Among My Books Volume Ii Part 26

"License they mean when they cry liberty,"

from Tacitus. This is no reproach to him so far as his true function, that of poet, is concerned. It is his peculiar glory that literature was with him so much an art, an end and not a means. Of his political work he has himself told us, "I should not choose this manner of writing, wherein, knowing myself inferior to myself (led by the genial power of nature to another task), I have the use, as I may account, but of my left hand."

Mr. Ma.s.son has given an excellent a.n.a.lysis of these writings, selecting with great judgment the salient pa.s.sages, which have an air of blank-verse thinly disguised as prose, like some of the corrupted pa.s.sages of Shakespeare. We are particularly thankful to him for his extracts from the pamphlets written against Milton, especially for such as contain criticisms on his style. It is not a little interesting to see the most stately of poets reproached for his use of vulgarisms and low words. We seem to get a glimpse of the schooling of his "choiceful sense"

to that nicety which could not be content till it had made his native tongue "search all her coffers round." One cannot help thinking also that his practice in prose, especially in the long involutions of Latin periods, helped him to give that variety of pause and that majestic harmony to his blank-verse which have made it so unapproachably his own.

Landor, who, like Milton, seems to have thought in Latin, has caught somewhat more than others of the dignity of his gait, but without his length of stride. Wordsworth, at his finest, has perhaps approached it, but with how long an interval! Bryant has not seldom attained to its serene equanimity, but never emulates its pomp. Keats has caught something of its large utterance, but altogether fails of its nervous severity of phrase. Cowper's muse (that moved with such graceful ease in slippers) becomes stiff when (in his translation of Homer) she buckles on her feet the cothurnus of Milton. Thomson grows tumid wherever he a.s.says the grandiosity of his model. It is instructive to get any glimpse of the slow processes by which Milton arrived at that cla.s.sicism which sets him apart from, if not above, all our other poets.

In gathering up the impressions made upon us by Mr. Ma.s.son's work as a whole, we are inclined rather to regret his copiousness for his own sake than for ours. The several parts, though disproportionate, are valuable, his research has been conscientious, and he has given us better means of understanding Milton's time than we possessed before. But how is it about Milton himself? Here was a chance, it seems to me, for a fine bit of portrait-painting. There is hardly a more stately figure in literary history than Milton's, no life in some of its aspects more tragical, except Dante's. In both these great poets, more than in any others, the character of the men makes part of the singular impressiveness of what they wrote and of its vitality with after times. In them the man somehow overtops the author. The works of both are full of autobiographical confidences. Like Dante, Milton was forced to become a party by himself.

He stands out in marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great movement of the Civil War, apart from the supine acquiescence of the Restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man. Very much alive he certainly was in his day. Has Mr. Ma.s.son made him alive to us again? I fear not. At the same time, while we cannot praise either the style or the method of Mr. Ma.s.son's work, we cannot refuse to be grateful for it. It is not so much a book for the ordinary reader of biography as for the student, and will be more likely to find its place on the library-shelf than the centre-table. It does not in any sense belong to light literature, but demands all the muscle of the trained and vigorous reader. "Truly, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is Milton's life it is naught."

Mr. Ma.s.son's intimacy with the facts and dates of Milton's career renders him peculiarly fit in some respects to undertake an edition of the poetical works. His edition, accordingly, has distinguished merits. The introductions to the several poems are excellent and leave scarcely anything to be desired. The general Introduction, on the other hand, contains a great deal that might well have been omitted, and not a little that is positively erroneous. Mr. Ma.s.son's discussions of Milton's English seem often to be those of a Scotsman to whom English is in some sort a foreign tongue. It is almost wholly inconclusive, because confined to the Miltonic verse, while the basis of any altogether satisfactory study should surely be the Miltonic prose; nay, should include all the poetry and prose of his own age and of that immediately preceding it. The uses to which Mr. Ma.s.son has put the concordance to Milton's poems tempt one sometimes to cla.s.s him with those whom the poet himself taxed with being "the mousehunts and ferrets of an index." For example, what profits a discussion of Milton's [Greek: hapax legomena], a matter in which accident is far more influential than choice?[363] What sensible addition is made to our stock of knowledge by learning that "the word _woman_ does not occur in any form in Milton's poetry before 'Paradise Lost,'" and that it is "exactly so with the word _female_"? Is it any way remarkable that such words as _Adam, G.o.d, Heaven, h.e.l.l, Paradise, Sin, Satan_, and _Serpent_ should occur "very frequently" in "Paradise Lost"? Would it not rather have been surprising that they should not? Such trifles at best come under the head of what old Warner would have called c.u.mber-minds. It is time to protest against this minute style of editing and commenting great poets. Gulliver's microscopic eye saw on the fair skins of the Brobdignagian maids of honor "a mole here and there as broad as a trencher," and we shrink from a cup of the purest Hippocrene after the critic's solar microscope has betrayed to us the grammatical, syntactical, and, above all, hypothetical monsters that sprawl in every drop of it. When a poet has been so much edited as Milton, the temptation of whosoever undertakes a new edition to see what is not to be seen becomes great in proportion as he finds how little there is that has not been seen before.

