THE STYLE OF MILTON: METRE AND DICTION
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, looks foolish
enough in the presence of this miracle. There is a sort of critics who,
in effect, decry poetry, by fixing their attention solely on the
possessions that poetry inherits. They are like Mammon--
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, are too likely to underestimate the degree of
his originality. Coleridge was probably wrong when he said that
"Shakespeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the
individual Shakespeare." But he was unquestionably right when he added
that "John Milton himself is in every line of _Paradise Lost_." The more
they are studied, the more do Milton's life and his art seem to cohere,
and to express the pride and the power of his character.
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 a 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 devotional lyrics, gave
a whole new province to English poetry, they left the idolatrous
government of the older provinces undisturbed. Dramatic and narrative
poetry went on in the old way, and drew their inspiration from the old
founts. Year by year, as our native poetic wealth increased, it became
more and more difficult to break with the past, and to lead poetry back
to Zion. Nature and precedent seemed allied against the innovation. The
worst of religious poetry, as Johnson more than once pointed out, is its
poverty of subject, and its enforced chastity of treatment. You cannot
make a picture out of light alone; there must be something to break it
on. Then, too, there was Shakespeare to be reckoned with: he had written
no hymns nor spiritual songs; among the works of God, he had found man to
be deserving of his unremitting attention; yet, while a certain monotony
of manner afflicted the singers of good and godly ballads, he had seemed
never at a loss for a subject, never at the end of the copious
inspiration that he drew from his unsanctified themes.
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 expected, mainly to the time of the civil troubles. It was then
that the versifying of the Psalms became a desolating industry; and Mr.
Zachary Boyd, an ornament of the University of Glasgow, having worked his
will on King David, made bold rhyming raids on passages of the Bible that
are usually allowed to rest in prose. The high places of scholarship felt
the new infection. Early in 1648, Joseph Beaumont, afterwards Master of
Peterhouse, and Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, published his
poem called _Psyche, or Love's Mystery_, in twenty cantos. "My desire
is," he says in the preface, "that this book may prompt better wits to
believe that a divine theam is as capable and happy a subject of poetical
ornament, as any pagan or humane device whatsoever." The poem is about
four times as long as _Paradise Lost_, and was written in eleven months,
which circumstance, his admiring biographer allows, "may create some
surprise in a reader unacquainted with the vigorous imagination, and
fertile flow of fancy, which so remarkably distinguished our author from
the common class of writers." A further explanation by the same eulogist,
who edited Beaumont's _Original Poems_ in 1749, makes all clear. "Our
Author," it appears, "did not look upon poetry as the serious business of
his life; for whilst he was thus amusing his leisure hours with the
Muses, he wrote a full and clear commentary upon the Book of
Ecclesiastes, and large critical notes upon the Pentateuch." After this,
the astonished reader will perhaps be disinclined to verify the
statement, reluctantly made, that in the poems of our author "we
sometimes meet with a vicious copiousness of style, at others, with an
affectation of florid, gay, and tedious descriptions; nor did he always
use the language of nature."
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. He rejects all supernatural fables, and makes it a point of
sound doctrine to choose only Christians for his characters. But that
poem, too, broke off in the middle.
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 damned 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 that poem by Boileau holds equally good against
_Paradise Lost_, which Milton, knowing as little of Boileau as Boileau
knew of him, had published some six years earlier. _Paradise Lost_, it
might almost be said, is superior to _Clovis_ in nothing, except the
style. By the force of his genius and the magic of his style, Milton
succeeded in an attempt thought hopeless by the best critical judges of
his century, and won his way through a ravine that was strewn with the
corpses of his epic predecessors.
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 was best suited for tragic passages in the drama, and that
blank verse should be employed chiefly for the lighter and more
colloquial purposes of comedy. Some echo of the courtly dispute then in
progress between Dryden and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard,
probably reached Milton's ear through his bookseller, Samuel Simmons; for
it was at the request of his bookseller that he added the three Miltonic
sentences on "The Verse," by way of preface. With his accustomed
confidence and directness of attack he begs the question in his first
words:--"The measure is English heroic verse without rime"; and in his
closing words he takes credit to himself for his "example set, the first
in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the
troublesome and modern bondage of riming."
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 his achievement as he won step by
step out of the void.
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-winged 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 the saving quality of Donne's remoter
extravagances. In Donne they are hardly extravagances; the vast
overshadowing canopy of his imagination seems to bring the most wildly
dissimilar things together with ease. To his unfettered and questioning
thought the real seems unreal, the unreal real; he moves in a world of
shadows, cast by the lurid light of his own emotions; they take grotesque
shapes and beckon to him, or terrify him. All realities are immaterial
and insubstantial; they shift their expressions, and lurk in many forms,
leaping forth from the most unlikely disguises, and vanishing as suddenly
as they came.
