The Inspiration of Paradise Lost

VI

Derivative Originality and Artistic Puritanism

The paradox of the immense mood-cultivation by Milton for the inspired effortless composition of Paradise Lost leads us to yet another curiosity connected with him. We have spoken of the poetry of the past in which he steeped himself. From the literary point of view, what most constitutes his long preparation of the inner mood for his masterpiece is his constant immergence in the high holy fire of the Old and New Testaments, the wide steady light of the Greek and Roman Classics, the strange or sombre or changing chiaroscuro of the Mediaeval and Renaissance writers. Out of this immergence resulted not only a poetic style at once reminiscent of past tones and typical of the sheer Milton: there resulted also the paradox that Milton is at the same time a most original and a most derivative poet, one who directly borrows again and again from his predecessors without ceasing to be unique and individual.

Let me give a few extreme instances of Milton's intense derivative novelty. We are familiar with the simile he offers when speaking of Satan's army of Angel-forms lying in a stupor on the fiery flood of Hell:

Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks

Of Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades

High over-arched embower...¹

Here he echoes, as critics have remarked, several poets but mainly Virgil. Virgil has written about the ghosts of the Underworld:

Quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo

Lapsa cadunt folia...

We may render the hexameters in English:

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Even as in forests of autumn at the break of frost a myriad

Leaves drift and fall...

Marlowe has caught from both Virgil and the Greek poet Bacchylides the stimulus for his own phrase about Tambur-laine's troops:

In numbers more than are the quivering leaves

Of Ida's forests...

But how unforgettable is Milton's expression - compact yet elegant, gathering up all the meaning in the opening stressed monosyllable "thick" and then suavely loosening it out into the picture of a fall helpless yet touched with beauty, and finally collecting the sense again in the polysyllabic place-name "Vallombrosa", literally meaning "Valley of Woods" and its very sound suggesting gleam and gloom and waver and whisper as in a great forest haunted by winds and threaded by streams. Another instance of Milton's derivative originality is a line of geographical evocation:

Mombaza, and Quiloa, and Melind,

And Samata...²

We are reminded of the Portuguese Camoës's:

De Quiloa, de Mombaça, e de Safala...

Quite a rhythmic phrase, but lacking in the art-touch introduced by the name "Melind" to close the line with an alliteration to its beginning, so that the strange catalogue is saved from being just a drift and acquires for the ear a satisfying point. A further example is Milton's famous vaunt about his own adventurous song that "pursues"

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.³

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Ariosto has substantially an almost exact analogue serving as Milton's model:

Cosa non detta in prosa mai, ne in rima,

which, in a faithful translation, would read:

Things spoken not in prose yet or in rhyme.

Milton has transfigured the expression. In Ariosto the line is a little pedestrian and the internal jingle of "cosa" and "prosa" cheapens rather than embellishes the poetry, and the repeated "in" though unavoidable looks somewhat like rhetorical padding. Milton has made everything more concise and breathed a high bravery and a mighty rarity into the significance by the suggestively long "unattempted" immediately after the short and simple yet strong vocable: "Things." Even in his most derivative moments Milton asserts his intense originality.

And his derivativeness can be extreme not only in scattered lines. The scheme itself of his epic owes to older writers. By Milton's day many had tackled the subject of the revolt in Heaven and the fall of Man in Eden. A Dutch poet named Vondel, author of Lucifer and Adam in Banishment, the one printed in 1654 and the other in 1664, is often mentioned as having supplied Milton with precedents which he freely imitated. We are also told of a drama in Italian, Adamo, by Giovanni Battista Andreini, published in 1613, and another drama in Latin, Adamus Exul, by Hugo Grotius, which came out in 1601 and from which Andreini himself is said to have borrowed. But hardly any book specifically devoted to Milton points to the work to which Milton owed the greatest debt. As shown by Norman Douglas for the first time,⁴ Milton drew the most from a little-known Italian contemporary, the poet-playwright Serafino della Salandra who put before the public in 1647 his Adamo Caduto. Salandra's development of his theme is repeated by Milton in Book after Book of Paradise

