Elevation of his style. 31. We rarely meet with feeble lines in Paradise Lost,[985] though with many that are hard, and, in a common use of the word, might be called prosaic. Yet few are truly prosaic; few wherein the tone is not some way distinguished from prose. The very artificial style of Milton, sparing in English idiom, and his study of a rhythm, not always the most grateful to our ears, but preserving his blank verse from a trivial flow, is the cause of this elevation. It is, at least, more removed from a prosaic cadence than the slovenly rhymes of such contemporary poets as Chamberlayne. His versification is entirely his own, framed on a Latin and chiefly a Virgilian model, the pause less frequently resting on the close of the line than in Homer, and much less than in our own dramatic poets. But it is also possible that the Italian and Spanish blank verse may have had some effect upon his ear.
[985] One of the few exceptions is in the sublime description of Death, where a wretched hemistich, “Fierce as ten furies,” stands as an unsightly blemish.
His blindness. 32. In the numerous imitations, and still more numerous traces of older poetry which we perceive in Paradise Lost, it is always to be kept in mind that he had only his recollection to rely upon.[986] His blindness seems to have been complete before 1654; and I scarcely think that he had begun his poem, before the anxiety and trouble into which the public strife of the commonwealth and the restoration had thrown him, gave leisure for immortal occupations. Then the remembrance of early reading came over his dark and lonely path like the moon emerging from the clouds. Then it was that the muse was truly his; not only as she poured her creative inspiration into his mind, but as the daughter of Memory, coming with fragments of ancient melodies, the voice of Euripides and Homer and Tasso; sounds that he had loved in youth, and treasured up for the solace of his age. They who, though not enduring the calamity of Milton, have known what it is, when afar from books, in solitude, or in travelling, or in the intervals of worldly care, to feed on poetical recollections, to murmur over the beautiful lines whose cadence has long delighted their ear, to recall the sentiments and images which retain by association the charm that early years once gave them—they will feel the inestimable value of committing to the memory, in the prime of its power, what it will easily receive and indelibly retain. I know not, indeed, whether an education that deals much with poetry, such as is still usual in England, has any more solid argument among many in its favour, than that it lays the foundation of intellectual pleasures at the other extreme of life.
[986] I take this opportunity of mentioning, on the authority of Mr. Todd’s Inquiry into the Origin of Paradise Lost (edit. of Milton, vol. ii., p. 229), that Lauder, whom I have taxed with ignorance, Vol. III., p. 522, really published the poem of Barlæus on the nuptials of Adam and Eve.
His passion for music. 33. It is owing, in part, to his blindness, but more, perhaps, to his general residence in a city, that Milton, in the words of Coleridge, is “not a picturesque but a musical poet;” or, as I would prefer to say, is the latter more of the two. He describes visible things, and often with great powers of rendering them manifest, what the Greeks called εναργεια, though seldom with so much circumstantial exactness of observation, as Spenser or Dante; but he feels music. The sense of vision delighted his imagination, but that of sound wrapped his whole soul in ecstacy. One of his trifling faults may be connected with this, the excessive passion he displays for stringing together sonorous names, sometimes so obscure that the reader associates nothing with them, as the word Namancos in Lycidas, which long baffled the commentators. Hence, his catalogues, unlike those of Homer and Virgil, are sometimes merely ornamental and misplaced. Thus, the names of unbuilt cities come strangely forward in Adam’s vision,[987] though he has afterwards gone over the same ground with better effect in Paradise Regained. In this there was also a mixture of his pedantry. But, though he was rather too ostentatious of learning, the nature of his subject demanded a good deal of episodical ornament. And this, rather than the precedents he might have alledged from the Italians and others, is, perhaps, the best apology for what some grave critics have censured, his frequent allusions to fable and mythology. |Faults in Paradise Lost.| These give much relief to the severity of the poem, and few readers would dispense with them. Less excuse can be made for some affectation of science which has produced hard and unpleasing lines; but he had been born in an age when more credit was gained by reading much than by writing well. The faults, however, of Paradise Lost are, in general, less to be called faults than necessary adjuncts of the qualities we most admire, and idiosyncrasies of a mighty genius. The verse of Milton is sometimes wanting in grace, and almost always in ease; but what better can be said of his prose? His foreign idioms are too frequent in the one; but they predominate in the other.
[987] Par. Lost, xi., 386.
Its progress to fame. 34. The slowness of Milton’s advance to glory is now generally owned to have been much exaggerated; we might say that the reverse was nearer the truth. “The sale of 1,300 copies in two years,” says Johnson, “in opposition to so much recent enmity, and to a style of versification new to all and disgusting to many, was an uncommon example of the prevalence of genius. The demand did not immediately increase; for many more readers than were supplied at first the nation did not afford. Only 3,000 were sold in eleven years.” It would hardly however be said, even in this age, of a poem 3,000 copies of which had been sold in eleven years, that its success had been small; and I have some few doubts, whether Paradise Lost, published eleven years since, would have met with a greater demand. There is sometimes a want of congeniality in public taste which no power of genius will overcome. For Milton it must be said by every one conversant with the literature of the age that preceded Addison’s famous criticism, from which some have dated the reputation of Paradise Lost, that he took his place among great poets from the beginning. The fancy of Johnston that few dared to praise it, and that “the revolution put an end to the secrecy of love,” is without foundation; the government of Charles II. was not so absurdly tyrannical, nor did Dryden, the court’s own poet, hesitate, in his preface to the State of Innocence, published soon after Milton’s death, to speak of its original, Paradise Lost, as “undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced.”
Paradise Regained. 35. The neglect which Paradise Lost never experienced, seems to have been long the lot of Paradise Regained. It was not popular with the world; it was long believed to manifest a decay of the poet’s genius, and, in spite of all the critics have written, it is still but the favourite of some whose predilections for the Miltonic style are very strong. The subject is so much less capable of calling forth the vast powers of his mind, that we should be unfair in comparing it throughout with the greater poem; it has been called a model of the shorter epic, an action comprehending few characters and a brief space of time.[988] The love of Milton for dramatic dialogue, imbibed from Greece, is still more apparent than in Paradise Lost; the whole poem, in fact, may almost be accounted a drama of primal simplicity, the narrative and descriptive part serving rather to diversify and relieve the speeches of the actors, than their speeches, as in the legitimate epic, to enliven the narration. Paradise Regained abounds with passages equal to any of the same nature in Paradise Lost; but the argumentative tone is kept up till it produces some tediousness, and perhaps, on the whole, less pains have been exerted to adorn and elevate even that which appeals to the imagination.
[988] Todd’s Milton, vol. v., p. 308.
Samson Agonistes. 36. Samson Agonistes is the latest of Milton’s poems; we see in it, perhaps, more distinctly than in Paradise Regained, the ebb of a mighty tide. An air of uncommon grandeur prevails throughout; but the language is less poetical than in Paradise Lost; the vigour of thought remains, but it wants much of its ancient eloquence. Nor is the lyric tone well kept up by the chorus; they are too sententious, too slow in movement, and, except by the metre, are not easily distinguishable from the other personages. But this metre is itself infelicitous; the lines being frequently of a number of syllables, not recognised in the usage of English poetry, and, destitute of rhythmical language, fall into prose. Milton seems to have forgotten that the ancient chorus had a musical accompaniment.