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, lulling the imagination into acquiescence by the
flow of the melody. Lines like these might well occur in _Richard II_.
The same Shakespearian note is clearly audible in such a passage as this,
where Comus describes the two brothers:--
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 even for the most attentive ear to follow the metre. A
brief description of a Puritan waiting-woman may be taken as an
illustration from Jasper Mayne's comedy of _The City Match_ (1639). As a
sample of blank verse it is perhaps somewhat smoother and more regular
than the average workmanship of that time:--
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 done to the ear. Such as it was, it suited the solemn moral
platitudes that it was called upon to utter. Peele, Marlowe, and
Shakespeare made the drama lyrical in theme and treatment; the measure,
adapting itself to the change, became lyrical in their hands. As the
drama grew in scope and power, addressing itself to a greater diversity
of matter, and coming to closer grips with the realities of life, the
lyrical strain was lost, and blank verse was stretched and loosened and
made elastic. During the twenty years of Shakespeare's dramatic activity,
from being lyrical it tended more and more to become conversational in
Comedy, and in Tragedy to depend for its effects rather on the rhetorical
rise and fall of the period than on the unit of the line. From the drama
of Charles the First's time, when inferior workmen had carried these
licenses to the verge of confusion, it is a perfectly natural transition
to the heroic couplet for Tragedy and the well-bred prose of Etherege for
Comedy. Blank verse had lost its character; it had to be made vertebrate
to support the modish extravagances of the heroic plays; and this was
done by the addition of rhyme. Comedy, on the other hand, was tending
already, long before the civil troubles, to social satire and the
life-like representation of contemporary character and manners, so that
prose was its only effective instrument.
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 caesura he permits to fall at any place in the line,
usually towards the middle, but, on occasion, even after the first or
ninth syllables. His chief study, it will be found, is to vary the word
in relation to the foot, and the sentence in relation to the line. No
other metre allows of anything like the variety of blank verse in this
regard, and no other metrist makes so splendid a use of its freedom. He
never forgets the pattern; yet he never stoops to teach it by the
repetition of a monotonous tattoo. Hence there are, perhaps, fewer
one-line quotations to be found in the works of Milton than in the works
of any other master of blank verse. De Quincey speaks of the "slow
planetary wheelings" of Milton's verse, and the metaphor is a happy one;
the verse revolves on its axis at every line, but it always has another
motion, and is related to a more distant centre.
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.
Tennyson's blank verse, when it is not carefully guarded and varied,
drops into a kind of fluent sing-song. Examples may be taken, almost at
random, from the _Idylls of the King_. Here is one:--
So all the ways were safe from shore to shore,
But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord.
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 _Paradise Lost_. The dullest ear is caught by the contrast
between the opening of the gates of Heaven--
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 three words of it have been pronounced, finishes
itself. From Carew's "Ask me no more," with its long train of imitations,
to the latest banality of the music-halls, the songs that catch the ear
catch it by the same device. The lyric, that is to say, is almost always
dependent for its music on easy idiomatic turns of speech. The surprising
word occurs rarely; with all the greater effect inasmuch as it is
embedded in phrases that slip from the tongue without a trace of thought
or effort. These phrases naturally allow of little diversity of
intonation; they have the unity of a single word, a single accepted
emphasis, and a run of lightly-stressed syllables more or less musical in
sequence.
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 gliding connectives; no
polysyllabic conjunctive clauses, which fill the mouth while the brain
prepares itself for the next word of value; no otiose epithets, and very
few that court neglect by their familiarity. His poetry is like the
eloquence of the Lord Chancellor Bacon, as described by Ben Jonson:--"No
man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered
less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered. No member of his speech
but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look
aside from him, without loss." It is this quality of Milton's verse that
makes the exercise of reading it aloud a delight and a trial. Every word
is of value. There is no mortar between the stones, each is held in place
by the weight of the others, and helps to uphold the building. In
reading, every word must be rendered clearly and articulately; to drop
one out, or to slur it over, is to take a stone from an arch. Indeed, if
Lamb and Hazlitt are right in thinking that Shakespeare's greatest plays
cannot be acted, by the same token, Milton's greatest poems cannot be
read aloud. For his most sonorous passages the human voice is felt to be
too thin an instrument; the lightest word in the line demands some faint
emphasis, so that the strongest could not be raised to its true value
unless it were roared through some melodious megaphone.
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 that to follow it laboriously throughout
its course is felt to be hardly necessary: miss it once and you can often
join it again at very near the same point. "But a reader of Milton," as
an early critic of Milton remarks, "must be always upon duty; he is
surrounded with sense; it rises in every line, every word is to the
purpose. There are no lazy intervals: all has been considered, and
demands and merits observation. Even in the best writers you sometimes
find words and sentences which hang on so loosely, you may blow them off.