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Lost. Even the details tally in many places and there are passages in Milton running parallel to those in Salandra with close verbal similarity, so that we may speak of Paradise Lost translating several parts of Adamo Caduto. But these very passages are yet typically Milton's, full of what has been called his "grand style". Literary pilfering is an old profession. Virgil lifted chunks out of Homer, and Shakespeare took most of his plots from Bandello and versified Plutarch in many places. But Milton stands at the head of those who have made a pastiche or mosaic of pilferings. And his own attitude to this kind of literary activity is clearly stated in a prose work of his, Eikonoklastes: "Borrowing, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors is accounted plagiary." Evidently Milton has all the past of good authors behind him in what he did, but he is unique by borrowing much more than any good author has done, and yet losing not one inch of his giant stature. That is the miracle of his genius. What in Salandra has gone dead down to the dead has lived immortally in Milton. Whatever he touched he suffused with a poetic personality of the greatest distinction and power. This personality had its limitations, but when its positive qualities are exercised we have effects which no other poet has surpassed and very few have equalled and which in a certain respect have no analogue either before or after him.

Sri Aurobindo⁵ has well hit off what this respect is - he has called it "that peculiar grandeur in both the soul and manner of the utterance and in both the soul and the gait of the rhythm which belongs to him alone of the poets". Sri Aurobindo⁶ has further remarked on Milton's grandeur as well as the other qualities given to English poetic speech by him: "these qualities are... easily sustained throughout, because with him they are less an art, great artist though he is, than the natural language of his spirit and the natural sound of its motion." Here Sri Aurobindo bears on several sides of our discourse. First, on what we have characterised as the essential spontaneity or effortlessness of Milton's

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artistically elaborate utterance. Secondly, on what we have marked as part of the lyric impulse in his epic expression - the extreme personal pervasion by him of his poetry. Thirdly, on the epic proportions into which he grew before writing Paradise Lost, so that his singing was the direct echo, as it were, of his very being. Another statement of Sri Aurobindo's can be related in general to our conception about Milton's spontaneous derivativeness and originality, his blending of excessive book-lore and of old expressive turns with a new psychological impetus and poetic fire. Sri Aurobindo⁷ writes: "It is true that he had not an original intellectuality, his mind was rather scholastic and traditional, but he had an original soul and personality and the vision of a poet."

Thus our four paradoxes about Milton can find points of indirect support in Sri Aurobindo who did not set out to write on the problems we have discussed. A fifth paradox we may frame about Milton apropos of Sri Aurobindo's recognition of him as a "great artist" and apropos of Sri Aurobindo's observation⁸ that, even where "the supreme vitalising fire has sunk", "Milton writing poetry could never fail in a certain greatness and power, nor could he descend, as did Wordsworth and others, below his well-attained poetical level."

This sustainment of poetical level signifies an unfailing certainty of style, a constant gift of construction, a persistent play of varied significant rhythm. A poet may achieve the sustainment by an acute striving or by a keen instinct: it is in either case a living sense of Form, and it is by the living sense of Form and not necessarily by a self-critical shipshaping that the poet is distinguished as an artist. Milton is acknowledged to be the pre-eminent artist among English poets. Only five others qualify to come anywhere near him: they are, in order of time, Spenser, Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, Yeats. Out of them Keats is the most original: in originality he is far superior to Milton. Sri Aurobindo calls Keats "the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, - not gran-

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diose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry."⁹ Rossetti stands next in subtle pictorial directness. Yeats is as masterly - though more mystical - in musical suggestions deepening the sight. Tennyson is at times fine both in eye and ear but often gives an impression of decoration. Spenser is a most melodious rhythmist and a sensitive word-painter, but tends to monotony. And, except for Spenser, none of them has such an amount of accomplished work as Milton, and nobody rivals him in the long drawn-out structure of modulated harmony. But our fourth paradox lies in the queer conjunction that the greatest artist in English poetry is also the greatest Puritan in England's literature.

