This sublime music in which the soul's emotion finds and obeys its own law was scarcely audible to the age which followed Milton's death, when poets had concentrated all their art on the effort to make both language and metre as instantaneously intelligible as possible. They succeeded much better in the second task than in the first: for the truth is that the exact meaning of a verse is much more often difficult to ascertain in the case of Pope than in the case of Milton. But no one has ever doubted how to read aloud a line of Pope or Dryden. And this has obvious advantages and was, of course, at first a great source of pleasure. It made Pope's poetry the most immediately popular we have ever had, as it still is the most effective for public quotation. Almost everybody, as Mr. Bridges has said, "has a natural liking for the common fundamental rhythms" and "it is only after long familiarity with them that the ear grows dissatisfied and wishes them to be broken." But in poetry as in music the more cultivated the ear the sooner it gets tired of being given too little to do: and as soon as every warbler had Pope's {223} tune by heart critical readers began to wish for something less obvious. The ultimate result of that dissatisfaction was the metrical experiments of Coleridge and the rich harvest of varied rhythms and melody with which Shelley and Tennyson and Swinburne enriched the nineteenth century. And all this movement had also, of course, a retrospective effect. It may be true that, as Mr. Bridges says, "there are very few persons indeed who take such a natural delight in rhythm for its own sake that they can follow with pleasure a learned rhythm which is very rich in variety, and the beauty of which is its perpetual freedom to obey the sense and diction;" but it could not fail to be the case that their number was increased by the comparative sensitiveness to the more intricate music of words which was inevitably produced in those who had learnt much Shelley or Tennyson by heart. And such people at once heard things in Milton which were absolutely inaudible to the ears of Dr. Johnson's generation. The comparative subtlety, both in imagination and in form, of the poetry of the nineteenth century made it impossible for poets to compete with journalists for the attention of the big public as Pope had done triumphantly; but as a set off against that loss it gave a far {224} richer delight to those who were capable of that interaction of the natural ear and the spiritual to which all great poetry makes its appeal. This led straight back to Milton who made that double appeal as only a very few poets in all the world have ever made it. And the more poetry is studied and loved as the greatest of the arts, as the medium through which that combination of the vision of genius with the slow trained cunning of the craftsman, which is what great art is, finds its most perfect expression, the more will men, or at least Englishmen, return to Milton. And especially, in some ways, to Samson, where his art is at its boldest and freest, and where it suffered longest from the indifference of dull ears.
A little book of this kind is not the place for a discussion of English metre, or even, in any detail, of Milton's. Those who wish to go into such studies will find much of what they want in the Poet Laureate's book on Milton's Prosody. It is possible to disagree with some of his proposed scansions of doubtful lines, but it is impossible not to learn a great deal from suggestions as to the rhythmical effects intended by Milton which come, as these do, from one who is himself a master of rhythm and has never concealed the fact {225} that Milton's was one of the schools in which he passed his apprenticeship. So his analysis, line by line, of the opening of the first chorus of Samson will be a revelation to many of what they have, perhaps, never felt at all, or felt only unconsciously without understanding anything of what it was which they felt or why. But even without such help no one whose ear has had the smallest training can fail to notice some of the more daring of Milton's metrical effects. In the lines quoted above, for instance, who can miss the triple stab of passionate agony in the thrice repeated, strongly accented "dark, dark, dark"? The most careless reader cannot fail to be arrested by the line, though he may not realize the means employed by Milton to enforce attention, the rare six stresses in a ten-syllabled line, the still rarer effect of three strongly stressed syllables following immediately upon one another, the inversion of three out of the five stresses of the next line, "irrecoverably dark" suggesting the spasmodic disorder of violent grief. These are certainly devices deliberately chosen for producing the required effects. And so, probably, are the more regular rhythm of the words which express the calming aspiration up to the throne of God, and the quiet {226} mono-syllabic simplicity of the divine utterance, "Let there be light," which continues its softening influence over the return in the following lines to his own sad conditions. How smoothly the complaint now goes: "The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon." It is in comparison with the earlier abruptness as if he had gone through something like the process of the psalmist, "until I went into the sanctuary of God: then understood I" what had before been "too painful for me." Then there is the comparatively unmarked rhythm of the intellectual argumentative passage which follows: till emotion begins again to overwhelm reflection, and shows itself in the strong alliteration of "light," "land," "light," "live," "life," "living," and in the strong caesura after "buried," the more marked for coming so early in the verse.
Such poor noting of technicalities as this gives, of course, no more of the secret of Milton's wonderful poetry than anatomy gives of the power and beauty of the human body. But it has its interest and even its use: provided that too much importance is not attributed to it and that no one makes the mistake of the lady who, according to the story, hopefully asked the painter what he mixed {227} his paints with, and received the crushing reply, "With my brains, Madam."
Samson Agonistes stands in marked contrast to its predecessor, Paradise Regained. And not only in being a drama. Its intense omnipresent emotion makes a still more important difference. In passing from one to the other we pass from the least to the most emotional of Milton's works. This would in any case have been a gain for most readers: but the gain is made more important by the extreme severity of Milton's final poetic manner. A style which excludes almost all ornament stands in especial need of the support of a visibly felt emotion. It has been said by a living writer that "when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means of expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose." This is roughly true, though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff. The special faculty of the poet, as Johnson well said, is that of joining music with reason. That is to say that the poet unites thought and feeling and gives them perfect expression. They are not distinct: they become in his hands a new single life, a unity. You cannot separate the emotion from the thought in any great line of poetry. When Wordsworth talks of the "unimaginable touch of time," there is {228} plainly emotion as well as thought and memory in his words: when Shelley cries in his despair—
"Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more—O never more!"
it is no mere cry of the heart: the mind is in it too: and neither in him nor in Wordsworth can you get the two apart again after the poet has joined them together.
Now, though in Paradise Regained the intellect is not allowed, as in much eighteenth-century poetry, to become so dominant as to make us feel that prose and not verse was the proper medium for what the poet had to say, yet it does play a greater part than it can commonly play with safety, perhaps a greater part than it plays in any other English poem of the first rank. It is only Milton's unfailing gift of poetic style which saves the situation. He could do what Wordsworth could not: conduct long discussions on abstract questions without descending from the note of poetry to that of the lecture-room. The gallant explorer who fights his way through the Prelude and the Excursion wins, as he deserves, a great reward, and a greater still if he does it a second time and a third, {229} when he has learnt that they both have marshy valleys into which he need not twice descend. But he has paid a price for the lesson, paid it in the endurance of a great deal of solid and heavy prose. That is partly because Wordsworth often thinks without feeling or imagining: he gives us his thought as it is in itself, as a professor of moral philosophy gives it, without passing it through the transforming processes of the emotions and the imagination. These hardly fail Milton half a dozen times in all his poetry: and the result is the difference between such lines as—
"This is the genuine course, the aim, and end
Of prescient reason; all conclusions else
Are abject, vain, presumptuous, and perverse:"
and such as Milton writes when he is nearest to bare thinking—
"Who therefore seeks in these
True wisdom, finds her not, or by delusion
Far worse, her false resemblance only meets,
An empty cloud."