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[43]
Mr. Tate thinks
that if we don't like Milton it is because of a prejudice against myth
and fable and a preference for the fragmentary: 'When we read poetry,
we bring to it the pseudo-scientific habit of mind; we are used to joining
things up in vague disconnected processes in terms that are abstract
and thin, and so our sensuous enjoyment is confined to the immediate
field of sensation. We are bewildered, helpless, confronted with one
of those immensely remote, highly sensuous and perfectly make-believe
worlds that rise above our scattered notions of process.' (1)
Not everyone will
find this impressive. If we are affected by the pseudo-scientific habit
of mind to that degree, some would suggest, we probably cannot read
poetry at all. But if we can and do read poetry, then our objection
to Milton, it must be insisted, is that we dislike his verse and believe
that in such verse no ' highly sensuous and perfectly make-believe world'
could be evoked. Even in the first two books of Paradise Lost, where
the myth has vigorous life and one can admire the magnificent invention
that Milton's verse is, we feel, after a few hundred lines, our sense
of dissatisfaction growing into sonlething stronger. In the end we find
ourselves protesting -protesting against the routine gesture, the heavy
fall, of the verse, flinching from the foreseen thud that comes so inevitably,
and, at last, irresistibly: for reading Paradise Lost is a matter of
resisting, of standing up against, the verse-movement, of subduing it
into something tolerably like sensitiveness, and in' the end our resistance
is worn down; we sur-
------------------------------------
1. The New Republic, 21st October 1931.
[44]
render at last
to the inescapable monotony of the ritual.
Monotony: the variety
attributed to Milton's Grand Style in the orthodox account can be discoursed
on and illustrated at great length, but the stress could be left on
, variety,' after an honest interrogation of experience, only by the
classically trained.
Here, if this were
a lecture, would come illustrative reading-out-say of the fatuous opening
to Book III. As it is, the point seems best enforcible (though it should
be obvious at once to any .one capable of being convinced at all) by
turning to one of the exceptionally good passages-for every one will
agree at any rate that there are places where the verse glows with an
unusul life.
One of these, it
will again be agreed, is the Mulciber passage at the end of Book I :
The hasty multitude
Admiring enter'd, and the work some praise
And some the Architect: his hand was known thru
Heav' n by many a Towred structure high,
Where Scepter'd Angels held thir residence,
And sat as Princes, whom the supreme King
Exalted to such power, and gave to rule,
Each in his Hierarchie, the Orders bright.
.N or was his name unheard or unador'd
In ancient Greece; and in Ausonian land
Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell
From Heav'n, they fabl' d, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o're the Chrystal Battlements: ,from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon .,to dewy Eve,
A Summers day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,
Qn Lemnos th' lEgrean Ile: thus they relate,
Erring. ..
[45]
elsewhere have
been the routine thump of' Sheer' and, Dropt ' is here, in either case,
obviously functional, and the other rhythmic features of the verse are
correspondingly appropriate.(1) "The stress given by the end-position
to the first' fell,' with the accompanying pause, in what looks like
a common, limply pompous Miltonicism and how he fell From Heav' n, they
fabl' d, thrown. ..--is here uncommonly right; the heavy' thrown' is
right, and so are the following rise and fall, the slopes and curves,
of the verse.
There is no need
to particularize further. This much room has been given to the fairly
obvious merely by way of insisting that the usual pattern of Milton's
verse has here an unusual expressive function-becomes, indeed, something
else. If anyone should question the unusual stress, the doubt would
be soon settled by a little exploration. And to admit the unusualness
is to admit that commonly the pattern, the stylized gesture and movement)
has no particular expressive work to do, but functions by rote, of its
own momentum, in the manner of a ritual. Milton has difficult places
to cross, runs the orthodox eulogy, but his style always carries him
through. The sense that Milton's style is of that kind, the dissatisfied
sense of a certain hollowness, would by most readers who share it be
first of all referred to a characteristic not yet specified-that which
evoked from Mr. Eliot the damaging word' magniloquence.' To say that
Milton's verse is magniloquent is to say that it is not doing as much
as its impressive pomp and volume seem to be asserting
[46]
[47]
that mere orotundity
is a disproportionate part of the' whole effect; and that it demands
more deference than it merits. It is to call attention to a lack of
something in
the stuff of the verse, to a certain sensuous poverty.
