The Common Pursuit (4 page)

(IX, 1182)

Again:

Milton seems to us often, as he writes of [Satan] to be giving of his own substance, but he can give of his own substance everywhere. In those altercations, for example, between Satan and Abdiel in Books V and VI we feel Milton now in the lines of the one, now in the lines of the other, but chiefly, without any doubt, in the lines of Abdiel.

In these passages, where he seems 'to be giving of his own substance*, we have the clear marks of Milton's failure to realize his undertaking—to conceive it dramatically as a whole, capable of absorbing and depersonalizing the relevant interests and impulses of his private life. He remains in the poem too much John Milton, declaiming, insisting, arguing, suffering, and protesting.

The best known example of his 'own substance' getting the upper hand and becoming a problem is in Satan. Not that the great Satan of die first two books isn't sufficiently dramatized; the trouble is quite other:

It would be hard to quarrel with what Dr Tillyard has to say about Satan. Dr Tillyard is not with the * Satanists', but he does not see 'how we can avoid admitting that Milton did partly ally himself with Satan, that unwittingly he was led away by the creature of his own imagination* : and he feels (to my mind with perfect tightness) that 'it is not enough to say with Saurat that Satan represents a part of Milton's mind, a part of which he disapproves and of which he was quite conscious'. The feeling of most readers would surely be with Dr Tillyard that there is more than conscious recognition, more than conscious disapproval, in all this. The balance is disturbed; the poem, instead of being on an even keel, has a pronounced list, and Satan is the cause of it.

And Professor Waldock points out that the Satan of the first two books appears no more, the Satan of the address to the Sun near the beginning of Book IV being a different one—different in con-

ception. But, not satisfied that this substitution restores the proper balance of sympathy, Milton, as Professor Waldock shows in detail, intervenes constantly to incite a disparaging view of Satan —to 'degrade' him, the extreme instance of the 'technique of degradation* being the pantomime trick in Book X by which the infernal host, breaking into applause, are made to hiss.

What radical 'consistency*, what wholeness, do these criticisms, which Professor Waldock enforces with minute observation and analysis, leave to Paradise Lost ? Milton has so little self-knowledge and is so unqualified intellectually, that his intention (the intended significance of the poem) at the level of justifying the ways of God to Men', and what he actually contrives as poet to do, conflict, with disastrous consequences to both poem as such and intention. Satan, a major element in the poem, gets out of hand (and a closely related misfortune overtakes God the Father), with tie result that the 'balance is disturbed'—and very badly. As a result of the conflict between feeling and theory Milton's treatment of the Fall is such that Professor Waldock has to conclude: 'Paradise Lost cannot take the strain at the centre, it breaks there, the theme is too much for it'. And yet he seems to diinJc that Milton can be credited with 'architectonic'—just as Mr Eliot speaks of Milton's 'sense of structure'.

Words used in that way seem to me to have no meaning. The attribution looks to me no better than a mere inert acquiescence in convention: 'architectonic' power has always been taken to be the mark of the Miltonic genius. But it is perhaps worth asking what gives the idea its plausibility—what makes it possible for Professor Waldock to say:

Nothing of this... can, it seems to me, make much difference to the obstinate fact that Paradise Lost is an epic poem of singularly hard and definite outline, expressing itself (or so at least would be our first impressions) with unmistakable clarity and point.

That 'epic poem', I think, gives the clue to a large part of the explanation: Paradise Lost is a classical epic—it is epic, classical and monumental: a strong traditional suggestion of qualities goes with those words. Actually, the undertaking to treat the chosen theme in an epic on the classical model illustrates very strikingly the peculiarities of the Miltonic genius that made strongly against

clarity and outline (at least, in any complex whole), and made for inconsistency, muddle and vagueness. To put it in a positive way, it illustrates the peculiarities that lead us to say that the word for Milton is 'character' rather than 'intelligence*. On the one hand there was his heroic self-confidence, his massive egotism and his conviction that nothing but the highest enterprise was worthy of him: for the Renaissance poet and scholar the form must be the epic; for the dedicated voice of the chosen English people the theme must be the greatest of all themes. On the other hand, only a great capacity for unawareness—unawareness in the face of impossibilities, his own limitations, and the implicit criticism incurred by his intentions in the attempt to realize them—could have permitted him, after pondering such an undertaking, to persist in it.

