  When Milton was born, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Dekker, Chapman, Daniel, Drayton, and half a hundred other Elizabethan notables were yet alive. When he died, Addison, Swift, Steele, and Arbuthnot were already born. Thus his life bridges the gulf between the age of Elizabeth and the age of Anne; and this further examination of his style has for object to inquire what part he may claim in the change of temper, method, subject, and form which came over English poetry during that period. The answer usually given to this question is that he had no part at all. He lived and died alone. He imitated no one, and founded no school. There was none of his more distinguished contemporaries with whom he was on terms of intimacy; none whose ideals in poetry remotely resembled his. So that although he is to be Others will have it that Milton was a belated Elizabethan. But the difficulty of that theory is that he reversed rather than continued many of the practices of the Elizabethans, and introduced reforms of his own, no less striking than the reforms effected by Dryden. Shirley is a good example of a genuine late Elizabethan. But in Shirley's works there is nothing that is not an echo. In Milton's, on the other hand, after the volume of 1645, there is nothing that echoes any earlier English poet even faintly. He renayed his ancestry; and, if he left no descendants, The Elizabethans, including even the author of Sejanus and the translator of Homer, were Romantics. The terms Romantic and Classic are perhaps something overworn; and, although they are useful to supply a reason, it may well be doubted whether they ever helped any one to an understanding. Yet here, if anywhere, they are in place; for Milton is, by common consent, not only a Classic poet, but the greatest exemplar of the style in the long bead-roll of English poets. The "Augustans" prided themselves on their resemblance to the poets of the great age of Rome. Was there nothing in common between them and Milton, and did they really borrow nothing and learn nothing from him? This much is agreed, that of all English styles Milton's is best entitled to the name of Classic. In his poems may be found every device that belongs to the Classic manner, as in Shakespeare's plays may be found every device that belongs distinctively to the Romantic. Perhaps the two manners are best compared by the juxtaposition of descriptive passages. In description it is impossible for literature to be exhaustive; a choice must be made, an aspect emphasised, and by far the greater part left to the imagination of the reader. A man, for instance, has stature, feature, bones, muscles, Broadly speaking, there are two methods available. You may begin with the more general and comprehensive of the relations that fall in with your purpose, securing breadth of view and truth in the larger values, leaving the imagination to supply the more particular and personal details on the barest of hints from you: or you may fix your gaze exclusively on some vivid cluster of details, indicating their remoter relations and their place in a wider perspective by a few vague suggestions. The first of these ways is Milton's. He maps out his descriptions in bold outline, attending Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall, Godlike erect, with native honour clad In naked majesty, seemed lords of all, And worthy seemed; for in their looks divine The image of their glorious Maker shone, Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,-- Severe, but in true filial freedom placed, Whence true authority in men. As pictorial description this is all but completely empty. It tells you only that they stood upright, that they were like their Maker, and that they were possessed of the virtues that their appearance would lead you to expect. Their physical delineation is to be accommodated by the imagination of the reader to this long catalogue of moral qualities,--nobility, honour, majesty, lordliness, worth, divinity, glory, brightness, truth, wisdom, sanctitude, severity, and purity. In the following lines the poet proceeds to distinguish the one figure from the other, adding a few details with regard to each. The epithets he chooses are still vague. Adam's forehead is "fair" and "large," his eye is "sublime," his locks are "hyacinthine," and (a Shakespeare commonly works in the reverse way. He does not, like Crabbe, describe "as if for the police"; he chooses his detail with consummate skill, but he makes use of it to suggest the emotions. It is impossible to set his description of persons over against Milton's; for the drama does not describe persons, it presents them in action; and a description, where it occurs, is often designed merely to throw light on the character and feelings of the speaker. "Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low" is a description rather of Lear, as he hangs over the dead body of Cordelia, refusing to believe that she is dead, than of Cordelia herself. "An excellent thing in woman" is not a doctrine, but a last