This poverty is best established by contrast, and tactical considerations
suggest taking the example from Milton himself:
Wherefore did Nature
powre her bounties forth,
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand,
Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks,
Thronging the Seas with spawn innumerable,
But all to please, and sate the curious taste r
And set to work millions of spinning Worms,
That in their green shops weave the smooth-hair'd silk
To deck her Sons, and that no corner might
Be vacant of her plenty, in her own loyns
She hutch' t th' all-worshipt ore, and precious gems
To store her children with; if all the world
Should in a pet of temperance feed on Pulse,
Drink the clear stream, and nothing Wear but Freize
Th' all-giver would be unthank't, would be unprais'd,
Not half his riches known, and yet despis'd,
And we should serve him as a grudging master,
As a Penurious niggard of his wealth,
And live like Natures bastards, not her sons,
Who would be quite surcharged with her own weight)
And strangl' d with her waste fertility;
Th' earth cumber'd, and the wing'd air dark't with plumes,
The herds would over-multitude their Lords,
The Sea o'refraught would swell, arid th' unsought diamonds .
Would so emblaze the forhead of the Deep,
And so bestudd with Stars, that they below
Would grow inur'd to light, and com at last
To gaze upon the Sun with shameless brows.
[48]
This is very unlike anything in Paradise Lost (indeed, it is not very
like most of Comus). If one could forget where one had read it) and
were faced with assigning it to its author, one would not soon fix with
conviction on any dramatist. And yet it is too like dramatic verse to
suggest Milton. It shows, in fact, the momentary pre dominance in Milton
of Shakespeare. It may look less mature, less developed, than the verse
of Paradise Lost; it is, as a matter offact, richer, subtler and more
sensitive than anything in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained or Samson
Agonistes. Its comparative sensuous richness, which, is pervasive, lends
itself fairly readily to analysis at various points;
for instance:
And set to work millions.. of spinning Worms,
That in their green shops weave the smooth-hair'd silk ...
The Shakespearian life of this is, to be explained largely by the swift
diversity of associations that are run together. 'The impression of
the swanning worms is telescoped with that of the ordered industry of
the workshop, and a further vividness results from the contrasting'
green,' with its suggestion of leafy tranquillity. ., Smooth hair'd'
plays off against the energy of the verse the tactual luxury of stroking
human hair or the living coat of an animal. The texture of actual sounds,
the run of vowels and consonants, with the variety of action and effort,
rich in subtle analogical suggestion, demanded in pronouncing them,
plays an essential part, though this is not to be analysed in abstraction
from the meaning. The total effect is as if words as words withdrew
them
[49]
selves from the'
focus of our attention and we were directly aware of a tissue of feelings
and perceptions.
No such effect
is possible in the verse of Paradise Lost, where the use of the medium,
the poet's relation to his words, is completely different. This, for
instance, is from the description, in Book IV, of the Garden of Eden,
which, most admirers of Milton will agree, exemplifies sensuous richness
if that is to be found in Paradise Lost:
And now divided into four main Streams,
Runs divers, wandring many a famous Realme
And Country whereof here needs no account,
But rather to tell how, if Art could tell,
How from that Sapphire Fount the crisped 'Brooks,
Rowling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold,
With mazie error under pendant shades
Ran Nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flours worthy of Paradise which not nice Art
In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon
Powrd forth profuse on HIll and Dale and Plaine,
Both where the morning Sun first warmly smote
The op,en field, and where the unpierc't shade
Imbround the noontide Bowrs: Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view: Groves whose rich
Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme,
Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde
Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables 'true,
If true, here onely, and of delicious taste. ..