When he came to the war in Heaven even Milton, as Professor Waldock observes, seems to have had some difficulty in persuading himself that he was taking it seriously. Yet the war in Heaven is an essential part of the epic conception, and to-foresee the absurdity of the part would have been to forswear the whole.

Having elaborated his criticisms, Professor Waldock, in the 'Conclusion* to his book, says that the poem *has enough left, in all conscience, to stay it against anything we can do*. But what has it left ? There are the first two books, which are of a piece and grandly impressive, and, in the others, numbers of'beauties* major and minor. But, surely, whatever is left, it cannot justify talk about 'architectonic', 'hard and definite outline', or Milton's 'sense of structure'. And if more is to be said by way of explaining illusions to the contrary, the Miltonic character may be invoked: it certainly suggests massiveness and a 'hard and definite outline', and in reading Paradise Lost we are rarely unconscious of the author. And it is natural to associate our sense of the whole characteristic enterprise with our sense of the character.

The paradoxical association of this 'character' with a use of language that tends to the reverse of'hard and definite outline' has much to do with the strength of Milton's influence in the nineteenth century—his prepotence in taste and practice in the period of English poetry to which Mr Eliot's work put a decisive

end. That his own technical preoccupations as a poet entailed a critical attitude towards Milton, Mr Eliot, in his recent paper, admits. I challenge his way of putting things because it seems to me, as I said, insidious—calculated, that is, not to promote critical light. 'And the study of Milton could be of no help: it was only a hindrance'.—As if it were a matter of deciding not to study Milton! The problem, rather, was to escape from an influence that was so difficult to escape from because it was unrecognized, belonging, as it did, to the climate of the habitual and 'natural'. Mr Eliot, who 'had the consciousness to perceive that he must use words differently' from Tennyson and Swinburne, had at the same time the consciousness that enabled him to name Milton for immediately relevant criticism. (That didn't mean, of course, that he had to give Milton much of his critical attention.)

Along with this misleading formulation goes what I can only call a speciously judicial refusal to judge—

And we can never prove that any particular poet would have written better poetry if he had escaped that influence. Even if we assert, what can only be a matter of faith, that Keats would have written a very great epic poem if Milton had not preceded him, is it sensible to repine for an unwritten masterpiece, in exchange for one which we possess and acknowledge ?

What we can say, and must, in so far as we are bent on getting recognition for Keats's greatness, is that, if he hadn't been capable of putting the beautiful first Hyperion behind him, with the remark that 'Milton's verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's humour', he wouldn't have been capable of the qualities that are the strength of the ode To Autumn and of the induction to the revised Hyperion, that constitute the proof of his major genius, and that make Tennyson's, put side by side with his, a decidedly minor one.

The reference to Tennyson has much point. For there is something decidedly Tennysonian about the handling of the medium in Hyperion, any representative passage of which, as I have noted elsewhere (Revaluation, pp, 267-8), offers the critic, in its way of being at the same time Tennysonian and Miltonic, an admirable way of bringing home the fact of Milton's predominance in the Victorian age—for in Tennyson we have the Victorian main

current. Milton in Tennyson, as in Keats, is associated with Spenser, and Tennyson had his specific original genius: 'he knew', says Mr Eliot, * everything about Latin versification that an English poet could use* and had a 'unique and unerring feeling for the sounds of words'. Tennyson himself defined his ambition as being to bring English as near to the Italian as possible, and his 'music' ('the emphasis... on the sound,.. . upon the word, not the idea') has a highly distinctive quality. But he, like Milton, had other than musical preoccupations; he aspired to be among 'the great sage-poets of all time'. In the ease with which he reconciled the two bents we see the Miltonic inheritance—as in the readiness with which the nobly-phrased statement of'thought' and moral attitudes in sonorous verse (the 'emphasis ... on the sound') was accepted as the type of serious poetic expression.

