1608-1674. HIS 'FLATS.' 159 This unskilful allegory appears to me one of the greatest faults of the poem; and to this there was no temptation but the author's opinion of its beauty. To the conduct of the narrative some objection may be made. Satan is with great expectation brought before Gabriel in Paradise, and is suffered to go away unmolested. The creation of man is represented as the consequence of the vacuity left in heaven by the expulsion of the rebels; yet Satan mentions it as a report rife in heaven before his departure. To find sentiments for the state of innocence was very difficult; and something of anticipation perhaps is now and then discovered. Adam's discourse of dreams seems not to be the speculation of a new-created being. I know not whether his answer to the angel's reproof for curiosity does not want something of propriety; it is the speech of a man acquainted with many other men. Some philosophical notions, especially when the philosophy is false, might have been better omitted. The angel, in a comparison, speaks of timorous deer before deer were yet timorous, and before Adam could understand the comparison. Dryden remarks, that Milton has some flats among his elevations.125 This is only to say that all the parts are not equal. In every work one part must be for the sake of others; a palace must have passages; a poem must have transitions. It is no more to be required that wit should always be blazing than that the sun should always stand at noon. In a great work there is 125 Milton's Paradise Lost' is admirable; but am I therefore bound to maintain that there are no flats among his elevations, when it is evident he creeps along sometimes for above a hundred lines together?-DRYDEN: Pref. to Second Miscellany, 1685. It is true he runs into a flat of thought sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he has got into a track of Scripture.-DRYDEN: Ded. of Juvenal, 1693. Milton's strong pinion now not Heaven can bound, And God the Father turns a school-divine. POPE: To Augustus. a vicissitude of luminous and opaque parts, as there is in the world a succession of day and night. Milton, when he has expatiated in the sky, may be allowed sometimes to revisit earth; for what other author ever soared so high, or sustained his flight so long? Milton, being well versed in the Italian poets, appears to have borrowed often from them; and as every man catches something from his companions, his desire of imitating Ariosto's levity has disgraced his work with the 'Paradise of Fools'-a fiction not in itself ill-imagined, but too ludicrous for its place. His play on words, in which he delights too often; his equivocations, which Bentley endeavours to defend by the example of the ancients; his unnecessary and ungraceful use of terms of art, it is not necessary to mention, because they are easily remarked, and generally censured, and at last bear so little proportion to the whole that they scarcely deserve the attention of a critic. Such are the faults of that wonderful performance 'Paradise Lost,' which he who can put in balance with its beauties must be considered not as nice but as dull, as less to be censured for want of candour, than pitied for want of sensibility. Of Paradise Regained,' the general judgment seems now to be right, that it is in many parts elegant, and everywhere instructive. It was not to be supposed that the writer of 'Paradise Lost' could ever write without great effusions of fancy, and exalted precepts of wisdom. The basis of 'Paradise Regained' is narrow a dialogue without action can never please like an union of the narrative and dramatic powers. Had this poem been written not by Milton, but by some imitator, it would have claimed and received universal praise. If Paradise Regained' has been too much depreciated, Samson Agonistes' has in requital been too much admired. It could only be by long prejudice, and the bigotry of learning, that Milton could prefer the ancient tragedies, with their encumbrance of a chorus, to the exhibitions of the French and English stages; and it is only by a blind confidence in the reputation of Milton that a drama can be praised in which the 1608-1674. 'SAMSON AGONISTES.'-HIS LANGUAGE. 161 intermediate parts have neither cause nor consequence, neither hasten nor retard the catastrophe. In this tragedy are however many particular beauties, many just sentiments and striking lines; but it wants that power of attracting the attention which a well-connected plan produces. Milton would not have excelled in dramatic writing; 126 he knew human nature only in the gross, and had never studied the shades of character, nor the combinations of concurring, or the perplexity of contending, passions. He had read much, and knew what books could teach, but had mingled little in the world, and was deficient in the knowledge which experience must confer. Through all his greater works there prevails an uniform peculiarity of diction, a mode and cast of expression which bears little resemblance to that of any former writer, and which is so far removed from common use that an unlearned reader, when he first opens his book, finds himself surprised by a new language. This novelty has been, by those who can find nothing wrong in Milton, imputed to his laborious endeavours after words suitable to the grandeur of his ideas. Our language, says 126 The imitators of Milton, like most other imitators, are not copies, but caricatures of their original; they are a hundred times more obsolete and cramp than he, and equally so in all places; whereas it should have been observed of Milton that he is not lavish of his exotic words and phrases everywhere alike, but employs them much more where the subject is marvellous, vast, and strange, as in the scenes of heaven, hell, chaos, &c., than where it is turned to the natural and agreeable, as in the pictures of Paradise, the loves of our first parents, the entertainments of angels, and