It should be plain at once that the difference was not
exaggerated. As the laboured, pedantic artifice of the
diction suggests, Milton seems here to be focussing rather
upon words than upon perceptions, sensations or things.
[50]
'Sapphire,' 'Orient
Pearl,' 'sands of Gold,' 'odorous Gumms and Balme,' and so on, convey
no doubt a vague sense of opulence, but this is not what we mean by
'sensuous richness.' The loose judgment that it is a verbal opulence
has a plain enough meaning if we look for contrast at the' bestudd with
Stars' of Comus's speech; there we feel (the alliteration is of a different
kind from that of the Grand Style) the solid lumps, of gold studding
the' forhead of the Deep.' In the description of Eden, a little before
the passage quoted, we have:
And all amid them
stood the Tree of Life,
High eminent, blooming Ambrosial Fruit
Of vegetable Gold. ..
It would be of
no use tot try and argue with anyone who contended that' vegetable Gold'
exemplified the same kind offusion as ' green shops.'
It needs no unusual
sensitiveness to language to perceive that, in this Grand Style, the
medium calls pervasively for a kind of attention, compels an attitude
towards itself, that is incompatible with sharp, concrete realization;
just as it would seem to' be, in the mind of the poet, incompatible
with an interest in sensuous particularity. He exhibits a feeling for
words rather than a capacity for feeling through words; we are often,
in reading him, moved to comment that he is ' external' or that he 'works
from the outside.' The Grand Style, at its best, compels us to recognize
it as an impressive stylization, but it functions very readily, and
even impressively, at low tension, and its tendency is betrayed,
[51]
even in a show piece like the description of Eden, by such offences
as :
Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view:
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme,
Others whose fruit burnisht wid1 Golden Rinde
Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true,
If true, here onely, and of dclicidus taste. ..
If the Eighteenth Century thought that poetry was something that could
be applied from the outside, it found the precedent as well as the apparatus
in Milton.
The extreme and
consistent ren'loteness of Milton's medium from any English that was
ever spoken is an immediately relevant consideration. It became, of
course, habitual to him; but habituation could not sensitize a medium
so cut off from speech-speech that belongs to the emotional and sensory
texture of actual living and is in resonance with the nervous system;
it could only confirm an impoverishment of sensibility. In any case,
the Grand Style barred Milton from essential expressive resources of
English that he had once commanded. Comus, in the passage quoted, imagining
the consequences of the Lady's doctrine, says that Nature would be quite
surcharged with her own weight,
And strangl' d
with her waste fertility;
Th' earth cumber'dJ and the wing'd air dark't with plumes,
The herds would over-multitude their Lords,
The Sea o're fraught would swell. ..
To cut the passage short here is to lame it, for the effect of Nature's
being strangled with her waste fertility is partly conveyed by the ejaculatory
piling-up of clauses,
[52]
as the reader, by turning back, can verify. But one way in which the
verse acts the meaning-not merely says but does--is fairly represented
in the line,
Th' earth cumber'd, and the wing'd air dark't with plumes,
where the crowding of stressed words, the consonantal clusters and the
clogged movement have a function that needs no analysis. This kind of
action in the verse, together with the attendant effects of movement
and intonation in the whole passage, would be quite impossible in the
Grand Style: the tyrannical stylization forbids.
But then, the mind that invented Milton's Grand Style had renounced
the English language, and with that, inevitably, Milton being an Englishman,
a great deal else.
Milton wrote Latin
as readily as he did English.' And: 'Critics sometimes forget that before
the Nativity Ode Milton wrote more Latin than English, and one may suggest
that the best of the Latin is at least as good as the best of the English.'
At any rate, one can believe that, after a decade of Latin polemic,
Latin idiom came very naturally to him, and was associated with some
of his .strongest, if not necessarily most interesting, habits of feeling.
