No More Learning

He takes, as was natural, the enjambed variety, but care-
fully avoids the breathless overlapping of his seniors Browne
and Marmion and Chalkhill and his younger contemporary
Chamberlayne.
The connection of Comus with Arcades is so close in all ways
that it is scarcely improper to regard it as deliberate. The earl of
Bridgewater, for whom it was written, was lady Derby's stepson
through her second husband, and his wife was her daughter by her
first. He was president of Wales, and, in virtue of his office,
lived at Ludlow castle, where Comus was acted. His daughter
Alice, who acted the Lady, must have been named after her
double grandmother. Lawes here certainly wrote the music,
and he acted the Attendant Spirit. As for the story, it was
partly supplied (beyond all question) by Peele's Old Wives Tale,
largely supplemented from Milton's classical and modern reading
(especially the Comus of the Dutchman Puteanus (1608)) and his
own imagination ; partly derived, at least according to tradition,
from an actual adventure of lady Alice and her two brothers.
But it has not always been sufficiently noticed that the whole, as
it were, is a filling up of Arcades—the Genius of the Wood
dividing himself into good and evil parts as Thyrsis and Comus,
the merely accidental songs being adapted and multiplied to suit
the action, and that action itself being devised, in full colour
and body, to take the place of a mere occasional situation, like that
of the earlier piece.
The amplification was more than justified, and in a surprisingly
large number of ways. The actual dramatic effect of the piece is
not great; and, on the other side, it has been pronounced too
much of a fully equipped drama to be a masque. But, putting
questions of words and names apart, it is a most admirable poem ;
and there have even not been wanting those who put it, for length
and poetic quality combined, first of all its author's works, while
admitting the superiority of Lycidas in the latter respect and the
three great later pieces in the first. One special point of interest is
that Milton here discards for his “tragedy, as Sir Henry Wotton
called it (i. e. the body of his dialogue), the couplet which he had
8
E L, VII.
CH. V.


## p. 114 (#130) ############################################

I14
Milton
used in Arcades, and adopts blank verse; while the rest of the
piece is in octosyllabic couplet or lyrical measures which are
almost an improvement on L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Arcades
itself. Something more will be said of the form later : the sub-
stance is amply worthy of it and, like it, duplex in character—an
ethical height and weight which the poet had never reached before
being matched with unimpaired grace in the lighter parts. It
would be difficult to find a poem where profit and delight are
more perfectly blended.
In Lycidas, the delight reaches an even higher pitch. For
once, there is no need to quarrel even with such an apparent
hyperbole as Pattison’s ‘high-water mark of English poetry'-
especially as high-water mark is not a thing that can only once be
reached. The circumstances, form and character of this exquisite
poem have been the subject of a great deal of writing. It formed
part of a collection of epicedes on Edward King, a slightly younger
contemporary of Milton at Christ's, who had become fellow and
tutor, and had intended to take orders, but was drowned on a
voyage to Ireland in the summer of 1637. Milton's contribution
is signed 'J. M. ' only. The general scheme is that of a classical
pastoral elegy; the verse form is a very peculiar, in fact, up to its
date, unique, arrangement of stanzas and lines of unequal length,
for the most part irregularly, and not entirely, rimed, but termi-
nating in a regular octave. To what extent the poem expresses
personal sorrow has been largely, but very unnecessarily, ques-
tioned; as an elegy, it has, poetically speaking, no superior even
in a language which contains the various laments on Sidney
before, and Adonais and Thyrsis after. The whole poem is a
tissue of splendid passages, not unconnected, but sewn cunningly
together rather than woven in one piece as regards subject. One,
however, of these passages contains, for the first time, a note
'prophesying war. ' Up to this date, Milton's verse, though
abstaining alike from the passionately amorist tone of contempo-
rary profane lyric, and from the almost erotically mystical tone of
contemporary sacred poetry, had contained nothing polemical;
and, even in the frequent eulogies of chastity in Comus, nothing
positively austere. Here, St Peter, coming among other symboli-
cal figures to bewail the dead, is made to deliver a tremendous
denunciation of what Milton later directly entitled 'the corrupt
clergy' of the time, and a prophecy of their ruin. The strict
pro-
priety of this has been questioned, even by some who agree with
Milton's views on the subject: the force and fire of the expression


## p. 115 (#131) ############################################

Sonnets
115
>
(not injured by a little obscurity, wbich, perhaps, was a necessary
precaution) may be admitted by the most thorough admirer of
Laud. And all the rest (except from the point of view of an objection
to pedantry which is itself ultra-pedantic) is absolutely proof
against criticism. There cannot be better verse than Lycidas.
The few, but extremely interesting, Sonnets derive their interest
from various sources. Except the earliest two, and the batch of
Italian pieces which follows, they bridge the interval between
Milton's first poetical period and his last—dotting the twenty
dark years with spots of light. It is true that the evil spirit of the
prose pamphlets retains some influence here, that his footing is
seen in the Tetrachordon sonnets, in the tail-sonnet (twenty lines,
the fifteenth and eighteenth of six syllables only) On the new
forcers of Conscience and, to some, though less, extent, in the
political sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell and Vane. It is true, also,
that one (xiv) On the Religious Memory of Mrs Catherine Thomson
is the most commonplace thing that Milton ever wrote. But, even
were the best and the most of them less good, they would be
interesting as resuming (with little following for more than another
century) the Elizabethan practice of this great form, and as
bringing it nearer to the commoner Italian model. Individually
and intrinsically, they do not need any allowance. Wordsworth’s
hackneyed praise is not very specially applicable to most of them;
and Johnson's contempt was contempt of the form itself, no doubt
slightly accentuated by dislike of the author. Taken dispassion-
ately, Milton's sonnets are examples, curiously various considering
their small number, at once of the adaptability of the kind to
'occasional purposes, and of the absence of any necessity that
this adaptability should be abused, as Wordsworth himself
certainly abused it, and as lesser men have abused it still more.
Nowhere, moreover, and this is natural, is the poet's tendency to
be autobiographical shown in a more interesting way. The pretty
overture to the nightingale not only shows the true Miltonic style
very early, but gives us a Miltonic person who might have developed
very differently. The other side--the side which did develop
appears in the three and twentieth year' (vii), and at once fore-
tells the compensations for the loss of the less austere personage.
And all the better later examples give that compensation, with
lighter touches here and there in the sonnets to Lawes, Lawrence
and Cyriack Skinner. The grace of these; the splendour of On
the late Massacher in Piemont and the sonnet on his blindness;
the dignity, even in partisanship, of the three political addresses;
8--2


