  To approach the question of Milton's poetic style thus late in the course of this treatise is to fall into the absurdity of the famous art-critic, who, lecturing on the Venus of Milo, devoted the last and briefest of his lectures to the shape of that noble work of art. In truth, since Milton died, his name is become the mark, not of a biography nor of a theme, but of a style--the most distinguished in our poetry. But the task of literary criticism is, at the best, a task of such disheartening difficulty, that those who attempt it should be humoured if they play long with the fringes of the subject, and wait for courageous moments to attack essentials. In one sense, of course, and that not the least important, the great works of Milton were the product of the history and literatures of the world. Cycles ferried his cradle. Generations guided him. All forces were steadily employed to complete him. But when we attempt to separate the single strands of his complex genealogy, to identify and arrange the influences that made him, the essential somehow escapes us. The genealogical method in literary history is both interesting and valuable, but we are too apt, in our admiration for its lucid procedure, to forget that there is one thing which it will never explain, and that thing is poetry. Books beget books; but the mystery of conception still evades us. We display, as if in a museum, all the bits of thought and fragments of expression that Milton may have borrowed from Homer and Virgil, from Ariosto and Shakespeare. Here is a far-fetched conceit, and there is an elaborately jointed comparison. But these choice fragments and samples were to be had by any one for the taking; what it baffles us to explain is how they came to be of so much more use to Milton than ever they were to us. In any dictionary of quotations you may find great thoughts and happy expressions as plentiful and as cheap as sand, and, for the most part, quite as useless. These are dead thoughts: to catalogue, compare, and arrange them is within the power of any competent literary workman; but to raise them to blood-heat again, to breathe upon them and vitalise them is the sign that proclaims a poet. The ledger school of criticism, which deals only with borrowings and lendings, ingeniously traced and accurately recorded, the least erected Spirit that fell From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts Were always downward bent, admiring more The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold, Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed In vision beatific. With curious finger and thumb they pick holes in the mosaic; and wherever there is wealth they are always ready to cry "Thief!" There is real interest in the enumeration of Milton's borrowings, and in the citation of parallel passages from the ancients to illustrate his work. But since style is the expression of a living organism, not a problem of cunning tesselation, it is permissible, in this place, to pass over what he borrowed from the ancients, in order to deal with a more intimate matter, and to attempt a valuation of that which he borrowed from no one, either ancient or modern. His indomitable personality and irrepressible originality have left their stamp on all his work, and have moulded his treatment, his handling, his diction, his style. We, who have been inured for centuries to Miltonic mouthings and mannerisms, Consider first his choice of subject. Ever since the Renaissance had swept modern poetry back to the pagan world, some voices of protest had been raised, some swimmers, rather bold than strong, had attempted to stem the tide. Among the earliest of these was Thomas Sternhold, Groom of the Chamber to King Henry the Eighth. Inspired perhaps by the example of a better poet, Clement Marot, Sternhold thrust some of the Psalms of David into a carterly metre, "thinking thereby," says Anthony À Wood, in his delightfully colloquial fashion, "that the courtiers would sing them instead of their sonnets, but did not, only some few excepted." In the reign of Elizabeth, when the classical mythology reigned and revelled in pageant and masque, in court and town, one Thomas Brice, a painful preacher, cried out against the pagan fancies that had caught the English imagination captive:-- We are not Ethnickes, we forsoth at least professe not so; Why range we then to Ethnickes' trade? Come back, where will ye go? Tel me, is Christe or Cupide lord? Doth God or Venus reign? But he cried to deaf ears, and the Elizabethan age produced no body of sacred poetry worth a record. The beautiful metrical version of the Psalms, made by Sir Philip Sidney and his sister, remained in manuscript for centuries. Drayton's Harmonie of the Church was suppressed. Robert Southwell, whose lyrics on sacred subjects give him a unique place among the poets of his age, joins in the oft-repeated complaint:-- Stil finest wits are 'stilling Venus' rose, In Paynim toyes the sweetest vaines are spent; To Christian workes few have their talents lent. It was left for George Herbert and his contemporaries to take up the attempt once more--this time with better success--"to reprove the vanity of those many love poems that are daily writ and consecrated to Venus, and to bewail that so few are writ that look towards God and heaven." Cannot thy dove Outstrip their Cupid easily in flight? Or, since thy ways are deep, and still the same, Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name? But although Herbert and his successors, in their Nevertheless, the seventeenth century, which stirred