, who, in their microscopic infatuation over one text at a time, miss the view of the whole waving field of all the texts together. Yet he shows much ingenuity in parts of the verbal proof, and produces also commentators of repute who agreed with him.
None of his writings hitherto had been in such popular demand; and as, besides the three editions of the original Divorce treatise, there were also in circulation his Bucer Tract, his Tetrachordon, and his Colasterion, he had identified himself with the Divorce subject by a total mass of writing larger than he had yet devoted to any other.
Accordingly, in 1645, in dedicating the last of the divorce pamphlets, which, he entitled Tetrachordon, to the Parliament, he concluded with a threat, "If the law make not a timely provision, let the law, as reason is, bear the censure of the consequences."
Moseley's precious little volume, with the engraver Marshall thus grimly immortalized in it, brings Milton to the beginning of 1646, or twelve months beyond his Tetrachordon and Colasterion. His wife having been for some months back with him, for better or worse, in the house at Barbican, he had dropped the Divorce argument, or at least its public prosecution.
There is no abatement in the Tetrachordon of the bitterness of Milton's feeling on the subject of an unsuitable marriage. Rather the bitterness is more concentrated and intense. It is as if eighteen months of rumination over his own unhappy condition had made him savage.
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