## p. 116 (#132) ############################################

116
Milton
the idealised tenderness of the finale on his dead wife-give us
not merely great poetry, but invaluable comment on the other
great poetry which was to follow them.
The year 1645, however, saw a more important event in
Milton's literary biography and in the history of English literature
than the move to Barbican, or the reconciliation with his wife, or
even the downfall of the royal cause. Hitherto—in this respect
following a considerable and respectable, though inconvenient and
dangerous, Elizabethan tradition—he had been very shy of printing
his poems. The Shakespeare lines were merely a trimming to the
edition of Shakespeare in which they appeared, and we do not know
exactly how they came there. Lycidas had formed part of a
collection containing other men's work; Lawes's edition of
Comus was anonymous. But now, at a time when his mind was
occupied with things very different from the composition of poetry,
Milton consented to the publication of his earlier poetical work (by,
and at the instance of, the bookseller Humphrey Moseley) as
Poems of Mr John Milton, both English and Latin, Compos'd at
several times . . . 1645. It has been supposed that this publication,
with its accompanying commendatory poems, was intended as a
sort of self-vindication, or counter-sally, in respect of his polemical,
and, in parts, highly unpopular, prose pamphlets. This seems very
doubtful; for anything like excuse, or plea in mitigation, was
absolutely alien from Milton's undoubting self-confidence and his
positive contumacy of spirit. Nor does the motto
Baccare frontem
Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro
necessarily involve any such intention. 'Good luck and escape from
the evil eye and the evil tongue to the poems' is all it invokes.
Probably, there was nothing more behind the matter than the fact
that, since Milton returned from Italy, he had had other things to
think about; and that Moseley's direct solicitation (a fact recorded
in the preface) was the main, if not the sole, occasional cause of the
appearance. The book had a bad portrait, with a Greek inscrip-
tion, by Milton himself, stigmatising the badness. For twenty
years and more after this he did not publish any poetry.
On the origin, date and circumstances of the great poem that
broke his silence, a very great deal has been written. That
Paradise Lost was entered at Stationers' Hall (that is to say, that
it was printed and ready for sale) on 20 August 1667 is the main
documentary fact. Four months earlier, on 27 April, Milton had
executed with Samuel Simmons the famous agreement for four
>


## p. 117 (#133) ############################################

Paradise Lost
117
>
payments of five pounds each, one down, the second when 1300
copies should have been sold, the third when a second edition on
the same scale should have been absorbed and the fourth at the
exhaustion of a third. But, in each, Simmons was allowed an
extra 200 copies on which he was to pay nothing. The MS, of
course, had been submitted for licensing? ; and the actual censor-
a chaplain of the archbishop of Canterbury named Tomkyns
had made slight objections but had not persisted in them. The
volume, a small quarto, with the poem in ten books, not twelve, was
published at 38. , and the second payment fell in about a year and
a half (26 April 1669) after the first. Further, the variations of
title-page, and, in a less degree, of text, usual in the same edition
of books at the time, are unusually great here, and have been
carefully tabulated, so far as possible, by Masson. The most im-
portant is the notable addition on ‘The Verse,' which did not
appear till 1668.
These things, in their various degrees, are certainties; and it is
a further certainty that, after Milton's death, his widow com-
pounded for the third five pounds (already due) and the fourth
which was accruing, for the present payment, in December 1680,
of eight pounds. The popular version of the matter seldom gets
the total-£18-right; but that is not the most important blunder
or fallacy connected with it. It is as certain that the offer of
£18,000 will not produce a Paradise Lost, as that the actual fee
or guerdon of £18 did not prevent its production.
With regard to the actual time occupied in composition, and the
sources, as they are vaguely called, of the poem, we know very
little-practically nothing. There is no doubt that, just before his
energies were diverted into pamphleteering, Milton had planned
a great epic; and, as his Latin poems show, had thought of some-
thing from the legends of the Bruts, or stories of Britain, to match
the Iliad and the Aeneid. It is further certain that, about 1640,
or a little later, he wrote out a long list (actually existing at
Trinity college, Cambridge) of subjects from British and Scriptural
history for dramatic treatment. Not only is Paradise Lost among
these, eo nomine, but four successive drafts, each more elaborate
than the preceding, exist of the persons and the distribution of
subject—the last and fullest, however, having its title changed
to 'Adam Unparadized' [sic]. Edward Phillips says that the
>
1
1 The actual M8 of bk. I which was submitted passed into the possession of Tonson
and thence to his descendants, who sold it & short time ago. It was, of course, in the
band of an amanuensis, not in Milton's (see remarks below).


## p. 118 (#134) ############################################

118
Milton
2
opening lines of Satan's speech? ('0 thou that with surpassing
glory crowned') were originally written and shown to him
and others ‘several years before the poem was begun,' as the
overture of the tragedy. On Phillips's authority, Aubrey gives
‘15 or 16' years for ‘several'; while the same vouchers assign the
actual date of beginning the epic to 1658 or thereabouts. If we
believe the quaker Ellwood, it was actually finished by 1665; but
plague and fire stopped the way to the press. Aubrey antedates
the finishing by two years or so.
On the whole, this is gossip.
What is certain is that Milton had had the subject before his
mind, either for epic or dramatic treatment, quite a quarter of
a century when it was published. The present writer has always,
from internal evidence of a vague but not unsatisfying kind, been
inclined to believe that the poem was actually begun not long after
his blindness had become a settled fact to him, which would coincide
with the 15 or 16 years above mentioned. The gossip has one
more interesting item, whatever may be its positive value, that he
wrote, or, rather, composed, it and his other poems by dictation
during half the year only, ‘from the Autumnal Equinox to the
Vernal. '
Again, fact assures us that the matter of the poem was largely
the result of general reading. Fancy, which has sometimes de-
served a harsher name, goes further and tries to assign particular
sources. The lies of Lauder--who actually took portions of Hog's
Latin translations of Milton, garbled them into divers more or less
obscure writers and put them forth as Milton's originals, plagiarised
by him-stand by themselves here; though, from another point of
view, they have an ungoodly fellowship of literary mystifications
and forgeries to keep them company. But the parallel-hunters
and the plagiarism-hunters and the source-hunters have spent
immense pains—by no means always or often with malicious
intent-to show that Milton imitated, borrowed from, or, in this
way and that, followed, the Adamo of the Italian dramatist
Giambattista Andreini (1613), the Lucifer, also a drama, of the
Dutch poet Vondel (1654), the Adamus Exul of Grotius (1601),
Sylvester's Du Bartas (1605) and even Caedmon, whose Genesis
was published by Milton's friend Junius, in 1655. Even more than
most such things, these suggestions, if they insinuate what is
properly called plagiarism, deserve simple contempt; and, if they
only infer acquaintance, are matter of simple curiosity at most.
Supposing Milton to have read all these books, Paradise Lost
1 P. L. IV. 32.