Milton's are all substance and weight: fewer would not have served his
turn, and more would have been superfluous. His silence has the same
effect, not only that he leaves work for the imagination, when he has
entertained it and furnished it with noble materials; but he expresses
himself so concisely, employs words so sparingly, that whoever will
possess his ideas must dig for them, and oftentimes pretty far below the
surface."
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 kind of writing for the
purposes of satire. At its best, his own satire attains to something like
it, as, for instance, in his description of Shaftesbury's early life:--
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 George Mackenzie, who repeated many of them from Waller and
Denham. Thereupon he searched other authors, Cowley, Davenant, and
Milton, to find further examples of them; but in vain. At last he had
recourse to Spenser, "and there I met with that which I had been looking
for so long in vain. Spenser had studied Virgil to as much advantage as
Milton had done Homer; and amongst the rest of his excellencies had
copied that."
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 in Hell"--may easily be
matched in Milton. In the Second Book of _Paradise Lost_ is described how
the damned
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 intelligence they convey one
meaning; to a scholar's memory they suggest also another. It became the
habit of Milton to make use of both values, to assess his words in both
capacities. Any page of his work furnishes examples of his delicate care
for the original meaning of Latin words, such as _intend_--"intend at
home ... what best may ease the present misery"; _arrive_--"ere he arrive
the happy Isle"; _obnoxious_--"obnoxious more to all the miseries of
life"; _punctual_--"this opacous Earth, this punctual spot";
_sagacious_--"sagacious of his quarry from so far"; _explode_--"the
applause they meant turned to exploding hiss"; _retort_--"with retorted
scorn his back he turned"; _infest_--"find some occasion to infest our
foes." The Speaker of the House of Commons had to determine, some years
ago, whether it is in order to allude to the Members as "infesting" the
House. Had Milton been called upon for such a decision he would doubtless
have ruled that the word is applicable only to Members whose deliberate
intention is to maim or destroy the constitution of Parliament.
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 modern
idea that a pun is a thing to laugh at. Milton's puns, like
Shakespeare's, give no smallest countenance to this theory. Sometimes he
plays with what is merely a chance identity of sound, as where Satan,
entering Paradise--
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 in the Sixth Book
exemplifies the more usual form of the Miltonic pun. When he introduces
the newly-invented artillery, Satan makes a speech, "scoffing in
ambiguous words"--
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 from
excess of thought. Some few instances occur in Milton, who, in _Lycidas_,
writes thus--
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 wit, by being too scarce of
words." He will be so intent upon the final and perfect expression of his
thought, that his life may pass before he finds it, and even if, in the
end, he should say a thing well, he is little likely to say it in due
season. "Brevity is attained in matter," says a master of English prose,
"by avoiding idle compliments, prefaces, protestations, parentheses,
superfluous circuit of figures and digressions: in the composition, by
omitting conjunctions--_not only ... but also, both the one and the
other, whereby it cometh to pass_, and such like idle particles." Either
sort of brevity may be learned from Milton. But any one who has been
compelled to make efforts of unprompted eloquence, and to choose his
expressions while he is on his feet, knows well how necessary is the
function performed by these same prefaces, protestations, parentheses,
and idle particles. Suavely uttered, they keep expectation alive in the
audience, and give the orator time to think. Whether in speaking or in
writing, no fluent and popular style can well be without them. _I should
be inclined to say--If I may be permitted to use the expression--Speaking
for myself and for those who agree with me--It is no great rashness to
assert_-- a hundred phrases like these are an indispensable part of an
easy writer's, as of an easy speaker's, equipment. To forego all these
swollen and diluted forms of speech is to run the risk of the opposite
danger, congestion of the thought and paralysis of the pen--the scholar's
melancholy. To give long days and nights to the study of Milton is to
cultivate the critical faculty to so high a pitch that it may possibly
become tyrannical, and learn to distaste all free writing. Accustomed to
control and punish wanton activity, it will anticipate its judicial
duties, and, not content with inflicting death, will devote its malign
energy to preventing birth.
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 recreation ground. It was Milton's
misfortune, not the least of those put upon him by the bad age in which
he lived, that what Shakespeare found in the tavern he had to seek in the
Church. Denied the wild wit-combats of the Mermaid, he disported himself
in a pamphlet-war on bishops and divorce. But he found health and
exercise for his faculties there; and the moral (for all things have a
moral) is this: that when, in a mood of self-indulgence, we can write
habitually with the gust, the licentious force, the flow, and the
careless wealthy insolence of the _Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's
Defence against Smectymnuus_, we need not then repine or be ill-content
if we find that we can rise only occasionally to the chastity, the
severity, and the girded majesty of _Paradise Lost_.