We have already said that he was Cromwell's Foreign Secretary; like Cromwell, he belonged to the sect of those who wanted to make religion "pure" and called themselves Puritans. They held that God should be worshipped in barest simplicity, with no elaboration of ritual and ceremony, and that man should live strictly, banning all lightness of mood, standing vigilant over all pleasures, even the pleasures of Art. We may remember they closed all theatres. They wanted to do away with the painted windows of Churches, the burning of incense, the chanting of prayers: they went straight to the stern and primitive teachings of the Old Testament: they were harsh with themselves and harsh with others. We know that Milton was a Spartan disciplinarian with the students whom he coached and that he mercilessly made his daughters read out to him in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Italian, French and Spanish which he had taught them to pronounce without understanding a single word: he caustically remarked that "one tongue was more than enough for any woman". About Paradise Lost itself John Richard Green has said: "Its scheme is the problem with which the Puritan wrestled in hours of gloom and darkness - the problem of sin and redemption, of the world-wide struggle of evil against good. The intense moral concentration of the Puritan had given an almost bodily shape to

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spiritual abstractions before Milton gave them life and being in the forms of Sin and Death." The Puritan in Milton is also responsible for the claim he set up about the didactic part of his poem. John Bailey has well noted: "He claimed to justify the ways of God to men. Perhaps he did so to his own mind which, in these questions, was curiously matter-of-fact, literal, legal and unmystical.... Everybody who stops to reflect now feels that the attitude of his God to the rebel angels and to man is hard and unforgiving, below the standard of any decent human morality, far below the Christian charity of St. Paul. The atmosphere of the poem when it deals with these matters is suggestive of a tyrant's attorney-general whose business is to find plausible excuses for an arbitrary despot."¹⁰ Waldock traces to Puritan theology the fact that "it does not come very naturally to Milton to suggest a loving God". This theology accounts for the woodenness so often observed of God's speeches. We have a verbose and argumentative Deity who seems to want considerably, if not altogether, in the feeling of the poetic. Again, Milton had very little humour: if he had been un-Puritan enough to have more sense of it he would have realised how absurd his God often sounded. In one speech¹¹ where God blames Adam and Eve in advance He gives even a strong impression, as Waldock points out, of nervousness, insecurity and doubt. Milton's defective humour goes hand in hand with the defect that is his in the sympathetic understanding needed for human actions. As we may expect of a Puritan, his picture of Adam and Eve not only lacks insight into the human soul's subtler motions but is also somewhat crude in its adjustment of rights as between man and woman. It has been observed that to Eve Adam is more the author and dispenser of her life than her dear husband and to Adam she is more a devoted disciple than a loving wife and, when they meet, the atmosphere is more of religion than of love.

Yes, Puritanism was powerful in Milton. But in spite of it he was English poetry's greatest artist because there were two other forces at work in him. Both of them carried the

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spirit of the Renaissance. One was Humanism, which revived the culture of Classical antiquity, affirmed the beauty of the natural world, the right of the senses and the emotions to self-fulfilment, the ability of the intellect to find truth by probing the discoveries of eye and ear. The other was Individualism, the self-assertion of personality, the confidence of the mind in its own judgments, the passion for freedom and independence, the urge to be original and unique. If powerfully Puritanical, Milton was still more Miltonic than Puritanical or, rather, Puritanical in a keenly individual fashion. While with the Puritans he criticised the despotism of Kings and the loose life of the Royal Court, he shared nothing of the Puritans' contempt for culture or their repressive intolerance towards other sects or their recoil from the pagan glories of old Greece and Rome. He dissented even from many of their dogmas and embraced the "heresies" known as Arianism and Mortalism. He scared them by demanding vehemently the abolition of censorship. He shocked them by advocating divorce on the simple ground of mutual disagreement and went so far as to regard polygamy as permissible. In fact, he was quite heterodox in several respects and, during the period when he composed Paradise Lost, he stood aloof from all denominations. Having a sensuous nature and a rich imagination, he could not toe the firm line of Puritanism: he indeed exercised a strong ethical will, but only to sublimate and not extirpate the spirit of the Renaissance in him. And partly it was this spirit and partly a vein of noble cheerfulness in his own nature that mingled with the Puritan to make even his religious self not altogether a hard one. None can miss receiving from him (to quote Bailey's phrase) "his high emotional consciousness of life as the glad and free service of God".¹²