## p. 119 (#135) ############################################

Paradise Lost
119
6
6
remains Milton's; and it is perfectly certain, not merely that
nobody else could have constructed it out of them, but that a
syndicate composed of their authors, each in his happiest vein and
working together as never collaborators worked, could not have
come within measurable distance of it, or of him.
For, after all the detraction and all the adulation (the latter,
in some cases, as damaging as the former or more so) which
Paradise Lost has received, it remains unique. It is not, as it has
been foolishly called, the only great poem'in existence; but it is
the only poem as great in a particular way, or, rather, it is quite
alone in its kind of greatness. It will be found that all objections
to it, when examined, involve a sort, or different sorts, of petitio
principii. 'It has no hero (for Adam is hardly such and Christ's
victory does not come till later) or a bad and unsuccessful hero
in Satan. ' Why should it have one? “The story is known before-
hand. ' This applies practically to all classical epic and drama.
'It, or part of it, is dull. That is a matter of taste. “Its religious
ideas are exploded. ' That is a matter of opinion. The list of
thrust and parry might be largely extended; but this may
suffice.
On the other hand, it can show a sustained magnificence of
poetic conception, and of poetic treatment in the solemn and
serious way, which has practically never been denied by any com-
petent critic. It would be difficult to find any two persons who
differed from each other more than Voltaire and Johnson, or any
two who, for different reasons, disliked Milton more. Yet Johnson
practically admits, though without enthusiasm, the magnificence
above claimed, and Voltaire is only enabled to shrug it off-he
hardly denies it—by the aid of a certain incompetence to appre-
ciate it if he would. It has been pronounced not delightful by
persons not incompetent: it can never, by any such, be pro-
nounced not great. That the whole is not quite at the height of
the first two books may be granted; but, even the lower level would
be a mountain top in other poetry. It matters little whether it
be approached from the side of form, or from that of spirit. As
regards form, it practically endowed English with a new medium
for great non-dramatic poetry: what, at the very time of
its completion, was being pronounced 'too mean for a copy of
verses,' was made great enough for the greatest poem. As regards
spirit, we find the loftiest height of argument, the most gorgeous
description, action not extremely varied but nobly managed,
character not much individualised but sufficiently adapted to the


## p. 120 (#136) ############################################

I 20
Milton
action, above all, a suffused imaginative dignity, not merely unsur-
passed, but unparalleled elsewhere.
The exact relations of Paradise Lost and its sequel or pendant
are rather uncertain. It is so perfectly natural that Milton should
have written this sequel that, perhaps, some people may hardly
look further; and it is equally natural that some time should
be allowed to pass between the successive publications. It has,
however, been customary to accept the statement of the afore-
mentioned quaker Ellwood to the effect that he, visiting Milton
at Chalfont during his retreat before the plague, 'pleasantly' said
to the poet 'Thou hast said much here of “Paradise Lost,” but what
hast thou to say of “Paradise Found”? Whereupon, Milton
answered nothing and 'sat some time in a muse'; but, next year, in
London, showed Ellwood the poem. Of course, if this be true,
it was finished considerably before the publication of Paradise
Lost. There is, however, a good deal that is suspicious about this
statement; it is not confirmed or supported by Phillips or any
other contemporary authority; and there is against it strong
evidence of a kind which receives too little general attention the
evidence of prosody. Critics who take very different views of
Milton's versification admit equally that there is a difference
between that of the two poems—a difference specially suggesting
some interval between their composition; but less between that
of Paradise Regained and its companion in publication Samson
Agonistes.
At any rate, these two were published together in 16711 by
one John Starkey, who lived at the prelatical sign of The Mitre in
Fleet street. They had been licensed (again by Tomkyns) on 2 July
1670. Of the details—copies printed, terms of publication and so
forth-we do not, in this instance, know anything; but, as the book
is said to be ‘Printed by J. M. ,' it has been supposed that it was
an independent venture of the poet's own. The sale was less rapid
than that of Paradise Lost, or (which is improbable) the edition was
much larger—at any rate, it was not exhausted for nine years, and
the tradition of the comparative unpopularity of the poem is early.
Phillips says that it was 'generally censured to be [i. e. criticised
as being] much inferior to the other, though he [his uncle] could
not hear with patience any such thing. He would have had more
1 Observe that, if Ellwood be right, Paradise Regained must have been kept
complete and unprinted for five years, by a poet who was in bad health and advancing
age, in spite of what has been shown to have been a rather flattering reception, so far
as sale went, of the earlier poem,


## p. 121 (#137) ############################################

Paradise Regained
I 21
than his usual uniqueness if he could have heard it with patience;
but an author's partiality need not bear all the blame of his im-
patience. The inferiority which the 'general censure' of Paradise
Regained has continued to ascribe, though it may be admitted to
some extent, is an accidental, and, so to speak, artificial, inferiority.
The subject is certainly less interesting: partly because it allows
of less addition, traditional or original, to the scriptural narrative,
and, partly, because the conclusion is even more foregone. It is
probable that, to Milton, with his semi-Arian views, the succumbing
of Christ to temptation was a sufficiently epical contingency: to the
orthodox and the infidel alike, it lacks that element. The poem is
rather long for the actual action, and yet rather short in itself a
mere episode in the real ‘Regaining of Paradise. ' And there are
other objections which may be made, some from what may be
called the point of view of the professional critic, some from more
popular approaches.
But, in purely poetic value, Paradise Regained is little inferior
to its predecessor. There may be nothing in the poem that can quite
touch the first two books of Paradise Lost for magnificence; but
there are several things that may fairly be set beside almost
anything in the last ten. The splendid 'stand at bay' of the
discovered tempter-Tis true I am that spirit unfortunate'-in
the first book; his rebuke of Belial in the second, and the picture
of the magic banquet (it must be remembered that, though it is
customary to extol Milton's asceticism, the story of his remark to
his third wife, and the Lawrence and Skinner sonnets, go the
other way); above all, the panoramas from the mountain-top in the
third and fourth; the terrors of the night of storm; the crisis on
the pinnacle of the temple—are quite of the best Milton, which is
equivalent to saying that they are of the best of one kind of poetry.
Our diminishing acquaintance with the circumstances of Para-
dise Regained as compared with those of Paradise Lost dwindles
to almost nothing when we come to Paradise Regained's com-
panion in print. No Ellwood boasts its suggestion; although
there are two Samson subjects for dramas in the Cambridge list
neither of these has any detail appended to it, and one refers to
an early episode (the fox tails and fire brands) of the hero's
life. And, though the other, Dagonalia, is concerned with the
catastrophe, it does not follow that the subject would have been
treated in the actual way of Agonistes. Nor is much to be learnt
from the short preface 'Of that sort of Dramatic Poem called
Tragedy. Although longer and less defiant than the afterthought


