The Inspiration of Paradise Lost
AMAL KIRAN (K.D. SETHNA)
The Integral Life Foundation
P.O. Box 239
Waterford CT. 06385
USA
First published 1994
(Typeset in 10.5/13 Palatino)
© Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna)
Published by
The Integral Life Foundation, U.S.A.
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry
PRINTED IN INDIA
I
Paradise Lost - here we have an epic which would seem almost to make paradise worth losing, since without that loss Milton could not have sung so sublimely and almost regained Paradise for poetry-mad people like the present writer. But more than three hundred years after its composition, years during which a lot of poetry-mad people have had their say about it, it is difficult to avoid making just a rehash of past critical comments. Yet, difficult or no, if one feels that the last word has not yet been spoken, one must make the attempt to bring new aspects forward or at least to present certain shades of old aspects with a new emphasis.
Difficulty is a thing no lover of Milton can shirk without being false to the Miltonic spirit, the spirit of one who, blind and lonely in his old age, amidst a political regime hostile to him and his hopes, kept on fashioning the greatest poetic work by any Englishman, outside the dramas of Shakespeare. The quintessence of this spirit are the words put into the mouth of Satan while that Archangel admonishes one of his despairing followers:
"Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering..."1
But while the admonition has tremendous power, it does not convey the Miltonic spirit's expansive sweep. It is power pared down to the bare bone of heroism. Power widely and richly deployed in a thunder of the whole heroic body's manifold movement is also Milton's. And, as he somewhere says, "if great things to small may be compared",2 then apropos of the difficult attempt I am going to make of finding Miltonic matters not yet fully explored, I may illustrate the poet's expansive sweep by quoting some lines about a most difficult attempt from a speech of Beelzebub, the next in
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strength to Satan among the rebel Angels.
After a long debate in Hell, Beelzebub suggests that the best way to continue war is not so much by direct action against Heaven's King as by a subtle attack on the soul of God's latest creation, Adam. But far indeed from the depths of Hell is the starry universe which in Milton's Cosmology hangs by a golden chain from God's Empyrean and at whose centre is the Earth where Adam is placed in the garden of Eden. Between Hell and Earth, in the Miltonic Cosmology, is the realm of Chaos and Old Night surrounding the starry universe as an enormous ocean a tiny island. So Beelzebub, when his strategy is accepted and his plan of entering Earth endorsed, raises the great question:
"But, first, whom shall we send
In search of this new world? Whom shall we find
Sufficient? Who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark, unbottomed, infinite Abyss,
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way, or spread his aery flight
Upborne with indefatigable wings
Over the vast Abrupt, ere we arrive
The happy Isle? What strength, what art, can then Suffice...?"3
Face to face with such a passage we ourselves may well employ the words: "What strength, what art!" Take the line:
The dark, unbottomed, infinite Abyss.
It is not so much the intrinsic quality of the adjectives that constitutes the strength of the art here: the adjectives are not novel, at least not at all to us and not quite to Milton's contemporaries, but mark the apt combination of their grand commonplaces in just this order. It creates not only an impression of length beyond length baffling the sight: it creates also what I may term a downward crescendo, a
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mounting sense of hollow after hollow heaped on each other. And the total effect of the three adjectives is that of two particulars and one generality. "Dark" is a defining word, so too is "unbottomed": they both have a concreteness, but "infinite" has a mysterious abstract neutrality about it, giving the two preceding qualities an immense continuation as if into nothingness, a void continuation borne out in sound by the three consecutive short i's, the first of which gets its shortness specially enforced by a stress while the remaining vaguely carry on to meet - across the unstressed opening syllable of the next word "Abyss" - the closing syllable of it, which is again a short i-sound heavily stressed. This word, after the adjectival trio massed before it, comes as a most natural climax that is - to borrow an expression from sub-marine warfare - an explosive depth-charge hissing into an unimaginable horror. And the horror is all the more vivified at the line's close by the phrase standing at the close of the line preceding this: "wandering feet". It is feet unpractised and fumbling that have to dare an empty profundity which supplies no ground for support, no slightest foot-hold. The contrast between small substantial things and a vacuous amplitude renders our line doubly dreadful: a keen dramatic quality, with a tinge of pathos, is infused into the picture. The dramatic quality is increased by the arrangement of pauses in the passage. Each of the lines prior to the one about the Abyss has a break somewhere. There is in them a tentative movement pressing on; now this movement is taken up and, without being annulled, it is assimilated into a full line-long phrase - a phrase holding with each of the three epithets a sort of pause yet forming one indissoluble whole with which both the significance and the rhythm reach a forceful fulfilment.
However, we are not allowed to stop. The sentence proceeds: the next phrase, at the same time that it is separate by means of the conjunction "and", gets interwoven with the earlier because of the understood "who shall". The syntax is just right for the theme of a lengthy yet uninterrupted
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journey. And in the new phrases we get two expressions joining up with the descriptions "dark" and "unbottomed". Either phrase has an adjective welded to another boldly used as a noun: "the palpable obscure", "the vast Abrupt". The first brings home to us the darkness all around by suggesting an oppressive overwhelming intensity of it: the darkness is such as may be physically felt. The second phrase makes the unbottomed character of the Abyss a nerve-shaking phenomenon: we get the sense as if an endless chasm suddenly broke open below what we had been led to believe was something solid. It is as though a precipice unexpectedly edged off into sheer space. The idea here of something solid ceasing and giving place to thin air is as natural as it is startling; for "the vast Abrupt" opposes no less than continues "the palpable obscure" - it suggests the disappearance of that which seemed dense like a solid. The suggestion of the same thing under two surprisingly opposed aspects is conveyed in terms of sound by the b and p repeated in "Abrupt" from the earlier phrase.
A further vivification is there of the menace of what we may call in the lingo of modern aviation a never-ending "air-pocket". A huge effort to counteract the menace is conjured up, as a vital necessity, in the words:
or spread his aery flight
Upborne with indefatigable wings...
That six-syllabled epithet catches up into a final heave of collected breath the difficult endeavour required of keeping afloat above instead of plunging helplessly into the nihil which all the time sucks down.
Several other points of poetic power may be elaborated. But as we shall meet similar ones in passages to be quoted later, we shall refrain here. The strength, the art we have appreciated must suffice - except that we should mention the sustained largeness of the sensitively modulated rhythm. This rhythmic largeness is unique to Milton among English
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poets. Several attain it, but never all through. Almost from the first line to the last of many thousands in Paradise Lost we have - though at varying altitudes - a spaciousness of sound which seems to be the echo of the very soul of Milton. Writers on Milton have justifiably found certain sides of his personality unsympathetic, even as they have done in the case of another poet who too dealt with a cosmic theme - the Italian Dante. But only sheer wrong-headedness, as in the modern poet-critic Robert Graves, can deny the spaciousness of soul which Milton's expressive rhythm indicates. When Wordsworth spoke of Milton he could not help saying in a line which is itself a piece of Miltonese:
Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart.
When contemplating what an anomaly of nothing Man would be if his teeming purposes were declared a product of Nature's purposelessness, his life a brief flash ending in total gloom, Coleridge could not better bring to a head the enormous oddity of denying immortality than by exclaiming:
If even a soul like Milton's could know death...
When Sri Aurobindo wants to characterise the cause of the height at which move Milton's best outbursts - the opening Books of Paradise Lost - he points to "the greatness of the soul that finds expression in its harmonies of speech and sound and the greatness of its sight".4 Even in those parts where the supreme poetic vitality is missing, the soul-spaciousness haunts the language and rhythm: what does not live amply from within has still a fine external amplitude. As Sri Aurobindo, noting the absence here of the deeper fire, immediately adds: "Milton writing poetry could never fail in a certain greatness and power,... the method and idea retain sublimity."5
Perhaps the reader will ask: "What exactly is meant by Milton's soul when we call it great or spacious?" The word is
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here used in a certain general fashion. We do not mean just what in our Yoga we understand by the "psychic being", the secret spark of the Divine in the deep heart, which has to be realised by a spiritual discipline. Of course, whatever we may name as the soul must have something to do with this spark, but there may be nothing direct. Milton was far from practising Yoga. So, with the psychic being as the hidden support, his soul should be conceived as that in him which had a poise of selfhood within the processes of thinking, willing, feeling, sensing - his intellectual individuality which tended to rule the common nature in him and to dynamise this nature with its own vision. The true posture of this individuality is best caught in that phrase of his:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.6
And the core of this individuality's vision was powerfully religious. Indeed, at the centre of anything we can call the soul, there must be, in the broad meaning of the term, a religious position - religious inasmuch as it concerns the individual's relation to what he momentously confronts as the immense ultimate Reality by which alone himself and all things else are explicable and interrelated. One may confront this Reality as spiritual or as no more than physical: one may even hang in a final doubt over its true character. In each case one has exercised - positively, negatively or neutrally - the central life of one's soul and found a position that is, broadly speaking, religious.
Now this position vis-à-vis the immensity of the ultimately real may be charged with different imaginative attitudes. The imaginative attitude may be oriented chiefly towards the multiform world-activity in which the ultimately real manifests itself. Shakespeare is the outstanding example of such an attitude and we rightly designate his genius as protean or myriad-minded. Dante exemplifies an attitude oriented in the main towards human life set in a wider complex scheme
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of an inhuman or superhuman Hereafter, created with a clear-cut diversity by a precise divine Wisdom and Grace. Hence Dante's forceful ranging across religious mysteries with an exact defining penetration of sight, a concentration upon keen details against a background of ultimate immensity. To Milton the ultimate immensity is itself the principal fact of both personal and poetic imagination though not of mystical intuition, much less of spiritual experience. Milton the man, Milton the poet, the whole individuality of him, his entire soul is charged with the boundless, the unfeatured, the supra-mundane which is ever losing itself into an infinity of the invisible. It is this that renders his soul spacious. No doubt, his vision seizes on particulars - he could not be a poet without a moved precision of sight in one way or another, but what his sight makes most precise is the fading of every particular's outlines into the indescribable and the shadowing of every particular's contents by that circum-ambience of the vast and vague. The thrilled sense of immensity that is natural to Milton has constructed for us in Paradise Lost a coherent story of world-wide significance within an all-enveloping cosmic picture whose magnitude overpasses any that the epic spirit of Europe has put forth.
Let us focus for a moment our minds upon this picture which we have already sketched. We may begin with our starry universe as seen distantly by Satan when at last he has traversed Chaos and reached this new creation, deep within which Man has been placed by Heaven's Lord. Satan beheld
Far off the empyrean Heaven extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With opal towers and battlements adorned
Of living sapphire, once his native seat,
And fast by, hanging in a golden chain,
This pendent World, in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude, close by the moon.7
The pendent World is not our earth: it is the entire collection.
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of stars including our solar system. This entire collection is also called by Milton the "orbicular World": it is a hollow globe of space spangled with constellations and enormous to human eyes but actually a mere pin-point in comparison to Heaven or the Empyrean, just as the tiniest possible star would be by the side of the moon - the under-side, we may say, if we are to make the moon stand in general for the Empyrean, below which the starry universe hangs. Stretched out above the World-drop is the boundary of Heaven, so wide a boundary that one could not say whether it was the straight side of a square or the curve of a circle. In fact, Milton has left it really "undetermined" whether the Empyrean was a circle or a square: in one place his Beëlzebub speaks of "Heaven's whole circumference",8 while in another the daughter of Satan, Sin, refers to God's "quadrature"9 as distinguished from the "orbicular World" which Satan succeeded in subverting. Perhaps Milton means to create a mystery about the shape of the Empyrean. But this Empyrean, though vast, is not boundless, as is evident from the fact that there are things beneath it. Beneath it is not only the sphere of stars: there is also the region of Hell, between whose roof and the bottom of the stellar sphere the distance is half of that which is between the bottom and the top of this sphere.10 Both the starry universe and the region of Hell are within the amorphous expanse of black Chaos - the expanse which originally occupied the whole lower half, as it were, of the infinity - the primeval circle of unlimited radius - whose whole upper half was occupied by the Empyrean. This infinite space is a state of God's eternal omnipresence, though He has His immediate and visible habitation in the midst of the Light, Freedom, Happiness and Glory that is spread out as Heaven.
Appositely does David Masson exclaim: "The physical universe of Dante's great poem would go into a nutshell as compared with that to which the imagination must stretch itself out in Paradise Lost..."11 The extreme immensity of existence through which the poem sweeps with a living
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vision is a measure of the spaciousness of Milton's poet-soul. And the rhythmic thrill with which he communicates his vision constitutes the spaciousness of sound pervading all of his epic and especially the opening Books where the inner and the outer, the inspiration and the expression, are totally blended.
The few lines we have culled from Paradise Lost belong to these Books and we may say their strength and art are enough to relieve every fallen Cherub from the misery of weakness. To read Milton is to be energised, expanded, uplifted. For flagging and dwindling spirits there is no tonic finer than the poetry that is Miltonic.
Notes and References
1.Bk. I, 157-8.
2.Bk. X, 306.
3.Bk. II, 402-11.
4.The Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, (Pondicherry, 1953), p. 120.
5.Ibid.
6.Bk. I, 254-55.
7.Bk. II, 1047-53.
8.Bk. II, 53.
9.Bk. X, 381.
10.Bk. I, 73-4.
11.Introduction to Paradise Lost in The Poetical Works of ]ohn Milton (London, 1934), p. 32.
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II
I hope my introductory words have toned up the reader to an interest in Paradise Lost and in the difficult job I have taken on myself under the influence of the ardours and rigours of Milton's epic inspiration. But before I actually start, let me evoke two pictures in which our poet does not directly figure yet which may aid our minds better to appreciate him.
Go back to 1834. A British ship is on way to India. In those days it used to take five months to make the voyage and there were many hazards: the ships were far more at the mercy of storms than our modern luxury-liners. And this particular boat was caught in a storm. If we may quote from Paradise Lost, it was surrounded by
a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turned by furious winds
And surging waves, as mountains to assault
Heaven's height, and with the centre mix the pole.1
A complete catastrophe was feared. Men were rushing about the deck and all hearts were flurried - all except one. A young man stood in a corner and with a firm low voice was reciting Paradise Lost, as if by its superb organised thunder he could quell that hullabaloo of the elements. This was Thomas Babington Macaulay going to India, destined to mould the educational policy of the foreign rulers there and to spread in our country the literature of his own, including Milton's epic. He was perhaps not altogether gracious in the way he pushed English literature forward at the expense of indigenous writing. But now as he stood on that pitching and tossing deck of the frail merchantman he seemed almost to shadow out something of the heavenly Power that Milton describes as going forth to create our universe in the Chaos which was, according to his epic, like an outrageous sea and
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to which that Power addressed its creative fiat. To quote
Paradise Lost again:
"Silence, ye troubled waves, and thou Deep, peace!"
Said then the omnific Word: "your discord end!"2
I do not know how and when exactly the discord around Macaulay ended. But even if it had continued for a full day, he could have gone on reciting the epic. For he knew the whole of it by heart. He once declared that if all the copies of this poem were destroyed he could reproduce it correctly down to the comma. And, in knowing it by heart, his affections were really engaged. Of all the poetic masterpieces of the past he loved it the best, and the very first piece of his own writing that burst into fame in the world was a long brilliant essay on Milton.
Essay on Milton - this brings us to our second picture. Instead of a young Englishman going to India, we have a younger Indian at Cambridge, the University of both Macaulay and Milton. This Indian undergraduate has lately come up from St. Paul's School of London, the very school which Milton had attended. Now the year is 1890. On the second of December the student, aged 18, pens a letter to his father across the seas. The subject is an invitation the previous night to coffee with one of the dons in whose room was waiting "the great O.B., otherwise Oscar Browning." Don't mix up Oscar Browning with either Robert Browning who often wrote poetry like prose or Oscar Wilde who often wrote prose like poetry. Oscar Browning was a super-don, nothing more, but he had a fine literary sense and could pick out good writing - poetry or prose - unerringly. The letter from King's College, Cambridge, after calling O.B. "the feature par excellence of King's", reads: "He said to me: ''I suppose you know you passed an extraordinarily high examination. I have examined papers at thirteen examinations and I have never during that time seen such excellent papers as yours (meaning my classical papers, at the scholarship examination). As
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for your essay, it was wonderful.' " Then the letter to the fond father continues in a personal vein: "In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton), I indulged my oriental tastes to the top of their bent, it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery, it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without restraint or reservation. I thought myself that it was the best thing I had ever done, but at school it would have been condemned as extraordinarily Asiatic and bombastic."
Thus the earliest piece of worthwhile critical writing we know of as Sri Aurobindo's was on Milton as well as Shakespeare - reminding us in one-half of it of Macaulay's first famous theme. There is the further curious coincidence that the earliest piece of writing by Milton himself, which the world came to know of, was a poem on Shakespeare, a tribute published in the Shakespeare Folio of 1632 though written a couple of years earlier. And it is not only in a style dramatic, bright with epigram, charged with "metaphysical" wit and imagery: in addition, it hints a comparison between Shakespeare's spontaneous exuberance and Milton's own laboriously reached perfection during that period:
... to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow...3
Some further facts in connection with Milton and Sri Aurobindo deserve our notice. When I asked Sri Aurobindo in 1933 about influences of other poets on his own work, the first name he mentioned, after speaking of his older contemporary Stephen Phillips, in relation to Love and Death, was Milton. He wrote: "I dare say some influence of most of the great English poets and of others also, not English, can be traced in my poetry - I can myself see that of Milton, sometimes of Wordsworth and Arnold...."4 Again, just as his earliest critical writing (which unfortunately has not survived) dealt at some length with Milton, the last general critical pronouncement he made on a poet's work was on
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Milton's achievement. In May, 1947, he wrote in a long letter on his own poetry a passage broadly comparing Lycidas and Paradise Lost. I may quote some lines: "If Lycidas with its beauty and perfection had been the supreme thing done by Milton even with all the lyrical poetry and the sonnets added to it, Milton would still have been a great poet but he would not have ranked among the dozen greatest; it is Paradise Lost that gives him that place. There are deficiencies if not failures in almost all the great epics, the Odyssey and perhaps the Divina Commedia being the only exceptions, but still they are throughout in spite of them great epics. So too is Paradise Lost. The grandeur of his verse and language is constant and unsinking to the end and makes the presentation always sublime."5
I may remark that this estimate is a little different from the one which Sri Aurobindo gave in The Future Poetry nearly a quarter century before. In some literary matters Sri Aurobindo in his later years shows, if not quite a change of view, at least a certain change of emphasis. And he granted to Milton a somewhat higher status than he had already done. In The Future Poetry6 he had said: "Paradise Lost is assuredly a great poem, one of the five great epical poems. of European literature, and in certain qualities it reaches heights which no other of them had attained, even though as a whole it comes a long way behind them... Paradise Lost commands admiration, but as a whole, apart from its opening, it has failed either to go home to the heart of the world and lodge itself in its imagination or to enrich sovereignly what we may describe as the acquired stock of its more intimate poetical thought and experience. But the poem that does neither of these things, however fine its powers of language and rhythm, has missed its best aim." In the later view, Sri Aurobindo, though not in the least unconscious of Milton's shortcomings, the disparities between the initial and the subsequent Books of the epic, is yet inclined to allow those sustained powers of language and rhythm a truer inward animation in even the inferior portions than he was ready to
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do in The Future Poetry. For, after saying in his 1947 letter, "I am prepared to admit the very patent defects of Paradise Lost", he can still call for a sympathetic sense and affirm: "We have to accept for the moment Milton's dry Puritan theology and his all too human picture of the celestial world and its denizens and then we can feel the full greatness of the epic."7
Sri Aurobindo has written several other things on Paradise Lost. We shall draw upon them as we go along. At the moment we are concerned with generalities and with the way Milton gets broadly related to Sri Aurobindo. The most striking and important relation, though perhaps the most general and impersonal, is that the two sole full-blown epics that have seen the light in English are Milton's Paradise Lost - 10,565 lines - and Sri Aurobindo's Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, whose lines add up to 23,813 in the 1954 edition.
Perhaps their inevitable juxtaposition has led many a critic in India to describe Sri Aurobindo's blank verse in Savitri as Miltonic. Also perhaps because Sri Aurobindo, like Milton, energises and expands and uplifts us, criticism is led to this description. But, while to be Miltonic is to impart energy, expansion, upliftment, all that imparts them need not be in Milton's style. Savitri differs from Paradise Lost both in style and substance, word-craft and vision. We shall dwell on the difference at a subsequent stage. Here we shall emphasise only the similarity of essential effect in terms of the energetic, the expansive, the uplifting. Cast your mind back to the perils of the journey through the unknown that Satan ultimately attempted. Now feel the dangers of a luminous and ecstatic soul-exposure - an experience through which Savitri's father, the Yogi-king Aswapati, passed:
His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.
In a moment shorter than Death, longer than Time,
By a power more ruthless than Love, happier than
Heaven,
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Taken sovereignly into eternal arms,
Haled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss,...
Hurried into unimaginable depths,
Upborne into immeasurable heights,
It was torn out from its mortality
And underwent a new and bourneless change.8
In a less sweeping and more controlled yet equally powerful language Sri Aurobindo gives us Savitri, the Avatar of the Supreme Mother, confronted by a mysterious Presence who works in the dark depths of our evolving universe and demands of her a sacrifice suited to her divine humanity:
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.
Assigner of the ordeal and the path
Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul
Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit's goads,
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.9
Sri Aurobindo has said that in certain qualities Paradise Lost reaches heights which no other epic has surpassed. "Rhythm and speech," he tells us, "have never attained to a mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement, seldom to an equal sublimity."10 Then he refers to "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."11 But with those two passages from Savitri before us - examples of many similar articulations - we may say these "heights" were never reached again until Sri Aurobindo composed his own epic. For, poetic grandeur, inward and outward, of a rare eminence indeed is resonant in them and I am sore tempted to analyse the technique serving as the vehicle of the spiritual afflatus. But I am not speaking on Sri Aurobindo and I have already devoted two books to the Aurobindonian inspiration and art, one of them
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still unpublished as a whole though all its parts have been printed in various journals. What I may just remark apropos of the resonance of the passages is that many a passage of such grandeur was dictated rather than written by Sri Aurobindo. And the lucky scribe, Dr. Nirodbaran, testifies that at times there was a rush of composition: once two or three hundred lines were dictated non-stop and few of them required reshaping afterwards. Paradise Lost, too, was not written out by Milton at all: it is unique among European epics in that everything was dictated, and when we think of the conditions under which Milton created most of it,
with mortal voice unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days,
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, And solitude,12
the picture of young Macaulay, threatened with shipwreck, reciting the Miltonic pentameters, is rather apposite: the ship of state, whose course Milton had helped to steer, the Commonwealth established by Cromwell, was sinking when he commenced Paradise Lost and the poet's own life was soon threatened. But the dictating voice never faltered. Poetically no less than morally it kept fluent and steady. And it is with its poetic fluency and steadiness that I shall begin my comment proper on the inspiration of Paradise Lost. I shall spotlight not any scene from the great story told in the poem but the scene of the poet in the act of composing his masterpiece. This scene, of which the unfaltering dictation forms part, is necessary to bear in mind if the true quality of the poem is to come alive to our imagination.
