We agreed that these were good lines, with the accent of poetry: but we allowed it to be a highly exalted way of telling how So-and-so climbed a hill for a better view but found none. Now obviously this exaltation does not arise immediately out of the action described (which is as ordinary as it well could be), but is derivative. It borrows its wings, its impetus, from a previous high moment, from the emotion proper to that moment, from the speech proper to that emotion: and these sustain us across to the next height as with the glide of an aeroplane. Your own sense will tell you at once that the passage would be merely bombastic if the poet were starting to set forth how So-and-so climbed a hill for the view—just that, and nothing else: as your own sense tells you that the swoop is from one height to another. For if bathos lay ahead, if Milton had but to relate how the Duke of York, with twenty thousand men, 'marched up a hill and then marched down again,' he certainly would not use diction such as:—
Up to a hill anon his steps he reared.
Even as it is, I think we must all detect a certain artificiality in the passage, and confess to some relief when Satan is introduced to us, ten lines lower down, to revivify the story. For let us note that, in the nature of things, the more adorned and involved our style (and Milton's is both ornate and involved) the more difficulty we must find with these flat pedestrian intervals. Milton may 'bring it off,' largely through knowing how to dodge the interval and contrive that it shall at any rate be brief: but, as Bagehot noted, when we come to Tennyson and find Tennyson in "Enoch Arden" informing us of a fish-jowter, that:—
Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean-spoil
In ocean-smelling osier—
(i.e. in a fish-basket)
—and his face
Rough-reddened with a thousand winter gales,
Not only to the market town were known,
But in the leafy lanes beyond the down
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp
And peacock yewtree of the lonely Hall
Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering,
why, then we feel that the vehicle is altogether too pompous for its load, and those who make speech too pompous for its content commit, albeit in varying degrees, the error of Defoe's religious lady who, seeing a bottle of over-ripe beer explode and cork and froth fly up to the ceiling, cried out, 'O, the wonders of Omnipotent Power!' The poet who commends fresh fish to us as 'ocean-spoil' can cast no stone at his brother who writes of them as 'the finny denizens of the deep,' or even at his cousin the journalist, who exalts the oyster into a 'succulent bivalve'—
The feathered tribes on pinions cleave the air;
Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear!
I believe this difficulty, which verse, by nature and origin emotional, encounters in dealing with ordinary unemotional narrative, to lie as a technical reason at the bottom of Horace's advice to the writer of Epic to plunge in medias res, thus avoiding flat preparative and catching at once a high wind which shall carry him hereafter across dull levels and intervals. I believe that it lay—though whether consciously or not he scarcely tells us—at the bottom of Matthew Arnold's mind when, selecting certain qualities for which to praise Homer, he chose, for the very first, Homer's rapidity. 'First,' he says, 'Homer is eminently rapid; and,' he adds justly, 'to this rapidity the elaborate movement of Miltonic blank verse is alien.'
Now until one studies writing as an art, trying to discover what this or that form of it accomplishes with ease and what with difficulty, and why verse can do one thing and prose another, Arnold's choice of rapidity to put in the forefront of Homer's merits may seem merely capricious. 'Homer (we say) has other great qualities. Arnold himself indicates Homer's simplicity, directness, nobility. Surely either one of these should be mentioned before rapidity, in itself not comparable as a virtue with either?'