so many questions in politics and criticism, stirred this also; the fitness of sacred subjects for heroic poetry was debated long and ardently both in France and England, and many experiments were made. These experiments belong, as might be Next, Cowley "came in robustiously and put for it with a deal of violence" in his sacred poem entitled Davideis. In the exordium of the First Book he proclaims his mission:-- Too long the Muses-Lands have Heathen bin Their Gods too long were Devils, and Vertues Sin; But Thou, Eternal World, hast call'd forth Me, Th' Apostle, to convert that World to Thee: T' unbind the charms that in slight Fables lie, And teach that Truth is truest Poesie. But it was not to be. His "polisht Pillars of strong Verse" were destined never to carry a roof. The theme, so vigorously introduced, soon languished; and by the time he had completed a Fourth Book, it lay, for all his nursing skill, prematurely dead on his hands. The poem is not finished, and yet there is nothing to add. After Cowley in date of composition, but before him in date of publication, Davenant in his Gondibert shows traces of the prevalent ambition. In France the question had been as zealously discussed, and had been illustrated by experiments no less elaborate. In 1657, a year after the appearance of Cowley's Davideis, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin brought out his sacred poem of Clovis, with a great flourish of trumpets, and a long prose demonstration that its theme was the grandest a French poet could choose. The real supernatural of the Christian religion, so he argued, is a subject much nobler for poetry than the pagan mythology, as the sunlight is brighter than the shadow. The controversy dragged on till 1673, when Boileau, in the third book of his Poetic, settled the question for the nonce, and fixed the opinion of the succeeding generation of critics. He casts an equal ridicule upon Clovis and upon the theory which it was designed to illustrate:-- The arts of fiction give the air of lies Even to the most unquestioned verities; And what a pious entertainment, too, The yells of Satan and his damnÈd crew, When, proud to assail your Hero's matchless might, With God himself they wage a doubtful fight. So the burial of Clovis was hastened by ridicule. Yet every one of the arguments brought against His courage and originality are witnessed also by the metre that he chose for his poem. To us blank verse seems the natural metre for a long serious poem. Before Milton's day, except in the drama, it had only once been so employed--in an Elizabethan poem of no mark or likelihood, called A Tale of Two Swannes. While Milton was writing Paradise Lost the critics of his time were discussing whether the rhymed couplet or some form of stanza was fitter for narrative poetry, and whether the couplet or blank verse better suited the needs of drama. As no one, before Milton, had maintained in argument that blank verse was the best English measure for narrative poetry dealing with lofty themes, so no critic had ever been at the pains to refute that opinion. In the year of the publication of Paradise Lost, Dryden delivered his judgment, that the rhymed couplet In these two cardinal points, then--the matter and the form of his poem--Milton was original. For the one there was no true precedent in English; for the other there was no precedent that might not rather have been called a warning. His matter was to be arranged and his verse handled by his own ingenuity and at his own peril. He left a highroad behind him, along which many a tuneful pauper has since limped; but before him he found nothing but the jungle and false fires. In considering his style, therefore, it is well to treat the problem as it presented itself to him, and to follow There were two great influences in English poetry, other than the drama, when Milton began to write: the influence of Spenser and the influence of Donne. Only the very slightest traces of either can be discerned in Milton's early verse. There are some Spenserian cadences in the poem On the Death of a Fair Infant, written in his seventeenth year:-- Or wert thou of the golden-wingÈd host Who, having clad thyself in human weed, To earth from thy prefixed seat didst post, And after short abode fly back with speed, As if to show what creatures Heaven doth breed; Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire To scorn the sordid world, and unto Heaven aspire? The later verses on The Passion, written in the same metre, are perhaps the last in which Milton echoes Spenser, however faintly. Meanwhile, in the hymn On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, he had struck a note that was his own, and it is not surprising that he left the poem on the Passion unfinished, "nothing satisfied with what was begun." As for the great Dean of St. Paul's, there is no evidence that Milton was touched by him, or, for that matter, that he had read any of his poems. In the verses written At a Vacation Exercise, he expressly sets aside Those new-fangled toys and trimming slight Which takes our late fantastics with delight; and he very early came to dislike the fashionable conceits that ran riot in contemporary English verse. A certain number of conceits, few and poor enough, is to be found scattered here and there in his early poems. Bleak Winter, for instance, is represented in three cumbrous stanzas, as the slayer of the Fair Infant:-- For he, being amorous on that lovely dye That did thy cheek envermeil, thought to kiss, But killed, alas! and then bewailed his fatal bliss. In