## p. 122 (#138) ############################################

I 22
Milton
on "The Verse of Paradise Lost, it is mainly explanatory of
differences from the accepted English form, the poet specially
objecting to tragicomic admixture, disclaiming stage intention
and maintaining the unities of action and time, without mention-
ing that of place, which, however, is, in fact, observed. His
comment on his choric metres is less enigmatical than that on the
Rous ode in Latin which, however, should be taken with it. It
merely disclaims regular strophic arrangement.
The poem itself is of the very highest interest, and does not
need any doubtful—hardly any certain external support. There
is scarcely anything, in poetry—Dante again excepted—which com-
bines poetical and personal appeal in so striking a fashion. The
parallel of Samson and Milton himself is extraordinary, even at first
blush, and the poet, with his strong autobiographical tendency, has
brought it out still further. The blindness, the triumph of politi-
cal enemies, the failing strength and closing life (see, especially,
the poignant lines? 'So much I feel my genial spirits droop. . .
And I shall shortly be with them that rest'), the unbroken
and undaunted resolution-all are in both. And there are less
certain, but most suggestive, added touches. There is no need to
.
make the story of the first marriage worse by confounding Mary
Powell with Dalila, nor can the cases be made to cover each other
by the utmost violence or the most perverted ingenuity. But, in
the Dalila passages of Samson, there certainly is that combination
of susceptibility to feminine charms and distrustful revolt against
them which is thoroughly Miltonic. One cannot but see in the
altercation with Harapha what Milton would have liked to say-
if he never said it—to an 'over-crowing' malignant; and the
whole tissue of situations is worked into similarity, now actual,
now allegoric.
But, quite independently of this, Samson Agonistes, from the
purely literary point of view, is a poem of the highest interest and
of the greatest beauty. An acting play, we are told, it was never
meant to be; but, even of the acting quality, it has probably as
much as any English play on the strict classical model can have.
It has certainly more than either Cornelia or Philotas, than either
Merope or Erechtheus. As a poem, dramatised in a given form,
it needs no allowance and no apology. Both the style and the
versification, to some extent, show that 'drooping of the genial
spirits' which has been quoted: they are harder and stiffer. But
there is even more art, if less 'bloomy flush of life'; and the art is
2 Ll. 594-8.
i See post.


## p. 123 (#139) ############################################

Samson Agonistes
123
almost more imposing than ever, if less graceful. When Mark
Pattison thought that, to critics who maintain that beauty is the
only characteristic of poetry, Samson ‘will seem tame, flat, mean-
ingless and artificial,' he showed clearly that he did not understand
the point of view to which he was referring.
Above all, the choruses give us not only much splendid verse
but an extraordinary abundance of special points of interest.
To begin with, there is—and this point is not Samsonic—the sub-
mission to the once loved, then slighted, enchantress rime. The
first two or three choruses or choric scenes are blank; rime,
not regular, but on a sort of further unregularised Lycidas
scheme, reappears with the striking epiphonema ‘God of our
Fathers, what is man' (1. 667), and is never wholly abandoned
afterwards. Nevertheless, the poet continues his ceaseless ex-
perimentation in the mere forms of verse, putting rime out of
the question-varying the assortment of his lengths, associating
different feet on an extension of the same bold principle which
had underlain the versification of Paradise Lost and, in places,
venturing on entirely new rhythms, his intention in which is not yet
quite certain, as in the famous 'O how comely it is and how
reviving' and 'When their hearts were jocund and sublime. '
And all this art is used for the presentation of a picture of
really great action and high passion, a picture which, if we
were ignorant of, and insusceptible to, all Biblical associations,
if we knew nothing about Milton's personal history, would
appeal to the eternal human interests. It may be that, in his
central and, as the phrase goes, greatest, works, Milton had some-
times forgotten this appeal. He had not done so in his earlier
and happier period; and, though the time was late and hardly
happy, he had returned to it now?
The subject of Milton's prose work is not a very easy one, and
it has been often neglected—comparatively, at least—in general
surveys of his work. So long, indeed, as criticism was mainly coloured
by the critic's agreement or disagreement with the author's views, it
1 Later than Paradise Regained and Samson, and in the year before his death,
Milton published (adding the tractate Of Education) a second edition of his minor
poems (Poems, etc. upon Several Occasions) with Thomas Dring. He omitted the
English prefatory matter not his own to Comus, but added On the Death of a fair
Infant and At a Vacation Exercise, and all his later minor verse except the Fairfax,
Vane, Cromwell and Cyriack Skinner II sonnets. Some, but not all, copies of this
included a new portrait instead of the old libel.
And it is of rather more than merely
bibliographical importance to remember that here, also, as in the 1645 issue, and as
in Lawes's editio princeps, Comus is not called Comus but simply A Mask.


## p. 124 (#140) ############################################

1 24
Milton
was almost impossible that anything valuable should be said on the
subject. There could not be any critical edification in discourse
which tended, on the one side, towards a sermon on the 30th of
January and, on the other, towards a Calf's Head club harangue.
But, even if the king be kept as entirely as possible out of the
matter, many difficulties, not merely troublesome but, as Milton's
own time would have said, 'disgustful,' remain. That poets have
usually been good prose-writers is a commonplace; and that some
of Milton's prose passages are among the finest in English is
hardly denied by anybody. Yet, even here, there have been gain-
sayers who were not political partisans, and whose competence
was not to be questioned; while, if we stop short of absolute gain-
saying, there has been hardly anybody, whose competence and
impartiality are not questionable, to praise without abundant
and uncomfortable allowance and exception. '
The difficulty arises mainly from the fact that, except in the
Education tractate, and in the curious Histories, Milton was
always 'fighting a prize' in his prose compositions; and that,
hardly ever, except in Areopagitica, had he a prize before him
which was worth the fight in a literary sense. This, to some
extent, might have been compensated if he had been a born ‘Swiss
of Heaven' in his controversies—if he had known how to make the
most of his case without positive passion. But he did not. One
would suppose that no one, unless entirely carried away by
sympathy with Milton's causes, could approve Milton's contro-
versial methods. His capital fault is that he never succeeds in
bringing, or, apparently, attempts to bring, the matter under any
consideration, or upon any ground, which his opponents can be
imagined as sharing, or reasonably invited to share. To convict
your adversary on your own statement of case is quite idle: and
this is what Milton is constantly doing. Even if his manner were
less offensive than it is admitted to be, this peculiarity would be
nearly fatal. His arguments against Ussher and Hall are not
merely indecent in form towards one of the most learned men in
Europe and one of the leaders of English literature, both of them
aged divines of unblemished reputation: they have the further draw-
back of constantly taking for granted premisses which Hall and
Ussher would utterly, and on strong reason, deny. In his divorce
tracts, when he is not (with a curious mixture of the pathetic and the
ludicrous) urging (under whatever general shield) his own painful
situation, he has recourse to such arguments as the opinion of
Lutheran divines on Henry VIII's conduct—which is about


