V
When apropos of Milton we speak of the lyric inspiration and of spontaneity, we must remember that he is spontaneous in a particular way that lyric poets are not. And here I mean more than the epic character of his lyricism. I mean what I have called the power behind in addition to the power beyond the poem, what he himself did to. make his total effortlessness possible. I may now specifically term it his sedulous cultivation of the inner mood - a deliberate travail seldom undergone by the lyric poets. And in the lines I have cited about harmonious numbers and the nightingale's nocturnal note we have the indication that Milton used to practise getting into the right mood for the voluntary movement of his poetry. He would feed on such thoughts as would naturally bring forth poetic utterance. I suppose thoughts like these differ with poets: what would touch Milton to music might not touch his contemporary and friend, Andrew Marvell. Marvell spoke of:
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
A steeping of the mind in Nature's greenery would be the mood in which Marvell could be marvellous as a poet. But, though Milton also mentions "shadiest covert", his is no "green shade": dense foliage at night-time, woods of pro-found gloom that are the nightingale's environment, are oftenest the physical counterparts of the mental milieu of Milton's song, an inner world of mysterious contemplation, in which the musical thoughts are no green ones but what the greatest line he ever wrote tells us:
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity...1
Milton made it a practice to plunge his mind in the contem-
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plation of lofty themes that his soul found most congenial and out of this contemplation sprang spontaneously his great verse. He did not labour over his verse, planning out its details beforehand, but he did labour over his frame of mind. And not only immediately before the composition of his epic did he habituate himself to live on certain elevations of the intellect which might touch most naturally the heavenly founts of Song. Long before the first words of Paradise Lost broke their controlled thunder upon the world, he had started climbing towards those elevations. Thus the third paradox about Milton is his lifelong toil over the inner mood which during five years sparked off his unpremeditated speech under the spell of Urania.
The reason why he toiled so much is that in very early life the intuition had formed of a great poem within him, waiting to be delivered in due season. He was barely thirty when he told his friends that he would write such a poem and a little later he even made bold to inform the public that the poem he sought to write would be one that the world would not willingly let die. But he felt unprepared to venture his wings at once, nor had the right subject dawned on him. Through the years that led up to his old age he cast about for a suitable theme and was not sure whether he would produce an epic or a tragic drama. In the meantime he set himself to the task of building his own intellect and character. For, he had the conviction that the man who would write a great poem must make his life a great poem first: his very substance should be mighty and majestic and his whole mind moulded to epic proportions. The inner mood over which he laboured was to rise out of this achievement and be the pregnant concentration of its slow-wrought greatness.
Broadly speaking, this achievement would involve three activities. We may indicate them in his own words. First, "devout prayer to that eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases". Secondly, the poet's not "presuming to
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sing the praises of heroic men, or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy". Thirdly, "industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs". In other words, (1) development of the religious sense, (2) nurture of the ethical conscience and the civic responsibility, (3) growth of the intellectual faculty and the artistic-literary instinct.