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1.Bk. VII, 212-15.
2.Ibid., 216-17.
3.On Shakespeare, 9-10.
4.Life - Literature - Yoga, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry (1952), p. 69.
5.Ibid., p. 60.
6.The Future Poetry, pp. 117, 118.
7.Life - Literature - Yoga, p. 60.
8.Savitri, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry (1954), p. 92.
9.Ibid., p. 21.
10.The Future Poetry, p. 117.
11.Ibid.
12.Bk. VII, 24-8.
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III
The usual picture of Milton composing Paradise Lost is constructed from the testimony of a number of contemporary biographers.1 Milton frequently composed lying in bed in the morning. It is supposed that this was his practice during winter. At other times we have to think of him as getting up early and, since he was already blind, impatiently waiting for his amanuensis to come and take dictation. At times he would have as many as thirty lines ready and, if the amanuensis arrived late, he would complain, saying "he wanted to be milked". When he was dictating, "he sat backward obliquely in an easy-chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it". The dictation of poetry was during part of the morning, for he had divided the day into several portions for his various works. Only one piece of evidence appears to be ambiguous on this point: it says that the poem got composed in a parcel of ten, twenty or thirty verses at a time, which were written down by whatever hand was next available. And there is a curious fact of general import to be added: during each of the five years from 1658 to 1663 when Paradise Lost was composed, the poetic vein flowed happily from the Autumnal Equinox - about the close of September - to a little after the Vernal Equinox of March 21, but during the remaining months, however much the old poet courted his fancy, he could not produce anything to his satisfaction.
This interesting picture is helpful both subjectively and objectively, but fault can be found with it on three scores. It tells us nothing about the inner process of Milton's composition. It omits one important detail about the time when the process went on. It does not clarify a certain point with regard to composition and dictation. What is not clarified is whether during the dictation Milton added to the lines already composed. We are left to imagine that he might have
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done so. But really we have no ground to think of any addition as a rule. If we attend to Milton's own evidence in his poem itself, as distinguished from that of his biographers in their books, we should believe most of his composition, if not all, to have been done before the arrival of his amanuensis in the early morning. His evidence also tells us that his poetry came to him not only in the early morning: it came even more at another and earlier time. And for this we have confirmation in some of the biographers themselves. Finally, we learn from him that the process of composing Paradise Lost was the exact opposite of what we should guess from the characteristics of his packed and polished, learned and Latinised style.
In the invocation to Urania, the Heavenly Spirit, at the beginning of Book VII, after referring to the solitude no less than the adversity into which his life has fallen, he adds about himself that he cannot really be lonely while Urania pays him her visit.
... nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East.2
This establishes two times for his composition - night and daybreak - and indicates nothing beyond them on either side. Neither before nightfall nor after sunrise did Milton compose Paradise Lost. If parcels of ten, twenty or thirty lines were found written by several hands, it must have been by different amanuenses on different mornings. Or else, if some other part of the day served for dictation, the poet may for his own reasons have postponed dictating his verses com-posed at night or early morning. His personal statement leaves no room for the supposition that he composed any-thing during the rest of the day, and the rest includes even the time of dictation when his amanuensis first arrived. The period beyond a part of the morning is all the more ruled out since his epic was not the only thing he was busy at from 1658 to 1663. The various works to which the several portions
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of the day were allotted comprised many undertakings of a very different nature, and for them a lot of daily reading and research was needed besides the literature he might have thought necessary as an aid to his poem. He was construct-ing a Body of Doctrine from the Scriptures, compiling a History of England, collecting materials for a Thesaurus or Dictionary of the Latin tongue. Every day he pursued his tasks with the use of several assistants whom he kept near him. Each afternoon he also made it almost a fixed practice to hear music, vocal or instrumental. And in the evening he got choice poetry read out, as an anonymous biographer related, "by way of refreshment after the day's toil and to store his fancy against the morning".
The mention of morning here also as the time of his poetic composition is in line with most of the biographical matter. But, while it has authentic relevance, the night-time which the poet pairs with it in the lines we have cited seems the more productive; for, in the three other passages in Paradise Lost about his composition, he points only to night-time. One of the three is in the Third Book of the epic, the remaining two in the Ninth. These two we may quote at once. In speaking of the need to change his "Notes" now to "Tragic" because he has to deal directly with Man's sin and Fall and Heaven's anger, he maintains that his "argument" can be even more "Heroic" than the old epic subjects,
If answerable style I can obtain
Of my Celestial Patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated Verse...3
Again, he affirms that there is no reason why he should not succeed and that certain circumstances of time and place may defeat him only
... if all be mine,
Not hers who brings it nightly to my ear.4
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It would appear that since the Third Book and the Ninth refer exclusively to hours of night, the morning hour mentioned in Book VII applied in some measure to the period when the middle parts of the poem were composed, whereas the initial and final parts to which the other two Books belong - that is, two-thirds of the poem - were done exclusively before Morn purpled the East.
What, however, is of the utmost importance is not the mere fact of night-time composition. The quotations from Book IX bring out the way Milton composed Paradise Lost at night, and the phrase already culled from Book VII is within a context that points to the same way, although now including dawn in the period of inspiration: what Milton in his apostrophe to Urania actually says about himself is:
Yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East.
If words have any meaning, our passages state, to begin with, that Milton received his poetry during his night's sleep. Now what would such reception imply? It would imply that he was perfectly passive in the process of composition: indeed Milton the man was as good as non-existent in the role of poet and only some power beyond him made him the hearer of its voice. But, if that was so during the night's slumber, may we not suppose that, when he was not asleep in the night and yet composing and when he composed wakefully in the early morning, the same phenomenon occurred?
The first quotation from Book IX not only makes the Celestial Patroness come "unimplored" in both the sleeping and the waking conditions at night. It also uses equivalent phrases for either condition. The Celestial Patroness "dictates" to Milton slumbering and "inspires easy" the non-slumbering Milton with verse which is "unpremeditated". Milton gets his song as a sheer gift: he is nothing except its hearer or transcriber.
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The second quotation does not at all distinguish the two conditions and, fusing them by means of the one word "nightly", suggests that in either condition all the poetry is brought to Milton's ear by the Celestial Patroness instead of being fashioned in any respect by the poet himself.
The full phrase from Book VII gives us the words "night-ly" and "when Morn purples the East" as both qualifying "visit'st" adverbially. Therefore, the same act of Urania - her visit - which presented Milton with poetry at night in a condition where personal initiative was impossible is spoken of as applying to him at dawn. Urania's visit at dawn should be taken to have repeated in the waking state what it had done in the sleeping - namely, to have used Milton as a medium.
Grammatically, it would even seem that the verb "visit" is used transitively in relation to "when Morn purples the East" no less than to "nightly", so that "slumbers" which is the object of this verb goes with both the adverbial expressions: the sense would be that the slumbers which were visited by Urania took place not only at night but also at daybreak.
The usual construing is intransitive where daybreak is concerned: "when Morn purples the East" does not get joined up with "slumbers". But the transitive possibility of "visit'st" in both instances should serve to strengthen the "mere-medium" state we have deduced for Milton at dawn as well as at night. And, when we remember that Milton was blind and stayed in "ever-during dark,"5 with eyes "that roll in vain... and find no dawn",6 we may see very little essential distinction between his Urania-visited sleep and his wakefulness visited by the same Celestial Patroness.
Keeping in mind their similarity and mutual shading-off, we get the right view of the passage in Book III which we have not yet quoted. There he tells how each night he would absorb himself in meditation on Hellenic and Hebrew poetry, visiting in imagination the old founts of inspiration, and
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird
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Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid Tunes her nocturnal note.7
Although here he seeks out the Muse and it is not the other way round, the result is the same: the "harmonious numbers" come of their own accord to the blindly brooding poet in the dark hours, just as to the "wakeful" nightingale comes its song.
Out of the two states in which Milton received inspiration, the sleeping one - for all the closeness of the waking to it - is certainly the more remarkable. Milton's slumber must have been the most extraordinary phenomenon in any poet's life. Coleridge's Kubla Khan was composed during a dream. But it is a wonder of brief spell and Coleridge never met with a repetition of the experience, though we may be right in viewing The Ancient Mariner and Christabel as resulting from a sort of prolongation or projection of the dream-state into the waking consciousness. If Milton is to be believed, he had a Kubla-Khan experience night after night from the Autumnal to the Vernal Equinox during several years. Might we not suggest that not only was his ear active but also his eye? Kubla Khan, we may remind ourselves, was seen as well as heard. And Milton, at the end of his famous invocation to "Holy Light" at the beginning of Book III, speaks of the compensation open to him from that Light for his blindness to physical Nature:
So much the rather thou, Celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.8
Might not the final statement be more than figurative? No doubt, Milton was not properly a mystic and in fact his mind was on the whole more powerful than subtle, too self-dependent in its judgment to let itself go in spiritual self-
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transcendence, it was strongly religious and not intuitively ecstatic; but his blindness, charged with a high degree of poetic aspiration, could very well have induced a kind of abnormal absorption so that his sleep might have grown a dream-vision accompanied by a direct audition of the rhythmically revealing word.
Yes, we may well suppose Milton's eye no less than his ear active in the course of his poetic sleep. But, while we stress the remarkable nature of this sleep as a recurring event over years, we must regard it as only different in degree and not in kind from the poetic wakefulness of the blind Milton. Even in the early stages of the epic, when the ever-during dark of the wakeful state frames his composition, we should speak of a dream-vision - a self-generating series of pictures, a sort of inward "movie" - just as we speak of a direct audition, the "harmonious numbers" flowing unforced. During sleep the poet would be cut off from the spur to memory's sight by the goings-on of the day-to-day world around: his dream-vision would be rapt, whereas the poetic wakefulness would be partly open to the suggestions of those goings-on. But owing to the abnormal absorption, what the eye would experience in the latter state would still be a dream-vision.
And what sign would confirm for us that a dream-vision was a constant feature of Milton's poetic process? In Kubla Khan we feel a certain vivid play of changing fantasy, apparently wanting in coherence yet conveying an impression of unity on some deeper level. Have we not the same sign in good portions of Paradise Lost - at least in the first two Books which are the best? Milton is a more tightly knit though less metaphysical mind than Coleridge, a mind more classically steady and less romantically tremulous in its general movement than his. So whatever quality it may have of dream-vision would not be quite the same. Only the essence of this quality would be recognised equally in both the poets. And we are struck by the complaint of several critics that there are various types of inconsistency in
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Milton's descriptions of Hell. "It is odd, for example," writes Kenneth Muir,9 "that the devils are doomed to dwell 'In admantine chains and penal fire,' and that Satan himself is chained on the burning lake, while a few lines later they are all able to fly to dry land, and before long they are engaged in all kinds of activities.... Waldock is right to point out that in other hells 'the damned have come to the end of their road'; but in Milton's, though it is a place of punishment, the damned are full of plans for the future. Milton (says Waldock) was trying 'to accomplish two incompatible things', namely, to depict a hell which was a place of perpetual torment, and one which was a base for military operation... It may be, as Mr. Eliot suggests, that we should 'not attempt to see very clearly any scene that Milton depicts'; the world to which he has introduced us does not require this kind of consistency. 'It should be accepted as a shifting phantasmagory.' Leavis and Waldock both feel that Milton's Hell is not 'consistently realized'; but to some readers the very inconsistencies give a nightmare quality which could not have been achieved in any other way."
Not that the nightmare quality runs riot. There is a method in the midst of the aberrancy. Milton gives us to understand about the devils that, as Muir puts it, "all-ruling Heaven has allowed them freedom so that they may heap further damnation on themselves..."10 Again, "as Hell had only just been founded and devils are different from human souls, we must not expect the same laws to operate."11 Also, "Milton makes clear that the tortures are intermittent, and there is no reason why we should not assume that they are not partly symbolic. The angels have been driven out from bliss, and that has always been the worst part of damnation."12 It is indeed possible to touch unity on a deeper level; and precisely this possibility wedded to the nightmare quality completes the Kubla-Khan affinity of Milton's work in many places.
Where the quality is not nightmarish, it is often still suffused with a strange species of vivid vagueness. Eliot13
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considers Milton lacking in sufficient visual power and he attributes in some measure the increase of the defect to his blindness. But the absence of fully realised visions may occasionally be due to the state of dream in which his poetry, according to his account, was frequently heard by him. Take his Eden. It has a certain indefiniteness, its flora and fauna do not display the details which would assimilate it to earth's landscapes. As Eliot14 has noted, the impression of Eden which we retain is that of light - "a daylight and a starlight, a light of dawn and of dusk". In Eliot's view, it is "the light which, remembered by a man in his blindness, has a super-natural glory unexperienced by men of normal vision". The "supernatural glory" could have been a product of the dream-state as well as of the heightened inward sensibilities of a blind man. The dream-state of a mind like Milton's could also be responsible for the imagery Eliot15 finds most memorable in him: "Milton is at his best in imagery suggestive of vast size, limitless space, abysmal depth, and light and darkness."
I think the Kubla-Khan affinity is too widely present in essence to be missed. And while we are about it we may recall that one of the many sources, from which Coleridge's dreaming imagination drew with the help of his profusely stored memory the materials of Kubla Khan, is Paradise Lost itself. Not only does the Xanadu of Kubla Khan, with its pleasance girdled by walls and towers, echo from Milton
the destined walls
Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can,16
Cambalu which was actually a city built by Kubla Khan himself. Also Coleridge's sacred river which takes birth when, from a chasm slanting
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover...
A mighty fountain momently was forced,
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and which, before reaching "caverns measureless to man" and sinking to "a sunless sea", runs "meandering with a mazy motion" through "fertile ground" -
gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree,
and
... forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery -
even this river, in its strange setting, comes with Miltonic memories. Milton has "a river large" which belonged to his Eden's "fertile ground"17 (Coleridge's very phrase) and which
through the shaggy hill
Passed underneath ingulfed; for God had thrown
That mountain, as his garden-mould, high raised
Upon the rapid current, which, through veins
Of porous earth with kindly thirst up-drawn,
Rose a fresh fountain, and with many a rill
Watered the garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the nether flood,
Which from his darksome passage now appears,
And now, divided into four main streams,
Runs diverse, wandering many a famous realm....18
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold,
With mazy error under pendent shades....19
Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gum and balm;
Others whose fruit, burnished with golden rind,
Hung amiable - Hesperian fables true,
If true here only - and of delicious taste.
Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interposed....20
Another side, umbrageous grots and caves
Of cool recess...21
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Coleridge's poem closes with a passage at whose beginning is
... an Abyssinian maid,
Singing of Mount Abora,
and at whose end a mention of "Paradise". Milton, in the same context as the lines from him quoted above, deals with various places where the heavenly garden is not located and he concludes:
Nor, where Abassin kings their issue guard,
Mount Amora (though this by some supposed
True Paradise)...22
Finally, from Coleridge's "milk of Paradise" we hark back to the "milky stream"23 from which Milton's Adam and Eve in Eden got "nectarous draughts", while Coleridge's immediately preceding "honey-dew" echoes the "mellifluous dews"24 brushed off the boughs in Heaven by Milton's Angels for their repast.
Thus the Kubla-Khan affinity is there in more than one sense. And it is interesting to mark that Milton distinguishes two kinds of sleep with different kinds of dream or vision in them. One is the reverse of the waking state in which for the most part Reason joins or disjoins for its own affirmations and denials the "imaginations, aery shapes" formed by "Fancy" out of sense-impressions. This Reason, as Adam says,
"retires
Into her private cell when Nature rests.
Oft, in her absence, mimic Fancy wakes
To imitate her; but, misjoining shapes,
Wild work produces oft, and most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late."25
This is ordinary sleep and its dream-creation. The other, an
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extraordinary slumber, working with a power of perception exceeding the normal, is shown us in the account Adam gives of the sleep which he twice had on the first day of his life. The first occasion was when he started wondering who the good and powerful Maker of his being was. He strays about, inquiring but getting no answer; then
"On a green shady bank, profuse with flowers,
Pensive I sat me down. There gentle sleep
First found me, and with soft oppression seized
My drowsèd sense, untroubled, though I thought
I then was passing to my former state
Insensible and forthwith to dissolve:
When suddenly stood at my head a dream,
Whose inward apparition gently moved
My fancy to believe I yet had being,
And lived. One came, methought, of shape divine,
And said, 'Thy mansion wants thee, Adam, rise...' "26
In his dream Adam is taken by the "shape divine" to the Garden of Bliss prepared for him:
"Whereat I waked, and found
Before mine eyes all real, as the dream
Had lively shadowed."27
Here "fancy" is no mimic creator of confusions in the sleep-state, and what comes as a dream is a revelation, a divinely given vision of things found to be true on waking, though the truth is of earth itself and not of any beyond. Similar is the second sleep of Adam after his contact and colloquy with God's presence in the garden to which he had been led. During this sleep God performed the operation of making Eve out of one of his ribs:
"Mine eyes he closed, but open left the cell
Of fancy, my internal sight, by which
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Abstract as in a trance, methought I saw
Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the Shape
Still glorious before whom awake I stood...."28
"Fancy" in this passage has a more explicit depth of meaning than in the previous one. It does not "wake" to do "wild work", as in ordinary sleep, while the rational man is unconscious: now it is an "internal sight" and the rational man is "awake" inwardly and witnesses the work of a superhuman agency. Of course, on this occasion too, as on the other, there is no vision of any beyond: Adam witnesses what is being done to his physical body by the glorious Shape. But the sleep that is like a trance can have many functions, and Milton's description of it can be a clue to the experience he was himself undergoing night after night.
The clue-character of the passages is suggested further by another reference to an extraordinary sleep. This time it is Eve's. When the Archangel Michael takes Adam to a hill and shows him a wakeful vision of some things to come and then relates the rest, Eve is sleeping far away, but when they return to her bower she is found awake and she says:
"Whence thou return'st and whither went'st I know;
For God is also in sleep, and dreams advise,
Which he hath sent propitious, some great good
Presaging, since, with sorrow and heart's distress
Wearied, I fell asleep."29
Here too is a sleep-knowledge of physical events by internal sight. And it is the internal sight and its sleep-knowledge that are the central facts: whether what is seen is physical or not is a secondary question. May we not take Milton's recurrent resort to these facts as a sign of personal experience, his nightly seeing of things not of the earth though very much coloured by physicalities no less than by his own personal attitudes, and hearing the poetic word which conjured them up?
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Ordinarily we should find it difficult to recognise his seeing things not of the earth, so strong is the stamp of the man's mental conception upon his dream-sight. Kubla Khan is an unmixed glimpse of the beyond-earth. All the reminiscences from Coleridge's reading, with which it is full, have only triggered off a peep into the occult - or, rather, the occult has itself caught hold of those reminiscences and organised them in its own light. That is why Sri Aurobindo30 has pronounced about Kubla Khan: "it is a genuine supra-physical experience caught and rendered in a rare hour of exaltation with an absolute accuracy of vision and authenticity of rhythm." About Paradise Lost Sri Aurobindo31 has said that in it Milton expressed "in fit greatness of speech and form the conception of Heaven and Hell and man and the universe which his imagination had constructed out of his intellectual beliefs and reviewed in the vision of his soul". This means that his intellectual beliefs considerably deter-mined the working of his imagination: the latter, though vitalising the former, was mechanised by it in turn. Milton had already with a firm hand built up in his mind a general religious picture before it got translated into poetry: the poetry, therefore, could exert its transfiguring influence on what was resolutely preconceived and not use ideas and beliefs to fashion a glorious surprise all through. But we must not overlook the reviewing which Sri Aurobindo mentions of everything in the vision of Milton's soul. It is there that we have the secret of the stupendous success attained by him in certain parts of his poem, especially the opening ones about which Sri Aurobindo32 has written: "There is nowhere any more magnificently successful opening than the conception and execution of his Satan and Hell, the living spirit of egoistic revolt fallen to its natural element of darkness and pain, yet preserving still the greatness of the divine principle from which he was born." A fiery fusion has here taken place of Milton's soul and poetic power: the soul's vision has wholly permeated the imagination and reduced the grip of the intellectual creed to the minimum. Elsewhere too in Para-
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dise Lost than its initial Books the permeation occurs, but it is intermittent and often allows a somewhat unsatisfying picturisation. Rightly does Sri Aurobindo33 declare: "Milton's heaven is indeed unconvincing and can be described as grotesque and so too is his gunpowder battle up there, and his God and angels are weak and unconvincing figures, even Adam and Eve, our first parents, do not effectively fill their part except in his outward description of them...."
However, none of these defects contradicts the possibility of mediumistic creation by Milton of his poetry: the grotesque, the weak, the ineffective in him only show how much his mind carried a superficial habit of imagination and the common colour of physicalities into the mediumistic state. If Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Christabel can be said to project part of the dream-consciousness into the waking world, Milton's inferior moments in Paradise Lost may be said to act the other way around. Even his superior moments are not free of this reverse process, but the process is not dominant, it is finely harmonised with the Miltonic version of the Kubla-Khan quality. If we do not mark that quality, it is because we have let his deliberate-looking and literary-structured style shape our judgment and because we have not stopped to attend to his unequivocal statements about the experiences he was undergoing night after night. "The vision of his soul", which Sri Aurobindo has included in the analysis of Milton's expression, was just the factor to bring about that experience, for right from the beginning of his life his soul was dedicated to the Muse with a profound prayer that he might be perfected some day for the achievement of a master-work. No other poet was born with so intense a sense of mission to do for England what Homer and Virgil had done for Greece and Italy, no other poet worked throughout his life with so deeply felt a direction towards a God-given poetic fulfilment. Well might his life be crowned with that extraordinary creative sleep.
And well might the creativity of that sleep find during his waking hours its counterpart in the ease with which, as he
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tells us, he composed his verses under Urania's inspiration. He calls his verse "unpremeditated". We must not think this contradictory to our assertion that he had already with a firm hand constructed a mental picture in general of his religious story. Preconceived picturisation does not debar unpremeditated verse. The latter implies no more than a happy fluency of composition in which vivid word-arrangements get suddenly born. The fluency can gather together ready-made conceptions and endow them with new life both imaginative and verbal, even sweeping away some of them in spite of the intellect's watchful presence. And, in Milton's case, we may expect the intensest and most original vitality because his fluency rose from a state essentially akin to the extraordinary creative slumber he experienced again and again.