the like. In general this unusual style better serves to awaken our ideas in the descriptions and in the imaging and picturesque parts than it agrees with the lower sort of narrations, the character of which is simplicity and purity. Milton has several of the latter, where we find not an antiquated, affected, or uncouth word for some hundred lines together, as in his fifth book, the latter part of the eighth, the former of the tenth and eleventh books, and in the narration of Michael in the twelfth. I wonder indeed that he who ventured (contrary to the practice of all other epic poets) to imitate Homer's lownesses in the narrative should not also have copied his plainness and perspicuity in the dramatic parts, since in his speeches (where clearness above all is necessary) there is frequently such transposition and forced construction, that the very sense is not to be discovered without a second or third reading; and in this certainly he ought to be no example.POPE: Postscript to the Odyssey. VOL. I. M Addison, sunk under him. But the truth is that, both in prose and verse, he had formed his style by a perverse and pedantic principle. He was desirous to use English words with a foreign. idiom. This in all his prose is discovered and condemned; 127 for there judgment operates freely, neither softened by the beauty nor awed by the dignity of his thoughts; but such is the power of his poetry, that his call is obeyed without resistance, the reader feels himself in captivity to a higher and nobler mind, and criticism sinks in admiration. Milton's style was not modified by his subject; what is shown with greater extent in 'Paradise Lost' may be found in 'Comus.' One source of his peculiarity was his familiarity with the Tuscan poets; the disposition of his words is, I think, frequently Italian, perhaps sometimes combined with other tongues, 128 Of him, at last may be said what Jonson says of Spenser, that he wrote no language,129 but has formed what Butler calls a Babylonish dialect, in itself harsh and barbarous, but made, by exalted genius and extensive learning, the vehicle 127 The admirers of Milton's political opinions, and some too who comprehend his poetry, have found his prose style, Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose, This, however, is not the case. The structure of his sentences is generally cumbersome. When no longer confined to numbers, he is as awkward and unwieldy as a swan out of water. What Donne is in poetic pauses Milton is in the euphony of prose. He is behind the best of his contemporaries-behind Taylor, and not to be compared for a moment with either Hobbes or Cowley. In his reply to the Eikon, whatever advantage he may have in argument is not assisted by his style, for Gauden has at least the better of him in the easy gracefulness of a good style. 128 The language and versification of the 'Paradise Lost' are peculiar in being so much more necessarily correspondent to each than those in any other poem or poet. The connexion of the sentences and the position of the words are exquisitely artificial; but the position is rather according to the logic of passion or universal logic than to the logic of grammar. Milton attempted to make the English language obey the logic of passion as perfectly as the Greek and Latin: hence the occasional harshness in the construction.-COLERIDGE: Lecture X. 129 Spenser in affecting the ancients writ no language; yet I would have him read for his matter, but as Virgil read Ennius.-BEN JONSON: (Works by Gifford, ix. 215.) 1608-1674. HIS VERSIFICATION. 163 of so much instruction and so much pleasure that, like other lovers, we find grace in its deformity. Whatever be the faults of his diction, he cannot want the praise of copiousness and variety: he was master of his language in its full extent; and has selected the melodious words with such diligence, that from his book alone the Art of English Poetry might be learned. 130 After his diction, something must be said of his versification. The measure, he says, is the English heroic verse without rhyme. Of this mode he had many examples among the Italians, and some in his own country. The Earl of Surrey is said to have translated one of Virgil's books without rhyme; 131 and, besides our tragedies, a few short poems had appeared in blank verse, particularly one tending to reconcile the nation to Raleigh's wild attempt upon Guiana, and probably written by Raleigh himself. 132 These petty performances cannot be supposed to have much influenced Milton, who more probably took his hint from Trissino's Italia Liberata;' and, finding blank verse easier than rhyme, was desirous of persuading himself that it is better. Rhyme, he says, and says truly, is no necessary adjunct of true poetry.133 But, perhaps, of poetry as a mental operation, metre or music is no necessary adjunct: it is, however, by the music of metre that poetry has been discriminated in all lan 130 The practice of cutting short a The is warranted by Milton, who, of all English poets that ever lived, had certainly the finest ear.-COWPER to Lady Hesketh, March 6, 1786. 131 He translated two-the second and the fourth-without rhyme. They are printed among Lord Surrey's Poems. 132 De Guiana Carmen Epicum. Authore G. C.,' printed in Hakluyt, vol. 3. Oldys attributes it to George Chapman. Sufficient attention has not been paid to this early and thoughtful specimen of blank verse. 133 Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him by the example of Hannibal Caro and other Italians, who have used it; for whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme (which I have not now the leisure to examine), his own particular reason is plainly this,—that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it, which is manifest in his Juvenilia, or verses written in his youth, where the rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer, though not a poet.-DRYDEN: Ded. of Juvenal, 1693. |