The religious sense was awake in Milton from the very beginning. Repeatedly in his early poems we come across an aspiration to be God's instrument. Most characteristic of himself are lines like:
Towards which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven,2
or
As ever in my great Task-master's eye.3
We hear also of his habit in later life to have the Hebrew Bible read out in the early morning and to sit in contemplation afterwards. The ethical conscience too was strong throughout. During his Italian tour he refrained from the slightest moral deviation even "in all those places in which vice meets with so little discouragement, and is practised with so little shame". Personal courage was another virtue of his. When he was told that in Rome there was a plot against him because he had spoken too freely on religion, he went to that city, moved about in as exposed a manner as possible and openly defended Protestantism for two months. What cut short his continental tour was the news of civil commotions in England. He thought it base to amuse himself abroad when his "fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty at home". In England he started writing a series of pamphlets on various public themes. Some of them made him unpopular, but he held on to his course. With the end of the Civil War he was appointed Latin Secretary to Cromwell. Time and again
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he defended the policy of the Commonwealth. The most famous occasion was when an attack on it was launched by the greatest scholar in Europe, Salmasius, for the favour of whose presence half a dozen Courts competed. The Council of State in England called on Milton to reply. The work demanded incessant application. He had already lost the sight of one eye and that of the other was getting weaker. His doctors warned him that if he took up the job of answering Salmasius he would go completely blind. Milton ignored the warning and strained himself to the utmost for a year. Salmasius was crushed by the Defensio Populi Anglicani (De-fence of the English People), lost his high position at the Swedish Court and died soon after. But Milton was hence-forth dependent totally on other men's eyes. Did his blind-ness daunt him? He continued with his pamphleteering. And a little before the restoration of the Stuart Monarchy he published his treatise, The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings Out of the Church, and, almost when Charles II came over, he brought out the anti-monarchical tract, The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free-Commonwealth. Had not Marvell and some other friends intervened, he would have been sent to the gallows out of hand and we should have had just a little of Paradise Lost and nothing of Paradise Regained or Samson Agonistes. All in all, his public life took up nearly twenty years involving him in endless controversies and keeping him away from his long-dreamt-of plan of composing an English epic. He put aside his personal ambitions and lent himself to his country amidst the dust and heat of the political arena.
But those twenty years were not really lost. Although many of his prose works are unreadable now because of their outmoded subjects and their violent and even virulent tone which was in accord with the habit of the times, they brought out the strength of his mind and widened the range of his interests. Even apart from the challenge of the immediate occasions to his inquiring spirit, he did not neglect to enlarge the general horizons of his knowledge. He continued the
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work begun in retirement at Horton to gather up into his mind all that had been written by way of history or geo-graphy, science or philosophy or poetry. His reading was always enormous. He was like an encyclopaedia by the time he found leisure for Paradise Lost. We see this from the far-stretching references in his epic, the manner in which he made his poem cover not only the Fall of the Angels and of Man but whatever happened afterwards in all parts of the world. Thus when he writes of Satan's shield he brings in his own contemporary, the scientist Galileo, and his explorations of space through the telescope: it is one of the most celebrated of Milton's similes. Satan
his ponderous shield,
Ethereal temper, massy, large and round,
Behind him cast. The broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening from the top of Fesolè,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe.4
Equally celebrated is the description of Satan's throne in Hell:
High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat...5
Or read the passage from the account of Satan's flying voyage from Hell to Earth:
As when far off at sea a fleet descried
Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring
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Their spicy drugs: they on the trading flood,
Through the wide Ethiopean to the Cape,
Ply stemming nightly toward the pole: so seemed
Far off the flying Fiend.6
Lastly, glance at the simile for the causeway built by Sin and Death between Hell and Earth:
So, if great things to small may be compared,
Xerxes the liberty of Greece to yoke
From Susa, his Memnonian palace high,
Came to the sea, and, over Hellespont
Bridging his way, Europe with Asia joined,
And scourged with many a stroke the indignant waves.7
These are but a few samples of Milton's eye traversing the pageant of all history and geography and world-work. Scholars have found his reading to include not only standard philosophy and accepted religion: they have found it to include also heretical speculations, even a book like Bodin's Heptaplomeres whose very presence in a man's library risked the reader's head. Milton seems to have packed into his own head whatever there was to know, so that his great poem, whenever it did get composed, would not merely set out to justify the ways of God to man but also survey mankind as if with God's omniscient eye!
In regard to purely literary preparation, Milton, before bringing forth his own epic, assimilated the epics of Europe's past into his own vitality. Not only have we oblique references to them in Paradise Lost: we have also the sense of their very presence in the temper and texture of the poem. It is as though the oceanic sweep of Homer pulsed through Milton's arteries, the broad even river-flow of Virgil ran in his veins, the concentrated titanism of Aeschylus made his bone and marrow, the grandiose passion of Lucretius tensed his tissues, the sweetly intense severity of Dante thrilled and toned his nerves - and, in addition to these formative forces,
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there were the diverse poetic qualities brought by Tasso and Ariosto and Camoes and all other continental writers who had essayed the epic strain in one manner or another, in long stretches or short. The Hebrew Prophets and the Christian Apostles were profoundly absorbed too – Genesis, the Book of Job, David's Psalms, Isaiah, the Gospels, the Apocalypse poured their splendour and terror into his spirit. From England itself, he was deeply influenced by Spenser's melodious subtlety, Marlowe's colourful violence, the multitudinous leaping lights and shadows that are Shakespeare's. He surcharged himself with past poetry to such an extent that he won access to some single supernal spring in the inner being from which all European verse had gushed through the ages in various directions. All those directions fused in Milton and were changed into his distinct individuality when the hour struck for him to roll out his own epic accents.