The fact of this slumber has hardly been noted by Milton-authorities and yet it is fundamental to the psychology of his inspiration. To my knowledge nobody has dwelt sufficiently on even the general aspect of this psychology. All that has been said amounts to nothing further than what David Masson affirms: "There can be little doubt that Milton believed himself to be, in some real sense, an inspired man." Apart from Blake,34 only Robert Graves has referred to the general aspect with a direct pointer, but he too does so just en passant.35 He comes to it in trying to clinch his contention that Milton was really "a minor poet with a remarkable ear for music, before diabolic ambition impelled him to renounce the true Muse and bloat himself up, like Virgil (another minor poet with the same musical gift) into a towering, rugged major poet." To take away from Milton the credit for what Graves is compelled to admit when he says: "the majesty of certain passages is superhuman" - to show Milton to be a minor poet on whom majesty was somehow imposed from outside himself, Graves obviously remembers the poet's own hints and writes: "There is strong evidence that he consciously composed only a part of Paradise Lost: the rest was communicated to him by what he regarded as a superhuman agency."
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One is not sure what Graves means by "consciously". To recover what was communicated" to him in sleep, Milton must have been inwardly conscious even when to all appearances insensible to outward touches. And since his poetry is said to have been communicated to him nightly and during his waking time as well, when he had the feeling of participating in its production, the point about being conscious should not in the literal sense arise at all. Graves most probably means Milton's individual labour as contrasted to the Muse's gift. That he could not merely mean waking creation is evident from his own statement about a poet's work: "The act of composition occurs in a sort of trance, distinguishable from dream only because the critical faculties are not dormant, but on the contrary more acute than normally.... Few self-styled poets have experienced the trance; but all who have, know that to work out a line by an exercise of reason, rather than by a deep-seated belief in miracle, is highly unprofessional conduct. If a trance has been interrupted, it is just too bad. The poem should be left unfinished, in the hope that suddenly, out of the blue, days or months later, it may start stirring again at the back of the mind, when the remaining problems will solve themselves without difficulty."36
Graves has the heart of the matter here, but he overlooks the experience of many poets that they often set themselves doggedly to draw the Muse by writing on their own, and succeed swiftly or slowly in getting inspired; they need not always wait for her to visit them. Milton in the period of his Paradise Lost was obviously not one of these. Whether asleep or awake, he composed in a conscious trance. He was the ideal poet as pictured by Graves and even out-idealled him by fusing trance and dream during certain watches of the night.
However, Milton's dream-vision and dream-audition - though facts psychologically curious in the extreme, and fundamental too since after them the easy and unpremeditated verse in the waking state becomes at once credible
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– stand on a par from the literary viewpoint with his expe-rience of poetry in the waking state. For here too we have the identical total effortlessness. And it is this total effortlessness that is the essential literary oddity to be accepted or rejected by us in connection with Paradise Lost.
Should we not take Milton at his word? He was basically a truthful man. Sometimes he was very dangerously truthful, once even risking his neck by uttering what he deemed to be the truth. And details he has left of his private and public career in many of his prose works, especially at considerable length in his Second Defence of the English People, have all been accepted. Hanford, one of the Milton-authorities, attests apropos of Second Defence: "The general credibility of this and other utterances about himself cannot be questioned."37 The fact of overwhelming night-inspiration during the waking condition had been remarked by Johnson who, on the authority of Richardson's Life, relates that Milton "would sometimes lie awake whole nights... and on a sudden his poetical faculty would rush upon him with an impetus, and his daughter was immediately called to secure what came". Perhaps the most impressive confirmation is from one who lived with him and knew him most intimately in his last period. Newton in his Life says that the poet's widow, "being asked... who the Muse was, replied it was God's grace, and the Holy Spirit that visited him nightly". Here both the sleeping condition and the waking - under possession of Urania - seem to be implied. Weighing everything we may fully credit the poetic assertions we have quoted from Milton.
But just realise how startling they are. If any great poem strikes us as having been most studiously created, it is Para-dise Lost - a masterpiece of Art in the literal sense. No poem in the world bears so clearly the signs of skill in composition, an extreme utilisation of the value of every syllable and sound. The Miltonic blank verse, boldly enjambed, varied in its pauses, at once majestic and terse by the Latinised turns of its English, is something unique in sovereign craftsman-
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ship. And then there is the immense fund of diverse learning with which it is crowded. We should expect the poet to have spent hours and hours composing and recomposing, brooding over one mode of saying and another, deliberately building up sentences and paragraphs, with a suspended syntax full of subordinate clauses and their dependent elements. We should also expect him to rummage patiently his stores of memory, or halt again and again, calling for volume after volume to be opened and consulted. But the fact is exactly the reverse.
Milton created Paradise Lost with consummate facility. Not that poetry came to him in abundance at a time, but whenever it did come, the artist and scholar in him were one with the poet, and his many-sided chisel-strokes were delivered without a moment's hesitation, indeed with perfect automatism. Elaborate grammatical structure and intricate rhythmical order, ceaseless articulate passion but with a perfect polish, multifarious learning deployed in balanced organisation - all issued from him as Pallas Athene is said to have been born, leaping splendid-limbed and golden-armoured, sudden yet complete, from the head of Zeus, a complex grandeur of form and function manifested in the simplest manner, without strain, without even visible process. If we are minded to make Milton himself suggest this manner we may take the lines in which the Portress of Hell-gate describes to Satan her birth from him in Heaven:
"All on a sudden miserable pain
Surprised thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzy swum
In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast
Threw forth, till on the left side opening wide,
Likest to thee in shape and countenance bright,
Then shining heavenly fair, a goddess armed,
Out of thy head I sprung. Amazement seized
All the host of Heaven; back they recoiled afraid..."38
One of the phrases here we shall have to ignore. "Sudden
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miserable pain" does not seem to fit the Miltonic process of creation. If it ere the young Milton, the student at Cam-bridge and at his father's place at Morton, the phrase might be accepted as a description of the frequent headache to which he was subject. The old Milton suffered only from gout, which is not known to affect the head, not even to give a swelled head which Milton perhaps had. All the rest of the description is rather apt. The eyes dim and dizzy in darkness are what we may expect in the first seizure of the poetic fury, even apart from their partial relevance to Milton's blind state and his night-inspiration. We may also regard as appropriate the statement that the new birth resembled very much its source, for there is, as we shall note later, a very personal element in all that Milton wrote. "Shining heavenly fair" and at the same time somewhat terrifying the beholder - this too is rather accurate for Milton's work. As for the "left side opening wide," surely Milton hinted in connection with Satan something wrong and wry, something sinister, but for himself we may understand merely a physiological truth about the activation of speech: the speech-centre in the brain is on the left side and so Milton would be using that side for the composite of his poetry.
Anyway, the immediacy, the simplicity with which poetry like his got composed in a flawless fullness constitutes a psychologic and aesthetic paradox - perhaps the most surprising fact in literary history.
In the report about the restriction of his creative period to autumn and winter and the drying up of his powers during spring and summer we have a suggestive index to the nature of his later poetry. This poetry appears to be something over which in general he had no control: on the whole it came and went as it listed. But the report does not quite prepare us for its absolute "given-ness" in all particulars. If it was first-rate, this was thanks entirely to the Muse; if it fell below the mark, that too was not in the least his work. Ordinarily we should be inclined to speak of Milton artistically labouring over the second half of Paradise Lost and scrupulously keeping up the
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sublimity of style even when the inner life-breath was comparatively feeble. We would conceive of keen art mating with inspiration in the first half and acting almost alone in part of the second. But, though the two halves are unequal on the whole, it would be a mistake to think that when his work was not supreme in quality he padded out everything with the help of a sharp artistic conscience playing upon his mastery of the language. Milton created portions of Paradise Lost in an inferior strain because Urania did not visit him in full force, but it was still Urania who wrote through him. And as we have already said, even when he wrote at his best there was no chopping and changing in the manner that the packed and polished, as well as learned and Latinised, posture of his verse might suggest to us.
When we think of a supreme artist in verse on a colossal scale, we at once name Virgil and Milton together. Yet they are worlds apart in their methods. Virgil is indeed a magician of meaningful phrases in Latin, phrases of exquisite sense and sound, but he got his effects after long exertion. He made the rough draft of seven or nine lines every morning and spent the whole day revising and refining them. Surely this kind of labour has also the breath of the Muse behind it: only, it implies the arduous clearing of the passage in the brain through which that breath flows. With Milton there was no arduous clearing. At his best, the breath blew with such force that the brain opened up a passage and the wonderful words rushed out. At his second-best, the words were not wonderful, they were just adequate, but the blowing was still forceful and the brain-opening immediate, though the more superficial and not the deepest layers must have served as the channel. I do not aver that he never changed anything later: he must have revised at times, perhaps even entirely redone some portions. What we are talking of is the general situation. This situation differs from what can be affirmed about the early Milton who used to correct his work fairly often. We have no proof of a similar treatment of Paradise Lost. And we cannot say that the proof
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is lacking merely because the original manuscript, as distinguished from the one submitted to the Licencer, has failed to survive. Edward Phillips, who used to go over the manuscript under the poet's directions, reports his correcting nothing else save "the orthography and pointing" - that is, the spelling and punctuation. Hence we may hold that the bulk of Paradise Lost stood from the first as it stands now and was created in nightly gusts of massive spontaneity blowing from beyond the poet's individuality through his highly individual mind. Most of its 10,565 lines, though thoroughly Miltonic, were, in respect of personal initiative, not at all composed by Milton.
1.A Milton Handbook by J.H. Hanford, (1946), pp. 50-65.
2.Bk. VII, 28-30.
3.Ibid., 20-4.
4.Ibid., 46-7.
5.Bk. III, 45.
6.Ibid., 23-4.
7.Ibid., 37-40.
8.Ibid., 51-5.
9.John Milton (1955), pp. 146-47.
10.Ibid., p. 146.
12.Ibid., pp. 146-47.
13.Selected Prose (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1953), pp. 143-44.
14.Ibid., p. 144.
15.Ibid.
16.Bk. XI, 386-87.
17.Bk. IV, 216.
18.Ibid., 224-34.
19.Ibid., 238-39.
20.Ibid., 248-53.
21.Ibid., 257-58.
22.Ibid., 280-82.
23.Bk. V, 306.
24.Ibid., 429.
25.Ibid., 108-13.
26.Bk. VIII, 286-96.
27.Ibid., 309-11.
28.Ibid., 460-64.
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29.Bk. XII, 610-14.
30.Life - Literature - Yoga: Some Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Revised and Enlarged Edition, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1967), p. 161.
31.The Future Poetry (Pondicherry, 1953), p. 116.
32.Ibid., p. 117.
33.Life - Literature - Yoga, p. 60.
34.Apropos of his own designs: "Tho' I call them Mine, I know that they are not Mine, being of the same opinion with Milton when he says that the Muse visits his slumbers & awakes & governs his soul when Morn purples the East..." (Letter, 16 August 1799, p. 1038 of G. Keynes, The Complete Writings of William Blake, London, 1957).
35.The Crowning Privilege (Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1959), pp. 338-9.
36.Ibid., p. 99.
37.A Milton Handbook, p. 3.
38.Bk. II, 752-59.
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IV
We have asserted the total effortlessness of Milton's complicated and deliberate-looking poetry. However, in asserting this, we must not imply that he did nothing to make such effortlessness possible. A hint of what he did is found in the mention in Book III of his mighty poetic outpouring - the passage from which we have already quoted some lines. It throws light on several matters. We shall first dwell upon its bearing on that effortlessness itself and, through the aspects disclosed by it in this connection, we shall proceed to the power behind Paradise Lost, as distinct from the power beyond the poem - what makes it, in spite of not being composed by Milton at all, so thoroughly Miltonic.
After telling us of his blindness, he speaks of yet not ceasing to wander
where the Muses haunt
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song,1
and he speaks of the haunts of his mind as being more Hebrew than Hellenic:
but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowering brooks beneath
That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow
Nightly I visit.2
Next, he puts together the names of four ancient personages, all famous but all blind like himself, and the first two of them poets whose fame he would wish to equal as he has equalled their fate:
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.3
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After naming these men, he continues what he started saying with "Nightly I visit":
Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,
Tunes her nocturnal note.4
Observe what Milton has said. One thing is that he compares himself with the nightingale. This is perhaps the most unexpected comparison an epic poet could have made. We hardly conceive of Homer's Iliad or Vyasa's Mahābhārata or Dante's Divina Commedia as a nightingale's song. Least of all would we normally associate this song with Paradise Lost. The nightingale reminds us of Catullus and Campion, Sappho and Sarojini Naidu. It is a symbol of lyricism. And in a very evident sense the grandioseness of Milton's chant is at the opposite pole to the lyrical. But Milton the epic poet par excellence has a special purpose in making the comparison between himself and night's "wakeful bird". It is in relation to the essential formative spirit of lyricism that we must understand him. He makes the comparison not merely because both he and that bird get their musical expression in the dark hours. The comparison extends, in the first place, to the spontaneous - that is effortless - nature of expression in either case, for he does not omit to emphasise this nature of his poetry: he says, "thoughts that voluntary move / Harmonious numbers". Milton does not have to force his thoughts to make music: the music comes naturally from the very act of thinking, with an immediate movement that has all the look of the lyrical. No doubt, lyrical poetry is believed to spring from the act less of thinking than of feeling. But thinking is never absent from it - and, though acute reflection does not usually go with it, the intellectual gesture towards things and even the intellectual seizure of them are not ruled out, provided there is, as it were, a thinking with one's organic self, with one's living senses, a warm and
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concrete turn of the being towards the intellectual act. And this turn is precisely what Milton tells us to be his practice.
Consider the word "feed". He says that at night he would feed on a certain kind of thoughts. The word he employs is at once a piece of inspired art and a disclosure of his psychology. He refers to "harmonious numbers", verbal music, issuing from his mind; and music is primarily associated with the mouth. So he suggests the mouth beforehand by the mention of feeding. That is the artistic touch. But the poetic psychology too is here. The picture of poetry as being produced by the lips because the poet has taken strange unearthly food is a recurrent one in literature: we may cite Coleridge's line in Kubla Khan about the bespelled singer:
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise.
And in this picture we have two implications: the poet has taken into himself the stuff of a spiritual Ananda, a mysterious divine delight, and he has done so with a turn as warm and concrete as eating and drinking, he has brought his organic self and his living senses into play. Milton, when he speaks of feeding on thoughts, discloses to us his way with them. It is the way of all true intellectual poetry and most directly the way of the lyricism of the intellect. Thus Milton presents us with two characteristics of lyricism in the poetry of his thoughts: absolute spontaneity and the warm concrete turn.
Nor does the curious truth hinted by Milton himself, that his epic is a peculiar form of lyricism, end with these two characteristics. There are two more, staring every reader of Paradise Lost in the face. In lyrical poetry, it is the person of the poet that gets expressed - the individual mind and heart come pulsing through the song. Lyrical poetry has for its main theme the author of it and his personal exultations and agonies. Now one of the things which strike us throughout Paradise Lost is the presence of Milton himself. Again and
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again he speaks in his own person. There are the elaborate introductions which precede the first, third, seventh and ninth Books. And everybody knows that in the figure of his Satan we have a strong dash of Milton the rebel against Charles I, the vehement defender of regicide who remained the unrepentant Republican even when the Stuart Monarchy was restored and who might have been the first to get hanged as Cromwell's bellicose foreign secretary and all-Europe champion. There is also the blending of himself with some of the attitudes and ideas in the great speeches made by Satan's followers: especially when Belial urges the preciousness of "this intellectual being" we feel Milton's own voice breaking out. There is further the gorgeous expenditure of Milton's learning and reflection - history, geography, astronomy, philosophical issues, political problems, social and domestic questions, all that interested or engaged the poet outside his immediate theme and filled his mind and life is poured out. We may characterise these outpourings as superfluities, as Johnson did the autobiographical introductions; but, as he was careful to add, "superfluities so beautiful, who would take away?" Everywhere in the epic we meet with the poet's individual presence and we seem to move within his many-sided richly-stored intelligence. Nor would Paradise Lost be the greatness that it is without this presence and this deployment of scholarship: they are of the very essence of its poetry.
The other epic poets are more or less submerged in their subjects. So little of Homer the man is in the Iliad that scholars have even hatched the silly theory that Homer is the name of half a dozen different hands that have pooled their works - silly because one Homer is already a mighty freak difficult enough in the economy of Nature. Virgil rarely intruded upon his story: once only he breaks out into a personal cry, a glorious passage all Latinists have by heart: "Fortunati ambo!..."5 Dante is more felt in his work and that is because the Divina Commedia is in the first person, a kind of autobiography: it tells of the poet's own journey through
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Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. But Dante fills his poem with so much of human interest outside himself, the stories of all those who suffer in Hell, all those who repent in Purgatory, all those who rejoice in Heaven, that he is just one human being amidst a multitude of men and women. In Paradise Lost there are no human beings except Adam and Eve and they by themselves have really little to bring home to us, for they have no experience, the world is quite virgin to them, their contacts with it are elementary and they are quite different from the dreaming, toiling, fighting, loving, suffering, aspiring mass of creatures we find around us and in the colourful history of six thousand years of splendour and folly. The only human being who breathes and passions and moves through Paradise Lost is Milton with his knowledge and his experience. Thus, before the Fall, Adam and his angel visitors talk as if to them, as to Milton, the world's processes were familiar matters. John Bailey6 well observes: " 'War seemed a civil game / To this uproar,' says Raphael, as if he were fresh from reading Livy or Gibbon and had all the wars of Europe and Asia in his memory... and, interesting as the passages are, it is difficult to forget the incongruity of Raphael and Adam discussing the Ptolemaic and Copernican theories of the universe, or Adam moralizing on the un-happiness of marriage as if he had studied the divorce reports or gone through a course of modern novels. Yet few and foolish are the readers who can dwell on dramatic improbabilities when Adam is pouring out the bitter cry wrung from Milton by the still unforgotten miseries of his first marriage...." Adam we find also talking at times "like a weary scholar" or like a student of the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages or "like a doubting Christian in an age of speculation". Raphael once breaks in with a question proper to a Platonic philosopher; and Milton, the chronic sufferer from gout which is one of the most painful diseases, lets us hear his own voice speaking when Nisroch, a rebel angel, refers to wounds received in the battle in Heaven and singles out bodily pain as "the worst of evils" which, "excessive,
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overturns all patience". In all this personal pervasion Milton can be considered in spirit a lyric poet with an epic subject and style. And when he bursts into directly personal expression we have some of the most effective and appealing things in Paradise Lost, things like
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me -7
or else:
Standing on Earth, not rapt above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
In darkness and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude...8
The fourth characteristic showing the lyricism of Milton's thoughts is the celebrated Miltonic music. Criticism, from the beginning, has stood in admiration before the wonderful rhythmic properties of Milton's blank verse. The usual term for them is "organ-music", but that covers the total effect, the massive tone of the verse-paragraph which is the unit of expression in Paradise Lost. But within the verse-paragraph there are various movements of delightful sound, with a flux and reflux of words peculiar to the Miltonic composition. In the two quotations just made we may notice this play of forward and backward in
Day,
and in
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though fall'n on evil days,
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues...
Or take those lines on Hell:
A dungeon horrible on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all...9
We have not only alliteration and assonance: we have also direct repetitions of word or phrase, running key-notes, as it were, to link up the various parts, make the new turn reminiscent and resonant of the old. Perhaps the most effective as well as meaning-charged product of this musical recurrence is the description of the discoveries made by Satan's followers in the infernal depths:
Through many a dark and dreary vale
They passed, and many a region dolorous,
O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp,
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of
death -
A universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good;
Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived,
Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras dire.10
Nor is the music of recurrence suitable only to high-pitched poetry in Milton's mouth. It is equally apt when the utterance is quietly firm, as in the opening sentence of the speech
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of Jesus after God has declared in Heaven that only a divine sacrifice can pay for man's disobedience. Jesus says:
Father, thy word is passed, man shall find grace;
And shall Grace not find means, that finds her way,
The speediest of thy winged messengers,
To visit all thy creatures, and to all
Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought?
Happy for Man, so coming!11
Bailey has commented: "Observe the peculiarly Miltonic interlacing of the whole, line leading to line and word to word: the 'grace' of the first line giving the key to the 'Grace' of the second, the repeated 'find' of the second line and the repeated 'all' of the fourth, the 'comes' of the fifth line leading on to the 'coming' of the sixth."12 Bailey further writes of the "cunning variety in the rhythm of the verses: three pauses in the first line, two in the second, only one in the third: the principal pause after the sixth syllable in both the first two lines, and yet the words and their accents so artfully varied that not the slightest monotony is felt; the suggestion of easy flight in the smooth unbroken movement of the third line -
The speediest of thy wingèd messengers."13
Sometimes Milton concentrates into single lines a most memorable music of vowels and consonants, either staccato or fluent. An extraordinary hammering in of progressive halts, with even a rhyme in the midst of the skilful assonance and consonance, is the line already cited:
death.
An unimpeded movement, but with every word weighted with a sense of fate, is another practically monosyllabic
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masterpiece ending a passage descriptive of Satan's entry into Eden at night:
So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold.14
A vast crisis is solemnly expressed by means of an utmost simplicity that is yet crowded with the profoundest suggestions through the long vowels tolling, as Bailey15 has marked, bell-like into the silence of midnight. And, mind you, this is not what is commonly known as onomatopoeia, such as Milton gives us in
Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds.16
Paradise Lost has onomatopoeia in diverse forms, and that too is part of its music; but here is a phonetic manifestation of the rhythm of the inner vision-feeling. This sort of word-vibration on the one hand and on the other the sound-waves which it intersperses of what I have termed the flux and reflux of word and phrase, these constitute the music affining Milton's poetry to lyricism in spite of its epic strength and volume. For, a complete lyric is not only a welling up of poetry by its own inner force, not only a measured cry of excited feeling and seeing and musing, not only a rhythmic language suffused with the personal and subjective element: it is also a poem whose verse is especially musical and brings in a marked manner the appeal of melodic or harmonic recurrence which is essential to all poetic movement. Perhaps no better illustration of the complete lyric in a brief compass can be offered than Landor's two-stanza'd Rose Aylmer:
Ah what avails the sceptred race,
Ah what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
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May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.
Added to the alliteration and assonance, the music here has the Miltonic flux and reflux - "Ah" twice, "what" thrice, "every" and "Rose Aylmer" two times. In the second stanza we have also instances of the Miltonic enjambment, the running-over from line 1 to line 2 and from the third line to the fourth. The pauses everywhere are diversely disposed. There is, in association with the general directness of statement, a play of choice collocation: "sceptred race", "form divine" - the latter a half echo of Milton's "human form divine". The tone is sweetly grave - deliberation and delicacy fused, as in Milton. And at the end we have both a Miltonic inversion - the object-phrase preceding the subject and verb - and a touch of thoughtful uplifted emotion, which is a typical Miltonism, in the word "consecrate" meaning "to set apart perpetually for sacred uses". Of course the epic pitch of expression is wanting in Landor's lyric of love's wakeful night-vigil, but enough dignity is present to make us perceive that this kind of lyricism, comparable in several ways to the song of night's "wakeful bird", could be the seed-form of the musical elevation on which Paradise Lost moves.