Mr. Ma.s.son is quite right in choosing to modernize the spelling of Milton, for surely the reading of our cla.s.sics should be made as little difficult as possible, and he is right also in making an exception of such abnormal forms as the poet may fairly be supposed to have chosen for melodic reasons. His exhaustive discussion of the spelling of the original editions seems, however, to be the less called-for as he himself appears to admit that the compositor, not the author, was supreme in these matters, and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases to the thousand Milton had no system, but spelt by immediate inspiration. Yet Mr. Ma.s.son fills nearly four pages with an a.n.a.lysis of the vowel sounds, in which, as if to demonstrate the futility of such attempts so long as men's ears differ, he tells us that the short _a_ sound is the same in _man_ and _Darby_, the short _o_ sound in _G.o.d_ and _does_, and what he calls the long _o_ sound in _broad_ and _wrath_. Speaking of the apostrophe, Mr. Ma.s.son tells us that "it is sometimes inserted, not as a possessive mark at all, but merely as a plural mark: _hero's_ for _heroes_, _myrtle's_ for _myrtles_, _Gorgons_ and _Hydra's_, etc." Now, in books printed about the time of Milton's the apostrophe was put in almost at random, and in all the cases cited is a misprint, except in the first, where it serves to indicate that the p.r.o.nunciation was not heroes as it had formerly been.[364] In the "possessive singular of nouns already ending in _s_" Mr. Ma.s.son tells us, "Milton's general practice is not to double the _s_; thus, _Nereus wrinkled look, Glaucus spell_. The necessities of metre would naturally constrain to such forms. In a possessive followed by the word _sake_ or the word _side_, dislike to [of] the double sibilant makes us sometimes drop the inflection. In addition to '_for righteousness' sake_' such phrases as '_for thy name sake_' and '_for mercy sake_,' are allowed to pa.s.s; _bedside_ is normal and _riverside_ nearly so." The necessities of metre need not be taken into account with a poet like Milton, who never was fairly in his element till he got off the soundings of prose and felt the long swell of his verse under him like a steed that knows his rider. But does the dislike of the double sibilant account for the dropping of the _s_ in these cases? Is it not far rather the presence of the _s_ already in the sound satisfying an ear accustomed to the English slovenliness in the p.r.o.nunciation of double consonants? It was this which led to such forms as _conscience sake_ and _on justice side_, and which beguiled Ben Jonson and Dryden into thinking, the one that _noise_ and the other that _corps_ was a plural,[365] What does Mr. Ma.s.son say to _hillside, Bankside, seaside, Cheapside, spindleside, spearside, gospelside_ (of a church), _nightside, countryside, wayside, brookside_, and I know not how many more? Is the first half of these words a possessive? Or is it not rather a noun impressed into the service as an adjective? How do such words differ from _hilltop, townend, candlelight, rushlight, cityman_, and the like, where no double _s_ can be made the scapegoat? Certainly Milton would not have avoided them for their sibilancy, he who wrote

"And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and sh.o.r.es and desert wildernesses,"

"So in his seed all nations shall be blest,"

"And seat of Salmana.s.ser whose success,"

verses that hiss like Medusa's head in wrath, and who was, I think, fonder of the sound than any other of our poets. Indeed, in compounds of the kind we always make a distinction wholly independent of the doubled _s_. n.o.body would boggle at _mountainside_; no one would dream of saying _on the fatherside_ or _motherside_.

