The ethics of rhetoric

by Richard M. Weaver

It can be shown that all of the features which make up Milton’s arduous style proceed from three or four sources. The first of these is the primacy of the concept. What this primacy signifies is that in his prose Milton wrote primarily as a thinker and not as an artificer. That is to say, his units of composition are built upon concepts and not upon conventionalized expository patterns. For him the linguistic sentence was a means, to be expanded and shaped as the driving force of the thought required. Or perhaps it would be more meaningful to say that for him the sentence was an accommodation-form. He will put into it as much or as little as he needs, and often, as we shall see presently, he needed a great deal. This use of the sentence as an accommodation-form produces what is perhaps the most obvious feature of his style, the long period. What length must a sentence have to be called “long”? Of course our usual standard is the sentence we are accustomed to, and in present-day writing that sentence will run 20-30 words, to cite an average range for serious writing. Milton’s sentences very frequently run 60-80 words, and many will exceed 100, the length of an average paragraph today.[129]

To examine Milton’s method with the lengthy period, we may well begin with the second sentence of Of Reformation in England, an outstanding specimen of 373 words.

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 overdated 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 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 could 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 exterior and bodily form, urgently pretending a necessity and obligement of joining the body in a formal reverence, and worship circumscribed; they hallowed it, they fumed it, 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 overbodying herself, given up 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 labor of high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull and droiling carcase to plod in the old road, and drudging trade of outward conformity.[130]

With reference to accommodation, let us attend to the scope of this sentence. It contains nothing less than a history of Christianity from the Protestant reformer’s point of view. Four stages are given in this history: the early revelation of true Christianity; its later misinterpretation through the “grossness and blindness” of its followers; the growth of institutionalism; and finally the atrophy of true religion produced by undue attention to outward circumstance. It is, as we see, a complete narration, dressed out with many illuminating details. We shall discover that Milton habitually prolongs a sentence thus until it has covered the unit of its subject. He feels no compulsion to close the period out of regard for some established norm, since he has his eye on a different criterion of completeness. In line with the same practice, some of his sentences are so fitted that they contain complete arguments, or even an argument preceded by its expository narration. As an example of the sentence containing a unit of argument, we may note the following from The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.

And yet there follows upon this a worse temptation: for if he be such as hath spent his youth unblameably, and laid up his chiefest earthly comforts in the enjoyments of a contented marriage, nor did neglect that furtherance which was to be obtained therein by constant prayers; when he shall find himself bound fast to an uncomplying discord of nature, or, as it often happens, to an image of earth and phlegm, with whom he looked to be the copartner of a sweet and gladsome society, and sees withal that his bondage is now inevitable; though he be almost the strongest Christian, he will be ready to despair in virtue, and mutiny against Divine Providence; and this doubtless is the reason of those lapses, and that melancholy despair, which we see in many wedded persons, though they understand it not, or pretend other causes, because they know no remedy; and is of extreme danger: therefore when human frailty surcharged is at such a loss, charity ought to venture much, lest an overtossed faith endanger to shipwreck.[131] This sentence contains a complete hypothetical syllogism, which can be abstracted as follows:

If the rigidity of the marriage relationship is not relaxed by charity, Christians will despair of finding their solace in that relationship.

The rigidity of the marriage relationship is not at present relaxed by charity.

Christians do despair of finding solace within that relationship (as shown by “those lapses and that melancholy despair, which we see in many wedded persons”).

Thus the argument prescribes the content of the sentence and marshals it.