In Milton's epic lyricism we have the second paradox about him. This paradox may be said to explain in general the first which is the spontaneity, the automatism of his artistically finished and learnedly loaded expression; for spontaneity is the characteristic movement of the lyric inspiration.
1.Bk. III, 27-29.
2.Ibid., 29-32.
3.Ibid., 35-36.
4.Ibid., 37-40.
5.Aeneid, IX, 446-9: "O fortunate pair!..."
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6.John Bailey, Milton (The Home University Library, Oxford, 1945), pp. 177-78.
7.Bk. III, 41-6.
8.Bk. VII, 23-8.
9.Bk. I, 61-6.
10.Bk. II, 618-28.
11.Bk. III, 227-32.
12.Bailey, op. cit., p. 159.
13.Ibid.
14.Bk. IV, 792.
15.Bailey, op. cit., p. 166.
16.Bk. I, 540.
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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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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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VI
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
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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VII
His "Plane" of Inspiration and Shakespeare's
Now we may note a few examples of Milton's art. On the more obvious yet none the less genuinely expressive level we have the four rivers of Hell conjured up, each by the appropriate phrase elaborating the etymological connotation of the river's Greek name and running in the right psychologically effective rhythm of vowels and consonants:
Abhorrèd Styx, the flood of deadly hate;
Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;
Cocytus, named of lamentation loud
Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegeton,
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.
Far off from these, a slow and silent stream,
Lethe, the river of oblivion, rolls
Her watery labyrinth...1
A less varied phonetic response to a situation but a more massive rush of accurate sonority gathering strength on strength as it goes on and yet collecting itself into one faultless whole, is the famous fall of Satan from Heaven:
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.2
Words have never been used with such fiercely combined assaults on the ear, terribly accumulating impacts on the eye, dreadfully swelling intensities of significance, powerfully
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diversified measurings out of movement. It may be worth our while to attend to a few details. The very first foot is a trochee, a metrical inversion in the iambic line, and the opening phrase is a grammatical inversion: both suggest at the same time the hurling violence on the part of the Almighty Power and a posture preparing the fate of being hurled headlong, upside down. Also, if "Him" did not stand clearly and emphatically at the start we would not remember it enough to connect up with it without surprise the final: "Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms." And this connecting up, after the spacious suspense of four intervening lines, knits the passage together so as to make us see the beginning and the end as applying to the same being and completing the prolonged process of his fall - the same rebel Archangel who was thrown from Heaven's height is seen reaching Hell's depth. The different positioning of the pause every-where is expressive - the most memorably so is the one in the middle of the last foot in the third line, allowing the next phrase to commence at the line's utter end with the long stressed monosyllable "down" immediately after the poly-syllabic "combustion". The art of controlled vehemence could go no further than in this whole passage.
Parts of the passage, lines 3-5, figure in a discussion by Sri Aurobindo of the use of epithets. "According to certain canons, epithets should be used sparingly, free use of them is rhetorical, an 'obvious' device, a crowding of images is bad taste, there should be subtlety of art not displayed but severely concealed - Summa ars est celare artem. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton whenever he chooses."3 Quoting from Milton as well as Shakespeare, Sri Aurobindo says: "Such lines... are not subtle or restrained, or careful to conceal their elements of powerful technique, they show rather a vivid richness or vehemence, forcing language to its utmost power of expression."4 When a critic remarked that Sri Aurobindo showed small judgment in
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choosing his citations as examples of a wealth-burdened movement, Sri Aurobindo replied: "He says that Milton's astounding effect is due only to the sound and not to the words. That does not seem to me quite true: the sound, the rhythmic resonance, the rhythmic significance is undoubtedly the predominant factor; it makes us hear and feel the crash and clamour and clangour of the downfall of the rebel angels: but that is not all, we do not merely hear as if one were listening to the roar of ruin of a collapsing bomb-shattered house, but saw nothing, we have the vision and the full psychological commotion of the 'hideous' and flaming ruin of the downfall, and it is the tremendous force of the words that makes us see as well as hear."5
But what is most notable about Milton is not only his capacity for such art: it is also his capacity to meet a similar situation with an art equally controlled at the opposite of vehement. We can imagine him producing a delicate effect in a different kind of scene, but we are quite unprepared to find not long after the picture of Satan's fall the picture of the fall of a comrade of his, who built Satan's palace in Hell and who, according to Milton, was the same spirit that in Greek mythology was known as having offended Zeus and been flung earthwards from Olympus. Milton, relating that he was not unheard of and unadored in ancient Greece and that "in Ausonian land/Men called him Mulciber", writes:
and how he fell
From Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o'er the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer's day, and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star,
On Lemnos, the Aegean isle.6
This is pure melody, though still with a massiveness in it, and the huge prolonged fall is like an exquisite cadence modulated so as to give again and again the sense of helpless
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plunging across space and time but still with a felicity in the movement, the changeful lights of "a summer's day" playing upon it and, before their disappearance, the falling object itself catching fire, as it were, for a moment in which its own celestial nature shows out and then fades away. We may wonder why Milton made his picture a strange and remote beauty. Perhaps the whole artistry was set off by his recollection of ancient Greece and of the land of the Italians who were known as Ausonians, and it was further influenced by his employment of the word "fabled": his imagination passed into an atmosphere of bright serene ideality and built up the picture. The disaster that overtook Satan was to Milton a terrific religious truth and could not in any way be recollected in tranquillity or mythically romanticised: it had to be expressed in all its stark elemental reality. However, there is a brief phrase in Book VI where the poet seems to combine the two moods and, by a certain effect of repeated word and re-echoed rhythm, add a magic touch to the depiction of a cosmic catastrophe. After saying that Satan and his companions, driven by God's Son, threw themselves down through a spacious gap disclosed by an opening in the crystal wall of Heaven, and after saying that eternal wrath burnt after them to the bottomless pit, Milton has the words:
Hell heard the unsufferable noise, Hell saw
Heaven ruining from Heaven...7
In these two statements, the first is splendidly powerful, the second splendidly subtle - the one foams and hisses with a mighty terror, the other rolls and rings with a profound beauty.
Perhaps Milton's art is at its most beautiful in those lines, the appreciation of whose rhythmic quality Matthew Arnold initiated with an ear for technique - the lines about "Proserpin", occurring in the midst of the long passage on the Garden of Eden. In that passage Milton employs first a positive, then a negative method; the latter throws into relief
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in the imagination what Eden must have been by telling us what wonderful fields or gardens known to song or story must not be identified with it. Milton the scholar is here at work with Milton the artist-poet. He sees to it that reference is made to every relevant place made memorable by books. The outcome, however, is not pedantic at all: rather a living profusion of ornate richness overwhelms us. And this profusion starts off with the famous phrases:
Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
Was gathered - which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world...8
We begin with four emphatic words - "Not that fair field" - all with stresses, the last two with heavy ones: the mind is thus briefly fixed upon the broad general scene. Then comes a lighter and livelier movement and we pass over a particular picture of happy activity going on - but not completed: on the contrary we are led to pause over the very centre of it, Proserpin, who is brought delicately into delightful focus by being called a fairer flower than any in the fair field, and then a deep shadow is swiftly conjured up with "gloomy Dis" -the epithet quantitatively long in the first syllable and unobtrusively joining up, by its second unaccented syllable's quantitative shortness of i-sound, with the quantitatively short but emphasised name "Dis" in which the same sound occurs. There is a momentary suspense at the line's end where the name stands, but the syntactical form presses us onward to a revelation of what the Lord of the Underworld did with Proserpin. And this revelation's surprise is rendered at the same time an inevitability by a certain play of repeated sounds. The preparation of the inevitability is in the fair flowery nature of the gatherer of flowery fairness. The clinching of the inevitability comes not only with the word "gathered" in connection with what Dis does, thus harking
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back to the earlier "gathering" connected with Proserpin: it comes also with the word "gloomy" alliterating with them and thereby suggesting that one who carries gloom would most naturally gather a flower-gatherer. Thus the imaginative art is made to wield a subtle logic which persuades without any obvious intention upon our minds, without breaking the mythological spell. And the scheme of repeated sounds helps also to mount up our emotion and intensify the tragic sense of the situation, with the result that we are in the right receptive state for the explicit expression of the consequence of the tragedy - the long and lonely heart-break of Proserpin's mother, Ceres. But Milton is not content with simply rendering us receptive: he reaches the utter acme of living art in what he says here. The run of eleven mono-syllables, bearing with them the single dissyllabic proper name "Ceres", creates a pathos that is unforgettable both in individual import and in what we may term world-significance. The dissyllabic "Ceres" keeps up connection with the preceding lines which have a lot of dissyllables and a few trisyllables, several of them containing the r of this proper name. The immediate connection is, of course, with the past participle passive "gathered" in the same line. Not only do we have the common r in it: we perceive there in addition the hints of a packed disaster and of a snatching away from sight, hints that prepare us for, as it were, the continuous unfoldment of the disaster's effect and the drawn-out movement of empty earth wide search. But the supreme artistry comes in the deep and universal feeling evoked by those twelve closing words themselves:
... whích/ cóst Cé/res áll/ thát páin/
To séek/ hér thróugh/ the wórld.
Spondees and long vowels and a slow exquisitely limping movement of stressed single syllables reinforce by inspired technical means the piercing significance. One mother-heart's anguish over a length of time is caught with such a
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profound vision and on so broad a plane that it becomes the anguish of the entire race. This transmutation is helped by the use of the words "all" and "world", as well as by the long-vowelled "pain" put at the end of a line where it acquires a special emphasis and a self-sufficient prominence disengaged from the particular occasion and particular statement.
To my mind, only three times in European literature before Milton a world-cry has emerged with an equal penetration from the picture of a limited and local situation. There is the sublime phrase in Homer's Odyssey:
Zenos men pais ea Kronīonos autar oixun
Eikhon apeiresien...
This may be hexametricised in English:
Son of Saturnine Zeus was I, yet have I suffered
Infinite pain...
Then there is the poignant phrase in Virgil's Aeneid:
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.
Again a hexametrical version would be:
Forth did they stretch their hands with love of the shore
beyond them.
Perhaps the poignancy comes out better in English by the pentameter-translation of Flecker's:
They stretched their hands for love of the other shore.
The third example I have in mind is the heroic phrase in Shakespeare's Hamlet:
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And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.
Perhaps the Shakespeare-line is the nearest to Milton in expression as well as technique. Here too we have spondees and long vowels and a slow obstructed motion: here too we have both the words "pain" and "world", the former in just the same metrical position as in Milton. The sole psycho-logical difference is that Shakespeare has a certain controlled vehemence most suitable to Hamlet's dying gasp about the difficult burdened life-continuation he was requesting from Horatio; Milton brings a tenderer and more tremulous rhythm, an intenser simplicity perfectly appropriate to a mother's travail of heart over a lost and ravished daughter.
It would be interesting to speculate why Milton has filled this phrase about Ceres, the Earth-goddess, a figure of Classical mythology, with such a world-cry. It would seem that the very depths of Milton's soul were stirred in this whole passage because Proserpin got merged with Eve in his imagination, gloomy Dis was identified with Satan who "gathered" Eve into his dark design, and the sorrow of Ceres grew the anguish of the whole earth for loss of Paradise. Have we not here the same accent of emotion and attitude as in the less beautiful but no less living lines that begin Paradise Lost -
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Brought death into the World, and all our woe -
or in those deeply simple ones in Book IX where Eve's unfortunate disobedient act, loaded with cosmic consequences, is done -
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth-reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat.
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
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Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe
That all was lost9 –
or, again, in the finely intense exclamation of Adam when Eve tells him of her deed –
How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost,
Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!10 –
or, finally, in the vision which Michael gives Adam of lost humanity at last reaching home with the help of "Joshua whom the Gentiles Jesus call" and
who shall quell
The adversary Serpent, and bring back
Through the world's wilderness long-wandered Man
Safe to eternal Paradise of rest.11
The proof, that Proserpin and Eve were fused in Milton's imagination and their far-reaching fates felt as if one, may be offered by spotlighting the lines preparatory to the account of Eve's fall. Milton starts finding Classical similitudes for her when she left Adam and "betook her to the groves". Just as the list of places which Eden was not, and which it surpassed, began with the Enna of Ceres and Proserpin, so now the list of comparisons, beginning with Oread, Dryad, Diana's attendant and Pales and Pomona, ends with a comparison
to Ceres in her prime,
Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove.12
Nor does the clear association of Ceres and of her still unborn daughter with Eve the future "Mother of all Mankind", as she is called in Book XI,13 stop with the mere comparison. The mention of "Proserpina" slips Milton's mind at once from Ceres to her and we get the poet's own address to Eve:
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O much deceived, much failing, hapless Eve,
Of thy presumed return! event perverse!
Thou never from that hour in Paradise
Found'st either sweet repast or sound repose;
Such ambush, hid among sweet flowers and shades,
Waited with hellish rancour imminent,
To intercept thy way, or send thee back
Despoiled of innocence, of faith, of bliss.14
Here something of the pain in store for Ceres and something of the misfortune awaiting Proserpina are mixed together, but the central suggestion of Hell's ambush for the unsuspecting maiden "among sweet flowers and shades" harks back definitely to "that fair field of Enna". A few lines further we have a touch answering to the wideness of Ceres's pain, for the "Fiend" who had invaded the Paradise of Adam and Eve was on his quest
Where likeliest he might find
The only two of mankind, but in them
The whole included race, his purposed prey.15
And soon after this we have even more direct analogues to the "fairer flower" that Proserpin was. Satan spies Eve among Eden's roses, uncompanioned by Adam and "oft stooping to support/Each flower of tender stalk":
Then she upstays
Gently with myrtle band, mindless the while
Herself, though fairest unsupported flower,
From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh.16
Perhaps we should add a motive of purely personal psychology to that of the whole earth's longing for the paradise that was lost. Both the artistic and the moral aspirations of Milton were mixed with the Ceres-legend long before he chose the subject of his epic. He may have been led
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to make his choice by the coincidence of those aspirations with the deep religious anguish he felt within the sense of Eve's fault and its universal consequence, the anguish for the divine state forfeited by humanity. In a letter to his friend Charles Diodati on September 23, 1637 - more than twenty years before he started Paradise Lost- he wrote: "... for whatever the Deity may have bestowed upon me in other respects, he has certainly inspired me, if any ever were inspired, with a passion for the good and fair. Nor did Ceres, according to the fable, ever seek her daughter Proserpin with such unceasing solicitude, as I have sought this perfect model of the beautiful in all the forms and appearances of things (for many are the forms of the divinities). I am wont day and night to continue my search..."17
Whatever the psychological motives behind the lines about Proserpin and Ceres in Paradise Lost, they are perhaps Milton's art-peak of austere poignancy. What shall we put up as his art-summit of austere sublimity? In my opinion it is a passage in the devil Belial's speech during the debate in Hell. Moloch has said: "My sentence is for open war." And he has argued that at the worst God would either abolish the very existence of the rebel angels, which would be far happier than having everlasting misery, or, if their substance is divine and immortal, they would be merely defeated but they would have disturbed Heaven and at least taken revenge. Belial questions the sense of such revenge, for it would bring greater punishments: he advises cessation of further activity so that God may relent or at least they themselves may get inured by the help of their purer essence to whatever Hell at the moment holds of torture. As for the idea of being destroyed by God, it is not likely that God could or would let them be annihilated. But if they are sure to be defeated and further punished, it should be the most logical thing to want annihilation, and yet would the logi-cal be also the enjoyable? This problem is thus stated by Belial:
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Our final hope
Is flat despair: we must exasperate
The Almighty Victor to spend all his rage;
And that must end us; that must be our cure –
To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense or motion?18
Here, as in the Proserpin-passage, is also a profound suggestion of sorrow and loss, there is even the phrase "full of pain" matching "all that pain". But everything is pitched high in place of exquisite, and that phrase which I have already quoted separately and praised –
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity –
has a verbal turn and a cast of rhythm which Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as the Mantra, the rare type of utterance we often meet with only in the Vedas and the Upanishads. "Its characteristics," says Sri Aurobindo, "are a language that says infinitely more than the mere sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into the Infinite and the power to convey not merely some mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing it speaks of, but its value and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind them all."19 Technique in the Mantra, more than technique in any other kind of poetry, is submerged in what is heard beyond the actual sounds, the intonation to which we listen in a bespelled and ulumined inwardness - in, as the Upanishads put it, śrotrasya śrotram, "the Ear behind the ear". But, more than technique elsewhere, technique here has to be the very embodiment of the significance-soul. Nothing can be
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altered in the least. For, though the poetry may still remain fine, the specific accent which makes the Mantra would disappear. Not only is it impossible to replace "those" by "these" or "the", or "Eternity" by "Infinity": it is also impossible to change "wander". If we substitute "voyage" or "travel", the meaning will persist in addition to the note of grandeur, but the rhythmic undertones and overtones that are the soul of the Mantra will not be the same: the needed significant resonance, the required suggestive plungingness and spreadingness will not be present arty more. The inexpressibly spiritual will be missed.
I should explain here that the Mantra which Milton attains by the austerely sublime is not a monopoly of poetic austerity. It can manifest in a style whose temper is one of vibrant exuberance, the style of Shakespeare. Shakespeare too captures the Mantric music on a few occasions: we listen to it, according to Sri Aurobindo, when we get:
In the dark backward and abysm of Time.
We may add:
the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
What differentiates for our present purpose these acmes of sublimity from that line of Milton's is a certain leap in their very temper, an urge of overflow in their essential spirit. The severity and serenity behind the outer form are absent. However, we must take care to set apart the Shakespearean spirit of overflow from that of a poet like Chapman. Both have the Romantic passion and not the Classic self-possession; but, while Chapman in his best lines like those in his translation or rather transposition of Homer –
When the unmeasured firmament bursts to disclose
her light,
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or,
The splendour of the burning ships might satiate
his eyes -
has an explosive effort, a muscular or nervous wrestling, in order to break out into poetic brilliance, both Homer in ancient Greek and Shakespeare in Elizabethan English achieve their tremendous effects with a godlike ease. Homer, like Milton, is self-gathered behind all his surge of "many-rumoured ocean". Shakespeare passions forth, yet with no gesticulation, no furious shouting: always a mighty natural-ness he brings at his greatest, he bursts as if by innate right to disclose his lustre: limits fall before him with the very breath of his poetic power, he does not have to hammer at them in order to flow over.
To feel better how the austerity au fond varies from the inner exuberance we may take up more than single lines and pit against that whole passage from Milton two from Shakespeare which have a motive not far removed. "To be no more" is the theme of Belial's speech. Here is Hamlet on the same subject:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:...
... To die, to sleep;
To sleep; perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect,
That makes calamity of so long life...
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of!
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought...
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A vivid speech on death and after-life occurs also in another play: a character named Claudio is speaking:
Ay, but to die and go we know not where!
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world.
Now recollect Milton. To get the full edge of the contrast let us add to the passage its full sequel:
And who knows,
Let this be good, whether our angry Foe
Can give it, or will ever? How he can
Is doubtful; that he never will is sure.
Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire,
Belike through impotence or unaware,
To give his enemies their wish, and end
Them in his anger whom his anger saves
To punish endless? 'Wherefore cease we, then?'
Say they who counsel war; 'we are decreed,
Reserved and destined to eternal woe;
Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,
What can we suffer worse?' Is this, then, worst -
Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?
What when we fled amain, pursued and struck
With Heaven's afflicting thunder, and besought
The deep to shelter us? This Hell then seemed
A refuge from those wounds. Or when we lay
Chained on the burning lake? That sure was worse.
What if the breath that kindled those grim fires,
Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage,
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And plunge us in the flames; or from above
Should intermitted vengeance arm again
His red right hand to plague us? What if all
Her stores were opened, and this firmament
Of Hell should spout her cataracts of fire,
Impendent horrors, threatening hideous fall
One day upon our heads; while we perhaps
Designing or exhorting glorious war,
Caught in a fiery tempest, shall be hurled,
Each on his rock transfixed, the sport and prey
Of racking whirlwinds, or for ever sunk
Under yon boiling ocean, wrapt in chains,
There to converse with everlasting groans,
Unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved,
Ages of hopeless end? This would be worse.
Our lengthy quotation, with several parts bearing a resemblance - in particular verbal turns as well as in general expressive eloquence - to portions in the speeches of Hamlet and Claudio, is sufficient to demonstrate our point about Milton's underlying restraint and Shakespeare's basic leapingness. But it will help also to bring out another difference between Milton and Shakespeare - the difference of "plane" of inspiration over and above "style" of inspiration. Sri Aurobindo has characterised Shakespeare's plane as that of the Life Force, Milton's as that of the Mind. Not that Shakespeare always feels or senses and never thinks or that Milton does the opposite. Milton could not be the poet he is if he never felt or sensed; but what separates him from Shakespeare and puts him with poets like Lucretius and Dante and Wordsworth and even Shelley whose style differs so much from his own is that the mind of thought works directly in him. He is a poet who puts into his poetry the passion of thought. He is an intellectual who is also an intense poet because in him thought is passionate. In Shakespeare, on the other hand, passion is thinking. He seems time and again to set going a fireworks of ideas, but
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actually we have ideas thrown up by a seething of sensation and emotion. Sri Aurobindo has well observed: "While he has given a wonderful language to poetic thought, he yet does not think for the sake of thought, but for the sake of life; his way indeed is not so much the poet himself thinking about life, as life thinking itself out in him through many mouths, in many moods and moments, with a rich throng of fine thought-effects, but not for any clear sum of intellectual vision or to any high power of either ideal or spiritual result."20 Hamlet who is Shakespeare's closest portrait of the thinking mind is yet all the time a-quiver with the élan vital. We may not perceive this when he is insufficiently worked up, but the moment his expression gets intense as in
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
we feel the grey cells vibrating in tune with the guts rather than vice versa. In Belial's speech there is nothing of this phenomenon of getting into the entrails, as it were, of an experience: the grey cells find their own voice in that speech and with it the emotional and sensational being is stirred. Or take the words of Adam after his condemnation, words which join up from afar with both Hamlet and Claudio in their general drift:
Why do I overlive?
Why am I mocked with death, and lengthened out
To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet
Mortality, my sentence, and be earth
Insensible?21
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A little later Adam has the phrases:
OConscience! into what abyss of fears
And horrors hast thou driven me; out of which
Ifind no way, from deep to deeper plunged!22
Surely, Adam is not talking in abstractions, but he is worlds away from Hamlet's and Claudio's thrilled vitalism.