The original yet composite style of Paradise Lost started its development from very early in Milton's life, for even in his youth he had taken something of the past masters into himself. Already in his nineteenth year we find him seeking to use his "Native Language" for some grave subject
Such where the deep transported mind may soar
Above the wheeling poles, and at Heaven's door
Look in, and see each blissful deity
How he before the thunderous throne doth lie,
Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings
To the touch of golden wires...8
Here, except for the rhymes, we might be in the midst of one of the several exordiums in Paradise Lost. And a little further in the same youthful exercise we have another touch of the later manner and mood:
Then sing of secret things that came to pass
When beldam Nature in her cradle was...9
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This looks forward to
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme10
as well as to
that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.11
In his twenty-first year we catch a high bold note like
The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the
deep,12
or the one about "the Old Dragon underground" who, at the
Judgment Day,
wroth to see his kingdom fail,
Swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail."13
We think at once of Satan who in Hell,
Prone on the flood, extended long and large,
Lay floating many a rood,14
and of Satan who, alarmed,
Collecting all his might, dilated stood,
Like Teneriffe or Atlas, unremoved:
His stature reached the sky, and on his crest
Sat Horror plumed...15
When the poet was twenty-two we get an anticipation not only of the music (though rhymed) but also of the theme of Paradise Lost: the lines uttering the prayer that we may answer on Earth Heaven's "divine sounds" -
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As once we did, till disproportioned Sin
Jarred against Nature's chime and with harsh din
Broke the fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love all motion swayed
In perfect diapason whilst they stood
In first obedience and their state of good.16
In Comus, four years later, the Miltonic soul that we soar with so often in the epic is fitly sounded:
In regions mild of calm and serene air,
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call Earth, and, with low-thoughted care,
Confined and pestered in this pinfold here,
Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being...17
In the lines in the same poem –
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts
Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;
Himself is his own dungeon18 –
we hear afar the Satanic outburst:
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.19
Apropos of Comus we may remark that in this "Masque", more than ever before, Milton shows himself the master of rhythm no less than word. The instinct of the inevitable sound reinforcing the precise verbal suggestion cannot be better illustrated than by his conversion of the clear adequacy of his first draft -
And airy tongues that lure night-wanderers -
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to the haunting atmospheric subtlety:
And airy tongues that syllable men's names.20
Or listen to the massive ominous effect:
The earth cumbered, and the winged air darked with
plumes.21
Lycidas, which comes three years after Comus, carries the master-rhythmist in even greater abundance and some of its passages have the authentic roll of Paradise Lost. They are too well known to be quoted. But we may touch on Milton's work during the twenty years of service to his country. He wrote only a few sonnets, yet the grip on the medium is steady and we can feel even here the poet preparing for his epic. In the midst of the Civil War, when on November 12, 1642, London was on the verge of being stormed by the King's armies who would have made short work of Milton, the poet coolly wrote a sonnet to be nailed up outside his door, advising the officer of the sacking-party to remember that if he spared the resident within he had the chance of being immortalised in verse. The sestet runs:
Lift not thy spear against the Muse's bower:
The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground; and the repeated air
Of sad Electra's poet had the power
To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.
