"Before thy fellows, ambitious to win
From me some plume, that thy success may show
Destruction to the rest. This pause between
(Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know";
and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an assonance,--
"If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge
Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft
In worst extremes and on the perilous edge
Of battle when it raged, in all assaults."
There can be little doubt that the rhymes in the first passage cited were
intentional, and perhaps they were so in the others; but Milton's ear has
tolerated not a few perfectly rhyming couplets, and others in which the
assonance almost becomes rhyme, certainly a fault in blankverse:--
"From the Asian Kings (and Parthian among these),
From India and the Golden Chersonese";
"That soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired
What hunger, if aught hunger, had impaired";
"And will alike be punished, whether thou
Reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow";
"Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy,
Save what is in destroying, other joy";
"Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden, and far happier days";
"This my long sufferance and my day of grace
They who neglect and scorn shall never taste";
"So far remote with diminution seen,
First in his East the glorious lamp was seen."[371]
These examples (and others might be adduced) serve to show that Milton's
ear was too busy about the larger interests of his measures to be always
careful of the lesser. He was a strategist rather than a drill-sergeant
in verse, capable, beyond any other English poet, of putting great masses
through the most complicated evolutions without clash or confusion, but
he was not curious that every foot should be at the same angle. In
reading "Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of vastness. You float under an
illimitable sky, brimmed with sunshine or hung with constellations; the
abysses of space are about you; you hear the cadenced surges of an unseen
ocean; thunders mutter round the horizon; and if the scene change, it is
with an elemental movement like the shifting of mighty winds. His
imagination seldom condenses, like Shakespeare's, in the kindling flash
of a single epithet, but loves better to diffuse itself. Witness his
descriptions, wherein he seems to circle like an eagle bathing in the
blue streams of air, controlling with his eye broad sweeps of champaign
or of sea, and rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser
expression. He was fonder of the vague, perhaps I should rather say the
indefinite, where more is meant than meets the ear, than any other of our
poets. He loved epithets (like _old_ and _far_) that suggest great
reaches, whether of space or time. This bias shows itself already in his
earlier poems, as where he hears
"The _far off_ curfew sound
Over some _widewatered_ shore,"
or where he fancies the shores[372] and sounding seas washing Lycidas far
away; but it reaches its climax in the "Paradise Lost." He produces his
effects by dilating our imaginations with an impalpable hint rather than
by concentrating them upon too precise particulars. Thus in a famous
comparison of his, the fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming
nightly toward the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He generalizes
always instead of specifying,--the true secret of the ideal treatment in
which he is without peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he is never
turgid. Tasso begins finely with
"Chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne
II rauco suon della tartarea tromba;
Treman le spaziose atre caverne,
E l'aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba,"
but soon spoils all by condescending to definite comparisons with thunder
and intestinal convulsions of the earth; in other words, he is unwary
enough to give us a standard of measurement, and the moment you furnish
Imagination with a yardstick she abdicates in favor of her statistical
poor-relation Commonplace. Milton, with this passage in his memory, is
too wise to hamper himself with any statement for which he can be brought
to book, but wraps himself in a mist of looming indefiniteness;
"He called so loud that all the hollow deep
Of hell resounded,"
thus amplifying more nobly by abstention from his usual method of
prolonged evolution. No caverns, however spacious, will serve his turn,
because they have limits. He could practise this self-denial when his
artistic sense found it needful, whether for variety of verse or for the
greater intensity of effect to be gained by abruptness. His more
elaborate passages have the multitudinous roll of thunder, dying away to
gather a sullen force again from its own reverberations, but he knew that
the attention is recalled and arrested by those claps that stop short
without echo and leave us listening. There are no such vistas and avenues
of verse as his. In reading the "Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of
spaciousness such as no other poet gives. Milton's respect for himself
and for his own mind and its movements rises wellnigh to veneration. He
prepares the way for his thought and spreads on the ground before the
sacred feet of his verse tapestries inwoven with figures of mythology and
romance. There is no such unfailing dignity as his. Observe at what a
reverent distance he begins when he is about to speak of himself, as at
the beginning of the Third Book and the Seventh. His sustained strength
is especially felt in his beginnings. He seems always to start full-sail;
the wind and tide always serve; there is never any fluttering of the
canvas In this he offers a striking contrast with Wordsworth, who has to
go through with a great deal of _yo-heave-ohing_ before he gets under
way. And though, in the didactic parts of "Paradise Lost," the wind dies
away sometimes, there is a long swell that will not let us forget it, and
ever and anon some eminent verse lifts its long ridge above its tamer
peers heaped with stormy memories. And the poem never becomes incoherent;
we feel all through it, as in the symphonies of Beethoven, a great
controlling reason in whose safe-conduct we trust implicitly.
Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's English are, it seems to me, for the
most part unsatisfactory He occupies some ten pages, for example, with a
history of the genitival form _its_, which adds nothing to our previous
knowledge on the subject and which has no relation to Milton except for
its bearing on the authorship of some verses attributed to him against
the most overwhelming internal evidence to the contrary. Mr. Masson is
altogether too resolute to find traces of what he calls oddly enough
"recollectiveness of Latin constructions" in Milton, and scents them
sometimes in what would seem to the uninstructed reader very idiomatic
English. More than once, at least, he has fancied them by
misunderstanding the passage in which they seem to occur. Thus, in
"Paradise Lost," XI. 520, 521,
"Therefore so abject is their punishment,
Disfiguring not God's likeness but their own,"
has no analogy with _eorum deformantium_, for the context shows that it
is the _punishment_ which disfigures. Indeed, Mr. Masson so often finds
constructions difficult, ellipses strange, and words needing annotation
that are common to all poetry, nay, sometimes to all English, that his
notes seem not seldom to have been written by a foreigner. On this
passage in "Comus,"--
"I do not think my sister so to seek
Or so unprincipled in virtue's book
And the sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever
As that the single want of light and noise
* * * * *
"(Not being in danger, as I trust she is not)
Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts,"
Mr. Masson tells us, that "in very strict construction, _not being_ would
cling to _want_ as its substantive; but the phrase passes for the Latin
ablative absolute." So on the words _forestalling night_, "i. e.
anticipating. Forestall is literally to anticipate the market by
purchasing goods before they are brought to the stall." In the verse
"Thou hast immanacled while Heaven sees good,"
he explains that "_while_ here has the sense of _so long as_." But Mr.
Masson's notes on the language are his weakest. He is careful to tell us,
for example, "that there are instances of the use of _shine_ as a
substantive in Spenser, Ben Jonson, and other poets." It is but another
way of spelling _sheen_, and if Mr. Masson never heard a shoeblack in the
street say, "Shall I give you a shine, sir?" his experience has been
singular.[373] His notes in general are very good (though too long).
Those on the astronomy of Milton are particularly valuable. I think he is
sometimes a little too scornful of parallel passages,[374] for if there
is one thing more striking than another in this poet, it is that his
great and original imagination was almost wholly nourished by books,
perhaps I should rather say set in motion by them. It is wonderful how,
from the most withered and juiceless hint gathered in his reading, his
grand images rise like an exhalation; how from the most battered old lamp
caught in that huge drag-net with which he swept the waters of learning,
he could conjure a tall genius to build his palaces. Whatever he touches
swells and towers. That wonderful passage in Comus of the airy tongues,
perhaps the most imaginative in suggestion he ever wrote, was conjured
out of a dry sentence in Purchas's abstract of Marco Polo. Such examples
help us to understand the poet. When I find that Sir Thomas Browne had
said before Milton, that Adam "was _the wisest of all men since_," I am
glad to find this link between the most profound and the most stately
imagination of that age. Such parallels sometimes give a hint also of the
historical development of our poetry, of its apostolical succession, so
to speak. Every one has noticed Milton's fondness of sonorous proper
names, which have not only an acquired imaginative value by association,
and so serve to awaken our poetic sensibilities, but have likewise a
merely musical significance. This he probably caught from Marlowe, traces
of whom are frequent in him. There is certainly something of what
afterwards came to be called Miltonic in more than one passage of
"Tamburlaine," a play in which gigantic force seems struggling from the
block, as in Michel Angelo's Dawn.
Mr. Masson's remarks on the versification of Milton are, in the main,
judicious, but when he ventures on particulars, one cannot always agree
with him. He seems to understand that our prosody is accentual merely,
and yet, when he comes to what he calls _variations_, he talks of the
"substitution of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or the Spondee, for the
regular Iambus, or of the Anapaest, the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for
the same." This is always misleading. The shift of the accent in what Mr.
Masson calls "dissyllabic variations" is common to all pentameter verse,
and, in the other case, most of the words cited as trisyllables either
were not so in Milton's day,[375] or were so or not at choice of the
poet, according to their place in the verse. There is not an elision of
Milton's without precedent in the dramatists from whom he learned to
write blank-verse. Milton was a greater metrist than any of them, except
Marlowe and Shakespeare, and he employed the elision (or the slur)
oftener than they to give a faint undulation or retardation to his verse,
only because his epic form demanded it more for variety's sake. How
Milton would have _read_ them, is another question. He certainly often
marked them by an apostrophe in his manuscripts. He doubtless composed
according to quantity, so far as that is possible in English, and as
Cowper somewhat extravagantly says, "gives almost as many proofs of it in
his 'Paradise Lost' as there are lines in the poem."[376] But when Mr.
Masson tells us that
"Self-fed and self-consumed: if this fail,"
and
"Dwells in all Heaven charity so rare,"
are "only nine syllables," and that in
"Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream,"
"either the third foot must be read as an _anapaest_ or the word _hugest_
must be pronounced as one syllable, _hug'st_," I think Milton would have
invoked the soul of Sir John Cheek. Of course Milton read it
"Created hugest that swim th' ocean-stream,"
just as he wrote (if we may trust Mr. Masson's facsimile)
"Thus sang the uncouth swain to th' oaks and rills,"
a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur precisely as in the
Italian poets.[377]
"Gest that swim" would be rather a knotty _anapaest_, an insupportable
foot indeed! And why is even _hug'st_ worse than Shakespeare's
"_Young'st_ follower of thy drum"?