"And _knowing_ so much, I muse thou art so poor";
"I fan away the dust _flying_ in mine eyes";
"_Flowing_ o'er with court news only of you and them."
All such participles (where no consonant divided the vowels) were
normally of one syllable, permissibly of two.[378] If Mr. Masson had
studied the poets who preceded Milton as he has studied _him_, he would
never have said that the verse
"Not this rock only; his omnipresence fills,"
was "peculiar as having a distinct syllable of overmeasure." He retains
Milton's spelling of _hunderd_ without perceiving the metrical reason for
it, that _d, t, p, b,_ &c., followed by _l_ or _r_, might be either of
two or of three syllables. In Marlowe we find it both ways in two
consecutive verses:--
"A hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse,
Two hundred thousand foot, brave men at arms."[379]
Mr. Masson is especially puzzled by verses ending in one or more
unaccented syllables, and even argues in his Introduction that some of
them might be reckoned Alexandrines. He cites some lines of Spenser as
confirming his theory, forgetting that rhyme wholly changes the
conditions of the case by throwing the accent (appreciably even now, but
more emphatically in Spenser's day) on the last syllable.
"A spirit and judgment equal or superior,"
he calls "a remarkably anomalous line, consisting of twelve or even
thirteen syllables." Surely Milton's ear would never have tolerated a
dissyllabic "spirit" in such a position. The word was then more commonly
of one syllable, though it might be two, and was accordingly spelt
_spreet_ (still surviving in _sprite_), _sprit_, and even _spirt_, as
Milton himself spells it in one of Mr. Masson's facsimiles.[380]
Shakespeare, in the verse
"Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,"
uses the word admirably well in a position where it _cannot_ have a
metrical value of more than one syllable, while it gives a dancing
movement to the verse in keeping with the sense. Our old metrists were
careful of elasticity, a quality which modern verse has lost in
proportion as our language has stiffened into uniformity under the
benumbing fingers of pedants.
This discussion of the value of syllables is not so trifling as it seems.
A great deal of nonsense has been written about imperfect measures in
Shakespeare, and of the admirable dramatic effect produced by filling up
the gaps of missing syllables with pauses or prolongations of the voice
in reading. In rapid, abrupt, and passionate dialogue this is possible,
but in passages of continuously level speech it is barbarously absurd. I
do not believe that any of our old dramatists has knowingly left us a
single imperfect verse. Seeing in what a haphazard way and in how
mutilated a form their plays have mostly reached us, we should attribute
such _faults_ (as a geologist would call them) to anything rather than to
the deliberate design of the poets. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the two best
metrists among them, have given us a standard by which to measure what
licenses they took in versification,--the one in his translations, the
other in his poems. The unmanageable verses in Milton are very few, and
all of them occur in works printed after his blindness had lessened the
chances of supervision and increased those of error. There are only two,
indeed, which seem to me wholly indigestible as they stand. These are,
"Burnt after them to the bottomless pit,"
and
"With them from bliss to the bottomless deep."
This certainly looks like a case where a word had dropped out or had been
stricken out by some proof-reader who limited the number of syllables in
a pentameter verse by that of his finger-ends. Mr. Masson notices only
the first of these lines, and says that to make it regular by accenting
the word _bottomless_ on the second syllable would be "too horrible."
Certainly not, if Milton so accented it, any more than _blasphémous_ and
twenty more which sound oddly to us now. However that may be, Milton
could not have intended to close not only a period, but a paragraph also,
with an unmusical verse, and in the only other passage where the word
occurs it is accented as now on the first syllable:
"With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell."