Apart from the fine-pitched Classical allusions - the mention of the poets Pindar and Euripides - we have in the last line, which looks simple enough, so exquisite a combination of vowels and consonants that a critic like Grierson considers it the most musical in all English poetry. At least we may deem it as beautiful as any waft on the ear in Paradise Lost. An effect
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comparable to any there in rhythmic strength is also in a Sonnet of 1652:
And rumours loud that daunt remotest kings.22
About the sonnet of white rage, On the Late Massacre in Piedmont (1655), three years before the commencement of Paradise Lost, Douglas Bush23 well observes that in spite of its especially arresting rhymes it is a structure of run-on lines and medial pauses that approaches the wheeling paragraphs of the epic. The remaining sonnets too seem to press each in its own way towards that style of packed controlled gravity as much as of incandescent elan, a style that can touch everything with both force and dignity. The very last which Milton wrote - on his dead wife - is not only a product of the same year as saw Paradise Lost invoke the "Heavenly Muse": it is also a poem speaking of a vivid dream that the blind Milton had, a sleep-experience richer than anything held by the day which was one long darkness to him. It is as if Milton's nights were getting animated with "forms more real than living man". And even his wife is a figure of mystery as she breaks upon his "fancy": one might say she was but a little more intimate version of his Urania who visited his slumbers, for the form of his wife
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But, oh! as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.24
Yes, Milton was poetically ready in every manner before he undertook his life's crowning work. But what those twenty years of social and political pamphleteering which meant postponement of it added to his expressive genius was an intense intellectual fervour and a constant penchant
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for the Latin mode of language-construction. For, the pamphlets are often infused with argumentative eloquence and many of them are written in resonant Latin in order to reach all Europe's ears. In fact, Milton, when he came to Paradise Lost, was in two minds about the tongue in which to compose it: should it be in Latin or in English? In his youth he had been proficient in Latin verse. He had actually performed the feat of writing in Latin an elegy on the death of his friend Charles Diodati which nearly equals in poetic excellence the elegy over his friend Edward King's death, the marvellous Lycidas. So if in his steel-tempered old age he were to write Paradise Lost in Latin he was certain to produce a work which might stand on a level with Virgil's Aeneid and Lucretius's De Natura Rerum. Besides, the whole of Europe would be his audience. Luckily for modern times which has, like the already modern Shakespeare, "small Latin and less Greek", he chose English and consented to limit his appeal. But, while choosing English, he made the language so Latinised that much of the poem could be followed by any Continental scholar of his day who had a smattering of English. This Latinisation was not deliberate: it came automatically of the varied practice his youthful proficiency in that language had received in those twenty years during which even his English prose is full of Latinisation. The ordinary reader is sometimes hampered by the recurring Latin constructions in Paradise Lost. For instance, how would he make sense of the first line in the apostrophe to "holy Light" -
Or hear'st thou rather pure Ethereal Stream,
Whose fountain who shall tell?25
It is not that the holy Light is hearing some "pure Ethereal Stream" just as Wordsworth's Lucy is pictured among rivulets:
... and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
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Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
Milton's holy Light is itself "pure Ethereal Stream": the word "hear" is employed with the Latin suggestion of being called, so that the line means: "Or art thou more properly called pure Ethereal Stream?" We have to think of "pure Ethereal Stream" as a name called out to the Light and the Light as hearing and approving of it. The word "name" itself in Paradise Lost carries often a Latin connotation. Thus the phrase "the Angelic Name"26 in a line in Book IX stands for "the Angelic race or nation": the Latin "nomen" has frequently this significance. Or take from the same Book the words "obnoxious first or last / To basest things."27 "Obnoxious" is used here in the Latin sense of "submissive, obedient, subject". I believe the absurd-sounding lines -
Adam, the goodliest man of men since born,
His sons; the fairest of her daughters, Eve - 28
