In the manner here indicated, these collocations serve to give the style a wonderful richness of thought. The reader feels that he is being shown both the esse and the potesse of the object named. At least, he gets a look at its manifold nature. The way in which Milton fills out the subject for his reader is at once lavish and perspicuous. Just as his figures were seen to have a prolonged correspondence, beyond what the casual or unthinking writer would bring to view, so his substantives and predicates are assembled upon a principle of penetration or depth of description.
Our general impression of Milton—an impression we get in some degree of all the great writers of his period and of the Elizabethan period before it—is that his thought dominates the medium. While the distinction between what is said and the form of saying it can never be drawn absolutely, it is yet to be remarked that some writers seem to compose with an awareness of how their matter will look upon the page, or how it will sound in the parlor; others seem to keep their main attention upon currently preferred terms and idioms. Again, some writers seem to accept the risk of suspension, transposition, and involution out of conscious elegance; Milton seems rather to require them out of strength of purpose. He was not a writer of writing, but consistently a writer of substance, and the language was his instrumentality, which he used with the familiar boldness of a master. One would go far to find a better illustration of the saying of John Peale Bishop that the English language is like a woman; it is most likely to yield after one has shown it a little violence. All of the great prose writers of the Elizabethan age and the Seventeenth century were perfectly capable of showing it that violence, and I believe this is the true reason that a lover of eloquence today reacts their works with irrepressible admiration. The tremendous suspensions and ramifications they were willing to create; their readiness to make function the test of grammar and to coin according to need, through all of which a rational, though not always a formal or codified syntax survives—these things bespeak a sort of magisterial attitude toward language which has been lost in the intervening centuries.
It is quite possible that long years of accumulated usage tend to act as a deterrent to a free and imaginative use of language. So many stereotypes have had time to form themselves, and so many manuals of usage have been issued that the choice would seem to lie between simple compliance and open rebellion. Either one uses the language as the leaders of one’s social and business world use it, or one makes a decisive break and uses it in open defiance of the conventionalized patterns. We may remember in this connection that when the new movement in modern literature got underway in the second decade of this century, its leaders proved themselves the most defiant and brash kind of rebels as they embarked upon the work of resuscitation and refurbishment, and it was to the Elizabethans especially that they looked for sanction and guidance. But the rebel with this program faces a dilemma: he cannot infuse life into the old forms that he knows are depriving expression of all vitality, and he exhausts himself in the campaign to smash and get rid of them.
That is partly an historical observation, and our interest is in laying bare the movement of a great eloquence. Yet if we had to answer whether some heroic style like that of Milton cannot be formed for our own day, when millions might rejoice to hear a sonorous voice speaking out of a deep learning in our traditions, our answer would surely be, yes. And if asked how, we would begin our counsel by telling the writer to heed the advice in Emerson’s American Scholar—better indeed than Emerson heeded it himself—to look upon himself not as a writer but as a man writing, and to try to live in that character. As long as one does that, it is most likely that the concept will dominate the medium, and that one will use, with inventive freedom, such conventionality as is necessary to language. A timid correctness, like perfect lucidity, sometimes shows that more attention has been devoted to the form than to the thought, and this may give the writing a kind of hard surface which impedes sympathy between writer and reader. Finally, one should remember that people like to feel they are hearing of the solid fact and substance of the world, and those epithets which give us glimpses of its concreteness and contingency are the best guarantors of that. The regular balancing of abstract and concrete modifiers, which we meet regularly in Shakespeare, mirrors, indeed, the situation all of us face in daily living, where general principles are clear in theory but are conditioned in their application to the concrete world. The man of eloquence must be a lover of “the world’s body” to the extent of being able to give it a fond description.
With these conditions practically realized, we might again have orators of the heroic mold. But the change would have to include the public also, for, on a second thought suggested by Whitman, to have great orators there must be great audiences too.
Chapter VII
THE SPACIOUSNESS OF OLD RHETORIC
Few species of composition seem so antiquated, so little available for any practical purpose today, as the oratory in which the generation of our grandparents delighted. The type of discourse which they would ride miles in wagons to hear, or would regard as the special treat of some festive occasion, fills most people today with an acute sense of discomfort. Somehow, it makes them embarrassed. They become conscious of themselves, conscious of pretensions in it, and they think it well consigned to the museum. But its very ability to inspire antipathy, as distinguished from indifference, suggests the presence of something interesting.
The student of rhetoric should accordingly sense here the chance for a discovery, and as he begins to listen for its revealing quality, the first thing he becomes aware of is a “spaciousness.” This is, of course, a broad impression, which requires its own analysis. As we listen more carefully, then, it seems that between the speech itself and the things it is meant to signify, something stands—perhaps it is only an empty space—but something is there to prevent immediate realizations and references. For an experience of the sensation, let us for a moment go back to 1850 and attune our ears to an address by Representative Andrew Ewing, on the subject of the sale of the public lands.
We have afforded a refuge to the down-trodden nations of the Old World, and organized system of internal improvement and public education, which have no parallel in the history of mankind. Why should we not continue and enlarge the system which has so much contributed to these results? If our Pacific Coast should be lined with its hundred cities, extending from the northern boundary of Oregon down to San Diego; if the vast interior hills and valleys could be filled with lowing herds and fruitful fields of a thriving and industrious people; and if the busy hum of ten thousand workshops could be daily heard over the placid waters of the Pacific, would our government be poorer or our country less able to meet her obligations than at present?[146]