heartbreaking movement of defiance, as if to refute any stander-by who dares to think that there is something amiss, that a voice should not be so low as to be inaudible. The contrast of the methods may, therefore, be better noted in the description of scenes. There The other is the imaginary view from Dover Cliff, described by Edgar in King Lear:-- How fearful And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low! The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade! Methinks he seems no bigger than his head; The fishermen, that walk upon the beach, Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark, Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge That on th' unnumbered idle pebbles chafes, Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more; Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight Topple down headlong. Johnson objected to this description: "No, sir; it should be all precipice,--all vacuum. This criticism is, in effect, a plea for Milton's method, although by a freak of fate it was uttered in vindication of Congreve. Some years earlier, in his edition of Shakespeare, Johnson had remarked on the same passage, and had indicated the poetic method that he approved: "He that looks from a precipice finds himself assailed by one great and dreadful image of irresistible destruction." Johnson's critical opinions on poetry are deserving of the most careful consideration, and, where they fail to convince, of an undiminished respect. But not Johnson himself can raise a doubt as to which of the two passages quoted above is the greater masterpiece of description proper. Shakespeare sets a scene before your eyes, and by his happy choice of vivid impression makes you giddy. The crows help, rather than impede your fall; for to look into illimitable vacuum is to look at nothing, and therefore to be unmoved. But the classic manner is so careful for unity of emotional impression that it rejects these humble means for It is apparent, therefore, how necessary to Milton were the concrete epic realities with which his poem deals,--the topographical scheme of things, and the definite embodiment of all his spiritual essences. Keats' Hyperion fails largely Four speedy Cherubim Put to their mouths the sounding alchymy. He avoids defining his creatures by names that lend themselves to definite picture: of Death he says-- So spake the grisly Terror; and he makes Raphael, at the call of Heaven's king, rise from among Thousand celestial Ardours. In the Tenth Book, Death, snuffing the distant scent of mortality, becomes all nose-- So scented the grim Feature, and upturned His nostril wide into the murky air. A superb example of this powerful use of abstract terms is contained in the First Book of Paradise Regained, where is described how Satan, disguised as an old man, took his leave of the Son of God, and Bowing low His gray dissimulation, disappeared Into thin air diffused. The word "dissimulation" expresses the fact of the gray hairs assumed, the purpose of deceit, the cringing attitude, and adds a vague effect of power. The same vagueness is habitually studied by Milton in such phrases as "the vast abrupt," "the palpable obscure," "the void immense," "the wasteful deep," where, by the use of an adjective Milton, therefore, describes the concrete, the specific, the individual, using general and abstract terms for the sake of the dignity and scope that they lend. The best of our Romantic poets follow the opposite course: they are much concerned with abstract conceptions and general truths, but they bring them home by the employment of concrete and specific terms, and figures so familiar that they cannot easily avoid grotesque associations. These grotesque associations, however trivial, are the delight of humour: Alexander's dust will stop a beer-barrel; divine ambition exposes what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death, and danger dare, Even for an egg-shell. The comments made by Johnson on a certain well-known passage in Macbeth are an excellent example of the objections urged against the Romantic method--a method whereby, says Johnson, poetry is "debased by mean expressions." He takes for text the invocation of Night by Lady Macbeth-- Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry, "Hold, hold!" Johnson's criticisms, which take up a whole paper in The Rambler, may be conveniently stated in summary. The epithet dun, he says, is "an epithet now seldom heard but in the stable, and dun night may come and go without any other notice but contempt." A knife, again, is "an instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employments; we do not immediately conceive that any crime of importance is to be committed with a knife." In the third place, although to wish to elude the eye of Providence is "the utmost extravagance of determined wickedness," yet even this great conception is debased by two unfortunate words when the avengers of guilt are made to peep through a blanket. It is easy, in this case at least, to defend Shakespeare. There is no