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125
as valuable as the opinion of Amphitryon's guests as to the
identity of Amphitryon. In the Salmasius and Morus contro-
versies and in the minor political or ecclesiastical pamphlets, it
is even worse. Cut the abuse out, and there is not much left
of them: cut out subsequently what cannot be admitted by the
communis sensus as real argument, and there is almost nothing left.
Even so, however, it would have been possible for Milton--if
he had been a cool-headed person with a dominant rhetorical
faculty, or even a strong sense of prose art, mastering his personal
convictions, as his poetic faculty and his sense of poetical art
mastered them in the other division—to make his prose work, un-
promising as is most of it in subject, a success in treatment. But
Milton was never cool-headed; and when he was out of his singing
robes, the poetic warmth was exchanged for a less genial variety.
Hypocrisy—even of that modified sort which makes every rhetorician
(if not, indeed, every artist) a útokpitns of a kind—was impossible
to him. And it so happened that some of his special characteristics
of style, which were harmless and even beneficial in verse, were
dangerous, more especially at the time, in prose. He was very
fond of long sentences—the very first of Paradise Lost contains
sixteen lines, and, perhaps, six score words, while there are others
longer. In verse, this did no harm, and much good-indeed,
without it, he could hardly have achieved, as will be duly pointed
out elsewhere, his famous 'verse-paragraph. ' His unerring sense
of verse-form prevented these sentences from being in any way
formless. But, in prose, it was different. Destitute of the girth
and band of the line, enabled to expand and expatiate, to indulge
in parenthesis, and epexegesis, and additional relative clause, by
the treacherous confusion of English and Latin grammar which
prevailed, his sentences too frequently become a mere welter;
and, in citing some of the finest, it is customary to commit the
minor fraud of stopping short where he ought to have stopped,
but did not.
If there had been—as it was practically impossible that there
should be then-an accomplished critic who, at the same time,
was not a political or ecclesiastical partisan, he must have been
genuinely distressed by Of Reformation touching Church-Discipline
in England, when it appeared in 1641. It is impossible to read a
page or two without seeing that here was a writer who united the
gifts of striking phrase and of rhythmical adjustment as, even in
that age of marvellous achievement in these respects, few had done;
but who exaggerated the defects of composition, usual after Hooker's


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Milton
time, in an almost unbelievable way. The second sentence, not
without premonition of the great flights later, is almost a pattern
of Milton's style when not at its best—that style, even at its best,
retaining a general likeness in composition, and (as Dryden says)
ordonnance, to it:
Sad it is to think how that doctrine of the gospel, planted by teachers
divinely inspired, and by them winnowed and sifted from the chaff of over-
dated ceremonies, and refined to such a spiritual height and temper of purity,
and knowledge of the Creator, that the body, with all the circumstances of
time and place, were purified by the affections of the regenerate soul, and
nothing left impure but sin; faith needing not the weak and fallible office
of the senses, to be either the ushers or interpreters of heavenly mysteries,
save where our Lord himself in his sacraments ordained; that such a
doctrine should, through the grossness and blindness of her professors, and
the fraud of deceivable traditions, drag so downwards, as to backslide one way
into the Jewish beggary of old cast rudiments, and stumble forward another
way into the new-vomited paganism of sensual idolatry, attributing purity or
impurity to things indifferent, that they might bring the inward acts of the
spirit to the outward and customary eye-service of the body, as if they would
make God earthly and fleshly, because they could not make themselves
heavenly and spiritual; they began to draw down all the divine intercourse
between God and the soul, yea the very shape of God himself, into an
external bodily form urgently pretending a necessity and obligement of
joining the body in a formal reverence and worship circumscribed; they
hallowed it, they fumed up, they sprinkled it, they bedecked it, not in robes of
pure innocency, but of pure linen, with other deformed and fantastic dresses,
in palls and mitres, gold, and gewgaws fetched from Aaron's old wardrobe, or
the flamins vestry: then was the priest set to con his motions and his
postures, his liturgies and his lurries, till the soul by this means of over-
bodying herself, given ap justly to fleshly delights, bated her wing apace
downward : and finding the ease she had from her visible and sensuous
colleague, the body, in performance of religious duties, her pinions now
broken, and flagging, shifted off from herself the labour of high soaring any
more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull and droiling carcase to
plod on in the old road, and drudging trade of outward conformity.
Now the reader of this, struggling like Robinson Crusoe with
the waves that, though they washed him ashore, all but strangled
and crushed him in the process, may naturally protest with all the
breath he has left on his deliverance. And he certainly would not
lack sound critical objections. There is no necessary harm in the
long cumulative sentence: it may be found (for instance in Ruskin)
of something like double the above length, but building up a
picture whose every stroke is a clear and congruous addition.
Milton's, at first sight and not at first sight only, is a daub of
plastered touches. One or two of the sections (if they can be
called sections) could, indeed, be kept clear by punctuation. But,
for the most part, they are not hinged and jointed together; they
are thrust bodily into each other's substance so far as composition


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6
goes, while the actual words could be thinned out, with, in many
cases, almost infinite advantage.
But, a little further thought will discover no small condolences
and vails' of the kind indicated above. In the first place, the
reader's sufferings would be considerably mitigated in the case of
the hearer, if the thing were cunningly declaimed. Now the
ancients never could rid themselves of the idea that poetry and
oratory were very close together: and Milton was largely an
ancient. Secondly, let it be considered how little it would take to
turn the passage into a blank verse tirade, not quite of Paradise
Lost quality, but of good Comus type. And, thirdly, let the
positive excellencies be noted. If the word-selection be sometimes
bad, it is not always so. How much better is 'overdated' than
our 'out of date’; how fine the kindred 'overbodying herself';
how happy the reversal of epithet order (always a favourite device
of Milton) in 'a formal reverence and worship circumscribed'!
While, all through, even if half whelmed by the over-sentencing,
there rings the wonderful prose cadence which we never find in
English—not even in Malory-till the early translators of the
Bible got it somehow from their originals and infused it into our
literature for ever.
This passionate, voluminous, eloquent, unequal medium served
Milton, when he did not use Latin (in which his manner was not
very different), throughout his life, and on almost all occasions. An
intenser passion, with a nobler subject,'elevated it into the noble, but
even then not always faultless, style of the great Areopagitica
passages; of the fine prayers at the close of Reformation touching
Church-Discipline in England; of the enthusiastic autobiography
of An Apology [for] Smectymnuus; of some parts even of the un-
fortunate divorce tracts. Less fortunate occasions and a lower
mood degrade it into the 'rude railing and insolent swagger' of
Eikonoklastes, which Mark Pattison, for all his liberalism and his
Milton-worship, describes as 'grossly indecent'; or into the in-
conceivably dreary horseplay—or worse of the Animadversions
upon the Remonstrant's defence. With passion and 'interest' (in
the doubtful sense) almost entirely absent, it composes itself into
the sober, businesslike, yet very far from inelegant, vehicle of the
Education tractate. It is really curious to see how, for the most
part, the sentences shorten themselves, how the composition is
clarified, the epithets are thinned and carefully sifted, in this tract.
And it is still more curious to note the exceptions to this-as in
the sentence of the third paragraph beginning, 'And for the usual