But however admirable his Latin may be judged to 'be, to latinize in
English is quite another matter, and it is a testimony to the effect
of the' fortifying curriculum ' that the price of Milton's latinizing
should have been so little recognized.
'This charm of the exceptional and the irregular in diction,' writes
Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith in his extremely valuable essay on English
Idioms (Words and Idioms, p. 267), , accounts for the fact that we can
enjoy the use
[53]
of idiom even in
a dead language which we do not. Know very well; it also explains the
subtlety of effect which Milton achieved by transfusing Greek or Latin
constructions into his English verse.' But Milton's transfusing is regular
and unremitting, and involves, not pleasant occasional surprises, but
a consistent rejection of English idiom, as the passage quoted from
Book IV sufficiently shows. So complete, and so mechanically habitual,
is Milton's departure from the English order, structure and accentuation
that he often produces passages that have to be read through several
times before one can see how they go, though the Miltonic mind has nothing
to offer that could justify obscurity-no obscurity was intended: it
is merely that Milton has forgotten the English language. There is,
however, a much more important point to be made: it is that, cultivating
so complete and systematic a callousness ,to the intrinsic nature of
English, Milton forfeits all possibility of subtle or delicate life
in his verse.
It should be plain, for instance, that subtlety of movement in English
verse depends upon the play of the natural sense movement and intonation
against the verse structure, and that' natural,' here, involves a reference,
more or less direct, to idiomatic speech. The development in Shakespeare
can be' studied as a more and more complex and subtle play of speech
movement and intonation against the verse. There is growing complexity
of imagery and thought too, of course, but it is not to this mainly
that one would refer in analysing the difference between a characteristic
passage of Othello and Romeo's dying lament: the difference is very
largely a matter of
[54]
subtle tensions within, pressures upon, the still smooth curves of the
still' regular' verse of Othello. No such play is possible in a medium
in which the life of idiom, the pressure of speech, is as completely
absent as in Milton's Grand Style. That is why even in the most lively
books of Paradise Lost the verse, brilliant as it is, has to the ear
that appreciates Shakespeare a wearying deadness about it. That skill
we are told of, the skill with which Milton varies the beat without
losing touch with the underlying norm, slides the cresura backwards
and forwards, and so on, is certainly there. But the kind of appreciation
this skill demands is that which one gives --if one is a classic-to
a piece of Latin (we find writers on Milton' appreciating' his Latin
verse in the same tone and spirit as they do his English).
An appreciation of Milton is the last reward of consummated scholarship.'
Qualified as Mark Pattison prescribes, one may, with Raleigh, find that
Milton's style is ' all substance and weight,' that he is almost too
packed to be read aloud, and go on to acclaim the' top of his skill'
in tlle choruses of Samson Agonistes. But the ear trained on Shakespeare
will believe that it would lose little at the first hearing of a moderately
well-declaimed passage, and that Samson Agonistes read aloud would be
hardly tolerable, because of its desolating exposure of utter loss-loss
in the poet of all feeling for his native English. The rhythmic deadness,
the mechanical externality with which the movement is varied, is the
more pitifully evident because of the personal urgency of the theme
and the austerity: there is no magniloquence here.
------------------------------------------
1 See Note B.
[55]
To arrive here, of course, took genius, and the consummation can be
analytically admired. But then, there" have been critics who found
rhythmic subtlety in phcebus with Admetus and Love in the Valley.
Up to this point
the stress has fallen upon Milton's latinizing. To leave it there would
be to suggest an inadequate view of his significance. 'His influence
is seen in Tennyson as well as in Thomson; and to say that he groups
with Tennyson and Spenser in contrast to Shakespeare and Donne is to
say something more important about him than that he latinized. The force
of associating him with Spenser is not that he was himself sage and
serious'; and in contrasting him with Donne one is not, as seems also'
commonly to be thought, lamenting that he chose not to become a Metaphysical.