need to make much of the fact that Johnson attributes the speech to Macbeth. The essence of the crime is that it is the treacherous and cowardly crime of an assassin, committed on a guest while he sleeps. Implements of war are out of place here; it is the very crime for a knife, and Lady Macbeth shows her sense of this when she uses the word. Again, the darkness that she invokes is not the solemn shadow of night, but the stifling, opaque smoke of Hell. The blanket was perhaps suggested to Shakespeare by the black canopy that hung over the Elizabethan stage to represent night; but, in any case, The mean associations, therefore, in so far as they exist, help Shakespeare's purpose. Milton had no purpose that could be furthered by such help. The omissions in his descriptions cannot be supplied by an appeal to experience, for what he describes is outside the pale of human experience, and is, in that sense, unreal. His descriptions do not so much remind us of what we have seen as create for us what we are to see. He is bound, therefore, to avoid the slightest touch of unworthy association; the use of even a few domestic figures and homely phrases would bring his hanging palace about his ears. What dangers he escaped may be well seen in Cowley's Davideis, which fell into them all. This is how Cowley describes the attiring of his Gabriel, who is commissioned to bear a message to David-- He took for skin a cloud most soft and bright, That e'er the midday Sun pierced through with light: Upon his cheeks a lively blush he spred; Washt from the morning beauties deepest red. An harmless flaming Meteor shone for haire, And fell adown his shoulders with loose care. He cuts out a silk Mantle from the skies, Where the most sprightly azure pleas'd the eyes. This he with starry vapours spangles all, Took in their prime ere they grow ripe and fall,-- --and so on. The whole business suggests the arming of Pigwiggin; or the intricacies of Belinda's toilet in The Rape of the Lock. Such a Gabriel should add the last touch of adornment from a patch-box filled with sun-spots; and then is fit only to be-- Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep. Milton was not in the least likely to fall into this fantastic-familiar vein. But he was also debarred from dealing freely in realism; from carrying conviction by some sudden startling piece of fidelity to the mixed texture of human experience and human feeling. When the feast is spread in Eden he remarks, it is true,--"No fear lest dinner cool"; but a lapse like this is of the rarest. His success--and he knew it--depended on the untiring maintenance of a superhuman elevation. His choice of subject had therefore not a little to do with the nature of his diction; and, through the influence of his diction, as shall be shown hereafter, with the establishment of the poetic The same motives and tendencies, the same consistent care for remoteness and loftiness, may be seen in the character of the similes that he most frequently employs. Almost all his figures and comparisons illustrate concrete objects by concrete objects, and occurrences in time by other occurrences later in time. The essentially Romantic sort of figure, scarcely used by Milton, illustrates subtle conceptual relations by parable-- Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath, When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies, And Faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And Innocence is closing up his eyes,-- Now, if thou would'st, when all have given him over, From death to life thou might'st him yet recover. Sometimes, by a curious reversal, poets, especially the more sophisticated poets of the Romantic Revival, describe a perfectly definite outward object or scene by a figure drawn from the most complex abstract conceptions. So Shelley, with whom these inverted figures are habitual, compares the skylark to A poet hidden In the light of thought; and Byron, describing the rainbow over a waterfall, likens it to Love watching Madness with unalterable mien. Both ways are foreign to the epic manner of Milton. His figures may be called historic parallels, whereby the names and incidents of human history are made to elucidate and ennoble the less familiar names and incidents of his prehistoric theme. Sometimes, following Homer, he borrows a figure from rustic life, as where, for instance, he compares the devils, crowding into Pandemonium, to a swarm of bees. But he perceived clearly enough that he could not, for the reasons already explained, afford to deal largely in this class of figure: he prefers to maintain dignity and distance by choosing comparisons from ancient history and mythology, or from those great and strange things in Nature which repel intimacy--the sun, the moon, the sea, planets in opposition, a shooting star, an evening mist, a will-o'-the-wisp, a vulture descending from the Himalayas, the ice-floes on the North-East passage, the sea-beast leviathan, Xerxes' Hellespontic bridge, the gryphon pursuing the Arimaspian, the madness of Alcides in Oeta, the rape of Proserpine, and a hundred more reminiscences of the ancient world. Even the great events of ancient history seemed to him at times too familiar, too little elevated and remote to furnish a resting-place for a song that intended "no middle flight." He transforms his proper names, both to make them more melodious, and to make them more unfamiliar to the ear. Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great Vision of the guarded mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold. "Bellerus" seems to be a name of Milton's coinage. He had written "Corineus," and probably disliked the sound, for in this case it can hardly have been that the name was too familiar. Both reasons concurred in prompting the allusion to Pharaoh and his Egyptian squadrons as-- Busiris and his Memphian chivalry. One would think "Italy" a pleasant enough sound, and "Vulcan" a good enough name for poetry. Neither was musical enough for Milton; both perhaps had associations too numerous, familiar, and misleading. Vulcan is mentioned, by that name, in Comus; but in Paradise Lost, where the story of his fall from Heaven is told, and the architect of Pandemonium is identified with him, both names, "Italy" and "Vulcan," are heightened and improved:-- In Ausonian land Men called him Mulciber. "Hephaistos," the name dear to moderns, could have found no place in Milton's works, unless it had been put in a description of the God's smithy, or, perhaps, in the sonnet where are pilloried those harsh-sounding Presbyterian names:-- Collkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp. Milton's use of proper names is a measure of his poetic genius. He does not forego it even in the lyric. Was there ever so learned a lyric as that beginning "Sabrina fair"--with its rich stores of marine mythology? History, not philosophy, was the source that he drew on for his splendours; and history, according to Milton, had, since the Fall of Man, furnished nothing but fainter and weaker repetitions of those stupendous events which filled the early theatre of universal space. His epic catalogues, which are few in number, show the same predominant interest in history and geography. The story of the Creation gave him an excellent opportunity of enumerating the kinds and properties of birds, beasts, fishes, and reptiles, plants and trees, after the manner of Chaucer and Spenser. This opportunity he refuses, or, at any rate, turns to but small account. His general descriptions are highly picturesque, but he spends little time on enumeration and detail. Of vegetables, only the vine, the gourd, and the corn are mentioned by name; of the inhabitants of the sea One last point in Milton's treatment must not be left unnoticed. Much adverse criticism has been spent on his allegorical figures of Sin and Death. There is good classical precedent for the introduction of such personified abstractions among the actors of a drama; and, seeing that the introduction of sin and death into the world was the chief effect of his main action, Milton no doubt felt that this too must be handled in right epic fashion, and must not be left to be added to the theme as a kind of embroidery of moral philosophy. In no other way could he have treated the topic These, then, here outlined slightly and imperfectly, are some of the most noteworthy features of Milton's style. By the measured roll of his verse, and the artful distribution of stress and pause The success of Paradise Lost, when it was published in 1667, was immediate and startling. Some of the poet's biographers have shed tears over the ten pounds that was all Milton ever received for his greatest work; others, magnanimously The singular thing to note is that the eighteenth century, which broke with almost every other seventeenth-century poet before Dryden, did not Thou chief, Poetic Spirit, from the banks Of Avon, whence thy holy fingers cull Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf Where Shakespeare lies, be present. And with thee Let Fiction come; on her aËrial wings Wafting ten thousand colours. The quotation need not be prolonged; even while he commemorates Shakespeare, Akenside goes to Milton for his material, and plays a feeble variation on the Miltonic phrase:-- In his right hand Grasping ten thousand thunders. Thus Lyttelton:-- Minerva, thee to my adventurous lyre Assistant I invoke, that means to sing Blenheim, proud monument of British fame Thy glorious work! "The building, not the field, I sing," he might have added, for Philips had already chanted the battle of Blenheim in like Miltonic fashion. Thus, again, the worthy Grainger, flattest of agricultural bards:-- Spirit of Inspiration, that did'st lead Th' Ascrean poet to the sacred mount, And taught'st him all the precepts of the swain; Descend from Heaven, and guide my trembling steps To Fame's eternal dome, where Maro reigns; Where pastoral Dyer, where Pomona's bard, And Smart and Somervile in varying strains, Their sylvan lore convey: O may I join This choral band, and from their precepts learn To deck my