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128
Milton
method of teaching arts,' where the unblessed memory of his tutor
occurs to him, where he loses his temper, his head, his command of
the rudder of style, and once more welters and wallows through
clause after clause of ill-jointed afterthought and ill-selected
abuse.
Lastly, it finds its way into channels again different—those of
the two Histories; and has something of surprise for us still.
Most people who have read it have been more or less fascinated
by the little History of Moscovia. The oddity of it is, of course,
less than it may seem to the modern reader. The seventeenth
century was, perhaps, the most learned of all centuries ; but-
some might say because—it was not largely provided with ready-
digested learning. Men, therefore, had to make their digests, their
conspectus, their abstracts for themselves : and this is a specimen.
It is singularly well done-quite a model of précis, with a little
expatiation and ornament betraying the poet's hand. The sentences
are mostly quite short, but not in the least snip-snappy, The
touches that had struck the writer's own attention are selected
and composed admirably to catch the reader's Manners, inci-
dents, local colour—all are used to relieve the mere gazetteer- or
chronicle-effect; and, where the piece becomes more dramatic and
less summary (as in the rather well known interview between Ivan
the Terrible and Sir Jerome Bowes), the style is perfectly equal to
the occasion. The reason, of course, is that there is nothing in the
subject which is cinis dolosus ; and so the foot never breaks
through the crust, and no 'curling tempests' of wrath and inco-
herence burst out.
This is not quite the case with the much longer and very much
odder History of England, where Milton gives himself the trouble
to tell over again what he well knew (and admits that he knew) to
be merely ‘modern fable. ' His reason is frankly given and it
makes us like him all the better—be it for nothing else but in
favour of our English poets and rhetoricians, who by their art will
know how to use them judiciously' as (let us say, though he does not)
Shakespeare had done in King Lear and Milton himself in Comus.
Here, there was certainly ‘miching mallecho' if wanted-monks
and popes and painted images and other dangerous things. But
either the ‘kind calm years' (he revised it in 1670), or the distance
of time, or the blessed influence of romance, though under the
mask of history, kept the coals from blazing; and the curious
power of dramatic recitative, little associated, as a rule, with
Milton, reappears. In the story of Edwin and Paulinus, he passes


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Prose Works
129
>
slightly over the famous incidents of the bird flying through the hall,
and the violent apostasy of the high priest, to dwell on the sign of
the imposition of the right hand. It is to be feared that we can
account for his slighting the heroism of Boadicea 'as if in Britain
women were men and men women. ' But the Caesarean invasions
are told with remarkable spirit; and the use of the historic present
in the account of the war between Brutus and the Greeks is
excellently vivid. Even the curious parallel introduced (in later
editions) at the beginning of the third book as to 'the late troubles,'
though, of course, one-sided, never lapses into the feverish in-
coherence of the earlier treatises; and it remains a strange
Epimethean criticism of the actual facts.
In these later years, too, he composed the longest of his prose
works, the Latin De Doctrina Christiana, which, after lying
unnoticed in the State Paper office for a century and a half, was
printed in 1825 by Sumner, and served as peg, though hardly as
subject, to Macaulay's essay. It is a curious document of its
author's tendency to 'ray out ’nonconformity in almost all direc-
tions and on almost all subjects : being pantheistic in philosophy,
Arian in theology, millenarian in eschatology, semi-Antinomian
in ethics (with advocacy of polygamy) and individualist as regards
church government, the whole, of course, being professedly Biblical
in origin. The recent attempt to attribute to Milton a Latin
religious romance entitled Nova Solyma will hardly commend
itself either to any impartial judge of evidence or to any competent
literary critic.
A complete list of Milton's prose will be subjoined ; and it
seems better to deal with it here in the manner adopted in the
foregoing pages than to tag more or less slight critical aperçus to
the several titles. More emphatically, perhaps, than is the case
with any portion of the work of an author of equal eminence, it is
a by-work. Except Areopagitica, there is hardly a piece of
it that can be said to be, in the common phrase, worthy of its
author, as a piece of literature ; and there is much in it that is
painful, much that is even offensive, to read. Yet it may be
questioned whether, from any literary point of view, one can wish
that it had not been written.
In the first place, it tells us a great deal about the author's
literary, as well as even more about his personal, character; and
it explains to us at once how the strong pleasure which he found
in form and the strong constraint which it imposes were needed to
produce the perfection of his poetic style, and how the volcanic
9
1
E. L. VII.
CH. V.


## p. 130 (#146) ############################################

130
Milton
quality of his genius forced even that constraint to permit the
variety, the pulse, the fluctuation, which made English blank verse
of the non-dramatic type.
In the second, it has given us passages the longer of them well
known by quotation and selection, the shorter constantly, as has
been said, to be found in all the welter and confusion of the mass of
extraordinary beauty, passages without which the crown of English
prose writing would show miserable gaps and empty socket-holes.
In the third, it is the strongest possible historical document as
to the necessity of an alteration—for a time, at any rate in the
dominant character of English prose style. In the other greatest
pre-restoration prose writers—in Donne, in Taylor, in Browne
-the solace is altogether above the sin. In Milton, it is not. Take
them, and you may say “Well, under this dispensation, a great
writer may slip, but look what he can do constantly without
slipping ! ' Take Milton, and the most that can be said is 'Such a
writer could never have written so ill so often under the other
dispensation ; but, at any rate, there are some passages, and those
very precious ones, which he would only have been likely to
produce under this. '
Glances have already been made, for special reasons, at some
of Milton's Latin works, but, when they are taken as a whole, their
interest is very considerable; and it is unfortunate with a mis-
fortune not likely now to be decreased—that few people know them
at first hand. Here, also, there is no comparison between the verse
and the prose-in fact, the latter is worse off even than its English
companion. A Latin Areopagitica would have given opportunity
for that stateliness, which is almost as characteristic of Milton's
prose as of his verse, to show itself almost unhindered. There are
flashes and glimmerings of it in the Latin pamphlets as it is.
Even the dull and discreditable Billingsgate against Morus is
relieved, so far as literary relief goes, by the passage on the
consolations of Milton's blindness and by the encomia on Christina
and on Cromwell. But these things are almost perforce drowned
in matter of a very different quality. The most enthusiastic de-
votee of the classics, if he retains any critical faculty, must pronounce
the usual controversial style, even of Greek, but, much more, of
Latin, to be deplorable; and the comparatively few people who
have studied technical classical rhetoric know why it was so.
The whole thing was conducted on more or less cut-and-dried
rules, which were only neglected-and that not always-by irre-
pressible genius like that of Demosthenes, or by eccentric


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Latin Works
131
individualities of late date like that of Lucian. With Lucian,
Milton had nothing in common : with Demosthenes, he had some-
thing, but not enough for the purpose. His models were Latin ;
and not so much the terser and more austere phrases of Tacitus or
the vivid cleverness of Sallust, as the academic and parliamentary
volubility of Cicero, largely adulterated with the ditch water of
many of the renascence Ciceronians. The consequence is that the
compositions are merely large themes, patched together with
commonplaces of the stalest kind. With a perfect command of
such Latin as he chose to use, Milton rarely, if ever, lets himself go
into a sublime or eloquent passage such as those which lighten the
a
darkness of the English polemic. The inability to carry the actual
argument into any equal court is the same, or greater ; but the
purple patches of declamation are rarely present. There is a good
deal of bandying of authority and of wearisome rebutting on
particular points. But, on the whole, the two sentences 'Salmasius
is an old fool' and 'Morus is a rascally and vulgar libertine,'
represent the whole gist of the two Defensiones and their supple-
ments, watered out into hundreds of pages, with floods of bad
jokes, trivial minutiae and verbose vituperation.
The verse, for the most part, is free from this great drawback? :
and, though it has something of the same quality of pastiche, stock
diction is more tolerable in poetry than in prose. Moreover, these
pieces have the distinction of belonging to a body of composition
which was the favourite literary exercise of good wits, and was
cultivated all over Europe for at least three centuries, if not more,
besides that of being written by the greatest poet who ever indulged
in this exercise. Many of them are only schoolboy or under-
graduate taskwork; but some, even of these, especially that entitled
In quintum Novembris, Anno ætatis 17, have interest; and
three of the later, Ad Patrem, Mansus, a graceful tribute to his
old Neapolitan friend, and Epitaphium Damonis, an elegy on the
companion of his youth Charles Diodati, have much more. Perhaps
the unusual opportunity of comparison with Lycidas has somewhat
enhanced the appreciation with which Epitaphium has been some-
times received ; and one may not be quite sure that, if we did not
know that Diodati was really a friend, and King but an acquaintance,
we could discover it from impartial reading of the poems. Perhaps,
the extreme rarity of acquaintance with the voluminous deliciae of
1 One or two epigrams on the abhorred Salmasius and Morus are not important
enough to form substantial exceptions; indeed, a broad, but rather neat, Martialesque
distich on Morus seems to be not Milton's at all, but some Dutchman's.
9_2