It would take a long separate essay to provide the historical backing for these last suggestions (obviously valid as they appear to me) in an examination of the Miltonic influence as it passes through the eighteenth century, appears in varied forms in the great poets of the Romantic period (it asserts itself plainly in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron), and emerges from that period to a subtle predominance in the Victorian age. It must be enough here to adduce the case of Matthew Arnold. Arnold was not an original poetic genius; he was a very intelligent man with a talent of the kind that provides evidence of what cultivated people in a given age feel to be 'natural' in modes of poetic expression. The Tennysonian Palace of Art had no attractions for him, and he states in his criticism a view of the function of the poet that postulates something very different from the poetry of the Victorian 'otherworld':

every one can see that a poet. . . ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in poetry; and life and the world being in modern times very complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it,...

But Arnold's characteristic poetic achievement may fairly be represented by The Scholar-Gipsy. This is a charming poem, but the significance it holds for us is that Arnold so clearly intended it to be much more than charming. He offers the Scholar, with unmistakable moral unction, as the symbol of a spiritual superi-

ority; a superiority that makes him an admonition and an ideal for 'us 5 , who, in this 'iron time', suffer

the sick fatigue, the languid doubt, Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.

The Scholar-Gipsy, we are insistently told, had 'one aim, one business, one desire'; his powers were 'firm to their mark'. But it is mere telling; the 'aim' and the 'mark' are mere abstract postulates: 'thou hadst—what we, alas, have not'. And that is clearly all that Arnold knows about it. He exhibits the Scholar as drifting about the Oxford countryside in an eternal week-end. 'For early didst thou leave the world'—and what the poem actually offers is a charm of relaxation, a holiday from serious aims and exacting business.

And what the Scholar-Gipsy really symbolizes is Victorian poetry, vehicle (so often) of explicit intellectual and moral intentions, but unable to be in essence anything but relaxed, relaxing and anodyne. Arnold himself was an adverse critic of die prevailing tradition, but he was not the 'man of genius' by whom alone 'expression is altered'. He has his own personal style, it is true; but the notion of distinctively poetic expression that informs it is quite normally and ordinarily Victorian. Various influences are to be seen in the diction and phrasing of The Scholar-Gipsy, but the significant clue is to be seen in such obvious reminders of Milton as this:

Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen, And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit, To the just-pausing genius we remit Our worn-out life, and are—what we have been.

Significant clue, I mean, when we are considering the question: How can so intelligent a man as Arnold have been capable, when writing verse, of such weak confusion, such intellectual debility, as The Scholar-Gipsy exposes? He exemplifies with peculiar force the general habit and tendency of Victorian poetic. For him, poetry, while being a medium for intellectual statement—for the presentment of'thought' such as might have been expressed in prose, differs from prose (we can see) in not imposing any strict intellectual criterion- The inferiority, in rigour and force, of the

intellectual content is compensated for by nobility, sonority and finish of phrasing. But the compensating cannot be clearly distinguished from a process that combines exaltation and an effect of heightened significance with an actual relaxing of the mind, so that the reader, though conscious of an intellectual appeal, doesn't notice any need for compensation; for the nobility and sonority go with a subtly 'musical 9 use of language—the * emphasis' is sufficiently 'on the sound' to save the 'idea' from close scrutiny.

Arnold, of course, had his own special exposure to Miltonic influence in his cult of Wordsworth. But his poetic was normally Victorian, and consideration of his case should bring home the force of the contention that, in Victorian poetic, we have to recognize the Miltonic influence. For in a tradition or habit—a use of language that seemed to the age 'natural'—which could do with a critic of Arnold's intelligence what the Victorian poetic did with him there is a potency that calls for a Milton to explain it. Milton's moral and intellectual prestige, and his power over the English mind, need not be enlarged on here. That prestige and that power had been refreshed by the great poets of the Romantic period, out of whose varied achievement emerged the Victorian poetic tradition, which favoured nobility, found the grand Wordsworth of the Immortality ode and the 'platform' sonnets more positively congenial than the Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads and, at the same time, tended, as Mr Eliot himself has pointed out, to be essentially preoccupied with the evocation of a poetic 'other-world'. The relevance of our earlier examination of Milton's use of language, for 'music' and yet for statement, should be plain.