(By the way, "conscience" here and in the Hamlet-solilo-quy have different shades. Hamlefs "conscience" means "consciousness", "awareness", and not the supposed moral instinct telling right from wrong. I may also remark in passing that Hamlet's "mortal coil" is not, as commonly believed, the body serving as a shell for the soul, but the turmoil and commotion of physical life. It is surprising how the word could be understood as "shell". The dictionary affords no ground. It gives us a choice between the archaic sense of "disturbance, much ado, noise" or the common one which may be summed up as: "a ring, or a series of rings, winding rope, wire, pipe, etc." Perhaps a snake which can turn itself into a ring or a series of rings can be said, with the ordinary meaning in mind, to shuffle off its mortal coil. But it beats me how creatures with shapes like Hamlet and our-selves can be spoken of as doing so. The sole exception may be somebody like Hamlet's uncle who had killed the old King, Hamlet's father, and usurped his throne. By a snake-like twist of metaphorical ingenuity which would not be untypical of Shakespeare's sinuous imagination we may describe that uncle as shuffling off his mortal coil in the ordinary meaning of the word, because the old King's ghost, apropos of the canard spread by the murderer that he had been stung to death while sleeping, declares to Hamlet:
The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown.)
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1.Bk. II, 577-84.
2.Bk. I, 44-9.
3.Savitri (1954), pp. 852-3.
4.Ibid., p. 853.
5.Life - Literature - Yoga (Revised and Enlarged Edition, Pondicherry, 1967), p. 93.
6.Bk. I, 740-6.
7.Bk. VI, 867-8.
8.Bk. IV, 268-72.
9.Bk. IX, 781-4.
10.Ibid., 900-1.
11.Bk. XII, 311-14.
12.Bk. IX, 495-6.
13.Bk. XI, 159.
14.Bk. IX, 504-11.
15.Ibid., 514-16.
16.Ibid., 530-33.
17.A Milton Handbook, p. 26.
18.Bk. II, 142-51.
19.Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Third Series), p. 97.
20.The Future Poetry, p. 100.
21.Bk. X, 773-7.
22.Ibid., 842-4.
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VIII
Poetry of the Thought-Mind and "Overhead Poetry"
Milton knew himself to be for "an audience fit, though few." It is impossible for many to address him in their minds as he makes Eve address Adam:
O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose,
My glory, my perfection!1
But in a poetic sense Milton can be likened to Adam and regarded as our glory and perfection if we interpret from the standpoint of poetic psychology the phrase:
O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose.
For, Milton is the first English poet to fashion the language of poetic thought: he is the Adam of the creative intelligence in English poetry, and poetic thinking really finds in him all repose - no strain, no gesticulation, an intellectual utterance achieved with sovereign ease on a gigantic scale: the thought-power in us can see its glory and perfection in him and solely in him who has used this power masterfully through 10,565 lines of pentametrical blank verse. Of course, we should not particularly look here for the inner mind, much less the domains still more occult. "Milton's architecture of thought and verse," writes Sri Aurobindo,2 "is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence, - for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he creates." Then Sri Aurobindo, referring to Vedic imagery, adds: "he does not stray into 'the mystic cavern of the heart', does not follow the inner fire entering like a thief with the Cow of Light into the secrecy of secrecies.
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Shakespeare does sometimes get in as if by a splendid psychic accident in spite of his preoccupation with the colours and shows of life."
Yes, Milton's mind, as we have already remarked, is not really mystical although it took Heaven and Hell to range over. His achievement, however, is not to be judged by what his mind could not do: the sweep of its positive virtues must be the determinant of our appraisal. Sri Aurobindo3 sums up his triumph: "he has given English poetic speech a language of intellectual thought which is of itself highly poetic without depending in the least on any of the formal aids of poetic expression except those which are always essential and indispensable, a speech which is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain intellectual thought-utterance. This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has fulfilled it..."
Perhaps the claim that Milton is the innovator of English poetry of the thought-mind will be challenged on behalf of Donne. Has not Donne made poetic speech a vehicle of intense thinking? Does he not press all the rest of man's parts into the service of a quivering complicated thought? Well, the very form in which we are led to make the claim for him is an index to the half-way-house position he occupies. His mind is more recognisably free than Shakespeare's from the Life-urge, but it is yet caught in that urge and is constantly allured to function from within it rather than to work on its own and seize it for vitalising the authentic creations of another power than the nervous being and its dynamic and dramatic thought-quiverings. Donne is trying at the same time to be mental and vital. His is a restless personality and the double effort brings with it all that violence, disturbed rhythm, counter-pointed expression which are extremely effective on occasion but often strike us as no more than a clever torture of the language. The poetic intelligence has not found its proper voice in him. Although his mental ingenuities come alive frequently enough, the genuine orientation of the mind towards intellectual thought is baulked of consummation
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because a style suitable for the dominant play of the poised intelligence has not yet been launched. Donne was so different a personality from Milton that it is not easy to institute illuminating comparisons except in a very general manner; but we may catch the essential difference between their dealings with the creative intelligence and its native accent by juxtaposing the last stanza of Donne's "Prayer" from his Litany with the end of the exordium to Milton's Book I of Paradise Lost. Donne finely breathes into poetic diction a semi-colloquial tone and an argumentative urgency:
O Holy Ghost, whose temple I
Am, but of mud walls and condensèd dust,
And being sacrilegiously
Half wasted with youth's fires, of pride and lust,
Must with new storms be weather-beat;
Double in my heart Thy flame,
Which let devout sad tears intend; and let
(Though this glass lanthorn, flesh, do suffer maim)
Fire, Sacrifice, Priest, Altar be the same.
Milton, though not infused with the speaking voice's accent, articulates his poetic diction with a high naturalness of insistent thinking:
And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dovelike sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss,
And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That, to the highth of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.4
Here we have the thought-mind perfectly free in its own
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clear air and, from above, charging the creative vitality with its poetic burden, even as the Divine Spirit whose wide wings are seen by Milton alighting and brooding over the Abyss to impregnate it. The Elizabethan Life Force had already come under the stress of intellectuality before Milton and the speech of Classicism had been essayed: there was even a pressure towards something more than mind, a pressure which we feel best perhaps in Vaughan whose life (1622-95) overlapped with Donne's old age as well as much of Milton's career. But in Milton we have both the liberation and the consummation of the mind's native tongue; for, in Sri Aurobindo's words, Paradise Lost "is the one supreme fruit of the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical manner, to achieve a poetic expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and to forge a complete balance and measured perfection of form".5
But when we speak of the mind's native tongue being Milton's, we do not yet hit off the whole quality of his mental poetry. For, such poetry has several kinds of movement. And in the age - the so-called English "Augustan" - which succeeded that of Milton we have a skilful language of the mind - the language of Dryden, Pope and others - yet with-out the natural nobility which moves in Milton. Rather there is a polished efficiency arranging glitters of thought. Even when a finer note is added, a tinge of truer feeling, there remains a lack of the authentically uplifting breath; and a well-turned idea, warmed by some sentiment, expresses it-self in a meticulously but superficially finished style and proves attractive to the average reader by an artistic coating of the commonplace. We may take an instance from Gray which has some connection with Milton. In his extremely popular Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard Gray has a stanza recalling our minds to a passage in the speech of Belial from which we have quoted in extenso. Gray tries to convey the pathos of a soul about to lose its earthly existence, standing on the verge of death but looking back before crossing over:
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For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?6
How different is the accent of the Miltonic utterance - elegiac
too in temper yet pitched in a nobler key:
... for who would lose,
Devoid of sense and motion?7
No doubt, the line about "those thoughts" is extraordinary even in Milton and is incomparable; but the passage, to stand out against Gray's, could well do with a lesser Miltonic line. Suppose we pick up a phrase8 from elsewhere and read:
this intellectual being,
That to the highth of deity aspired...
The passage would still be worlds apart from the stanza by Gray. Even if we took the expression of a more "intellectual being" than Gray's we should feel Milton's distinctive quality. Here are some verses from a poem of Coleridge in an intellectual vein:
If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom
Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare
As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,
Whose sound and motion not alone declare,
But are their whole of being!...9
This is the genuine language of the thinking mind, with actually a Miltonic influence on some of the verbal turns. And yet what is often termed Milton's "organ-voice" is
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wanting - something in the manner and still more in the rhythm, that makes the miracle of the line about "those thoughts" not a sheer freak of revelatory music but an exceptional upsurge from a sort of constant base in the rhythm-roll of Paradise Lost. The reason for this is that, though mostly limited to the mental range of vision and not piercing beyond it to a recognisable spiritual sight as distinguished from a high theological view, the thought-mind in Milton echoes the movement of a greater power of cognition: its breath of expressive sound seems caught from a level of consciousness which Sri Aurobindo's system of Yogic psychology considers the first "plane" in the hierarchy of "planes" above the mental level whose instrumental centre is in our brain.
Sri Aurobindo writes of "overhead poetry" - poetry coming from vastnesses of being and consciousness that are as yet unreached by mental man and whose manifestations in him have been rare and sporadic so far. At the top of the gradation which they form is what he calls Overmind, the world of the great Gods who are essentially One Existence and who, from the utterly divine and till now unmanifested Supermind, draw a delegated dynamism for their cosmic functions. The poetic word hailing from the Overmind is the Mantra. We have already spoken of its characteristics. Leading up to its source from the mental plane are the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuition. Unlike the Mind proper, the Higher Mind carries a natural awareness of the One Self everywhere and knows and sees through a lofty and comprehensive thought-force. It has "a strong tread often with bare unsandalled feet and moves in a clear-cut light: a divine power, measure, dignity is its most frequent character".10 The One Self everywhere is common to all the overhead planes, but the force at work varies: the Illumined Mind visions rather than thinks. "The outflow of the Illumined Mind comes in a flood brilliant with revealing words or a light of crowding images, sometimes surcharged with its burden of revelations, sometimes with a luminous sweep."11
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The Intuition, which must be differentiated from the swift sudden leap of thought which occasionally takes place on the mental level, "is usually a lightning flash showing up a single spot or plot of ground or scene with an entire and miraculous completeness of vision to the surprised ecstasy of the inner eye; its rhythm has a decisive inevitable sound which leaves nothing essential unheard, but very commonly is embodied in a single stroke."12 Although none of these three planes has the overwhelming massiveness of the Overmind word and its vibration as from infinite to infinite, all of them have an intrinsic wideness which is not the same as the expansive tension of mental or any other poetry at its most cogent. And Milton has a spontaneous spaciousness of rhythm because, in spite of his thought and word generally lacking in the spiritual depth of the overhead, his rhythm echoes the Higher Mind.
Sri Aurobindo says: "When Milton starts his poem -
Of that forbidden Tree -
he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the substance or the style. But there is a largeness of rhythm and sweep of the language which has a certain kinship to the manner natural to what is above."13 In another place Sri Aurobindo calls Milton's "grand style" a derivate from or substitute for the manner of the "Higher Thought". And here he brings in a comparison with Shakespeare's poetry which too has an affinity with an overhead plane. This affinity seems to be more by the way the vision works than by the sound of its working. Sri Aurobindo14 begins by asking us to take Milton's grand style anywhere at its ordinary level or in its higher elevations: there is always or almost always, he tells us, an echo of the Higher Thought. After citing again the opening lines of Paradise Lost, Sri Aurobindo wants us to consider as an instance,
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Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
Then Sri Aurobindo goes on: "Shakespeare's poetry coruscates with a play of the hues of imagination which we may regard as a mental substitute for the inspiration of the Illumined Mind and sometimes by aiming at an exalted note he links on to the Illumined overhead inspiration itself as in the lines [to sleep] I have more than once quoted:
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge?
The rest of that passage falls away in spite of its high-pitched language and resonant rhythm far below the overhead strain. So it is easy for the mind to mistake and take the higher for the lower inspiration or vice versa. Thus Milton's lines might at first sight be taken because of a certain depth of emotion in their large lingering rhythm as having the overhead complexion, but this rhythm loses something of its sovereign right because there are no depths of sense behind it. It conveys nothing but the noble and dignified pathos of the blindness and old age of a great personality fallen into evil days."15
Not that Sri Aurobindo altogether denies to Milton the substance and the expression making the large lingering rhythm exercise its sovereign right. He grants: "Naturally, something from the higher planes can come into a poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it."16 A direct uplifting into the Mantric Overmind cannot be expected more frequently than once or twice, but now and again the other overhead levels do mingle their voices with
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the mental Miltonic or else draw it into themselves: most often their influence, when it does enter in, plays upon a Higher-Mind transfiguration of the mental Miltonic. Perhaps the Higher Mind is directly vocal in:
Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss...17
The Illumined Mind seems to put its own stamp on a Higher-Mind expression when we hear:
Thou Sun, of this great world both eye and soul...18
The deeply suggestive touch of the Intuition appears to lie on a similar utterance that we have already culled:
Harmonious numbers...19
Possibly a breath of the Overmind itself passes faintly over the same basic speech with the phrase in God's mouth before the creation of the world out of Chaos:
Boundless the Deep, because I am who fill
Infinitude...20
All these phrases, however, are rare wingings that must be carefully distinguished from the general level of Paradise Lost where repeatedly we meet with mental reflections of the overhead. Thus we might easily be tempted to cry "Higher Mind" on reading:
bring back
Safe to eternal Paradise of rest.21
But, for all the solemn exquisiteness and expansive poignancy of the second line, a touch of the profundities is still
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somewhat absent, such as is found in the more simple-worded yet more subtle-thoughted sweep from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri:
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives.22
Again, we may imagine the Illumined Mind flashing out of Milton's vivid account of how Satan
Springs upward like a pyramid of fire
Into the wild expanse23
or fusing with the Intuition in the phrase about the Eternal Eye that
forth from his holy mount,
And from within the golden lamps that burn
Nightly before him, saw without their light
Rebellion rising...24
But we should be able to distinguish these semblances from the Illumined Mind truly breaking through the Higher Thought when we get Sri Aurobindo's:
One-pointed to the immaculate Delight,
Questing for God as for a splendid prey,
He mounted burning like a cone of fire25 –
and we rise sheer beyond all possible affinities with Milton's "pyramid of fire" or even his "Eternal Eye" when the Illumined Mind comes assimilated into the Intuition and even into the Overmind in the suddenly revelatory:
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient.26
Nor should we be seduced into mixing up the Intuition proper with the suggestive intensity of Milton's
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which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell: myself am Hell27 -
or the suggestive obscurity of his
yet from those flames
No light but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe...28
The Intuition proper disturbs our depths in Sri Aurobindo's verses on Hell's weird "epiphanies" –
And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire
Drew adoration to a gleam of slime,29
or pierces to a sacred secrecy within us with
This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown.30
Finally, though the Miltonic poetry can be profoundly moving as well as mighty, we do not yet receive the accent of the Overmind from:
Long were to tell
What I have done, what suffered, with what pain
Voyaged the unreal, vast, unbounded Deep
Of horrible confusion...31
We get the clear Overmind accent in those forceful lines already cited from Sri Aurobindo about Savitri's sacrificial Avatarhood for the evolving world's perfection:
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.32
Here I may appropriately quote what Sri Aurobindo
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wrote to me when in a poem which he had considered "overhead" the line –
An ultimate crown of inexhaustible joy –
was found unsatisfactory by him and I asked him whether it was bad poetry or not "overhead" enough and therefore not in tune with its context. Sri Aurobindo replied: "The line is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually (in Paradise Lost) some of the largeness and rhythm of the Higher Mind, but his substance is - except at certain heights - mental, mentally grand and noble. The interference of the mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling blocks when one tries to write from 'above'."33 I changed the line to:
An ultimate crown of joy's infinity.
Sri Aurobindo considered this to be more acceptable as part of the poem concerned. It may be noticed that a small shift is made from the abstractly effective to the concretely effective, from poetic ideation to poetic suggestion, from the conceived spiritual to the perceived spiritual. "Inexhaustible joy" transmits a powerful thought about something beyond the thought-mind: "joy's infinity" conveys a direct vivid sense of the supra-intellectual reality. This reality is now before us with its intrinsic novelty, its natural transcendence of common or human fact: previously it needed to be imagined from a strong hint partly negating such fact and partly magnifying it. Joy is now identified with an infinity: an infinity already there in its own right, with its very being a divine Ananda, hangs upon our view, and when called "an ultimate crown" it immediately brings up the suggestion of a vast overhang-ing sky free from all trammels. Joy, described as "inexhaustible", had no clear skiey implication: when combined with "an ultimate crown", it carried only a massive idea of something domelike above, unhampered by pain.
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Sri Aurobindo's Savitri employs constantly and in the highest degree a style presenting spiritual vision and expe-rience in all their concreteness. Even in the moments where a thought-form is prominent, spiritual vision and experience have moulded thought to their own luminous truths instead of thought essaying to capture them in a mental cast for intelligible communication. The style of Savitri thus is different from that of Paradise Lost in very temper and texture. We should commit a psychological mistake to term it Miltonic. Miltonic it is in so far as it organises a stupendous energy with a stupendous control and in so far as Milton has always a spaciousness of utterance. But to dub it Miltonic all round, as most reviews of Savitri have done, is to skim the mere surface of style-quality.
And it differs from the mental Miltonic not only in basic psychology: it differs also in expressive attitude and technical posture. The ends of criticism are hardly served by seeing Miltonism as soon as we have anywhere a high-pitched blank verse embodying at some length an epic theme. The technique of Miltonism is in the first place enjambment, the running over of lines, the sense drawn out inseparably from one verse to another, but with pauses set at varying places within the lines - as in the passage about Beëlzebub when fear and desire were swaying his fellow-demons:
Which when Beelzebub perceived - than whom,
Satan except, none higher sat - with grave
Aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed
A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat, and public care;
And princely counsel in his face yet shone,
Majestic though in ruin. Sage he stood,
With Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies; his look
Drew audience and attention still as night
Or summer's noonday air...34
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Savitri has quite a different technique. Take the lines on the heroine herself, conscious of her great transformative mission:
A work she had to do, a word to speak;
Writing the unfinished story of her soul
In thoughts and actions graved in Nature's book
She accepted not to close the luminous page,
Cancel her commerce with eternity,
Or set a signature of weak assent
To the brute balance of the world's exchange.35
Sri Aurobindo has made, in a letter, some general remarks on his technique in Savitri. "Savitri," he says, "is blank verse without enjambment (except rarely) - each line a thing by itself and arranged in paragraphs of one, two, three, four, five lines (rarely a longer series), in an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement, so far as that is a possibility in English....36 Pauses hardly exist in this kind of blank verse; variations of rhythm as between the lines, of caesura, of the distribution of long and short, clipped and open syllables, manifold constructions of vowel and consonant sounds, alliteration, assonances, etc., distribution into one line, two line, three or four or five line, many line sentences, care to make each line tell by itself in its own mass and force and at the same time form a harmonious whole - these are the important things."37
Yes, Savitri is mostly end-stopped while Paradise Lost is mainly enjambed, but we must avoid the mistake of reading Milton as if there were to be no retardation of the voice at the close of a line. Although we may not halt as much as we would in an end-stopped structure, we must never forget that poetry is broken up into lines of a certain metrical pattern and the line-unit must be felt to however small a degree. John Diekhoff has even mustered some external evidence that Milton himself, in spite of thinking in run-over blocks and "verse-paragraphs", regarded the line as a more
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or less isolated unit to be indicated as such by some sort of breath, pause, or lingering at the end.38
The general difference in expressive attitude Sri Aurobindo well touches off half-humourously in a remark drawn by my attachment of the label "Miltonic" to his lines:
The Gods above and Nature sole below
Were the spectators of that mighty strife.
"Miltonic?" asks Sri Aurobindo and goes on to answer: "Surely not. The Miltonic has a statelier more spreading rhythm and a less direct more loftily arranged language. Miltonically I should have written
Only the Sons of Heaven and that executive She
Watched the arbitrament of the high dispute."39
Sri Aurobindo's syntactical construction too is not markedly Latinised like Milton's in numerous places, nor have we in him the typical Miltonic flux and reflux of words except on a very rare occasion as when he says:
A greater darkness waited, a worse reign,
If worse can be where all is evil's extreme;
Yet to the cloaked the uncloaked is naked worst.40
1.Bk. V, 28-9.
2.Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Third Series), pp. 118-9.
3.The Future Poetry, p. 117.
4.Bk. I, 17-26.
5.The Future Poetry, p. 116.
6.Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 85-8.
7.Bk. II, 146-51.
8.Bk. IX, 167.
9.Human Life: On the Denial of Immortality, 1-5.
10.Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Third Series), p. 116.
12.Ibid.
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13.Ibid., p. 65.
14.Ibid., p. 117.
16.Ibid., pp. 117-8.
17.Bk. V, 297.
18.Ibid., 171.
19.Bk. III, 37-8.
20.Bk. VII, 168-9.
21.Bk. XII, 311-4.
22.Savitri, Bk. VI, Canto 2.
23.Bk. II, 1013-4.
24.Bk. V, 712-5.
25.Savitri, Bk. I, Canto 5.
26.Ibid., Canto 4.
27.Bk. IV, 73-5.
28.Bk. I, 62-4.
29.Savitri, Bk. II, Canto 7.
30.Ibid.,
31.Bk. X, 469-72.
32.Savitri, Bk. I, Canto 2.
33.Life - Literature - Yoga, p. 38.
34.Bk. II, 299-309.
35.Savitri, Bk. 1, Canto 2.
36.Savitri (1954), p. 821.
37.Ibid., p. 825.
38."Terminal Pause in Milton's Verse", Studies in Philology, XXXII (1935), pp. 235-9.
39.Savitri, pp. 861-2.
40.Ibid., Bk. II, Canto 7.
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IX
Savitri is in many respects unMiltonic. However, Sri Aurobindo's early blank verse which assimilates several influences into a varied vigorous originality mingles Paradise Lost most with the chief immediate influence - Stephen Phillips's Christ in Hades and Marpessa - and the principal background influence - Kalidasa's Vicramorvasie. And this blank verse is of particular interest because of a certain question raised by Sri Aurobindo in connection with Milton: "One might speculate on what we might have had if, instead of writing after the long silence during which he was absorbed in political controversy until public and private calamities compelled him to go back into himself, he had written his master work in a continuity of ripening from his earlier style and vision. Nothing quite so great perhaps, but surely something more opulent and otherwise perfect."1 What exactly the ripe result would have been like may be gauged from other remarks of Sri Aurobindo's in the same context.