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Milton
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has also enhanced opinion
of this piece among those who are competent to read it, but do not
know much of the corpus to which it belongs. But it certainly
has both elegance and pathos.
What seems to have been Milton's last Latin' verse of import-
ance, though it is not exactly a success in itself, has extraordinary,
and generally overlooked, interest of form? . Ad Joannem
Rousium is an attempt (explained carefully in scheme by Milton
himself) at a Latin strophic ode, in which the most singular
liberties are taken with the construction and correspondence
of the lines and, indeed, with the whole arrangement. His
explanation leaves us a good deal in the dark, and, whereas
he says that he has 'looked rather at a method of convenient
reading than at one of singing on old modes' it seems more like a
sort of musical chase of a chain of motives through variations of
metre. But it is very valuable for purposes of comparison with
the choruses of Samson ; and it could hardly be more so as an
indication of Milton's own interest in metrical experiment.
At this point, we may naturally pass to a general consideration
of Milton's literary form, which, in his case, is almost more im-
portant than in that of any other very great English writer. In
general style, Milton's peculiarity appears, as has been pointed out,
so early as the poem on the Morning of Christ's Nativity: and it
perseveres until Samson. Even the furious welter of the prose
cannot prevent the calm and stately phraseology from emerging--at
least occasionally—the mighty rhythm from subjugating the chaotic
throng of words, now and then. In the verse, the phenomena go all
the other way. It is only on the rarest occasions—when he attempts
humour, or when he becomes simply didactic—that the style is other
than consummate in its own way. To that way, hardly more than
one epithet of praise, in the wider and higher range, can be denied.
Milton's style is never exactly natural; it never has even the
quaint eccentric nature which the conceit of the time sometimes
takes on, as, for instance, eminently in Browne. It is always con-
fessed and almost ostentatious art: art attained, to some extent,
by definite and obvious rhetorical devices, such as apposition; the
old Chaucerian posing of the substantive between two epithets for
the special purpose of drawing attention to some connection or
opposition between the two; the reversal of the order of noun and
1 He has left us a few Greek pieces of no value.
? There is a MS copy of this in the Bodleian which has been sometimes thought to
be autograph.


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Versification
133
adjective in the same line, or clause. In his poetry, he particularly
affects proper names of resonance and colour-scattering them over
his verse paragraphs with an effect that is almost pyrotechnical.
But these verse paragraphs themselves are almost the central
secret and peculiarity of the Miltonic manner-serving as a bridge
between his style proper and his versification. It is perfectly clear
that he was dimly aiming at something of the same kind in prose ;
and he sometimes came near it. In verse, he attained it very
early, and perfected it more and more. The thing is not, of course,
of his own invention: it is an inspiration from drama and, especially,
from the soliloquies of Shakespeare. But non-dramatic blank verse
had been little practised by anyone, and the first and chief example
of it, Surrey's translation of the Aeneid, though Vergil gives ex-
cellent opportunity, was not likely to arrive at any such mastery.
The early blank verse writer was too glad to get safely to the end
of his line to think about playing tricks with that line, so as to put
it in concatenation with others. But the dramatist had to do this;
and, in doing it, he discovered—in Shakespeare's case perfectly, in
others less so—the various secrets of the mystery. And the average
dramatist had not only discovered them, but, about the time when
Milton entered upon serious verse writing, had begun to abuse and
degrade the art-making his lines battered deformities and his
verse sentences ruinous heaps.
To Milton's sense of stately order, such things must have been
abhorrent; and his musical training, no doubt, strengthened his
aversion. His first finished poems are in tight, not loose, verse-
the sonnet, the solemn stanzas of On the Morning of Christ's
Nativity, the easy, but fairly regular and uniform, as well as uncom-
plicated, sevens and eights of L'Allegro and its companion. When
he makes a serious attempt with blank verse in Comus, there is even
noticeable a tendency to fall back on the single-moulded line of
Marlowe, accurately constructed in itself and correctly accumulated,
but not jointed, and continued, and twined into a contrasted pattern
of various but homogeneous design. Yet, even here, the power of
his own genius for verse, and his matchless daring in experiment,
introduced variety. And when, some twenty years after, he perhaps
began, and some thirty years after definitely set to work on and
completed, Paradise Lost, he had become an absolute master of
the blank verse line, single and combined.
The exact principles of Miltonic versification, in the epics and
Samson, have been matters of sharp controversy; and, in such a
History as this, it is the duty of a writer to be an expositor and


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Milton
2
not an advocate. The various opinions on the subject may be
reduced, with less violence than in some other cases, to the usual
three. The older opinion-long considered the orthodox one and
still held by some, though chiefly by foreign, critics-is that Milton's
blank verse lines are strictly decasyllabic, apparent exceptions
being due to actual elision or running together of syllables; and that,
though it cannot be said that they are all strictly iambic or arranged
in rising stress, variations from this are due only to wrenched accent,
'impure' construction for the sake of preventing monotony and so
forth. The opposite view is that Milton, not more from his study
of the classics than from that of English poets and, especially,
Shakespeare, was fully conversant with the practice, if not the
theory, of substitution of equivalent feet-disyllabic or trisyllabic,
trochee, spondee, dactyl, anapaest—for the iambic; and that he used
this deliberately for the purpose of obtaining varied and concerted
music. This opinion, which is that of the present writer, grew up
slowly during the eighteenth century, but has been increasingly
common in the nineteenth, though not often thoroughly worked
out. Between the two, and held by some critics of great distinc-
tion, is a theory (or, perhaps, more than one) according to which
Milton always intended the strict five-foot ten-syllabled line, but
gave himself certain intricate dispensations, capable of being more
or less rigidly systematised, by which a larger number of syllables
than ten could be written in the line; could (in some cases, though
not in all) be actually pronounced in it; but could be metrically
elided. To put the thing, perhaps, more intelligibly by examples :
according to theory (i) ominous,' when the i makes an eleventh
syllable, and 'the Eternal,' when the is in the same case, should be
pronounced 'om'nous' and 'th' Eternal' and, in at least the latter
case, printed so. According to (ii) ominous' and 'the Eternal'
should be written in full, pronounced in full, and reckoned metri-
cally as trisyllabic feet, or in another notation) as combinations
of two unaccented and one accented syllables. According to
(iii) they should be written and pronounced in full, but the i
and the first e should be regarded as metrically 'vanished. '
Putting aside this capital point, on which the student must
make
up his mind after full consideration of the subject, there are
not a few lines of Milton where unusual combinations of foot or
arrangements of stress give rise to difficulty. On another great
general feature, there is not, nor can there be, any difference of
opinion as to fact; and this is that Milton pays no attention to the
supposed necessity, or, at least, propriety, of putting a pause near
>