Mr. Ma.s.son speaks of "the Miltonic forms _vanquisht, markt, lookt_, etc."

Surely he does not mean to imply that these are peculiar to Milton?

Chapman used them before Milton was born, and pressed them farther, as in _nak't_ and _saf't_ for _naked_ and _saved_. He often prefers the contracted form in his prose also, showing that the full form of the past participle in _ed_ was pa.s.sing out of fas.h.i.+on, though available in verse.[366] Indeed, I venture to affirm that there is not a single variety of spelling or accent to be found in Milton which is without example in his predecessors or contemporaries. Even _highth_, which is thought peculiarly Miltonic, is common (in Hakluyt, for example), and still often heard in New England. Mr. Ma.s.son gives an odd reason for Milton's preference of it "as indicating more correctly the formation of the word by the addition of the suffix _th_ to the adjective _high_." Is an adjective, then, at the base of _growth_, _earth_, _birth_, _truth_, and other words of this kind? Horne Tooke made a better guess than this.

If Mr. Ma.s.son be right in supposing that a peculiar meaning is implied in the spelling _bearth_ (Paradise Lost, IX. 624), which he interprets as "collective produce," though in the only other instance where it occurs it is neither more nor less than _birth_, it should seem that Milton had hit upon Horne Tooke's etymology. But it is really solemn trifling to lay any stress on the spelling of the original editions, after having admitted, as Mr. Ma.s.son has honestly done, that in all likelihood Milton had nothing to do with it. And yet he cannot refrain. On the word _voutsafe_ he hangs nearly a page of dissertation on the nicety of Milton's ear. Mr. Ma.s.son thinks that Milton "must have had a reason for it,"[367] and finds that reason in "his dislike to [of] the sound _ch_, or to [of] that sound combined with _s_.... His fine ear taught him not only to seek for musical effects and cadences at large, but also to be fastidious as to syllables, and to avoid harsh or difficult conjunctions of consonants, except when there might be a musical reason for harshness or difficulty. In the management of the letter _s_, the frequency of which in English is one of the faults of the speech, he will be found, I believe, most careful and skilful. More rarely, I think, than in Shakespeare will one word ending in _s_ be found followed immediately in Milton by another word beginning with the same letter; or, if he does occasionally pen such a phrase as _Moab's sons_, it will be difficult to find in him, I believe, such a harsher example as _earth's substance_, of which many writers would think nothing. [With the index to back him Mr.

Ma.s.son could safely say this.] The same delicacy of ear is even more apparent in his management of the _sh_ sound. He has it often, of course; but it may be noted that he rejects it in his verse when he can. He writes _Basan_ for _Bashan_, _Sittim_ for _s.h.i.+ttim_, _Silo_ for _s.h.i.+loh_, _Asdod_ for _Ashdod_. Still more, however, does he seem to have been wary of the compound sound _ch_ as in _church_. Of his sensitiveness to this sound in excess there is a curious proof in his prose pamphlet ent.i.tled 'An Apology against a Pamphlet, called A Modest Completion, etc.,' where, having occasion to quote these lines from one of the Satires[368] of his opponent, Bishop Hall,

"'Teach each hollow grove to sound his love, Wearying echo with one changeless word,'

"he adds, ironically, 'And so he well might, and all his auditory besides, with his _teach each!_'" Generalizations are always risky, but when extemporized from a single hint they are maliciously so. Surely it needed no great sensitiveness of ear to be set on edge by Hall's echo of _teach each_. Did Milton reject the _h_ from _Bashan_ and the rest because he disliked the sound of _sh_, or because he had found it already rejected by the Vulgate and by some of the earlier translators of the Bible into English? Oddly enough, Milton uses words beginning with _sh_ seven hundred and fifty four times in his poetry, not to speak of others in which the sound occurs, as, for instance, those ending in _tion_. Hall, had he lived long enough, might have retorted on Milton his own

"Manli_est_, resolut_est_, br_east_, As the magnetick hard_est_ iron draws,"

or his

"What moves thy inquisition?

