Milton

by John Cann Bailey

This is the first disadvantage of the subject chosen by Milton, that he believed in it too much. The fact that he did so and thought its prose truth all-important at once limited the freedom of his imagination and diverted him from the single-minded pursuit of the proper end of poetry. He was evidently quite unaware of this drawback and it has been little, if at all, noticed by his critics. {152} On the other hand, he was perfectly aware of what would appear to other people to be the disadvantages involved in the choice of a subject so unlike those of previous epics. He speaks more than once of the novelty of this theme, the best-known allusion being the beautiful introduction to Book IX., in which he describes his subject, that of the human sin and the divine anger

"That brought into this World a world of woe,
Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery,
Death's harbinger:"

and contrasts it with those other sins and other angers on which Homer and Virgil built their poems. But he is not afraid of the contrast: he thinks it is all to his own advantage—

"Sad task! yet argument
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;
Or Neptune's ire or Juno's, that so long
Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea's son:
If answerable style I can obtain
Of my celestial Patroness who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated verse,
{153}
Since first this subject for heroic song
Pleased me, long choosing and beginning late,
Not sedulous by nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only argument
Heroic deemed—"

The whole passage is too long for quotation. Indeed, as we have already had occasion to notice, it is one of the difficulties of discussing Milton that quotation is almost always compelled to do him an injury by giving less than the whole of any one of those long-sustained flights of music in which he rises and falls, turns to the left hand or the right, as his imagination leads him, but always on unflagging wings of undoubted and easy security. But enough has been quoted here to illustrate the poet's direct challenge of Homer and Virgil in this matter of subject. He was perfectly well aware that he was making an entirely new departure, not only from the subject of the ancients but also, as is shown by his detailed condemnation of "tilting furniture, emblazoned shields" and the rest, from those of such poets as Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. He did it deliberately, with open eyes. And there is no doubt that he was at least partly right. To this day he and Dante, in their different ways, enjoy a common advantage {154} over Homer, and still more over a poet mainly of fancy like Tasso, in the fact that their subject, that of the meaning and destiny of human life, is one in itself of profound and absorbing interest to all thinking men and women. Even if their treatment of it be in some parts and for some people unsatisfying or irritating they at least have started with that advantage. A dangerous advantage because, as we have seen in Milton's case and might also see in Dante's, tempting them to go outside the pure business of their art; but still in itself an advantage. Milton was probably also right in feeling that the fighting element in the old poets had been greatly overdone. The most interesting parts of the Iliad for us to-day are not battles, but such things as the parting of Hector and Andromache and the scene between Priam and Achilles. Where the fighting still moves us, as in the case of Hector and Achilles, or Virgil's Turrus and Pallas, it is mainly for the sake of an accompanying human and moral interest altogether above its own. The miscellaneous details of weapons and wounds which evidently once gave so much pleasure are now equally tedious to us whether it is Homer or Malory or Morris who narrates them. They can no longer give interest; they can only receive it {155} from such intrinsic interest as may belong to the combatants.

So far Milton had some justification for preferring his own subject to those of Homer and Virgil. But, so far as we can judge, he was entirely unconscious of its disadvantages: as well of those which it shares with the Iliad and Aeneid as of those peculiar to itself. Of the former, the most conspicuous is that inevitably involved in the introduction of divine persons into the action. Everybody feels that Homer's gods constantly spoil the interest and probability of his story, while very rarely enhancing its dignity. One never understands why they can do so much, and yet do no more, to affect the action. Their interference is always irritating, generally immoral, and on the whole ineffective. Their omnipotence is occasional and irrational: they are limited in the use of it by each other, and all alike, even Zeus, are limited by a shadowy Law or Fate in the background. Their interventions only make the struggle seem unfair or unreal, and we are glad to be rid of them.