He speaks of the intellectual age dawning on English poetry after the Elizabethan outburst of the Life-Force. But, according to him, "we have at first an intermediate manner, that of Milton's early work and of the Carolean poets, in which the Elizabethan impulse prolongs itself but is fading away under the stress of an increasing intellectuality."2 "Milton's early poetry is the fruit of a strong classical intellectuality still touched with the glow and beauty of a receding romantic colour, emotion and vital intuition. Many softer influences have woven themselves together into his high language and rhythm and been fused in his personality into something wonderfully strong and rich and beautiful. Sug-
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gestions and secrets have been caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their hints have given a strange grace to a style whose austerity of power has been nourished by great classical influences; Virgilian beauty and majesty, Lucretian grandeur and Aeschylean sublimity coloured or mellowed by the romantic elements and toned into each other under the stress of an original personality make the early Miltonic manner which maintains a peculiar blending of sweetness and beauty not elsewhere found in English verse."3 The later Milton, though achieving a greatness of speech and form, "has turned away from the richer beauty and promise of his youth, lost the Virgilian accent, put away from him all delicacies of colour and grace and sweetness."4 Perhaps it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that delicacies of colour and grace and sweetness have all been put away: the early sensuousness and tenderness break in at several moments. But even through them runs a sterner temper than before, and where the inspiration is not plenary a dry breath often blows over the play of sensation and emotion, preventing them from vivifying, as they should, the intellectual motive. And Sri Aurobindo is right in that whatever sensuousness and tenderness are actually there cannot be called either the high consummation of the Virgilian accent haunt-ing the youthful ventures, or the final ripening of the early romantic strain whose variegated roots were in the soil of the Elizabethan imagination.
To illustrate the sort of fulfilment on a large scale which a continuity of development from the young to the old poet would have brought about, we may be tempted to look at some lines in Paradise Lost which Milton's nephew Edward Phillips has marked as written a number of years earlier when the poem was tentatively projected not as an epic but as a tragedy. Aubrey's Memoir of Milton gives precision to Phillips's piece of information by reporting Phillips himself as putting those lines 15 or 16 years before the epic commenced. This takes us from 1658, the date of the epic's commencement, to 1642, just five years after Milton's early
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poetry had come to a close with the writing of Lycidas. The lines in question, therefore, may suggest themselves as a stage of direct growth from that poetry to the epic. But are they really so? They are ten lines standing at present in Book IV: they form part of Satan's speech on first alighting on the Earth and seeing, among the glories of the newly created stellar universe, the Sun full-blazing at noon-day. Here they are:
O thou that, with surpassing glory crowned,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the god
Of this new World - at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminished heads - to thee I call,
OSun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
Ifell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
Warring in Heaven against Heaven's matchless King!5
Perhaps there is a slightly tenderer, more romantic note in a few phrases of the passage, but it is hardly the promise of a temper and style much different from what we observe in Satan's first speech in Hell to Beëlzebub:
If thou beest he - but Oh how fall'n! how changed
From him! - who, in the happy realms of light,
Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine
Myriads, though bright - if he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsel, equal hope
And hazard in the glorious enterprise,
Joined with me once, now misery hath joined
In equal ruin; into what pit thou seest
From what highth fall'n...6
Or that description of Satan:
His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
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Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured: as when the sun new-risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or, from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.7
The temper and style which we are looking for and which Milton failed on the whole to develop from his early work are, to my mind, discoverable in Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death, written in his twenty-seventh year - discoverable everywhere except in those moments when Kalidasa's glorious voluptuousness comes to the fore. Of course, we cannot expect to illustrate our point by any passage very closely parallel in matter to anything in Paradise Lost. We can only make a suggestive comparison and what is to be seized is the difference of expressive spirit within a context of broadly affined moods. We shall take two passages from Milton. One of them is already familiar to us in part:
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.
O then at last relent! Is there no place
Left for repentance, none for pardon left?
None left but by submission; and that word
Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame
Among the Spirits beneath, whom I seduced
With other promises and other vaunts
Than to submit, boasting I could subdue
The Omnipotent. Ay me! they little know
How dearly I abide that boast so vain,
Under what torments inwardly I groan!8
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The other passage is Adam's outcry on being shown by Michael a prevision of "many shapes of Death" and "the ways that lead to his grim cave":
O miserable Mankind, to what fall
Degraded, to what wretched state reserved!
Better end here unborn. Why is life given
To be thus wrested from us? rather why
Obtruded on us thus? who, if we knew
What we receive, would either not accept
Life offered, or soon beg to lay it down,
Glad to be so dismissed in peace. Can thus
The image of God in Man, created once
So goodly and erect, though faulty since,
To such unsightly sufferings be debased
Under inhuman pains?9
Now, keeping both the passages in mind, with the turns of manner in which the thought and the emotion are expressed, let us appreciate the stylistic spirit of Ruru's exclamation in Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death at the piteous sight of the people in the Underworld where he has ventured in search of his prematurely lost Priyumvada:
O miserable race of men,
With violent and passionate souls you come
Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days
In fear and anguish, catching at stray beams
Of sunlight, little fragrances of flowers;
Then from your spacious earth in a great horror
Descend into this night, and here too soon
Must expiate your few inadequate joys.
O bargain hard! Death helps us not. He leads
Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,
The naked spirit here. Oh my sweet flower,
Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?
Ah me! But I will haste and deeply plunge
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Into its hopeless pools and either bring
Thy old warm beauty back beneath the stars,
Or find thee out and clasp thy tortured bosom
And kiss thy sweet wrung lips and hush thy cries
Love shall draw half thy pain into my limbs;
Then we shall triumph glad of agony.10
The Miltonic mode of speech is quite evident. Enjambment is freely practised: the grand style is at command (especially from line 6 to the middle of line 11): exquisite yet power-suffused rhythm is constant and reaches a climax in
We may put together a series of exclamations too. The one in the opening line of each passage is quite evident; there are also "O then at last relent" and "Ay me!" in the first Milton answered by "O bargain hard!" and "Ah me!" in the Sri Aurobindo. But, in the midst of resemblances to Paradise Lost, we have a most distinct play of colour and grace and sweetness, an absolutely unmistakable Virgilian accent. Caught up into the general classical sense of form, the disciplined language and technique, now come to us the romantic poignancy, the emotional vital intuition: it is as if Milton matured the rare rich promise of his life's dawn within the spacious "intellectual being" of its evening - it is as if, recalling and addressing that promise, he worked with the resolution of Ruru, to bring
Thy old warm beauty back beneath the stars.
No doubt, the "intellectual being" is more active in Paradise Lost than in Love and Death: the latter is not charged directly with philosophical values, its temperament is more akin to the Elizabethans than to the poets of the next age, but just as in the early Milton the intellect and its imagination manage to make the moods of the Life-Force a material for
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reflective brooding, so also Sri Aurobindo in Love and Death infuses the play of idealistic passion and aesthetic sensation with thought-values though as yet the intellectual vision has not fully detached itself to bring a poetry of its own. In some places we find even a subtler operation of thought-values assimilated into the sweep of high emotion, than in Milton's more clearly intellectual poetry. Look at those verses of Milton on old age, Michael's words to Adam:
So may'st thou live; till, like ripe fruit, thou drop
Into thy mother's lap, or be with ease
Gathered, nor harshly plucked, for death mature.
This is old age; but then thou must outlive
Thy youth, thy strength, thy beauty, which will change
To withered, weak, and grey; thy senses then,
Obtuse, all taste of pleasure must forgo
To what thou hast; and, for the air of youth,
Hopeful and cheerful, in thy blood will reign
A melancholy damp of cold and dry,
To weight thy spirits down, and last consume
The balm of life.11
Now listen to the lines on old age in Love and Death:
Not as a tedious evil nor to be
Lightly rejected gave the gods old age,
But tranquil, but august, but making easy
The steep ascent to God. Therefore must Time
Still batter down the glory and form of youth
And animal magnificent strong ease,
To warn the earthward man that he is spirit
Dallying with transience, nor by death he ends,
Nor to the dumb warm mother's arms is bound,
But called unborn into the unborn skies.12
Even the extreme note of intellect transfigured into intensest spiritual movement that we have in
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Those thoughts that wander through Eternity
seems compassed by Love and Death amidst its other qualities:
Long months he travelled between grief and grief,
Reliving thoughts of her with every pace,
Measuring vast pain in his immortal mind.
And his heart cried in him as when a fire
Roars through wide forests and the branches cry
Burning towards heaven in torture glorious.
So burned, immense, his grief within him; he raised
His young pure face all solemnised with pain,
Voiceless. Then Fate was shaken and the Gods
Grieved for him, of his silence grown afraid.13
Here, together with the pervading majesty, there comes the sheer transcendent revelation of word and rhythm which that Miltonic line examples: I mean Sri Aurobindo's phrase –
And perhaps the whole passage illustrates most completely, though in a somewhat subtler fashion than those already quoted, what Paradise Lost might have been if Milton had written it in a continuity of ripening from his earlier style and vision instead of putting the romantic glow of the Elizabethans far behind him. I say "most completely" be-cause one of Milton's grandest passages can be picked out for comparison to it as a whole. The ones we have so far juxtaposed with citations from Love and Death have shown Milton in a slightly mixed form, Milton ascending and descending, his top not quite constant. Now we can represent him by lines which have been considered some of the loftiest in the language - the description of Satan's army of rebels:
Cruel his eye, but cast Signs of remorse and passion, to behold
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The fellows of his crime, the followers rather
(Far other once beheld in bliss), condemned
For ever now to have their lot in pain –
Millions of spirits for his fault amerced
Of Heaven and from eternal splendours flung
For his revolt - yet faithful how they stood,
Their glory withered; as, when heaven's fire
Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines,
With singed top their stately growth, though bare,
Stands on the blasted heath.14
It is impossible to decide which passage is more nobly conceived and executed, and which of the two analogous similes more stupendously splendid in originality of application. It is even difficult to distinguish the Aurobindonian grand style from the Miltonic. Yet a very sensitive perception can feel that there passes through the Aurobindonian a faint quiver of beauty, a secret breath of sweetness, a touch part Virgil part Shakespeare and part Spenser, which the Miltonic with its austerer accent has all but lost to power and greatness.
Not that Milton's passage is the least bit inferior in poetic quality, nor can we regret that Milton wrote it with the temper and style characteristic of his old age. All we can say is that if he had retained, more actively than he occasionally did, the earlier double-strained soul and manner - if he had kept as a regular element the glow and grace which his semi-romantic youthful verse carried in a blend with the clear cogency of the classical intelligence turning upon life from its own centre of reflective vision - the poetic level of Paradise Lost would have been more opulent in the bulk and more equally sustained in perfection of living speech. For, although Milton never fails as an artist, the art-intensity tends to be less inward in many parts as Paradise Lost progresses. In his early work, in spite of the fact that his substance is often slight because as yet his imagination rather than his whole self and mind is using the poetic form, the art-intensity is
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such as can be more consistently alive. This is due to the drive and warmth of the colourful Life-Force caught by him from the just preceding Elizabethan age. That Life-Force, if it had continued in the later work, would not only have brought a richer expression: it would also have saved him from stumbling time and again over what Sri Aurobindo terms "the rock of offence that always awaits poetry in which the intellectual element becomes too predominant, the fatal danger of a failure of vision". The Life-Force has a more natural impulsion than the thinking mind: hence the sight and insight needed for genuine poetry can be stirred more continually when the poetic part in one is functioning from within the vital being or in close contact with it even when the intellectual being is lord of one's self.
And there is one particular element which the intellectual Milton, by outgrowing his vital being's Elizabethan inspira-tion, lost to the radical detriment of the substance of his great epic. A poem dealing with Heaven and Hell requires in its substance a more than conceptual-imaginative sense of worlds other than earth: it may achieve fine poetry without such super-sense, but it will not be heavenly or hellish enough, its truth will lack the lights and shadows belonging to the inner dimensions of reality. We have already noted two things about Milton vis-à-vis these dimensions. First, although there is a Kubla-Khan quality in parts of Paradise Lost, a quality not sufficiently appreciated by critics, what we get is not so much the occult seizing the outer consciousness as the outer consciousness infusing itself into the occult and almost taking away the sting of strangeness. Secondly, Milton's mind at the time of his epic is powerful in thought but with little subtlety in the matter of the supra-intellectual; it has hardly the mystical bent, it is more philosophico-theological and ethical than genuinely spiritual: usually it has, as Sri Aurobindo has said, "no subtle echoes, no deep chambers". And yet the early Milton held the promise of something subtle, something deep, a strangeness beyond or behind the mind. We have inklings of it in a felicitous phrase like
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Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss,15
And looks commercing with the skies,
The rapt soul sitting in thine eyes,16
where, by the way, "commerce" is piquantly used for the first time in English as a verb signifying "commune". And we get hints of the same strangeness in the rhythmic no less than verbal suggestions of the couplets,
Oft, on a plat or rising ground,
I hear the far-off curfew sound,
Over some wide-watered shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar17
or those blank verses,
What might this be? A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory,
Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses18
or just the line:
And rifted rocks whose entrance leads to Hell...19
Then there is that conceit transfigured into rich and strange about musical "raptures" breathed into the air:
How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled!20
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Of course, we must realise that Milton is not speaking of darkness as a raven, a crow-like bird, being smoothed down by the musical cadences as by soft stroking fingers. Such an image would lead to the grotesquerie of the raven smiling. "Raven" here is an adjective, standing for "glossy black" and qualifying the noun "down" which means "soft hair": the down belongs to darkness and it is darkness that is caressed into smiling. A queer yet fascinating secret presence is conjured up and the music which is the theme becomes too a live thing. Nor does Milton's Comus stop with them. He goes on to compare the ravishing effect with what super-natural creatures like his mother "Circe with the Sirens three" used to produce in "prisoned souls", lapping them in Elysium:
Yet they in pleasing slumber lulled the sense,
And in sweet madness robbed it of itself;
But such a sacred and home-felt delight,
Such sober certainty of waking bliss,
I never heard till now.21
In lines 3 and 4 here we have an extremely apt pointer to a state of being which a mystic who has made God a constant glow and intensity in his heart might well speak of. No doubt, Comus is far from any sainthood: still, the words show the simple yet subtle precision of a verbal artistry which may prove adequate to profound spiritual purposes.
Finally, we may instance those famous verses from Lycidas whose exact meaning has not yet been determined by critics. They come soon after Milton has talked of the greed of the new clergy, the failure of the pastors to look after their flock of believers. After recounting this clergy's slothful wickedness Milton caps the description of the harm done with the semi-mysterious lines -
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing done22
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lines which perhaps have the Church of Rome in view: the word "wolf" may be an allusion to the legendary she-wolf which suckled the founders of Rome. But the real "baffler" arrives soon on the heels of these lines. Milton breaks out into a most sombre warning:
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.23
This is terrific. The presence of an unerring and inevitable doom as if from weird regions beyond the human confronts us. Various explanations have been offered, including the extremely prosaic one that makes the two-handed engine the Parliament with its two Houses - the Commons and the Lords. Whatever Milton may have had in mind, he has given us a most stirring symbol through which something beyond all earthly authority gets manifested: a touch of the Omni-potent is felt in a profoundly mysterious manner.
There is nothing in Paradise Lost like it: the nearest approach to it is the vaguely awesome ending of the phrase about Satan when he collects all his might and poises himself to oppose the angelic squadron trying to hem him round:
Sat Horror plumed...24
Next to this phrase in dreadful suggestion is the more elaborate passage on the second of the two Shapes Satan meets at Hell's gate when he tries to get out:
The other Shape -
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable in number, joint, or limb;
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
For each seemed either - black it stood as Night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,
And shook a dreadful dart: what seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.25
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Later we come to know that this Shape is Death. The picture is very impressive and deserves the praise of Coleridge for its abstract vagueness whose appeal to the imagination has a subtle force which concrete, clearly defined imagery would lack altogether. But the depths in us are not directly shaken: the outer mind shudders and transmits some shadow of its feeling to the depths. The same thing happens when we read of Satan and Death ready to fight:
So frowned the mighty combatants that Hell
Grew darker at their frown...26
And it is interesting to note that in this context Milton has words harking back to part of the "engine"-verses in Lycidas:
Each at the head
Levelled his deadly aim; their fatal hands
No second stroke intend...27
But there is not the mystery of the two-handed engine's single smite to end anything. And a more relevant compa-rison, showing the same lack, is made possible by two passages in another context in Paradise Lost. The first actually lends some precision to the Lycidas-image by its picture of the angel Michael, the leader of God's armies, fighting against Satan and his rebel hosts:
the sword of Michael smote and felled
Squadrons at once: with huge two-handed sway
Brandished aloft, the horrid edge came down
Wide-wasting.. 28
This is magnificently formidable yet not mysteriously so; and, although we know Michael to be a divine warrior and we cannot identify the retributive power in the Lycidas-lines, we feel a greater and more fundamental wrath conveyed by them. The force of this wrath goes home deeper also in their
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reference to the decisiveness of the blow than in what Milton says soon after the mention of the angel wielding his long heavy sword with both hands. Now Michael and Satan are pictured as opposed, their swords about to slash down:
Together both, with next to almighty arm
Uplifted imminent, one stroke they aimed
That might determine, and not need repeat...29
Here we have the exact equivalent of
Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.
But with all its power it has not the same reverberations in the secret places of the heart.
Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death has something of them in the midst of the later Miltonic manner. We may cite a few passages:
He turned and saw astride the dolorous flood
A mighty bridge paved with mosaic fire,
All restless, and a woman clothed in flame,
With hands calamitous that held a sword,
Stood of the quaking passage sentinel.30
... caverns
That into silent blackness huge recede....31
Shapes he saw,
And heard the hiss and knew the lambent light
Loathsome, but passed compelling his strong soul.32
He entered and beheld a silent hall
Dim and unbounded; moving then like one
Who up a dismal stair seeks ever light,
Attained a dais brilliant doubtfully
With flaming pediment and round it coiled
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Python and Naga monstrous, Joruthcaru,
Tuxuc and Vasuki himself, immense,
Magic Carcotaca all flecked with fire...33
How wanting in the occult atmosphere, though poetically powerful and mythologically significant, is Milton's account of Satan and his devils in Hell changed into serpent forms! –
Dreadful was the din
Of hissing through the hall, thick-swarming now
With complicated monsters, head and tail -
Scorpion, and Asp, and Amphisbaena dire,
Cerastes horned, Hydras, and Ellops drear,
And Dipsas (not so thick swarmed once the soil
Bedropt with blood of Gorgon, or the isle
Ophiusa); but still greatest he the midst,
Now Dragon grown, larger than whom the Sun
Engendered in the Pythian vale on slime,
Huge Python...34
To return to Sri Aurobindo - a passage which is perhaps the most successful in Love and Death in the genre we are illustrating:
He held the flower out subtly glimmering.
And like a living thing the huge sea trembled,
Then rose, calling, and filled the sight with waves,
Converging all its giant crests; towards him
Innumerable waters loomed and heaven
Threatened. Horizon on horizon moved
Dreadfully swift; then with a prone wide sound
All Ocean hollowing drew him swiftly in,
Curving with monstrous menace over him.
He down the gulf where the loud waves collapsed
Descending, saw with floating hair arise
The daughters of the sea in pale green light,
A million mystic breasts suddenly bare,
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And came beneath the flood and stunned beheld
A mute stupendous march of waters race
To reach some viewless pit beneath the world.35
Not weird, but semi-spiritually suggestive like some of the early-Milton effects, is the line in the above passage:
A million mystic breasts suddenly bare...
Love and Death has other subtleties too, with a pointer soft or strong to strange profundities of which the young Milton held the vivid promise:
This passionate face of earth with Eden touched.36
But Love has joys for spirits born divine
More bleeding-lovely than his thornless rose....37
He heard
Through the great silence that was now his soul,
The forest sounds...38
And the young mother's passionate deep look,
Earth's high similitude of One not earth...39
Men live like stars that see each other in heaven,
But one knows not the pleasure and the grief
The others feel: he lonely rapture has,
Or bears his incommunicable pain.40
Wonderful age with those approaching skies.41
Enough of what Milton might and could have written! We may now ask why he did not write it and what interfered with the natural curve of his development.
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1.The Future Poetry (1953), p. 116.
2.Ibid., p. 112.
3.Ibid., pp. 114-5.
4.Ibid., p. 116.
5.Bk. IV, 32-41.
6.Bk. I, 84-92.
7.Ibid., 591-9.
8.Bk. IV, 73-88.
9.Bk. XI, 500-11.
10.Collected Poems and Plays (1942), Vol. I, pp. 106-7.
11.Bk. XI, 535-46.
12.Op. cit., p. 111.
13.Ibid., p. 92.
14.Bk. I, 604-15.
15.On Time, 11-12.
16.Il penseroso, 39-40.
17.Ibid., 73-6.
18.Comus, 205-9.
19.Ibid., 250-3.
20.Ibid., 260-4.
21.Ibid., 536.
22.Lycidas, 128-9.
23.Ibid., 130-1.
24.Bk. III, 488-9.
25.Bk. II, 666-73.
26.Ibid., 719-20.
27.Ibid., 711-3.
28.Bk. VI, 260-3.
29.Ibid., 316-8.
30.Collected Poems and Plays, I, p. 107.
31.Ibid., p. 106.
32.Ibid.
33.Ibid., p. 109.
34.Bk. X, 521-31.
35.Op. cit., pp. 104-5.
36.Ibid., p. 110.
37.Ibid., p. 87.
38.Ibid., p. 91.
39.Ibid., p. 97.
40.Ibid., pp. 100-1.
41.Ibid., p. 112.
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X
We have seen how the manifold greatness of Paradise Lost was prepared by Milton through decades and how the growth towards it can be traced from youth along middle age to the poet's fifties. Nothing interfered with its evolution: even the twenty years of ecclesiastical, social and political controversy helped it. But just the things that helped the greatness were responsible for draining out or at least thinning the psychological diversity in which they were one intermixed element, and aggrandising it at their expense. The conventions of controversy in those days permitted harsh language, but Milton the poet of Comus and Lycidas could not plunge into the mêlée of vituperation without doing something that went against his poetic grain. Not that the poet in him ran contrary to the temper of a Juvenal: savage indignation could find a natural tongue in him, as in the condemnatory passage in Lycidas about the unscrupulous pastors, the "blind mouths" that eat up instead of feeding their flock. But the sort of abuse to which Milton the pamphleteer delivered himself up with superabundant gusto, putting at its service his marvellous command of the language, could hardly foster the finer traits of the poetic mind. The vigour that went into vituperation could rise to poetry also and the prose works blaze out time and again with inspired utterance; yet this utterance is pitched through-out in the sublime key and never touches the exquisite. Power is henceforth the main attribute of Milton's genius -power variedly deployed with a massive intellectuality and a soaring imagination but not able easily to bend and soften into the sensuous, the subtle, the sweet. This difficulty was increased by the indulgence in unrestrained invective at many places of the prose-works. For the sensuous, the subtle, the sweet had been natural to Milton and the concentration of power constantly in their very opposite resulted
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in a hardening of his sensibilities which marred his later poetry inasmuch as it led to a grandly lop-sided culmination of his genius.