Know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall, And my promotion thy destruction?"

With the playful controversial wit of the day he would have hinted that too much _est-est_ is as fatal to a blank-verse as to a bishop, and that danger was often incurred by those who too eagerly _shun_ned it. Nay, he might even have found an echo almost tallying with his own in

"To begirt the almighty throne Beseeching or besieging,"

a pun worthy of Milton's worst prose. Or he might have twitted him with "a _seq_uent king who _seeks_." As for the _sh_ sound, a poet could hardly have found it ungracious to his ear who wrote,

"Gna_sh_ing for angui_sh_ and despite and _sh_ame,"

or again,

"Then bursting forth Afre_sh_ with con_sc_ious terrors vex me round That rest or intermi_ssion_ none I find.

Before mine eyes in oppos_ition_ sits Grim Death, my son."

And if Milton disliked the _ch_ sound, he gave his ears unnecessary pain by verses such as these,--

"Straight cou_ch_es close; then, rising, _ch_anges oft His cou_ch_ant wat_ch_, as one who _ch_ose his ground";

still more by such a juxtaposition as "matchless chief."[369] The truth is, that Milton was a harmonist rather than a melodist. There are, no doubt, some exquisite melodies (like the "Sabrina Fair ") among his earlier poems, as could hardly fail to be the case in an age which produced or trained the authors of our best English glees, as ravis.h.i.+ng in their instinctive felicity as the songs of our dramatists, but he also showed from the first that larger style which was to be his peculiar distinction. The strain heard in the "Nativity Ode," in the "Solemn Music," and in "Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as regards metrical construction, than anything that had thrilled the English ear before, giving no uncertain augury of him who was to show what sonorous metal lay silent till he touched the keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various language, that have never since felt the strain of such prevailing breath. It was in the larger movements of metre that Milton was great and original. I have spoken elsewhere of Spenser's fondness for dilatation as respects thoughts and images. In Milton it extends to the language also, and often to the single words of which a period is composed. He loved phrases of towering port, in which every member dilated stands like Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and pa.s.sages that stamp him great, the verses do not dance interweaving to soft Lydian airs, but march rather with resounding tread and clang of martial music. It is true that he is cunning in alliterations, so scattering them that they tell in his orchestra without being obvious, but it is in the more scientific region of open-voweled a.s.sonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet withhold it (rhyme-wraiths one might call them), that he is an artist and a master. He even sometimes introduces rhyme with misleading intervals between and un.o.bviously in his blank-verse:--

"There rest, if any rest can harbour _there_; And, rea.s.sembling our afflicted powers, Consult how we may henceforth most offend Our enemy, our own loss how re_pair_, How overcome this dire calamity, What reinforcement we may gain from hope, If not, what resolution from des_pair_."[370]

There is one almost perfect quatrain,--

"Before thy fellows, ambitious to win From me some plume, that thy success may show Destruction to the rest. This pause between (Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know";

and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an a.s.sonance,--

"If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft In worst extremes and on the perilous edge Of battle when it raged, in all a.s.saults."

There can be little doubt that the rhymes in the first pa.s.sage cited were intentional, and perhaps they were so in the others; but Milton's ear has tolerated not a few perfectly rhyming couplets, and others in which the a.s.sonance almost becomes rhyme, certainly a fault in blankverse:--

"From the Asian Kings (and Parthian among these), From India and the Golden Chersonese";

"That soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired What hunger, if aught hunger, had impaired";

"And will alike be punished, whether thou Reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow";

"Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy, Save what is in destroying, other joy";

"Shall all be Paradise, far happier place Than this of Eden, and far happier days";

"This my long sufferance and my day of grace They who neglect and scorn shall never taste";

"So far remote with diminution seen, First in his East the glorious lamp was seen."[371]