Milton is still more deeply involved in the same difficulty. All his personages except two are superhuman. It is his great disadvantage as compared with Dante that the {156} main lines of his story are all scriptural and therefore outside the influence of his invention, that his actors are divine, angelic, or sinless beings, and therefore such as can provide little of the uncertainty of issue or variety of temper and experience which are the stuff of drama. He is hampered by having constantly to assert the true free will and responsibility of Satan for his rebellion and of Adam for his disobedience, even to the extent of putting argumentative soliloquies confessing it into their own mouths. So far he succeeds: both are felt to be free in their fatal choice. But the war in heaven can arouse no interest because its issue is obviously foregone, and much of the action of the rebel angels necessarily conflicts with the frequent statements that they can do nothing except as permitted by their Conqueror. At one moment they know their powerlessness, at another they hope for revenge and victory. These are grave difficulties which deprive large parts of the poem of that illusion of probability or truth without which poetry cannot do its proper work. A further difficulty, from which ancient poets were free, arises from the purely intellectual and spiritual nature of the Christian God. It is as if Homer had had to deal with the divine unity of Plato instead of {157} with his family of loving, quarrelling, fighting gods and goddesses. A being who is Incomprehensible as well as Almighty and Omniscient can hardly be an actor in a poem written for human readers. The gods in the Iliad shock us because they are too like ourselves: Milton's God may sometimes shock us too: but He is more often in danger of fatiguing us by His utter remoteness from our experience, by His dwelling not merely, not indeed so often as we could wish, in clouds and darkness, but in a world of theological mysteries which necessarily lose more in sublimity than they gain in clearness by being perpetually discussed and explained. Dante's poem is at least as full as Milton's of obscure theological doctrines and attempts at their explanation; but, either by virtue of the plan of the Divina Commedia or by some finer instinct of reserve and reverence in the poet, we never find ourselves in Dante as we do in Milton exercising our critical faculties, whether we will or no, on the very words of God Himself. If we reject an argument as unconvincing or fallacious, it is on Virgil or Statius, Beatrice or Thomas Aquinas, that we sit in judgment. The Divine Mind, intensely and constantly felt as its presence is from the first canto of the poem to the last, is yet felt always as from behind a {158} curtain which can never be raised for the sight of mortal eyes.

Still, it must be admitted that, impossible as was the task of making the Infinite and Eternal an actor and speaker in a human poem, Milton's very failure in it is sublime. His prodigious powers are nowhere more wonderfully displayed than in trying to do what no one, not even himself, could do. The second half of his third book, for instance, is far more interesting than the first, but it may well be doubted whether the mere fact of his accomplishing the first at all is not a greater proof of his poetic genius. Nowhere does that unfailing certainty of style, in which he has scarcely an equal among the poets of the whole world, stand him in such astonishing stead as in these difficult dialogues in heaven.

"Father, thy word is passed, Man shall find grace;
And shall Grace not find means, that finds her way,
The speediest of thy wingèd messengers.
To visit all thy creatures, and to all
Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought?
Happy for Man, so coming;"

On the side of invention there is nothing remarkable; but, on the side of art, what a {159} divine graciousness there is in its tone and manner; what incomparable skill in the management of the verse! Note the quiet monosyllabic beginning, taking note, as it were, of the decree of mercy, and then the expansion of it, the loving voice pressing forward in freer movement as it confidently proclaims the happy results that cannot fail to follow. And observe the peculiarly Miltonic interlacing of the whole, line leading to line and word to word: the "grace" of the first line giving the key to the "grace" of the second, the repeated "find" of the second line and the repeated "all" of the fourth, the "comes" of the fifth line leading on to the "coming" of the sixth. To make a list of such details as these is not to explain the effect which they produce; that is the secret of Milton's genius. So is that cunning variety in the rhythm of the verses: three pauses in the first line, two in the second, only one in the third: the principal pause after the sixth syllable in both the first two lines, and yet the words and their accents so artfully varied that not the slightest monotony is felt; the suggestion of easy flight in the smooth unbroken movement of the third line—