the lines on Shakespeare the monument promised to the dead poet is a marvel of architecture and sculpture, made up of all his readers, frozen to statues by the wonder and astonishment that they feel when they read the plays. But perhaps the nearest approach to a conceit of the metaphysical kind is to be found in that passage of Comus, where the Lady accuses Night of having stolen her brothers:-- O thievish Night, Why shouldst thou, but for some felonious end, In thy dark lantern thus close up the stars Which Nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps With everlasting oil to give due light To the misled and lonely traveller? When Milton does fall into a vein of conceit, it is generally both trivial and obvious, with none of Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish; A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon't that nod unto the world, And mock our eyes with air: thou hast seen these signs; They are black Vesper's pageants. They are the poems of John Donne. Nothing could be further from the manner of Milton, or less likely to overcome his own positive imagination. Here are two examples of Donne's best poetic manner:-- But yet thou canst not die, I know; To leave this world behind, is death; But when thou from this world wilt go, The whole world vapours with thy breath. And again:-- Twice or thrice had I loved thee, Before I knew thy face or name; So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be. Let it be considered what Milton means by the terms "World" and "Angel," how clear an external reality each embodies for him. Any forced comparison used by him is not an attempt to express a subtlety, but merely a vicious trick of the intellect. The virtues of the metaphysical school were impossible virtues for one whose mind had no tincture of the metaphysic. Milton, as has been said already, had no deep sense of mystery. One passage of Il Penseroso, which might be quoted against this statement, is susceptible of an easier explanation:-- And if aught else great bards beside In sage and solemn tunes have sung Of turneys, and of trophies hung, Of forests, and enchantments drear, Where more is meant than meets the ear. He alludes no doubt to Spenser, and by the last line intends only allegory--a definite moral signification affixed to certain characters and stories--not the mystic correspondences that Donne loves. The most mysterious lines in Comus are these:-- A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses. They are purely Elizabethan and reminiscent. But if the stranger beauties of the metaphysical school were beyond his reach, its vices touched him wonderfully little, so that his conceits are merely the rare flaws of his early work. The dramatists were a much more potent influence than either Spenser or the metaphysical school. He learned his blank verse from the dramatists. Perhaps he took the subject of Comus from the Old Wives' Tale of George Peele; and when he set himself to write a masque he was doubtless well acquainted with the works of the chief master in that kind, Ben Jonson. William Godwin, in his Lives of Edward and John Phillips, expresses the opinion that Milton studied the works of Jonson more assiduously than those of any other Elizabethan. The specific evidence that he cites--a few passages of possible reminiscence--is not convincing. He has no more striking coincidence to show than the resemblance between a phrase in Il Penseroso:-- Come, but keep thy wonted state and two lines of Jonson's Hymn to Cynthia:-- Seated in thy silver chair State in wonted manner keep. If the original genius of a poet is to be sworn away at this rate, there will soon come a time when no man is secure. Both words are common in Elizabethan English; if their occurrence in a single line is to warrant a charge of plagiarism, the next step will be to make them Jonson's property, and to forbid the use of either to all but the tribe of Ben. Milton doubtless studied Jonson's works; and, if specific resemblances are both weighed and counted, a good case can be made out for the influence of Jonson's prose on the author of the Areopagitica. But the fact is that criticism finds itself here in a region where this minute matching of phrase with phrase is useless or misleading. Milton's early poems grew on Elizabethan soil, and drank Elizabethan air. It matters little that there are few verbal coincidences; the influence is omnipresent, easy to feel, impossible to describe in detail. From whom but the Elizabethans could he have learned to write thus?-- Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race: Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours, Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace; And glut thyself with what thy womb devours. The Elizabethan style is not to be mistaken, the high-figured phrases, loosely welded together, Their port was more than human, as they stood. I took it for a faery vision Of some gay creatures of the element, That in the colours of the rainbow live, And play i' the plighted clouds. I was awe-strook, And, as I passed, I worshipped. If those you seek, It were a journey like the path to Heaven To help you find them. This has all the technical marks of late Elizabethan dramatic blank verse: "vision" as a trisyllable; the redundant syllable in the middle of the line; the colloquial abbreviation of "in the"; not to mention the fanciful vein of the whole passage, which might lead any one unacquainted with Milton to look for this quotation among the dramas of the prime. The great hyperbolical strain of the