The qualities of
Donne that invite the opposition are what is shown in this:
On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe;
And what the hills
suddennes resists, winne so ;
Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,
Thy Soule rest, for none can worke in that night.
This is the Shakespearian use of English; one might say that it is the
English use-the use, in the essential spirit of the "language,
of its characteristic resources. The words seem to do what they say;
a very obvious example of what, in more or less subtle forms, is pervasive
being given in the image of reaching that the reader has to enact when
he passes from the second to the third line.
But a comparison will save analysis:
[56]
For so to interpose a little ease,
Yet our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hur1d,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps-- under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows denied,
Sleep'st by tl1e fable of Bellerus old, '
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona' s hold. ..
The contrast is sharp; the use of the medium, the attitude towards it
in both writer and reader, is as different as possible. Though the words
are doing so much less work than in Donne, they seem to value themselves
more highly--they seem, 'comparatively, to be occupied with valuing
themselves rather than with doing anything. This last clause would have
to be 'saved for Tennyson if it were a question of distinguishing fairly
between Milton and him, but, faced with the passage from Donne, Milton
and Tennyson go together. Tennyson descends from Spenser by way of Milton
and Keats, and it was not for nothing that Milton, to the puzzlement
of some critics, named Spenser as his 'original': the mention of Tennyson
gives the statement (however intended) an obvious significance.
The consummate
art of Lycidas, personal as it is, exhibits a use of language in the
spirit of Spenser incantatory, remote from speech. Certain feelings
are expressed, but there is no pressure behind the words; what predominates
in the handling of them is not the tension of something precise to be
deemed 'and fixed,
[57]
but a concern for
mellifluousness--for liquid sequences and a pleasing opening and closing
of the vowels. This is the bent revealed in the early work; the Shakespearian
passage in Comus is exceptional. Milton, that is, some one will observe
of the comparison, is trying to do some thing quite other than Donne;
his bent is quite different. Exactly: the point is to be clear which
way it tends.
The most admired things in Comus-it is significant are the songs.
Sweet .Echo, sweetest
Nymph that liv'st unseen
\, Within~ thy airy shell
By slow Meander's margent green,
And in the violet imbroider'd vale
Where the love-10m Nightingale
Nightly to thee her sad Song mourneth well. ..
Quite plainly,
the intention here is not merely to flatter the singing voice and suit
the air, but to produce in words effects analogous to those of music,
and the exquisite achievement has been sufficiently praised. The undertaking
was congenial to Milton. Already he had shown his capacity for a weightier
kind of music, a more impressive and less delicate instrument:
Blest pair o£Sirens,
pledges of Heav'ns joy,
Sphear-bom harmonious Sisters, Voice, and Vers,
Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ
Dead things with inbreath' d sense able to pierce, And...
We remember the Tennysonian felicity: 'God-gifted organ voice.' At a
Solemn Musick, though coming from not long after 1630, anticipates umnistakably
the' melodious noise' of Paradise Lost, and suggests a further account
[58]
of that sustained
impressiveness, that booming swell, which becomes so intolerable.
This, then, and not any incapacity to be interested in myth, is why
we fmd Milton unexhilarating. The myth of Paradise Lost, indeed,
suffers from deficiencies related to those of the verse. ' Milton's
celestial and infernal regions are large but insufficiently furnished
apartments filled by heavy conversation,' remarks Mr. Eliot,(1 )and
suggests that the divorce from Rome, following the earlier breach with
the Teutonic past, may have some thing to do with this mythological
thinness. But it is enough to point to the limitations in range and
depth of Milton's interests, their patent inadequacy to inform a sense
of myth, of fable, of ordered wholes in experience.' His strength is
of the kind that we indicate when, distinguishing betWeen intelligence
and character, we lay the stress on the latter; it is a strength, that
is, involving sad disabilities. He has' character,' moral grandeur,
moral force; but he is, for the purposes of his under taking, disastrously
single-minded and simple-minded.