theme, which though to song unknown, Is most momentous to my country's weal! Grainger frequently echoes Milton; and in the passage where he addresses the Avon, at Bristol, he pays a more explicit tribute:-- Though not to you, young Shakespeare, Fancy's child, All-rudely warbled his first woodland notes; * * * * * On you reclined, another tuned his pipe, Whom all the Muses emulously love, And in whose strains your praises shall endure While to Sabrina speeds your healing stream. Better and more striking instances of the Miltonic spell laid on blank verse are easily to be found for the seeking. But since it is the omnipresence of this Miltonic influence that is asserted, passages like these, which catch the eye on any chance page of eighteenth-century blank verse, and are representative of hundreds more, suffice for the purpose. There has been a tendency among recent historians of English literature to group together the poets who, like Dyer in Grongar Hill, and Thomas Warton in The Pleasures of Melancholy, echo the strains of Milton's early poems, and to name them "Miltonics," precursors of the Romantic Revival. No doubt there is a marked difference between Milton's earlier manner and his later; not a few of his lovers, if they were forced to choose, would readily give up the three major poems to save the five best of the minor. But it is going far to appropriate the name of "Miltonic" to imitators of the earlier poems. Perhaps the study of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso and Comus helped forward the Romantic Revival; but the chief influence of Milton on the development of English poetry was not this. It was natural enough that those who had been taught from childhood to read and admire Paradise Lost should find relief and novelty in the freer and more spontaneous music of these youthful poems. But Above all, he may fairly be called the inventor and, by the irony of fate, the promulgator of that "poetic diction" which, in the time of its deformity and decay, Wordsworth sought to destroy. Johnson attributes the invention to Dryden. "There was therefore," he says, "before the time of Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words, at once refined from the grossness of domestick use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote defeat the purpose of a poet." There is no need to quarrel with this account, if we are careful to understand exactly what Johnson means. Dryden, he says in effect, wrote plain, well-bred English; he eschewed technical terms, shunned the florid licenses of the Elizabethans, and yet, in his more studied verse, never dropped into the town-gallant vein of some of his contemporaries, the slang of Butler or Lestrange. Johnson, it should be remembered, thought the diction of Lycidas "harsh," and it is plain enough from many of his utterances that he ranged Milton with the poets who use words and phrases "too remote" from the language of natural intercourse. Milton himself, it must be admitted, is not wholly free from blame. The elevation and vagueness of his diction, which were a mere necessity to him in the treatment of large parts of his subject, are yet maintained by him in the description of things comparatively familiar. When Sin is described as "rolling her bestial train" towards the gates of Hell, the diction is faultless; when the serpent (as yet an innocent reptile in Paradise), Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine His braided train, it is impossible to cavil; but when Raphael, in conversation with Adam, describes the formation of the banks-- where rivers now Stream, and perpetual draw their humid train, criticism is less at ease. We feel that we are drawing near to the "poetic diction" of the eighteenth century. Eve's tears are called precious drops that ready stood Each in their crystal sluice, but the description is saved by the lines that immediately precede, where Milton says the word, and thereby shows that he is not seeking idle periphrasis:-- But silently a gentle tear let fall From either eye, and wiped them with her hair. His constant preference for words of Latin origin certainly brings Milton near at times to the poetic diction banned by Wordsworth. "Vernal bloom" for "spring flowers," "humid bow" for "rainbow," the description of the brooks rolling-- With mazy error under pendent shades, the use of phrases like "nitrous powder" or "smutty grain" for "gunpowder," and "optic glass" or "optic tube" for the telescope or "perspective," are instances of the approximation. A certain number of these circuitous phrases are justified by considerations of dramatic propriety. When Raphael describes the artillery used in Heaven, he speaks of cannon balls as "iron globes" his alimental recompense In humid exhalations; still less when, speaking of food, with which he confesses himself to be familiar, he calls it "corporal nutriment." But the chief sinner is Adam. If the evil passions of the rebel Angels invented the pun, it was the pomposity of our father Adam that first brought "poetic diction" into vogue. When