Elizabethans, which so often broke into rant, is caught and nobly echoed in praise of virtue:-- If this fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness And earth's base built on stubble. Or, to take a last example of Milton's earlier style, this description of the Lady's singing is in marked contrast to the later matured manner:-- At last a soft and solemn-breathing sound Rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes, And stole upon the air, that even Silence Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might Deny her nature, and be never more Still to be so displaced. I was all ear, And took in strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of Death. This has the happy audacity of Shakespeare, and his delight in playing with logic; it is almost witty. The Miltonic audacity of the later poems is far less diffuse and playful. When the nightingale sings, in Paradise Lost, "Silence was pleased." When Adam begs the Angel to tell the story of the Creation, he adds, "Sleep, listening to thee, will watch." Either of these paradoxes would have been tormented and elaborated into a puzzle by a true Elizabethan. Milton, then, began as a pupil of the dramatists. But his tendencies and ambitions were not dramatic, so he escaped the diseases that afflicted the drama in its decadence. When he began to write blank verse, the blank verse of the dramatists, his contemporaries, was fast degenerating into more or less rhythmical prose. Suckling and Davenant and their fellows not only used the utmost license of redundant syllables at the end of the line, but hustled and slurred the syllables in the middle till the line was a mere gabble, and interspersed broken lines so plentifully that it became impossible She works religious petticoats; for flowers She'll make church-histories. Her needle doth So sanctify my cushionets; besides My smock-sleeves have such holy embroideries, And are so learned, that I fear in time All my apparel will be quoted by Some pure instructor. Yesterday I went To see a lady that has a parrot: my woman While I was in discourse converted the fowl; And now it can speak nought but Knox's works; So there's a parrot lost. Blank verse that has learned to tolerate such lines as the two here set in italics can only end by becoming prose. And, indeed, that was the destined development of the drama, even had the theatres never been closed under the Commonwealth. The history of blank verse reflects with curious exactness the phases of the history of the drama. When the metre was first set on the stage, in the Senecan drama, it was stiff and slow-moving; each line was monotonously accented, and divided from the next by so heavy a stress that the absence of rhyme seemed a wilful injury At the time when blank verse was yielding to decay, Milton took it up, and used it neither for conversational nor for rhetorical purposes. In the interests of pure poetry and melody he tightened its joints, stiffened its texture, and one by one gave up almost all the licenses that the dramatists had used. From the first he makes a sparing use of the double ending. The redundant syllable in the middle of the line, which he sometimes allows himself in Comus, does not occur in Paradise Lost. In the later poem he adopts strict practices with regard to elision, which, with some trifling exceptions, he permits only in the case of contiguous open vowels, and of short unstressed vowels separated by a liquid consonant, in such words, for instance, as "dissolute," or "amorous." By a variety of small observances, which, when fully stated, make up a formidable code, he mended the shambling gait of the loose dramatic blank verse, and made of it a worthy epic metre. In a long poem variety is indispensable, and he preserved the utmost freedom in some respects. He continually varies the stresses in the line, their number, their weight, and their incidence, letting them fall, when it pleases his ear, on the odd as well as on the even syllables of the line. The pause or cÆsura he permits to fall at any place in the line, usually towards the middle, but, on occasion, even after the first or ninth syllables. It may well be doubted whether Milton could have given a clear exposition of his own prosody. In the only place where he attempts it he finds the elements of musical delight to consist in "apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another." By "apt numbers" he probably meant the skilful handling of stress-variation in relation to the sense. But the last of the three is the essential of Miltonic blank verse. There lies the secret for whoso can divine it. Every well-marked type of blank verse has a natural gait or movement of its own, which it falls into during its ordinary uninspired moods. The elements of musical delight here are almost barbarous in their simplicity. There is a surfeit of assonance--all, shore, shore, lord; heart, Arthur; ways, safe, pain. The alliteration is without complexity,--a dreary procession of sibilants. Worst of all are the monotonous incidence of the stress, and the unrelieved, undistinguished, crowded poverty of the Saxon monosyllables. No two such consecutive lines were ever written by Milton. His verse, even in its least admirable passages, does not sing, nor trip with regular alternate stress; its movement suggests neither dance nor song, but rather the advancing march of a body of troops skilfully handled, with incessant changes in their disposition as they pass over broken ground. He can furnish them with wings when it so pleases him. No analysis of his prosody can