Another cause of this kind of development was the intense influence exercised on Milton by what we may call the poetic mind of Renaissance Europe aspiring after heroic poetry. Greatness was intrinsic to his being, and even in his youth he looked beyond the fashionable modes of verse in his day and sought for "some graver subject",
Above the wheeling poles.1
In contemporary Italy he found theories and experiments pointing the way. F. T. Prince in The Italian Element in Milton's Verse, has fully brought out what was hitherto a general suspicion that the Renaissance Italian idea of heroic poetry came to complete flower in Paradise Lost. Milton is indeed Greek and Roman and Hebrew and even Mediaeval Christian, but he is all these through a profound steeping of himself in the Italian response of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the Classical world.
That response was twofold. First and foremost there was a preoccupation with the grandeur of antiquity as it re-sounded in the Homeric and the Virgilian epics. Already in the Mediaeval Dante we see the Virgilian epic inspiring the vision of the ancient world. When Dante presents the great figures of that world he gives them a gravity and nobility which strike a new note in Mediaeval literature. This note is absent in the rest of Europe even after Dante. Chaucer, for instance, was versed not only in Dante and Petrarch but also in Virgil. Yet except on rare occasions he has not absorbed anything of the majesty of the Virgilian word. Thus, as a critic has pointed out, he attempts in The House of Fame a few lines of paraphrase from Virgil, the start of the Aeneid. This is how he puts it:
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I wel now singen, yif I kan,
The armes, and also the man
That first cam, thrugh his destinee,
Fugityf of Troy countree.
Have we here the least sensitiveness to the tone of the Virgilian overture? –
Arma virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
Litora...
A hexametrical approximation of the lines would be:
Arms and the man I sing, who first from the coasts
of Troya
Came to Italy, reached the shores Lavinian, high fate
Driving him...
In the ears of Renaissance Italy the advent of the arms and the man of Virgil kept a continuous clangour of epic ambi-tion. All the arts and the general conduct of life strove to model themselves by a concept of "magnificence" derived from an idealisation of the Classical world. It is this concept that is said to be active "in 'the vision of an ideal humanity' that inspires Piero's great frescoes at Arezzo" and "in the calm majestic tempo of the Farness Palace in Rome". "Raised to demonic intensity, it breathes a terrible life into the race of titans who people Michelangelo's paintings." "A man's least utterance or gesture, it was felt, should carry a Roman weight of grandeur - Sempre il magnanimo si magnifica in suo cuore! How much more then must epic poetry, 'the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform', be raised to the utmost pitch of splendour." Again and again an attempt was made in Renaissance Europe and especially Italy to accomplish the perfect epic. We mark it in Tasso no less than in his predecessors. But they fall short of entire success.
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Milton, with a poetic gift surpassing theirs, inherited their dream and, as Prince states it, "brought to this literary heritage the full heroic temper it required". Consequently, the aspiration of several centuries flowered in him with a plenitude of grandeur in which all gentler and more delicate motions were almost submerged.
We spoke of a twofold response in Italy to the Classical temper. Over and above the straining after heroic poetry, there was the stress on art as the essence of the poetic expression. Virgil, who had been in antiquity the supreme master of poetry as an art, obsessed the Italian mind of the Renaissance with the importance of literary discipline, the need to mould deliberately a fitting diction of choice word and resonant rhythm. The poet as "maker" bulked larger than the poet as "seer". In the Middle Ages the poems of Virgil constituted a book of inspired wisdom: we hear of the sortes Virgilianae, divination by chance selection of passages from Virgil. The Renaissance did not neglect the Latin poet's substance, but it was more the heroic quality of it than the seerhood that was emphasised, and this quality was almost indissolubly bound up with the texture of the verse, the high language serving as its representative body, the noble structure of phrase in which it made itself felt. Poetry was not just the common language intensified: it was a sifted, refined, special speech prepared for ceremonial uses. Milton did not quite agree with the Italian emphasis, he was too religious-minded to be a devotee of Art instead of a high priest of divine mysteries. To him the heroic quality itself was part of the Seer's function which was to turn the vision of the Divine into a power on earth. However, he accepted the necessity of unremitting attention to Art, the call for a lofty poetic diction scrupulous in its cast of word, rhythm, syntax, sentence, paragraph. Thus we find Paradise Lost far removed from day-to-day speech. Also, it employs no more than about nine thousand different words, in contrast to Shakespeare's free handling of over twenty-three thousand. People imagine that Milton's vocabulary was rather limited. But we have only to
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look at his prose-works to see his enormous vocabulary and linguistic daring no less than his expressive gusto and the uninhibited torrent of his abuse. The energy that is there is of course undeniably present in the poem: if the range of words is smaller, the restriction is voluntary and due to the selectiveness of speech that the idea of poetry as a ceremonial art demanded. The choice words themselves have also to keep up a stately motion: their structure and their sound must answer to the heroic religiosity so typically Milton's and with a superb stiffness devote themselves single-mindedly to the theme of high seriousness he had adopted - Man's first disobedience and the fruit of the God-forbidden tree - so that he might rise both verbally and conceptually
... to the highth of this great argument...
We may, however, note that none of the Renaissance poets - neither the Italian Tasso who wrote Gerusalemme Liberata, the epic of the Crusades, nor the Portuguese Camoës who penned Os Luciados, the epic of Vasco de Gama and Portuguese colonisation in the East - raised so dense an edifice of song as did Milton. There is more softness in them. Milton has less of it not because the ideal Renaissance epic has to crush out all softness but because of his own pheno-menal strength of soul which got its sensibilities considerably hardened by those twenty years of acrimonious and thunder-throated controversy. All the factors in operation we have to take together in order to understand why Milton became so great and in the achievement of a unique greatness sacrificed the more opulent, more uniformly perfect masterpiece that he could have produced.
And there is one further factor to be assessed. We may hold it responsible at the same time for the frequent out-wardness rather than inwardness of finished expression which Paradise Lost has in some of its later Books and for the entry of the old subtlety and richness and tenderness at several places in the poem in spite of the pervading rigour
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and grandeur. The factor I am speaking of has a double aspect: on the one side it is Milton's loss of sight and on the other his keen ear for music. The blindness which overtook him in his forty-second year led to some want of freshness in imaginative response to visual objects. The varied impact which the details of Nature make on a poet's eye under different conditions of atmosphere and different circumstan-ces of mood was necessarily lacking in Milton: the old sensitiveness of language following the actual impression does not occur often in Paradise Lost. There are fine or majestic generalities. They are quite enough on very many occasions where distinct and detailed seeing is not needed and the effect as a whole rather than in its minutiae is aimed at. The long rolling paragraphs which sweep us along shift naturally the emphasis from particularities. But when the energy in these paragraphs has not the plenary inner impul-sion and we are not carried off our feet we become aware of the somewhat undistinguished descriptive phrases. Also, when the vagueness is part of what we have considered semi-occult dream-vision mixing with Milton's outer mind which was used to a blind man's blurred contact with shape and colour, we have a positive quality. When, however, the inspiration seizes mostly on the outer mind, it shows up a defect by the conventionalism of the descriptions. A man not blind might have provided to the inspiration an outer mind sufficiently pricked with sensitive observation to be capable of vivid response even on its own plane.
But, while the reader feels a comparative drop in the poetry, Milton himself seems never to have realised that he fell short anywhere. Perhaps fundamentally the constant sense he had of Urania rushing all the words through him prevented any diffidence from creeping in. And what helped his confidence and failed to keep his self-critical power sharp enough was the application almost exclusively of his keen ear for music as a test to his own poetry. The greatest of poetic rhythmists, he appears often to have been content if his verses sounded well. There is an anecdote illustrating how
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his ears were eyes to him. Once he heard a lady sing finely and he said: "Now will I swear this lady is handsome." Provided his ear was satisfied with what he composed, on many occasions he felt he had created the perfect form. And the satisfying exercise of the auditory imagination tended to cover up the deficiency in the visual.
Yes, the preoccupation with the sound of verse is often responsible for the outwardness rather than inwardness of finished expression which some of the later Books of Paradise Lost exhibit. But it serves on the other hand to evoke at times a few of the characteristics of Milton's early poetry. For, the musical sense is closely connected with the emotional being as well as with a feel for the subtle shade, the delicate suggestion. And on the wing-waft, as it were, of this sense Milton the poet of heroic religiosity brought something of the old tenderness into his epic and cut by the exquisite edge of that tenderness into significant depths of the soul to make up for whatever disadvantages of insight might result from the blind man's fate of being
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature's works,2
and to counteract the general hardening of sensibilities by those controversial years. The lines on "Proserpin", which are at once intense music and intense emotional significance conveyed with a rare delicacy and subtlety, are an outstanding instance. But there are other instances too. Even in the midst of the most sublime passages of Book I a wonderful emotional touch makes its appearance, creating one of the finest no less than greatest dramatic moments in all poetry. This moment is concerned with Satan's first speech after all his hosts have assembled:
He now prepared
To speak; whereat their double ranks they bend
From wing to wing, and half enclose him round
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With all his peers: Attention held them mute.
Thrice he essayed, and thrice, in spite of scorn,
Tears, such as Angels weep, burst forth: at last
Words interwove with sighs found out their way...3
To match this moment there is in Paradise Lost another which is to my mind unforgettable in the opposite way. In place of the mood of heroic devilry melting into poignant soulfulness we get the mood of absolutely human gentleness rising to a heavenly heroism in the words of Eve after Adam has uttered a harsh condemnation of her for bringing about the fall of them both and provoking God's anger and punishment:
"Forsake me not thus, Adam! witness Heaven
What love sincere and reverence in my heart
I bear thee, and unweeting have offended,
Unhappily deceived! Thy suppliant
I beg, and clasp thy knees; bereave me not
Whereon I live, thy gentle looks, thy aid,
Thy counsel in this uttermost distress,
My only strength and stay. Forlorn of thee,
Whither shall I betake me, where subsist?
While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps,
Between us two let there be peace; both joining,
As joined in injuries, one enmity
Against a foe by doom express assigned us,
That cruel Serpent. On me exercise not
Thy hatred for this misery befallen –
On me already lost, me than thyself
More miserable. Both have sinned; but thou
Against God only; I against God and thee,
And to the place of judgment will return,
There with my cries importune Heaven, that all
The sentence, from thy head removed, may light
On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe,
Me, me only, just object of His ire."4
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I cannot think of a more beautiful piece of tender and profound pathos than those words:
Between us two let there be peace...
And how apt is the artistry! A simple movement at the beginning, then a succession of four stressed monosyllables - "scarce one short hour" - as if the words were sobbed out with some effort, then the adverb "perhaps" releasing the tension and suggesting by its h a small outflow of the breath in a sort of controlled sigh and then the final phrase, smooth yet with a subtle tug of emotion by means of the semi-inverted accent in the third foot - "let there" - and the general inversion, very naturally managed, of the two parts of the expression - namely,
Between us two let there be peace,
instead of
Let there be peace between us two.
This general inversion is quadruply effective. For one thing it throws into relief that semi-inverted third foot: without it we should have "let there" at the very start of the line where it would be hardly noticed as anything unusual. Again, the balanced sounds at the commencement and at the termination of the phrase - "between" and "be peace" - would be absent and in their place we should have a crowding of the same combinations of short and long sounds: "be peace between..." Further, without the general inversion, the long sound of "peace" would break upon us suddenly - with some violence, instead of peacefully, whereas at present it is prepared by the second syllable of "between" and comes like a crowning inevitability as though it were an absolute need of the occasion once "between" has started the rhythmic movement. Finally, the hushing sibilance with which we are
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left at the phrase-end in a culmination of a series of terminal s-sounds running through the rest of the phrase ("scarce", "perhaps", "us") would have disappeared and most of the value of the word "peace" as well as of the total emotional gesture would have been lost.
I may add one more remark. In the midst of an individual situation what I have called in another connection the world-cry enters here with "scarce one short hour perhaps". For, this turn catches the uncertainty of all life lived under the shadow of death: the stab of the brevity threatening human existence everywhere is felt and a statement directly apply-ing to Adam and Eve grows prototypal and fills with a universal tone.
Possibly the lines acquire a special intensity because a personal reminiscence steals both into the drama appropriate to Adam and Eve and into the sense of the ubiquitous human condition. Indeed, the whole passage bears to my mind an autobiographical note. The lines immediately preceding it and expressing Adam's condemnation of Eve and his broad vision of the discord which Woman would bring into Man's life throughout history have been regarded by most commentators as an echo of Milton's own bitter experience at the beginning of his first marriage. But not many care to remember that what commenced as a sort of tragic farce ended in an entirely different strain and that Adam's speech is only one part of Milton's personal expression here: it must be taken together with Eve's speech in order to give a true and complete autobiographical picture.
Let us attend a little to Milton's early married life, all the more with the aim to dispel the common idea that Milton was a rather unpleasant husband to his first wife. Milton was thirty-four in 1642 when he suddenly took a journey into the countryside, nobody knowing why. He went there a bachelor and after a month returned a married man. He brought home Mary Powell, the seventeen-year old daughter of a Royalist Justice of Peace. A little later war broke out between the Royalists and the Roundheads (the Puritans) to whose
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party Milton belonged. Just before the war Mary's parents invited her to their house. Hardly a month had passed since the marriage. Milton consented to her visit on condition that she would return soon. But Mary prolonged her stay at her parents' place and refused to come back when Milton wrote pressing letters. She shared her parents' Royalist views and it was political difference that was largely the cause of the breakdown of the marriage: some responsibility should be ascribed also to Mary's rather gay upbringing and Milton's rather serious temperament. Milton was extremely incensed for a while and took the occasion to publish two pamphlets, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Tetrachordon, in which he vehemently argued that incompatibility of mind is more destructive of married happiness than adultery itself which in law is the main ground conceded for divorce. Although his pamphlets came out on the heels of his marital failure we must not imagine that he cooked up his views on divorce to suit his own needs. There is evidence5 that he held advanced views even earlier and had already projected books on the subjects of ecclesiastical and civil and domestic liberties, all of which he wrote in the course of a few years.
The divorce pamphlets made Milton very unpopular by their bold position and did not bring his wife back. However, when Oxford, her home-town, was in danger of falling to the Roundheads and the King's fortunes were in decline every-where, her people thought it politic to patch up differences. They were further encouraged in this by the rumour that Milton, considering himself virtually unmarried, was paying court to a gifted young woman, a Miss Davis. So Mary was sent to London, and one evening when Milton was on a customary visit to a relation of his, Mr. Blackborough, she waited in another room. Suddenly she entered. Edward Phillips tells the story: "He was surprised to see one whom he thought to have never seen more making submission and begging pardon on her knees before him. He might probably at first make some show of aversion and rejection; but partly his own generous nature, more inclinable to reconciliation
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than to perseverance in anger and revenge, and partly the strong intercession of friends on both sides, soon brought him to an act of oblivion, and a firm league for peace for the future..." Mary herself may well have pleaded Eve-like for peace between them.
Three children were born in the rest of their married life. "But," as Phillips writes, "it was not only by children that she increased the number of the family." For, after the fall of Oxford, many of Mary's kindred - her father and mother and several brothers and sisters - came to live with Milton. They got badly on his nerves yet he let them be until Mary's father died, shortly after which the Powells moved out. It showed remarkable magnanimity on the poet's part not only to shelter the pack of his wife's relatives but also to live cheek by jowl for four years with a family temperamentally no less than politically at odds with him. And if he had not been particularly attached to Mary, he could hardly have succeeded in being so magnanimous for so long.
What about his life with Mary up to the time she died in 1652? Is any analogy possible between it and his depiction of Adam's life with Eve? Adam and Eve are shown as most harmonious after their quarrel and reconciliation. But it is generally supposed that Milton's relations with Mary were not particularly happy at any period: she is often looked upon as the model for Dalila in Samson Agonistes. This is an error. Milton's nephews have reported that Mary lived in good accord with her husband until her death. And there is the sonnet on "my late espoused Saint", in which Milton speaks with much feeling apropos of a dream about his dead wife, and in which the dead wife bends to embrace him. The sonnet is said to be on his second wife Katharine Woodcock because of two reasons. In it he speaks of his wife having died in childbed and Katharine is said to have died after giving birth to a daughter. Again, the sonnet speaks of his wife's face being veiled: Milton had married Katharine nearly five years after his total blindness and the dream reflected his lack of physical sight of her. Un-
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fortunately, both the arguments are ineffective.
Professor W. R. Parker has submitted that the sonnet refers to Mary and not Katharine. For, in the first place, while Mary actually died as the result of childbirth, just three days after her daughter Deborah had been born, Katharine died four months after giving birth to her child and the immediate cause of her death was consumption though the disease may have been brought on by the birth of that child. In the second place, we are being fanciful in interpreting the veiled face as a pointer to the fact that Milton had never seen Katharine physically: the sonnet itself unequivocally indicates that the poet had seen his wife in reality, for his dream brought her to him
... such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of Her in Heaven without restraint...6
Now there is no evidence that Milton had seen Katharine five years earlier than his marriage to her, while the biographical fact is that Mary, whom he had married almost ten years previous to his blindness, died a year subsequent to his loss of sight. The lines above bear all this out convincingly: they have the words "once more" which clearly imply that in Heaven he would have "full sight" of her a second time and the phrase "without restraint" suggests that he would resume in Heaven what had been interrupted on earth by his blindness even before her death. If nothing else were there, the turn "once more" would be enough to rule out Katharine as the subject of the poem. And if she is ruled out, who else than Mary can remain? The veiled face can be of none else than her. And since we know that she whom Milton had seen for over nine years was obscured to his eyes for a year or so before her death, the veiling could very easily be under-stood as symbolising this later obscuration. On a deeper level which is suggested by the whiteness and luminosity associated with her -
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Came vested all in white, pure as her mind...
So clear as in no face with more delight7
the veiling could symbolise an element of divine or heavenly mystery entering into the dream-figure of the woman who belonged no longer to the earth.
So Milton's relations with Mary in the wake of their quarrel and reconciliation may be traced in those of Adam with Eve. And a personal tone may be considered vibrant in the last passage of Paradise Lost which displays their harmony all the more touchingly because its subject is their expulsion from the happy Garden, and which finds the epic Milton in another of his tenderer and most beautiful spells. Archangel Raphael and the Guardian Cherubim of Eden have been missioned by God to see the human pair out of Paradise, not urgently yet with the brandished sword of God blazing high in front and the bright array of Cherubim closing in behind. Raphael personally takes them to the frontier of common earth:
In either hand the hastening Angel caught
Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain - then disappeared.
They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.8
So wonderfully appropriate a close, in every detail, is this that it should come as a surprise indeed that anybody was
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not satisfied with it. And yet ever since Addison there has been discussion over the final lines. Addison proposed to omit the last two. He said that they strike a note of sadness which is not in keeping with an epic theme: an epic should, in his view, end cheerfully. Perhaps he meant that there should be an accent of calmness or fortitude and no pathetic touch. But I think Milton has here so subdued a pathos that both fortitude and calmness are conjured up. Four elements have to be considered. The steps of Adam and Eve are slow, because they are not in a hurry to leave Paradise where they have spent a delightful life before the Fall and where they would have best been able to forget the punishment incurred for the falling. The steps are wandering, because there is as yet no fixed goal to their journey beyond and a wide world is before them, through which there can be a great deal of moving about. The pair is now all on its own, the Angels do not keep it company and God will not be directly talking to Adam as He used to do prior to the Fall. But, against the force of the word "solitary" and encompassing all the other suggestions, we have the ruling initial phrase: " hand in hand." Adam and Eve were never so united in heart as they are at this moment: hence a deep and happy though humble strength is in them and its presence, put by Milton at the very start of his final phrase, subdues the pathos of the situation and leaves us with a serenity in the sadness, a sweet courage in the ache of exile. To omit the couplet would be to sacrifice poetic subtlety and fineness and a profoundly imaginative precision in picturing La condition humaine.
Peck, in opposition to Addison, felt that to omit the last two lines would maim the expression, but he was one with Addison in regarding them as an unsuitable ending. So he proposed putting them before and not after
I suppose the phrase "and Providence their guide" gives a
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religio-moralistic colour which appeals to a certain type of mind. And in itself its final position would not be anything objectionable. But we would be shutting the book with a last impression on the mind instead of with a last movement in the heart: perhaps there might also be a soupgon of smugness. The close which Milton himself has provided is far better. And how will Peck's transposition assort with the line which would now precede the real close? Just see the new combi-nation:
Through Eden took their solitary way.
We have a succession of gestures without any aptness in the series. In the version made by Milton, after the act of wiping the tears, comes the phrase about the world being all before them to choose the place of rest from, and about Providence being their guide. That is a sort of reason for not weeping much. And when Providence was their inner or secret guide, they might well find a silent happiness not only in each other but even in their solitude or outward and seeming God-forsakenness; the words "hand in hand" follow quite felicitously where Milton has placed them and would interrupt the inward logic of the whole situation if transposed anywhere else. Peck's proposal takes off with one hand what it concedes with the other: it is really as gauche as Addison's.
But, as noted by F. L. Lucas, perhaps it is Bentley who really takes the cake in gaucherie. He holds up the adjective "wandering" and comments in effect: "Erratic steps? Very improper. Was not Providence their guide? Then how can one say 'wandering'? Milton's mind must have been wandering." Bentley falls foul also of "solitary". His opinion is that, since after all Adam had Eve and nobody else and Eve had nobody except Adam, the two of them could not be more solitary out of Paradise than in it. Raising his eyebrows over everything in the couplet, he proposes an emendment
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which, according to him, is "as close as may be to the author's words and entirely agreeable to his scheme"; he wishes us to read thus
Then, hand in hand, with social steps their way
Through Eden took, with Heavenly comfort cheered.
I wonder if even Addison would have concurred with Bentley, despite the word "cheered" by which he literally satisfies Addison's demand for a cheerful termination to an epic.
All attempts to improve Milton are bound to fail: his whole final passage is perfect. And it carries us back to the very beginning of the poem where the theme is enunciated. The "happy seat" in our passage harks back to the "blissful seat" there. Similarly, we have both there and here the mention of "Eden". And Milton gives a further echo in "Providence their guide" and in "solitary way" to the lines with which ends the overture of the epic, the invocation to the Heavenly Muse and the Spirit of God:
And justify the ways of God to men.
The "argument" in this context has the Latin meaning of "theme" and we are led by its presence to take the two lines after it as part of the Miltonic theme - a procedure which is supported by the recurrence of "Providence" in the epic's terminal passage. On the other hand, the "ways" of the initial passage throws a light on the "way" in the terminal and subtly counteracts the adjective "solitary": it is as if, even in the "solitary way" of Adam and Eve, God's "ways" were still present as true justice: thus "solitary way" is brought into rapport with the guidance of Providence mentioned a little earlier. So we have an interesting and helpful crosslight between the two ends of Paradise Lost and a general illumination of the depths of the theme.