His daily contacts with fellow-creatures also were no series of severities. His biographers have left ample evidence to this effect.¹³ "As he was severe on one hand, so he was most familiar and free in his conversation with those to whom he was most sour in his way of education. He could be

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cheerful even in his gout-fits, and sing." And "though he had been long troubled with that disease, insomuch that his knuckles were all callous, yet was he not ever observed to be very impatient". His daughter Deborah who read the most to him in his blind days remembered him with tenderness and said he had been "delightful company, the life of the conversation - and that on account of a flow of subject and an unaffected cheerfulness and civility". "He had an excellent ear, and could bear a part both in vocal and instrumental music."

The consequence, to Paradise Lost, of so complex a nature, with several opposite traits held together, is that the matter rather than the manner is Puritan, and even in the matter the basic theme alone is such, for around this theme Milton erects a magnificent edifice of references to the wide world's culture.

However, when we label his poetic manner as non-Puritan we must make a reservation just as we have made when labelling his matter as Puritan. There is, for all its opulence, an austerity, a kind of high calm Puritanism, in Milton's manner. Sri Aurobindo has drawn a valuable distinction between the austere in outward form and the austere au fond - austerity of expression and austerity of temper. The former he defines: "to use just the necessary words and no others... the one expressive or revealing image, the precise colour and nothing more, just the exact impression, reaction, simple feeling proper to the object - nothing spun out, additional, in excess."¹⁴ According to such a definition, Milton on the whole can hardly pass as austere: "his epic rhetoric, his swelling phrases, his cult of the grandiose" would rule him out and perhaps even "his sprawling lengthiness" would by itself, in the eyes of the extremists of the bare and spare, exclude him. If we judge by a set technical method we are likely to lose the essential temper. Austerity can be felt in the spirit of the writing, "as a something constant, self-gathered, grave and severe; it is the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton, Wordsworth,

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Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides...."¹⁵ "There can be a very real spirit and power of underlying austerity behind a considerable wealth and richness of expression. Arnold in one of his poems gives the image of a girl beautiful, rich and sumptuous in apparel on whose body, killed in an accident, was found beneath the sumptuousness, next to the skin, an under-robe of sack-cloth. If that is admitted, then Milton can keep his claim to austerity in spite of his epic fulness and Aeschylus in spite of the exultant daring of his images and the rich colour of his language. Dante is, I think, the perfect type of austerity in poetry, standing between the two extremes and combining the most sustained severity of expression with a precise power and fulness in the language which gives the sense of packed riches - no mere bareness anywhere."¹⁶ It is a sort of inner tavasyā or discipline, an ātmasaṁyama or self-possession that renders Milton, like Aeschylus and Dante, austere although outwardly he is lavish of splendour and strength and sweep, even as Aeschylus is audacious in colour and image, Dante burdened with beauty and significance in the midst of his forcefully cut conciseness. We may add, with Sri Aurobindo - especially apropos of Dante's Divina Commedia but also to some extent in relation to Milton's Paradise Lost - that "austerity... is not incompatible with a certain fineness and sweetness".¹⁷

Notes and References

¹.BK. I, 302-4.

².BK. XI. 399-400.

³.BK. I, 16.

⁴.Old Calabria (London, 1956), "Milton in Calabria", pp. 165-176.

⁵.The Future Poetry (Pondicherry, 1953), p. 117.

⁶.Ibid.

⁷.Ibid., p. 118.

⁸.Ibid., p. 120.

⁹.Ibid., p. 185.

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¹⁰.John Bailey, Milton (The Home University Library, Oxford, 1945), pp. 148-49.

¹¹.Bk. III, 80-134.

¹².Bailey, op. cit., pp. 145-46.

¹³.J.H. Hanford, A Milton Handbook (1946).

¹⁴.Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Third Series (Sri Aurobindo Circle, Bombay, 1949), p. 18.

¹⁵.Ibid., p. 17.

¹⁶.Ibid., pp. 19-20.

¹⁷.Ibid., p. 28.

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