explain the wonders of his workmanship. But it is not idle to ask for a close attention to the scansion of lines like these, wherein he describes the upward progress of the Son of God and his escort after the Creation:-- The heavens and all the constellations rung, The planets in their station listening stood, While the bright pomp ascended jubilant. In the last line the first four words marshal the great procession in solid array; the last two lift it high into the empyrean. Let any one attempt to get the same upward effect with a stress, however light, laid on the last syllable of the line, or with words of fewer than three syllables apiece, and he will have to confess that, however abstruse the rules of its working may be, there is virtue in metrical cunning. The passage in the Seventh Book from which these lines are quoted would justify an entire treatise. The five regular alternate stresses first occur in a line describing the progress over the wide plain of Heaven:-- He through Heaven, That opened wide her blazing portals, led To God's eternal house direct the way. But, indeed, the examination of the music of Milton involves so minute a survey of technical detail as to be tedious to all but a few lovers of theory. The laws of music in verse are very subtle, and, it must be added, very imperfectly ascertained; so that those who dogmatise on them generally end by slipping into fantasy or pedantry. How carefully and incessantly Milton adjusted the sound to the sense is known to every reader of Heaven opened wide Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound On golden hinges moving-- and the opening of those other gates-- On a sudden open fly, With impetuous recoil and jarring sound, The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook Of Erebus. But there are many more delicate instances than these. In the choruses of Samson Agonistes, where he reaches the top of his skill, Milton varies even the length of the line. So he has hardly a rule left, save the iambic pattern, which he treats merely as a point of departure or reference, a background or framework to carry the variations imposed upon it by the luxuriance of a perfectly controlled art. The great charm of the metre of Wither, which Charles Lamb admired and imitated, lies in its facile combination of what, for the sake of brevity, may be called the iambic and trochaic movements. In L'Allegro and Il Penseroso Milton had proved his mastery of both its resources. The gaiety of these lines-- Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee Jest, and youthful Jollity-- passes easily into the solemnity of these-- But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloister's pale. In Samson Agonistes he sought to extend something of the same liberty to the movement of blank verse. He freely intermixes the falling with the rising stress, shifting the weights from place to place, and often compensating a light patter of syllables in the one half of the line by the introduction of two or three consecutive strong stresses in the other half. Under this treatment the metre of Gorboduc breaks into blossom and song:-- O, how comely it is, and how reviving To the spirits of just men long oppressed, When God into the hands of their deliverer Puts invincible might. To try to explain this marvel of beauty is to beat the air. By his deliberate attention to the elements of verbal melody Milton gave a new character to English blank verse. But this is not all. Quite as important is the alteration that he made in the character of English poetic diction. The essence of the lyric is that it is made up of phrases, not of words. The lines run easily because they run on tracks chosen for their ease by the instinct of generations and worn smooth by use. The lyrical phrase, when the first two or All this Milton changed. He chooses his every word. You cannot guess the adjective from the substantive, nor the end of the phrase from its beginning. He is much given to inverting the natural English order of epithet and noun, that he may gain a greater emphasis for the epithet. His style is not a simple loose-flowing garment, which takes its outline from its natural fall over the figure, but a satin brocade, stiff with gold, exactly fitted to the body. There is substance for it to clothe; but, as his imitators quickly discovered, it can stand alone. He packs his meaning into the fewest possible words, and studies economy in every trifle. In his later poetry there are no The carefully jewelled mosaic style was practised very early by Milton. It occurs already in the hymn on the Nativity:-- See how from far upon the eastern road The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet: O run, prevent them with thy humble ode And lay it lowly at his blessed feet. The same deliberateness and gentle pause of words one after another rounding and falling like clear drops is found in the song of the Spirit in Comus:-- Sabrina fair, Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair. This is the effect which Sir Henry Wotton, Milton's earliest critic, speaks of, in a letter to Milton, as "a certain Doric delicacy in your songs and odes, whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language." There are poems, and good poems among the number, written on a more diffuse principle. If you miss one line you find the idea repeated or persisting in the next. It is quite possible to derive pleasure from the Faerie Queene by attending to the leading words, and, for the rest, floating onward on the melody. You can catch the drift with ease. The stream