the curse has fallen in Eden he makes a long speech for the comfort of Eve, in the course of which he alludes to "the graceful locks of these fair spreading trees," speaks of the sun as "this diurnal star," and, studying protection against the newly experienced cold, advises-- how we his gathered beams Reflected may with matter sere foment, Or by collision of two bodies grind The air attrite to fire; --for all the world as if he were a man of science lecturing to some Philosophic Institute on the customs of savages. If, then, the term "poetic diction" is to be Even the best poets of the age are not freer than the rest from the baneful Miltonic infection. Coleridge found the source of "our pseudo-poetic diction" in Pope's Homer. But Pope was from boyhood a sedulous student of Milton, and a frequent borrower. The mock-heroics of the Dunciad are stilted on Miltonic phrases; and in the translation of Homer, above all, reminiscences of Milton abound. In most of them Milton's phraseology is weakened and misapplied. Two Once in your cause I felt his matchless might, Hurled headlong downward from th' ethereal height. The word "flaming" in Milton's splendid line did not suit Pope's purpose--so it disappears, and with it half the glory of the original. In place of it, to eke out the syllables, he inserts the idle, if not foolish, substitute "downward." This is the art of sinking in poetry. Again, Ulysses, narrating his adventures, in the Ninth Odyssey, remarks:-- In vain Calypso long constrained my stay, With sweet, reluctant, amorous delay. The whole line, so beautiful when it describes the modesty of Eve, in its new context becomes stark nonsense. It is Ulysses who is "reluctant," and Calypso who is "amorous." The misuse of Milton's line makes the situation comic. James Thomson (to take another example) with a genuine thin vein of originality, too often conceals it under Miltonic lendings. The trail of Paradise Lost runs all through The Seasons. In such a description as this of the Moon in Autumn there is a cluster of reminiscences:-- Meanwhile the Moon Full-orbed and breaking through the scattered clouds, Shows her broad visage in the crimsoned east. Turned to the Sun direct, her spotted disk, Where mountains rise, umbrageous dales descend, And caverns deep, as optic tube descries, A smaller Earth, gives all his blaze again, Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day. Thomson could not resist the attractions of Milton's stately Latin vocabulary. Where Milton describes how, in Paradise-- the flowery lap Of some irriguous valley spread her store; Thomson follows with-- See where the winding vale its lavish stores Irriguous spreads. Where Milton describes how Satan, wounded by Michael-- writhed him to and fro convolved, Thomson follows with a description of the Spring meadows, where the sportive lambs This way and that convolved, in friskful glee Their frolics play. The lambs emulating Satan are a kind of epitome and emblem of those descriptive poets of the eighteenth century who took Milton for their model. But perhaps the best example of all is Gray, whose work is full of Miltonic reminiscence. He She all night long her amorous descant sung,-- is echoed by Gray in the Sonnet on the Death of Richard West:-- The birds in vain their amorous descant join. Now a "descant" is a variation imposed upon a plain-song. The word exactly describes the song of the nightingale; but the addition of the verb "join" robs it of all meaning. Again, the passage in the Second Book of Paradise Lost where Moloch describes the pains of Hell-- when the scourge Inexorably, and the torturing hour Calls us to penance,-- lingered in Gray's memory when he addressed Adversity-- Whose iron scourge and torturing hour The bad affright, afflict the best. The "torturing hour" in Gray's line becomes one of the chance possessions of Adversity, suspended from her belt with the rest of her trinkets. Observe how the word "hour" has been emptied of its meaning. It affrights one class of persons, and afflicts another, which anything that is "torturing" In these and many other passages of eighteenth-century verse it may be seen how literary reminiscence sometimes strangles poetry; and how a great man suffers at the hands of his disciples and admirers. The thing has happened so often that it ceases to cause surprise; were not Lydgate and Occleve pupils (save the mark!) of Chaucer? And yet it remains a paradox that Milton's, of all styles in the world, unapproachable in its loftiness, invented by a temper of the most burning zeal and the profoundest gravity for the treatment of a subject wildly intractable by ordinary methods, should have been chosen by a generation of philosophical organ-grinders as the fittest pattern for their professional melodies; and that a system of diction employed by a blind man for the description of an imaginary world should have been borrowed by landscape-gardeners and travelling pedlars for the setting forth of their works and their wares. |
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