which involve the representation of Adam as one of his own sons and Eve as one of her own daughters, owes also to Latin as well as Greek. Grammarians call it "the inclusive superlative". Thucydides in his Peloponnesian War29 calls that contest "the most worthy of mention among all those which had preceded it", as if it were itself one of those preceding contests. A Latin poet speaks of Diana as "comitum pulcherrima", "the fairest of her own attendant girls". But we must not think of Milton as the sole perpetuator of this classic form. Shakespeare had already written in A Midsummer Night's Dream:30 "the greatest error of all the rest." Likewise most of Milton's Latinisms have precedents elsewhere. Our lines illustrate also the Latin phrase-arrangement known as the Chiasmus - the reversing of the order of words previously followed: thus the first phrase ends with the sons of Adam while the second begins with the daughters of Eve instead of
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ending with them. The Chiasmus is widely employed in English. Milton differs in his Latinisms from other writers mostly in using them on a very large scale. But even this does not render, as some critics claim, his language utterly unEnglish. A Latin turn is part of the multiple modulation to which English lends itself. Thus the turn about Hell which Milton puts in Moloch's mouth -
this dark opprobrious den of shame,
The prison of his tyranny who reigns
By our delay31 –
employs the relative "who" with an antecedent in the possessive case: "his." The normal English expression would be: "the prison of the tyranny of Him who reigns by our delay." But the irregularity dared by Milton is justified not only by its adroit brevity: it is justified by the inherent Latin proclivity of English itself. It occurs several times in Sri Aurobindo - even in his prose. Milton's critics have exaggerated his Latinity. They have also forgotten that he has no marked Latinity in thousands of lines. And even when he has a lot of it his disparagers forget that real Latinity would make for a flexibleness in the disposition of words, which no English writer can risk. Latin, unlike English, is an inflected language: its word-endings denote gender, number, tense, case, so that, without being misunderstood, a writer can shuffle the order of the words in the interests of emphasis and rhythm. Without the freedom thus indulged in, there can be no genuine Latinisation of English. If Milton were truly Latinised, the opening lines of his poem -
Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse -
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could with impunity be written:
Of that forbidden Muse whose heavenly seat
Brought Man's first blissful taste, with greater fruit
Of disobedience, till the loss and woe
Of the one mortal Man and all our death
Regain us and restore into the World,
Sing, Eden tree...
This order of words would not display much more license than "the extraordinary involution and confusion" of verbal arrangement which Patrick Maxwell has noted as leading yet to no obfuscation of sense in Horace's Odes, Book V, the first fifteen lines.
To cut a long story short: Milton on the eve of Paradise Lost was quite ripe for the learnedly loaded, artistically complex and finished, Latinly cast poetry of Paradise Lost. Such poetry, rising to a grand manner reflective of the dynamic and dedicated structure which the poet had made of his own mind and life through sustained self-culture and crowded public experience, would be natural to him. It would be natural whether composed with difficulty or with ease. It would be natural even if he were the sheer medium of a power beyond himself. We should not at all be surprised at the absolute effortlessness which he claims for a highly literary and scholarly style like his. The character of the style makes no odds to its being wholly inspired. The inspiration works through the established mould of the man's being. If the mould established were like Milton's, the inspiration could bring about the result that Paradise Lost should be thoroughly Miltonic without being written in the least by Milton. What Milton made himself by lifelong effort fitted him not only to reach the inner breaking-point of intensity at which a power beyond him could enter and take charge of his work: it fitted him also to receive this power in a shape most personal to him and seeming the exact opposite of our conception about the style of effortlessly composed poetry.
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Notes and References
1.Bk. II, 148.
2.Sonnet: "How soon hath time...", 12.
3.Ibid., 14.
4.Bk. I, 284-91.
5.Bk. II, 1-5.
6.Ibid., 636-43.
7.Bk. X, 306-11.
8.At a Vacation Exercise, 33-8.
9.Ibid., 45-6.
10.Bk. I, 16.
11.BK. III, 54-5.
12.On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, 156.
13.Ibid., 171-2.
14.Bk. I, 195-6.
15.Bk. IV, 986-7.
16.At a Solemn Music, 19-24.
17.Comus, 4-9.
18.Ibid., 383-5.
19.Bk. IV, 75-8.
20.Comus, 208.
21.Ibid, 730.
22.On the Lord General Fairfax, at the Siege of Colchester, 4.
23.English Poetry (1952), p. 73.
24.Lines 9-14.
25.Bk. II, 7-8.
26.Bk. IX, 142.
27.Ibid., 170-1.
28.Bk. IV, 323-4.
29.Peloponnesian War, I. i.
30.A Midsummer Night's Dream, V, 1, 252.
31.Bk. II, 58-60.
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