circles in so many eddies An illustration and contrast may serve to point the moral. Here is an example of Spenser's diffuser style, taken from the second book of the Faerie Queene. Guyon, escaped from the cave of Mammon, is guarded, during his swoon, by an angel:-- Beside his head there satt a faire young man, (This announces the theme, as in music.) Of wondrous beauty and of freshest yeares, (The fair young man was fair and young.) Whose tender bud to blossom new began, (The fair young man was young.) And florish faire above his equal peers. (The fair young man was fair, fairer even than his equals, who were also his peers.) In the remaining lines of the stanza the comparison of his hair to the rays of the sun is played with in the same way:-- His snowy front curled with golden heares, Like Phoebus' face adorned with sunny rayes, Divinely shone; and two sharp winged sheares, Decked with diverse plumes, like painted Jayes, Were fixed at his back to cut his ayery wayes. The whole stanza is beautiful, and musical with the music of redundance. Nothing could be less like Milton's mature style. His verse, "with frock of mail, Adamantean proof," advances proudly and irresistibly, gaining ground at every step. He brings a situation before us in two lines, every word contributing its share:-- Betwixt these rocky pillars Gabriel sat, Chief of the angelic guards, awaiting night. With as decisive a touch he sketches the story of Jacob-- In the field of Luz, Dreaming by night under the open sky, And waking cried, This is the gate of Heaven. Or the descent of Raphael:-- Like Maia's son he stood, And shook his plumes, that heavenly fragrance filled The circuit wide. The packed line introduced by Milton is of a greater density and conciseness than anything to be found in English literature before it. It is our nearest native counterpart to the force and reserve of the high Virgilian diction. In his Discourse of the Original and Progress of Satire, Dryden has called attention to the close-wrought quality of Virgil's work. "Virgil," he says, "could have written sharper satires than either Horace or Juvenal, if he would have employed his talent that way. I will produce a verse and a half of his, in one of his Eclogues, to justify my opinion; and with commas after every word, to show that he has given almost as many lashes as he has written syllables: it is against a bad poet, whose ill verses he describes:-- non tu, in triviis, indocte, solebas Stridenti, miserum, stipula, disperdere, carmen?" [Wouldst thou not, blockhead, in the public ways, Squander, on scrannel pipe, thy sorry lays?] Dryden appreciated the terrible force of this Next this (how wildly will ambition steer), A vermin wriggling in the usurper's ear, Bartering his venal wit for sums of gold, He cast himself into the saint-like mould; Groaned, sighed, and prayed, while godliness was gain, The loudest bagpipe of the squeaking train. Except the first line, which is wholly idle, there is nothing that could be spared here. Pope, also, knew the value of condensation; but he works in antithetic phrases, so that his single words are less telling; and where Dryden's lines are swords edged with contempt, Pope's are stings, pointed with spite. Thus, of Lord Hervey:-- Amphibious thing! that acting either part, The trifling head, or the corrupted heart, Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board, Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord. Eve's tempter thus the Rabbins have exprest, A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest; Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust, Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust. The necessities of rhyme sometimes hamper both Dryden and Pope; and the nearest parallel to the manner of Virgil is to be sought in Milton. The famous line describing Samson-- Eyeless, in Gaza, at the mill, with slaves-- is a good example; the sense of humiliation and abasement is intensified at every step. Or, to take a passage in a very different key of feeling, the same quality is seen in the description of the obedience of Eve:-- Required with gentle sway And by her yielded, by him best received, Yielded with coy submission, modest pride, And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay. The slight stress and pause needed after each word, to render the full meaning, produce, when the words are short as well as emphatic, a line of terrific weight and impact. What more heartbreaking effect of weariness and eternity of effort could be produced in a single line than this, descriptive of the dolorous march of the fallen angels?-- O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp, Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death. It would be difficult to match this line. In The Tears of Peace, Chapman has a line (he repeats it in the Tragedy of Biron) which owes some of its strength to the same cause. He describes the body as-- This glass of air, broken with less than breath, This slave, bound face to face to death till death. The eight stresses give the line a passionate energy. All superfluous graces are usually discarded by Milton. He steers right onward, and gives the reader no rest. A French critic of that age, who has already been mentioned as the author of Clovis, praises Malherbe and Voiture and the worthies of their time, at the expense of the ancients. He calls Homer, especially, "a tattler, who is incessantly repeating the same things in the same idle ridiculous epithets,--the swift-footed Achilles, the ox-eyed Juno, far-darting Apollo." Milton felt none