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Versification and Style 135
the middle of the line, and that his freedom of handling here is vital
to his versification. On the propriety, as distinguished from the
fact, of the variation, such unanimity has not prevailed. The more
rigid eighteenth century critics regarded the central or centripetal
pause as an absolute law, the breach of which was to be justified
by no success of result. Johnson was not quite so strait-laced as
this; but as, with him, regularity of correspondence was the main
article of poetry, he objected to such confusions of the methods
of the poet and the declaimer’; and, consistently enough, disliked
blank verse altogether. It is, at any rate, certain, that it is by
variety of line material (attained by whatever means), and by
further variation of pause, that Milton achieves the extraordinary
freedom from monotony, and the force of character, which dis-
tinguish his verse. And it has been recognised, with increasing
decision, that he does not employ these means in a fashion merely
continuous or strung together, that his verse construction is really
periodic or paragraphic—the sections corresponding in division of
sense and substance, as it were, to long but unequal stanzas or
strophes of verses identical at first sight, but individually variable.
If the reader will compare the sketches of the progress of
English prosody given at intervals in this History; if he will
remember that Milton was a careful scholar and a fluent writer
of Latin verse; and if he will pay particular attention to the
Rous ode in Latin, and to Samson in English-he will not have
much difficulty in appreciating the position of the poet in regard
to quality of versification. So far as Milton's historical position is
concerned, he is almost the central figure in the whole history of
our verse. Brought into definite form as that verse had been,
after two centuries of experiment, by Chaucer; restored and re-
formed, after nearly two more of disarray, by Spenser; enormously
varied and advanced by Shakespeare and the later Elizabethans
Milton found it liable to fresh disorders. He did not so much
directly attack these as elaborate, for non-dramatic poetry, a
medium practically involving all the order and all the freedom
possible in English verse—yet without rime. And, in Samson, he
returned to rime itself in choruses, though not universally or
regularly, but, rather, with an extension of the occasional use
which he had tried in Lycidas.
In the larger sense of style, Milton holds so great a place that
we may almost let the arrangement of this chapter pass here
into a conclusion-summary. He is, admittedly, in the least
disputed sense of that much debated term, 'the grand style,' the


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136
Milton
grandest-styled of English poets. He never, indeed, attains to
the absolute zenith of expression-As does Shakespeare often and,
perhaps, Dante sometimes. He is, unlike them, strangely un-
modern; he has, indeed, it has been quite correctly said,
little even of the renascence about him, except those tricks and
fashions of form which have been noticed. Biblical, classical
and medieval influences almost alone work on him—especially the
former two. Under their joint pressure, he has elaborated a
manner so all-pervading, that, if it were not also great, it might,
or must, be called a mannerism. But it is always a mannerism of
grandeur and never-this is another of the points in which Milton
is unique one of grandiosity. It does break down sometimes,
though rarely, when he attempts humour ; when he lets himself
prose, and so forth ; but, even then, it does not become grandiose,
still less bombastic: it is merely flat and dull or, sometimes,
grotesque. Almost everywhere, the magnificent state and cere-
mony covers and carries off the occasion, the subject, resistlessly,
This manner has some modes and phases which are worth
particularising, especially in the attempt to complete the presenta-
tion in little of the work and figure of so great a poet. One of the
most remarkable of these is the famous ‘Miltonic vague'-the
preference of vast but rather indeterminate pictures, tinted with a
sort of dim gorgeousness or luridity, as the case may be—to sharper
outlines and more definite colours. Another—as it may seem in a
different sphere of thought—is the peculiar moral atmosphere of a
kind of magnanimous intransigeance which pervades the whole.
The common saying that 'Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost' is
merely a way of expressing this wider truth to the vulgar mind.
It is not at all probable that Milton meant anything of the kind ;
according to 'the rules,' a hero ought to be victorious, and Satan's
victory is exceedingly Pyrrhic; according to 'the rules,' he ought to
be good, if not faultless, and certainly Milton did not think Satan
good. But he has made Satan the most interesting person, and
his unflinching nonconformity the most interesting thing, in the
poem. In Paradise Regained, he enjoys a double presentation of
this kind the persistence of Satan, unconquered by past or future
certainty of defeat, and the resistance of Christ, to which Milton's
semi-Arian views must, as has been said, have given a peculiar
interest. As regards Agonistes, the other common saying, that
'Samson is Milton,' contains the general truth again. Samson
is incarnate resistance; he has resisted grace and the Philistines
alike, in the past ; his repentance and atonement consist in re-


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Poetical Quality
137
sisting his father, the chorus, Harapha, the officer, the lords,
Dalila, everybody; and his final simulated compliance is only to
obtain the means of making this resistance triumph. Even some
forty years earlier, the centre of Comus is the invincible resolution
of the Lady; and the real inspiration of Lycidas, apart from the
poetry, is the defiant denunciation-utterly different from the
parallel and, no doubt, suggesting passage in Dante
of St Peter.
Now this pervading irreconcilableness, wherein Milton and Dante,
to some extent, come together again, can only be made poetical by
a style of severe splendour; and it meets this eminently in both,
but more exclusively and restrictively in Milton.
It is almost a necessary consequence of this peculiar kind of
magnificence that Milton has always been more admired and
written about than loved and read, except in his earlier and
smaller poems. Some have been bold enough to say that even
1 Penseroso is generally known only in a few passages of its
brightest purple; and the extraordinary beauty of the latter part
of Comus has not prevented persons who united cultivation with
frankness from pronouncing it heavy. That this is unfortunate
need hardly be said. To begin with, it is a loss, to him who does
not read it, of some of the greatest poetry in the world-of poetry
which scarcely ever declines below a level that most poets scarcely
ever reach. But the loss is greater than this. Careless folk are
sometimes found who decry the historic estimate altogether, and
who maintain that a minor poet of the twentieth century is better
worth reading than a minor poet of the thirteenth, though the
later, for the most part, is simply a hand at the machine which
the earlier had helped to construct. But Milton is not a minor
poet, and his influence is omnipresent in almost all later English
poetry, and in not a little of later prose English literature. At
first, at second, at third, hand, he has permeated almost all his
successors. Without Milton, you cannot understand, in the real
sense of understanding, writers so different as Landor and Tennyson,
as Thomson and Wordsworth. He might walk through English
letters and, like the unwelcome apparition in one of Dickens's
shorter stories, ejaculate ‘Mine !