These examples (and others might be adduced) serve to show that Milton's ear was too busy about the larger interests of his measures to be always careful of the lesser. He was a strategist rather than a drill-sergeant in verse, capable, beyond any other English poet, of putting great ma.s.ses through the most complicated evolutions without clash or confusion, but he was not curious that every foot should be at the same angle. In reading "Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of vastness. You float under an illimitable sky, brimmed with suns.h.i.+ne or hung with constellations; the abysses of s.p.a.ce are about you; you hear the cadenced surges of an unseen ocean; thunders mutter round the horizon; and if the scene change, it is with an elemental movement like the s.h.i.+fting of mighty winds. His imagination seldom condenses, like Shakespeare's, in the kindling flash of a single epithet, but loves better to diffuse itself. Witness his descriptions, wherein he seems to circle like an eagle bathing in the blue streams of air, controlling with his eye broad sweeps of champaign or of sea, and rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser expression. He was fonder of the vague, perhaps I should rather say the indefinite, where more is meant than meets the ear, than any other of our poets. He loved epithets (like _old_ and _far_) that suggest great reaches, whether of s.p.a.ce or time. This bias shows itself already in his earlier poems, as where he hears

"The _far off_ curfew sound Over some _widewatered_ sh.o.r.e,"

or where he fancies the sh.o.r.es[372] and sounding seas was.h.i.+ng Lycidas far away; but it reaches its climax in the "Paradise Lost." He produces his effects by dilating our imaginations with an impalpable hint rather than by concentrating them upon too precise particulars. Thus in a famous comparison of his, the fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming nightly toward the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He generalizes always instead of specifying,--the true secret of the ideal treatment in which he is without peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he is never turgid. Ta.s.so begins finely with

"Chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne II rauco suon della tartarea tromba; Treman le spaziose atre caverne, E l'aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba,"

but soon spoils all by condescending to definite comparisons with thunder and intestinal convulsions of the earth; in other words, he is unwary enough to give us a standard of measurement, and the moment you furnish Imagination with a yardstick she abdicates in favor of her statistical poor-relation Commonplace. Milton, with this pa.s.sage in his memory, is too wise to hamper himself with any statement for which he can be brought to book, but wraps himself in a mist of looming indefiniteness;

"He called so loud that all the hollow deep Of h.e.l.l resounded,"

thus amplifying more n.o.bly by abstention from his usual method of prolonged evolution. No caverns, however s.p.a.cious, will serve his turn, because they have limits. He could practise this self-denial when his artistic sense found it needful, whether for variety of verse or for the greater intensity of effect to be gained by abruptness. His more elaborate pa.s.sages have the mult.i.tudinous roll of thunder, dying away to gather a sullen force again from its own reverberations, but he knew that the attention is recalled and arrested by those claps that stop short without echo and leave us listening. There are no such vistas and avenues of verse as his. In reading the "Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of s.p.a.ciousness such as no other poet gives. Milton's respect for himself and for his own mind and its movements rises wellnigh to veneration. He prepares the way for his thought and spreads on the ground before the sacred feet of his verse tapestries inwoven with figures of mythology and romance. There is no such unfailing dignity as his. Observe at what a reverent distance he begins when he is about to speak of himself, as at the beginning of the Third Book and the Seventh. His sustained strength is especially felt in his beginnings. He seems always to start full-sail; the wind and tide always serve; there is never any fluttering of the canvas In this he offers a striking contrast with Wordsworth, who has to go through with a great deal of _yo-heave-ohing_ before he gets under way. And though, in the didactic parts of "Paradise Lost," the wind dies away sometimes, there is a long swell that will not let us forget it, and ever and anon some eminent verse lifts its long ridge above its tamer peers heaped with stormy memories. And the poem never becomes incoherent; we feel all through it, as in the symphonies of Beethoven, a great controlling reason in whose safe-conduct we trust implicitly.

Mr. Ma.s.son's discussions of Milton's English are, it seems to me, for the most part unsatisfactory He occupies some ten pages, for example, with a history of the genitival form _its_, which adds nothing to our previous knowledge on the subject and which has no relation to Milton except for its bearing on the authors.h.i.+p of some verses attributed to him against the most overwhelming internal evidence to the contrary. Mr. Ma.s.son is altogether too resolute to find traces of what he calls oddly enough "recollectiveness of Latin constructions" in Milton, and scents them sometimes in what would seem to the uninstructed reader very idiomatic English. More than once, at least, he has fancied them by misunderstanding the pa.s.sage in which they seem to occur. Thus, in "Paradise Lost," XI. 520, 521,