of this contempt for Homer, but he discarded the practice. His epithets are chosen to perform one exploit, and are dismissed when it is accomplished. As with single epithets, so with lines and phrases; he does not employ conventional repetitions either for their lyrical value or for wafting the story on to the next point of interest. He seeks no effects such as Marlowe obtained by the lyrical repetition of the line:-- To entertain divine Zenocrate. He arrests the attention at every word; and when the thing is once said, he has done with it. In his Discourse of Satire Dryden raises an interesting point. He makes mention of "the beautiful turns of words and thoughts, which are as requisite in this, as in heroick poetry itself, of which the satire is undoubtedly a species." His attention, he says, was first called to these by Sir By the "turns of words and thoughts" Dryden here means the repetition of a word or phrase in slightly altered guise as the thought is turned over in the mind and presented in a new aspect. There is an almost epigrammatic neatness about some of the examples that he cites from Ovid and Catullus. It is not surprising that he failed to find these elegant turns in Milton, for they are few. Addison and Steele, writing in the Tatler, reproach him with having overlooked the speech of Eve in the Fourth Book of Paradise Lost:-- Sweet is the breath of Morn, her rising sweet, With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the Sun, When first on this delightful land he spreads His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower, Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertile Earth After soft showers; and sweet the coming-on Of grateful Evening mild; then silent Night, With this her solemn bird, and this fair Moon, And these the gems of Heaven, her starry train: But neither breath of Morn, when she ascends With charm of earliest birds; nor rising Sun On this delightful land; nor herb, fruit, flower, Glistering with dew; nor fragrance after showers Nor grateful Evening mild; nor silent Night, With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon, Or glittering star-light, without thee is sweet. Dryden remarks that the elegance he speaks of is common in Italian sonnets, which are usually written on the turn of the first thought; and certainly this speech of Eve might be truly compared, in all but the metrical structure, to an interspersed sonnet. There is another elaborate piece of repetition at the close of the Tenth Book, where the humble prostration of Adam and Eve is described in exactly the form of speech used by Adam to propose it. But the repetition in this case is too exact to suit Dryden's meaning; by a close verbal coincidence the ritual of penitence is emphasised in detail, and the book brought to a restful pause. Scattered here and there throughout Milton's longer poems Dryden might, nevertheless, have found the thing he sought. One instance that he gives is taken from the fourth Georgic of Virgil, where Orpheus, leading Eurydice up from Hell, suddenly turns to look on her:-- Cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem; Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes. This turn--"deserving grace, if grace were known feel by turns the bitter change Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce. In the Fifth Book, when Raphael arrives at the gate of Paradise, the angels to his state And to his message high in honour rise, For on some message high they guessed him bound. In Samson Agonistes it is noted that nations grown corrupt love bondage more than liberty, Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty. Yet in the main Dryden is right, for even instances like these are not many, and the tricky neatness of Ovid is nowhere to be found in the English epic poet. Milton seldom allows his verse to play in eddies; he taxes every line to its fullest capacity, and wrings the last drop of value from each word. A signal characteristic of his diction has its origin in this hard dealing. He is often not satisfied with one meaning from a word, but will make it do double duty. Here the Latin element in our language gave him his opportunity. Words borrowed from the Latin always change their usage and value in English air. To the ordinary But he was not content to revive the exact classical meaning in place of the vague or weak English acceptation; he often kept both senses, and loaded the word with two meanings at once. When Samson speaks of Dalila as That specious monster, my accomplished snare-- something of this double sense resides in both epithets. In two words we are told that Dalila was both beautiful and deceitful, that she was skilled in the blandishments of art, and successful in the work of her husband's undoing. With a like double reference Samson calls the secret of his strength "my capital secret." Where light, again, is called the "prime work of God," or where we are told that Hell saw "Heaven ruining from Heaven," the original and derivative senses of the words "prime" and "ruin" are united in the conception. These words, and many others similarly employed, are of Latin origin; but Milton carried his practice over into the Saxon part of our vocabulary. The word "uncouth" is used in a double-barrelled sense in the Second Book of Paradise Lost-- Who shall tempt with wandering feet The dark, unbottomed, infinite Abyss, And through the palpable obscure find out His uncouth way? And when Satan's eyes are called "baleful," the word, besides indicating the "huge affliction and dismay" that he feels, gives a hint of