As _bottom_ is a word which, like _bosom_ and _besom_, may be
monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to circumstances, I am persuaded
that the last passage quoted (and all three refer to the same event)
gives us the word wanting in the two others, and that Milton wrote, or
meant to write,--
"Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit,"
which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of ripple that Milton liked
best.[381]
Much of what Mr. Masson says in his Introduction of the way in which the
verses of Milton should be read is judicious enough, though some of the
examples he gives, of the "comicality" which would ensue from compressing
every verse into an exact measure of ten syllables, are based on a
surprising ignorance of the laws which guided our poets just before and
during Milton's time in the structure of their verses. Thus he seems to
think that a strict scansion would require us in the verses
"So he with difficulty and labor hard,"
and
"Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold,"
to pronounce _diffikty_ and _purp'_. Though Mr. Masson talks of "slurs
and elisions," his ear would seem somewhat insensible to their exact
nature or office. His _diffikty_ supposes a hiatus where none is
intended, and his making _purple_ of one syllable wrecks the whole verse,
the real slur in the latter case being on _azure or_.[382] When he asks
whether Milton required "these pronunciations in his verse," no positive
answer can be given, but I very much doubt whether he would have thought
that some of the lines Mr. Masson cites "remain perfectly good Blank
Verse even with the most leisurely natural enunciation of the spare
syllable," and I am sure he would have stared if told that "the number of
accents" in a pentameter verse was "variable." It may be doubted whether
elisions and compressions which would be thought in bad taste or even
vulgar now were more abhorrent to the ears of Milton's generation than to
a cultivated Italian would be the hearing Dante read as prose. After all,
what Mr. Masson says may be reduced to the infallible axiom that poetry
should be read as poetry.
Mr. Masson seems to be right in his main principles, but the examples he
quotes make one doubt whether he knows what a verse is. For example, he
thinks it would be a "horror," if in the verse
"That invincible Samson far renowned"
we should lay the stress on the first syllable of _invincible_. It is
hard to see why this should be worse than _cónventicle_ or _rémonstrance_
or _súccessor_ or _incómpatible_, (the three latter used by the correct
Daniel) or why Mr. Masson should clap an accent on _surfàce_ merely
because it comes at the end of a verse, and deny it to _ínvincible_. If
one read the verse just cited with those that go with it, he will find
that the accent _must_ come on the first syllable of _invincible_ or else
the whole passage becomes chaos.[383] Should we refuse to say _obleeged_
with Pope because the fashion has changed? From its apparently greater
freedom in skilful hands, blank-verse gives more scope to sciolistic
theorizing and dogmatism than the rhyming pentameter couplet, but it is
safe to say that no verse is good in the one that would not be good in
the other when handled by a master like Dryden. Milton, like other great
poets, wrote some bad verses, and it is wiser to confess that they are so
than to conjure up some unimaginable reason why the reader should accept
them as the better for their badness. Such a bad verse is
"Rocks, caves, lakes, _fens_, bogs, _dens_ and shapes of death,"
which might be cited to illustrate Pope's
"And ten low words oft creep in one dull line."
Milton cannot certainly be taxed with any partiality for low words. He
rather loved them tall, as the Prussian King loved men to be six feet
high in their stockings, and fit to go into the grenadiers. He loved them
as much for their music as for their meaning,--perhaps more. His style,
therefore, when it has to deal with commoner things, is apt to grow a
little cumbrous and unwieldy. A Persian poet says that when the owl would
boast he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a hole. Shakespeare would
have understood this. Milton would have made him talk like an eagle. His
influence is not to be left out of account as partially contributing to
that decline toward poetic diction which was already beginning ere he
died. If it would not be fair to say that he is the most artistic, he may
be called in the highest sense the most scientific of our poets. If to
Spenser younger poets have gone to be sung-to, they have sat at the feet
of Milton to be taught. Our language has no finer poem than "Samson
Agonistes," if any so fine in the quality of austere dignity or in the
skill with which the poet's personal experience is generalized into a
classic tragedy.
Gentle as Milton's earlier portraits would seem to show him, he had in
him by nature, or bred into him by fate, something of the haughty and
defiant self-assertion of Dante and Michel Angelo. In no other English
author is the man so large a part of his works. Milton's haughty
conception of himself enters into all he says and does. Always the
necessity of this one man became that of the whole human race for the
moment. There were no walls so sacred but must go to the ground when _he_
wanted elbow-room; and he wanted a great deal. Did Mary Powell, the
cavalier's daughter, find the abode of a roundhead schoolmaster
_incompatible_ and leave it, forthwith the cry of the universe was for an
easier dissolution of the marriage covenant. If _he_ is blind, it is with
excess of light, it is a divine partiality, an over-shadowing with
angels' wings. Phineus and Teiresias are admitted among the prophets
because they, too, had lost their sight, and the blindness of Homer is of
more account than his Iliad. After writing in rhyme till he was past
fifty, he finds it unsuitable for his epic, and it at once becomes "the
invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre."