He reveals everywhere a dominating sense of righteousness and a complete
incapacity to question or explore its significance and conditions. This
defect of intelligence is a defect of imagination. He offers as ultimate
for our worship mere brute assertive will, though he condemns it unwittingly
by his argument and by glimpses of his own fmer human standard. His
volume of moral passion owes its strength too much to innocence-a guileless
unawareness of the subtleties of egotism-to be an apt agent for projecting
an ' ordered whole of experience.'
-----------------
1. See me essay on Blake, now to be found in Selected Essays.
[59]
It involves, too,
a great poverty --of interest. After the first two books, magnificent
in their simple force (party politics in the Grand Style Milton can
compass), Paradise Lost, though there are intervals of relief, becomes
dull and empty: 'all,' as Raleigh says, , is power, vagueness and grandeur.'
Milton's inadequacy to myth, in fact, is so inescapable, and so much
is conceded in sanctioned comment, that the routine eulogy of his '
architectonic' power is plainly a matter of mere inert convention.
But even if the realized effect were much less remote than it actually
is from the abstract design, even if the life and interest were much
better distributed, the orthodox praise of Milton's architectonics would
still be questionable in its implications. It would still be most commonly
found to harbour the incomprehensions betrayed by the critic cited in
the opening of this chapter.
In his time (as in ours) there was a good deal to be said for the Spenserian
school against the technical breakdown to which the Jacobean dramatists
had ridden English verse. Webster is a great moment in English style,
but the drama was falling off, and blank verse had to survive in a non-dramatic
form, which required a more rigid treatment than the stage could offer
it. In substance, it needed stiffer and less sensitive perceptions,
a more artificial grasp of sensation, to offset the supersensitive awareness
of the school of Shakespeare, a versification less imitative of the
flow of sensation and more architectural. What poetry needed, Milton
was able to give. It was Arnold who, in the 1853 preface to his own
poems, remarked that the sensational imagery of the Shakespearian tradition
had not been without its baleful effect on poetry down to Keats: one
may imitate a passage in Shakespeare without penetrating to the mind
that wrote it, but to imitate Milton
[60]
one must be Milton;
one must have all of Milton's resources in myth behind the impulse:
it is the myth, ingrained in his very being, that makes the style.'
If that is so, the style, as we have seen, condemns the myth. Behind
the whole muddled passage, of course, and not far behind, is the old
distinction (see, for instance, Raleigh) between the' Classical style'
and the Romantic ,' the' Romantic' including Shelley (and one presumes,
Swinburne) along with Shakespeare. It is enough here to say that the
inability to read Shakespeare (or the remoteness from the reading of
him) revealed in such a passage and such a distinction throws the most
damaging suspicion upon the term' architectural.' The critic clearly
implies that because Shakespeare exhibits more 'sensitive perceptions,'
and offers a ' versification more imitative of the flow of sensation,'
he is therefore indifferent to total effect and dissipates the attention
by focussing, and asking us to focus, on the immediate at the expense
of the whole. As a matter of fact, anyone of the great tragedies is
an incomparably better whole than Paradise Lost; so fmely and subtly'
organized that architectural analogies seem inappropriate (a good deal
of Paradise Lost strikes one as being almost as mechanical as bricklaying).
The analysis of a Shakespeare passage showing that' supersensitive awareness'
leads one into the essential structure of the whole organ ism: Shakespeare:'
s marvellous faculty of intense local realization is a faculty of realizing
the whole locally.
A Shakespeare play, says Professor Wilson Knight, may be considered
as ' an extended metaphor,' and the phrase suggests with great felicity
this almost incon-
[61]
ceivably close
and delicate organic wholeness. The belief that' architectural' qualities
like Milton's represent a higher kind of unity goes with the kind of
intellectual bent that produced Humanism--that takes satisfaction in
inertly orthodox generalities, and is impressed by invocations of Order
from minds that have no glimmer of intelligence about contemporary literature
and could not safely risk even elementary particular appreciation.
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