the woes that are in store for the victims on whom those eyes have not yet lit. It was this habit of "verbal curiosity" and condensation which seduced Milton into punning. Some of his puns are very bad. There is a At one slight bound high overleapt all bound. But in most of these cases it seems likely that he believed in an etymological relation between the two words, and so fancied that he was drawing attention to an original unity of meaning. Some such hypothesis is needful to mitigate the atrocity of his worst pun, in Paradise Regained, where he describes The ravens with their horny beaks Food to Elijah bringing even and morn-- Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought. Milton was no philologist, and we may be permitted in charity to suppose that he derived "raven" and "ravenous" from the same root. Some of his puns are to be justified for another reason--that they are made the weapons of mockery. So when Satan rails against Abdiel he says-- Thou shalt behold Whether by supplication we intend Address, and to begirt the Almighty Throne Beseeching or besieging. The long punning-bout between Satan and Belial Ye, who appointed stand, Do as you have in charge, and briefly touch What we propound, and loud that all may hear. And again, when it has taken effect, scattering the heavenly host in unseemly disorder, he says-- If our proposals once again were heard, We should compel them to a quick result. Belial, "in like gamesome mood," replies to the jests of his leader, until, by the providence of Heaven, his wit and his artillery are buried under a weight heavier than themselves. On this whole scene Landor remarks that "the first overt crime of the refractory angels was punning"; and adds, with true Miltonic conciseness, "they fell rapidly after that." Some minor flaws, which may be found in Milton by those who give a close examination to his works, are to be attributed to the same cause--his love of condensed statement. Mixture of metaphors in poetry is often caused merely by the speed of thought, which presents a subject in a new aspect without care taken to adjust or alter the figure. In these cases the obscurity or violence of expression arises not from defect, but But now my oat proceeds, And listens to the Herald of the Sea. The syntax of the thought is sufficiently lucid and orderly, but it is compressed into too few words. In the Fifth Book of Paradise Lost is described how-- The Eternal Eye, whose sight discerns Abtrusest thoughts, from forth his holy mount, And from within the golden lamps that burn Nightly before him, saw without their light Rebellion rising--saw in whom, how spread Among the Sons of Morn, what multitudes Were banded to oppose his high decree; And, smiling, to his only Son thus said. Here, it is true, "the Eternal Eye" smiles and speaks to his only Son. But Milton has really discarded the figure after the words "his high decree," which bring in a new order of thoughts. He trusts the reader to follow his thought without grammatical readjustment--to drop the symbol and remember only the thing symbolised. His trust was warranted, until Landor detected the solecism. The clearest case of mixed metaphor ever charged against Milton occurs in the Eleventh Book, where the lazar-house is described-- Sight so deform what heart of rock could long Dry-eyed behold? Rogers pointed this out to Coleridge, who told Wordsworth that he could not sleep all the next night for thinking of it. What months of insomnia must he not have suffered from the perusal of Shakespeare's works! The close-wrought style of Milton makes the reading of Paradise Lost a hard task in this sense, that it is a severe intellectual exercise, without relaxation. The attention that it demands, word by word, and line by line, could not profitably be given to most books; so that many readers, trained by a long course of novel-reading to nibble and browse through the pastures of literature, find that Milton yields little or no delight under their treatment, and abandon him in despair. And yet, with however great reluctance, it must be admitted that the close study and admiring imitation of Milton bring in their train some lesser evils. Meaning may be arranged too compactly in a sentence; for perfect and ready assimilation some bulk and distention are necessary in language as in diet. Now the study of Milton, if it teaches anything, teaches to discard and abhor all superfluity. He who models himself upon this master will never "go a-begging for some meaning, and labour to be delivered of the great burden of nothing." But he may easily fall into the opposite error of putting "riddles of It is good, therefore, to remember that Milton himself took a holiday sometimes, and gave a loose to his pen and to his thought. Some parts of his prose writings run in a full torrent of unchastened eloquence. An open playground for exuberant activity is of the first importance for a writer. Johnson found such a playground in talk. There he could take the curb off his prejudices, give the rein to his whimsical fancy, and better his expression as he talked. But where men must talk, as well as write, upon oath, paralysis is not easily avoided. In the little mincing societies addicted to intellectual and moral culture the creative zest is lost. The painful inhibition of a continual rigorous choice, if it is never relaxed, cripples the activity of the mind. Those who can talk the best and most compact sense have often found irresponsible paradox and nonsense a useful and pleasant |
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