If the structure of _his_ mind be undramatic, why, then, the English
drama is naught, learned Jonson, sweetest Shakespeare, and the rest
notwithstanding, and he will compose a tragedy on a Greek model with the
blinded Samson for its hero, and he will compose it partly in rhyme.
Plainly he belongs to the intenser kind of men whose yesterdays are in no
way responsible for their to-morrows. And this makes him perennially
interesting even to those who hate his politics, despise his Socinianism,
and find his greatest poem a bore. A new edition of his poems is always
welcome, for, as he is really great, he presents a fresh side to each new
student, and Mr. Masson, in his three handsome volumes, has given us,
with much that is superfluous and even erroneous, much more that is a
solid and permanent acquisition to our knowledge.
It results from the almost scornful withdrawal of Milton into the
fortress of his absolute personality that no great poet is so uniformly
self-conscious as he. We should say of Shakespeare that he had the power
of transforming himself into everything; of Milton, that he had that of
transforming everything into himself. Dante is individual rather than
self-conscious, and he, the cast-iron man, grows pliable as a field of
grain at the breath of Beatrice, and flows away in waves of sunshine. But
Milton never let himself go for a moment. As other poets are possessed by
their theme, so is he _self_-possessed, his great theme being John
Milton, and his great duty that of interpreter between him and the world.
I say it with all respect, for he was well worthy translation, and it is
out of Hebrew that the version is made. Pope says he makes God the Father
reason "like a school divine." The criticism is witty, but inaccurate. He
makes Deity a mouthpiece for his present theology, and had the poem been
written a few years later, the Almighty would have become more heterodox.
Since Dante, no one had stood on these visiting terms with heaven.
Now it is precisely this audacity of self-reliance, I suspect, which goes
far toward making the sublime, and which, falling by a hair's-breadth
short thereof, makes the ridiculous. Puritanism showed both the strength
and weakness of its prophetic nurture; enough of the latter to be scoffed
out of England by the very men it had conquered in the field, enough of
the former to intrench itself in three or four immortal memories. It has
left an abiding mark in politics and religion, but its great monuments
are the prose of Bunyan and the verse of Milton. It is a high inspiration
to be the neighbor of great events; to have been a partaker in them and
to have seen noble purposes by their own self-confidence become the very
means of ignoble ends, if it do not wholly depress, may kindle a passion
of regret deepening the song which dares not tell the reason of its
sorrow. The grand loneliness of Milton in his latter years, while it
makes him the most impressive figure in our literary history, is
reflected also in his maturer poems by a sublime independence of human
sympathy like that with which mountains fascinate and rebuff us. But it
is idle to talk of the loneliness of one the habitual companions of whose
mind were the Past and Future. I always seem to see him leaning in his
blindness a hand on the shoulder of each, sure that the one will guard
the song which the other had inspired.
Footnotes:
[358] The Life of John Milton: narrated in Connection with the
Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. By David
Masterson, M.D., LL.D. Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature
in the University of Edinburgh. Vols. I., II. 1638-1643. London and
New York: Macmillan & Co. 1871. 8vo. pp. xii, 608.
The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited, with Introduction, Notes
and an Essay on Milton's English by David Masson, M.A., LL.D.
Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of
Edinburgh. 3 vols. 8vo. Macmillan & Co. 1874.
[359] Book I. 562-567.
[360] Ibid., 615-618.
[361] Apology for Smectymnuus.
[362]
"For him I was not sent, nor yet to free
That people, victor once, now vile and base,
Deservedly made vassal."--P.R. IV. 131-133.
[363] If things are to be scanned so micrologically, what weighty
inferences might not be drawn from Mr. Masson's invariably printing
[Greek: _apax legomena_!]
[364]
"That you may tell heroës, when you come
To banquet with your wife."
_Chapman's Odyssey_, VIII. 336, 337.