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We shall now discuss briefly these depths. But before we do so, let me note that "paradise" and "Eden" are not synonymous as we usually suppose. After leaving the gate of "Paradise", Adam and Eve are still in Eden, taking their solitary way through it. The fact is that the "blissful seat" was only a part of the land of Eden, it was situated in Eden's eastern side, as may be gathered from several lines in Paradise Lost and most definitely perhaps from these in Book IV:
for blissful Paradise
Of God the garden was, by him in the east
Of Eden planted; Eden stretched her line
From Auran eastward to the royal towers
Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian kings
Or where the sons of Eden long before
Dwelt in Telassar.9
In Milton's vision, as detailed earlier in the same Book,10 the garden of Paradise is the top of a mound in the midst of a plain: hence in the closing passage Adam and Eve are led by the Angel
down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain...
The adjective "subjected" has the force of the Latin "subjectus", meaning "lying under, bordering".
1.At a Vacation Exercise, 33-4.
2.Bk. III, 48-9.
3.Bk. I, 618-24.
4.Bk. X, 915-36.
5.Cf. Kenneth Muir, Milton, pp. 64-72, 77-8.
6.Sonnet on "my late espousèd Saint", 7-8.
7.Ibid., 9, 11-12.
8.Bk. XII, 637-44.
9.Bk. IV, 208-14.
10. Ibid., 132-5.
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XI
At the very outset the problem of the theme of Paradise Lost is bedevilled by the figure of Satan. So mightily alive - indeed the sole living character in the poem - is the Arch-demon that all other concerns than his are from the dramatic viewpoint dwarfed. And, if by the theme is meant whatever grips us most out of a work, Paradise Lost has its burning centre in the fortunes of Satan. Whether Milton intended it or no, the Fall of Satan, his fight against God and Man, his heroism or villainy, his success or failure are the main interest of the epic. But Satan's doings have evidently to be seen with chief reference to the Fall of Man which he brings about: the title of the poem requires attention to be focussed on this Fall and its consequences. And the formal as distinguished from the informal theme is indeed the one which Milton states in his opening lines:
Sing, Heavenly Muse...
And supplementing this formal theme is the purpose ex-pressed at the close of the second invocation in the same paragraph, the call to God's creative Spirit to illumine and purify the poet,
Milton officially devotes himself to the setting forth of God's justice in regard to Man's Fall which was caused - as in
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answer to the question in the next passage he tells us - by Satan in the guise of a serpent. But, with this answer, he launches on his fundamental though unofficial theme and briefly pricks out the figure of his villain-hero and the tale of his great yet sacrilegious and reprehensible no less than doomed enterprise:
The infernal Serpent; he it was whose guile,
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The Mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel Angels, by whose aid, aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equalled the Most High
If he opposed, and, with ambitious aim,
Against the throne and monarchy of God,
Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud,
With vain attempt.1
It is necessary to see Paradise Lost in a complex rather than in a simple manner if we are to cope with its full develop-ment. The poem is multi-mooded and we shall show scarce appreciation of its genius by overstressing either Satan or else Adam and Eve. The spotlight of intention is on the Fall of Man, but the broad revealing sweep of the execution makes the Fall of Satan the epic subject and, in effect, the poet's assertion of Eternal Providence is in relation to both Satan and Man. God Himself juxtaposes them in general apropos of His mention of the freewill gifted to Man:
I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all the Ethereal Powers
And Spirits, both them who stood and them who failed;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.2
In particular too God juxtaposes Man and Satan when He
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speaks of the future of the rebel Angels on the one hand and on the other the future of human beings:
The first sort by their own suggestion fell,
Self-tempted, self-depraved; Man falls, deceived
By the other first: Man, therefore, shall find grace;
The other, none.3
With this word of warning against simplification of the Miltonic theme we may leave Satan aside except for a few remarks, for he has been sufficiently commented on by critics. Sri Aurobindo, touching on Milton's high "aim" and lofty "subject", writes: "there is nowhere any more magnificently successful opening than the conception and execution of his Satan and Hell, the living spirit of egoistic revolt fallen to its natural element of darkness and pain, yet preserving still the greatness of the divine principle from which he was born."4 Sri Aurobindo here catches Milton's supreme insight in a nutshell. But Milton does not conceive and execute Satan always from a deep-seeing height. Instead of making both his bravery and his baseness natural, as it were, to his fallen supernature on every occasion, a fear in Milton lest the Arch-Rebel should completely run away with the poem works in places, charging the poetry with a self-baulking motive. It is not only in the later parts of the epic that Satan ceases to be heroic under Milton's hand: even in the earlier half we have small "asides", countering the remnant of the original divine principle's greatness. Thus, after one of the bravest outbursts at almost the beginning,5 we get the depreciating "aside" on "the Apostate Angel":
Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair...6
Again, in Book I itself we are told of his
high words that bore
Semblance of worth, not substance...7
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In Book IV we overhear him soliloquising on his boast to his fellows that he could subdue "The Omnipotent":
Ay me, they little know
Under what torments inwardly I groan,
While they adore me on the throne of Hell.8
Now we may pass on to Man. We shall dwell on Man's fate as summarised in the divine judgment that he shall find grace. But to find grace must not be understood to mean that Man would be totally and immediately forgiven: payment must be made for transgressing God's law. Only, the payment will not be the final act nor will it be equal to the results of grace. The very next sentence in God's mouth to the one quoted runs:
In mercy and justice both,
Through Heaven and Earth, so shall my glory excel;
But mercy, first and last, shall brightest shine.9
Here we have a statement about God's ways, the work of Eternal Providence.
It is often thought that in regard to Man Paradise Lost is concerned merely with his Fall and God's punishment of him - punishment which, though harsh enough in principle, is tempered with some kindness in practice. Indeed, the actual event poetised of Man's history is this Fall and that punishment: hence the title of the poem. But just as the events in Heaven and elsewhere preceding the drama in the Garden of Paradise are an important part of the epic, so also Man's fate subsequent to that drama is a significant portion of it. Unlike what precedes the drama in Paradise, it is not narrated as fact; but it is rendered vividly present by prophecy and promise and preachment. The epic, in its vision and message, is as much concerned with it as with the
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narrated fact. And Milton takes care in his opening passage itself to bring it in; for, he speaks there of one greater Man coming and restoring fallen humanity and regaining the blissful seat. All these things and not exclusively Man's first disobedience and its consequences, the advent of death and all our woe, are implied as thematic in Milton's opening passage. Eternal Providence, therefore, must connote more than the justice meted out to Man for his disobedience. And what it does connote becomes fairly explicit in phrases pretty early in the same Book that states the theme. Thus a speech of Satan's about God has the words:
... if then his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good...10
And soon after these words on the beneficent office of Providence we have lines where Milton formulates God's ways with both Satan and Man apropos of Satan's being left at large,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enraged might see
How all his malice served but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy, shown
On Man by him seduced, but on himself
Treble confusion, death, and vengeance poured.11
Surely, if infinite goodness, mercy and grace are shown on Man, we have to go far beyond the context of death and woe inflicted on him as penalty for his sin and, if they are shown in answer to all of Satan's malice, we have to view that very death and woe as an expression of them; for the results, which Satan's malice has meant to be death and woe and which apparently are what it has meant them to be, serve as starting-points for the manifestation of infinite goodness, mercy and grace - manifestation which could never have
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happened without those results. It is thus possible to say paradoxically, "Those results themselves are a blessing to Man and they enable him to get gifts from God which he in an unfallen state could never have received." It is this paradox that is not only implied in the passage we have quoted but also hinted at in the later phrase we have already cited:
But mercy, first and last, shall brightest shine.
What is the force of the word "first"? We can understand how mercy could last shine brightest: the end would be glorious. But to shine brightest first the mercy would have to be present in the very situation that sets off the mechanism of justice: in other words, the temptation of Man, his Fall and the punishment it involves must all be intensely visible in the total story of God's ways with humanity as a supreme mercy under temporary disguise.
Such a transfiguring retrospect is analogous to the one suggested by Milton in reference to world-creation. When the starry universe is created with the race of Man at its centre, the multitudes of Heaven sing the Creator's praise and pitting the new World against the so-called loss of worshippers which Satan's defection has caused to Heaven they declare:
Who seeks
To lessen them, against his purpose, serves
To manifest the more thy might; his evil
Thou usest, and from thence creat'st more good.12
But we should note in the same context that the race of men at the core of the "more good" which is the starry universe - "another Heaven/From Heaven not far"13 - is called "thrice happy" with a condition hanging to their happiness: soon after being declared blessed they are re-characterised:
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thrice happy, if they know
Their happiness, and persevere upright!14
This is all in tune with the emphasis on the great woe emanating from Man's disobedience. Milton keeps the woe-motif running everywhere, but his composition is shot with counterpoint: without diminishing the woe-motif he sets up an opposite current of secret significance which prepares us for a dazzling climax in Book XII where the ways of God stand completely vindicated within Miltonic Christianity. Framing this climax we have the phrases addressed to Adam –
then wilt thou not be loth
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier far – 15
and –
the Earth
Shall be all Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden...16
The one phrase refers to a subjective condition of right living according to Christian precepts and the indwelling "Spirit of God", the other to an objective condition of terrestrial life at the end of history. And both the states are implied in the climax which is put in Adam's mouth after Raphael has revealed to him how Man's historical travail born of his Fall will terminate - historical travail acquiring an utterly new orientation by the coming of Christ once in the midst of history and again for Final Judgment. Adam exclaims:
O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense,
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good - more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
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Light out of darkness! Full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By me done and occasioned, or rejoice
Much more that much more good thereof shall spring –
To God more glory, more goodwill to men
From God - and over wrath grace shall abound.17
Milton-scholars know this passage as the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall. Arthur C. Lovejoy18 has written on it at some length and traced the general idea of it, through several predecessors of Milton in the poetic field, ultimately to an old hymn of the fourth or fifth century A.D., which says, "O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem!" ("O happy fault, which has deserved to have so great a redeemer!") and to St. Ambrose of the fourth century who cries out: "Felix ruina, quae reparatur in melius" ("Happy is the downfall which is restored for the better"). Lovejoy, how-ever, feels that this idea and Milton's special theme in his epic do not quite interplay. He writes: "... the culmination of the redemptive process in human history was also for Milton the culminating theme in his poem. Yet it undeniably placed the story of the Fall, which was the subject of the poem announced at the outset, in somewhat ambiguous light; when it was borne in mind, man's first disobedience could not seem the deplorable thing which for the purposes of the poet - and of the theologian - it was important to make it appear. The only solution was to keep the two themes separate. In the part of the narrative dealing primarily with the Fall the thought that it was after all a felix culpa must not be permitted explicitly to intrude; that was to be reserved for the conclusion, where it could heighten the happy final consummation by making the earlier and unhappy episodes in the story appear as instrumental to that consummation, and indeed as its necessary conditions."
Lovejoy is right in telling us that there is no explicit intrusion of the felix culpa in the portions of the poem concerned primarily with the Fall. But the implicit presence
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of it is undoubtedly strong and Milton intended the reader to have a glimmering of it - a glimmering only, of course, since otherwise his climax would be spoiled. It is not true that he keeps the two themes separate. I should opine that the Fall-theme is like the crescent moon which carries in its arms the remainder of the orb in a shadowy fashion and, as this theme gets developed, the orb gets more and more filled out with light though its full form shows itself not before that passage in Book XII. The shadowy fashion is perfectly visible -"darkness visible" - from the very First Book of Paradise Lost: the words "O Goodness infinite" and "over wrath grace shall abound" are anticipated there by "Infinite goodness, grace and mercy" and similarly the final
That all this good of evil shall produce
is already there in
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good.
The sole new nuance in Book XII, which introduces the setting out of the fortunate character of the Fall with absolute explicitness, is the phrase: "And evil turn to good."
Book II, in passing, carries on the thread of the theme. After Beelzebub has suggested that the fallen Angels should avenge themselves on God by perverting God's new favourite, Man, about whom rumour has reached them, Milton attributes this "devilish counsel" in origin to Satan himself:
for whence
But from the Author of all ill could spring
So deep a malice, to confound the race
Of mankind in one root, and Earth with Hell
To mingle and involve, done all to spite
The great Creator?19
Then Milton adds:
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but their spite still serves
His glory to augment.
Here also is an anticipation of Man's good coming out of evil, though the terms are general, summed up in God's "glory".
The theme is kept ringing in our ears by a couple of indirect variations on it in the same Book. What the fallen Angels fear of God's subtle design they try in their own way to imitate for their own furtherance. Satan declares from the pit of Hell:
I give not Heaven for lost. From this descent
Celestial Virtues rising will appear
More glorious and more dread than from no fall.20
One of Satan's colleagues, Mammon, plays on the same point:
Our greatness will appear
Then most conspicuous when great things of small,
Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse,
We can create, and in what place so e'er
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain
Through labour and endurance.21
The expression, no doubt, is perverse, but it serves in a negative fashion to sow more seeds of the theme's later flowering.
Book III develops the suggestions of Books I and II in a manner that almost forestalls Book XII. Even apart from the phrase about mercy, first and last, shining brightest, we have a whole passage foreshadowing the long description of Christ's work and of the world's end in Book XII. Let us look at some of the highlights of this description. Raphael says to Adam:
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thy punishment
He shall endure, by coming in the flesh
To a reproachful life and cursed death,
Proclaiming life to all who shall believe
In his redemption, and that his obedience
Imputed becomes theirs by faith - his merits
To save them, not their own, though legal, works...22
... So he dies
But soon revives; Death over him no power
Shall long usurp. Ere the third dawning light
Return, the stars of morn shall see him rise
Out of his grave, fresh as the dawning light,
Thy ransom paid, which Man from Death redeems...23
... This godlike act
Annuls thy doom, the death thou shouldst have died...24
Then to the Heaven of Heavens he shall ascend
With victory triumphing through the air
Over his foes and thine; there shall surprise
The Serpent, Prince of Air, and draw in chains
Through all his realm, and there confounded leave;
Then enter into glory and resume
His seat at God's right hand, exalted high,
Above all names in Heaven; and thence shall come,
When this World's dissolution shall be ripe,
With glory and power, to judge both quick and dead -
To judge the unfaithful dead, but to reward
His faithful, and receive them into bliss,
Whether in Heaven or Earth; for then the Earth
Than this of Eden, and far happier days.25
Less than a hundred lines later Raphael reverts to the subject of the World's end after speaking of the decline of Truth and works of Faith:
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So shall the World go on,
To good malignant, to bad men benign,
Under its own weight groaning, till the day
Appear of respiration to the just
And vengeance to the wicked, at return
Of Him so lately promised to thy aid...26
Last in the clouds from Heaven to be revealed
In glory of the Father, to dissolve
Satan with his perverted World; then raise
From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined,
New Heavens, new Earth, Ages of endless date
Founded in righteousness and peace and love,
To bring forth fruits, joy, and eternal bliss.27
Now let us go back to Book III. At first, after God's promise of grace and His demand for a sacrifice to appease justice, Christ is speaking:
Behold me, then: me for him, life for life,
I offer; on me let thine anger fall;
Account me Man: I for his sake will leave
Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly die
Well pleased; on me let Death wreak all his rage...28
But I shall rise victorious, and subdue
My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil
Death his death's wound shall then receive, and stoop
Inglorious, of his mortal sting disarmed;
I through the ample air in triumph high
Shall lead Hell captive maugre Hell, and show
The powers of Darkness bound. Thou, at the sight
Pleased, out of Heaven, shalt look down and smile,
While, by thee raised, I ruin all thy foes...29
Then, with the multitude of my redeemed,
Shall enter Heaven, long absent, and return,
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Father, to see thy face, wherein no cloud
Of anger shall remain, but peace assured
And reconcilement: wrath shall be no more...30
God speaks next. Towards the end of His speech we read of Christ's reward on his return and of the Final Judgment:
All knees to thee shall bow of them that bide
In Heaven, or Earth, or, under Earth, in Hell.
When thou, attended gloriously from Heaven,
Shalt in the sky appear, and from thee send
The summoning Archangels to proclaim
Thy dread tribunal, forthwith from all winds
The living, and forthwith the cited dead
Of all past ages, to the general doom
Shall hasten; such a peal shall rouse their sleep.
Then, all thy Saints assembled, thou shalt judge
Bad men and Angels; they arraigned shall sink
Beneath thy sentence; Hell, her numbers full,
Thenceforth shall be for ever shut. Meanwhile
The World shall burn, and from her ashes spring
New Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell,
And, after all their tribulations long,
See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds,
With Joy and Love triumphing, and fair Truth...31
It is clear that almost the whole context within which the paradox of the felix culpa can burst upon us is already present quite early in Paradise Lost. So a reader with a good memory will hardly feel that Milton has gone back on his tracks. The felix culpa is the logical concept arising from those early passages if one realises intensely the drama of redemption - God becoming Man, revealing depths of mercy in divinity that would else have never come forth, and establishing at last a divine kingdom on earth which would compensate for all the tribulations endured. But Milton, master artist that he is, keeps back the one phrase which
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would throw into sharp relief the fortunateness of the Fall much before Book XII. Nowhere in Book III do we have anything corresponding openly to turns like "far happier place" and "far happier days." Only the somewhat cryptic "mercy, first and last" is allowed to glimmer out. And in Book VII a suggestion is indirectly made when apropos of World-creation we read of Satan's evil being used by God to create "more good". Thus Milton works most skilfully towards his climax, so that it is a surprise at the same time that on a back-look it appears inevitable, perfectly prepared. Lovejoy is mistaken in saying that the two themes are held separate: they are really held together but in a subtle manner playing with their congruence without fully catching our attention.
The thematic structure of Paradise Lost is metaphysical in the modern sense, based on the so-called Metaphysical Poets of the seventeenth century, that there is a tug of opposites, a fusion of contraries, an intriguing uncertainty between a human tragedy and a divine comedy. From the start itself the metaphysical tension is introduced by the subsidiary clause -"till one greater Man..." – in the opening phrase about Man's first disobedience. In Book III the tension reaches a clear form, for there the redemptive process is expounded.
And there, with the treatment of the redemption, a momentous question becomes pertinent which carries us straight into the metaphysical not in the sense of a tug of contraries but in that of an ultimate world-philosophy. Linked with this question are several others arising from the doctrinal passages of Paradise Lost. And some of them have such unexpected implications that no survey of Milton's poem would be true to Miltonism without an appraisal of his metaphysics.
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1. Bk. I, 34-44.
2. Bk. III, 98-102.
3.Ibid., 129-32.
4.The Future Poetry and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1972), p. 84.
5.Bk. I, 94-124.
6.Ibid., 126.
7.Ibid., 531-2.
8.Bk. IV, 86-9.
9.Ibid., 132-4.
10.Ibid., 162-3.
11.Bk. I, 214-20.
12.Bk. VII, 613-6.
13.Ibid., 617-8.
14.Ibid., 631-2.
15.Bk. XII, 586-8.
16.Ibid., 463-5.
17.Ibid., 469-78.
18."Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall", A Journal of English Literary History, Sept., 1937.
19.Bk. II, 380-5.
20.Ibid., 14-6.
21.Ibid., 257-62.
22.Bk. XII, 404-10.
23.Ibid., 419-24.
24.Ibid., 437-8.
25.Ibid., 451-65.
26.Ibid., 337-42.
27.Ibid., 545-51.
28.Bk. III, 236-41.
29.Ibid., 236-58.
30.Ibid., 260-4.
31.Ibid., 321-38.
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XII
B. Rajan, in his important study, Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader, has observed that Paradise Lost was meant to be an epic of the Christian world and therefore aimed at the utmost general conformity to the body of universal Christian belief. The words "utmost general" are, of course, the operative ones. Rajan would hardly deny unorthodox traces. Milton, being what he was, would certainly not violate his own integrity by quite submerging his differences from universal Christianity; but, according to Rajan, he would never let them obtrude in a work which was intended to be a moral and religious poem, not a systematic theological treatise in verse, and whose appeal should be to every Christian mind.
No doubt, Milton's metaphysics - his vision of ultimate realities, his basic world-philosophy - comes out as universally Christian in its dramatic part: Satan's opposition in Heaven, God's way with it, Man's original state and its loss, the role of Evil in world-history, God's providential bringing of Good out of Evil through Christ's intercession. And perhaps this part has mattered most to Christendom. But it should not induce us to agree with Rajan.
For, we can show how Milton, at least once, makes no bones about his poor opinion of Roman Catholicism, the creed of the Christian majority, and how without raising explicit theological controversies he is absolutely clear in his unorthodox tenets wherever he sets them forth in a poetic manner organic to his tale.
At a point in Book III his prejudice against the Roman Church gets so much the better of him that he frames a downright condemnation of all its religious orders and instruments. The close of the picture of Limbo evidences no attempt to be unobtrusive in sectarian attitude. That "Paradise of Fools" is reserved for "all things vain", all hope-
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builders on vain things, all half-finished or hideous "works of Nature's hand" including not only "embryos and idiots" but also
eremites and friars,
White, black and grey, with all their trumpery.1
And among the vain things are to be seen
Cowls, hoods and habits, with their wearers tosst
And fluttered into rags, then relics, beads,
Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls.2
We may gauge the extreme strength of Milton's anti-Roman bias by noting that the context in which it leaps out is perhaps the only one where he writes inconsistently with the doctrinal passages occurring from Book III onward. Here we have the suggestion of human beings existing after death in a recognisable form, even though the existence is but in a Chamber of Horrors, as it were. This suggestion, as we shall demonstrate, is at odds with Milton's heterodox solution of the problem of what a few lines earlier he calls "the other life". Ironically, horror-crowded Limbo appears to constitute his sole concession to the body of universal Christian belief in the field concerned. And it strikes us that Milton is carried away on a flight of fancy spurred by vehement antipathies, and is not altogether conscious of doctrinal implications. In all other places where he fits metaphysics into poetry, especially when some celestial being who cannot but be endowed with responsible knowledgeableness is made to talk, Milton's meaning is unequivocal. And its frequent non-conforming peculiarity should go home to anybody who is not rapt away from intellectual questions by (to quote Todd) "his sweet and solemn-breathing strains" or (to quote Rajan) his "background of incantation".
We shall not involve ourselves in every metaphysical detail and turn; nor shall we more than touch on the
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Unitarian-Trinitarian dispute - whether Milton believes Christ to be co-essential with God or inferior to Him. We shall briefly busy ourselves, in the Miltonic context, with the fundamental nature of God, the relation of it to that of His Creation, the nature of man's spirit and body, man's future on earth and beyond.
Milton's God has often been mocked: He has been dubbed a sophistical bore, a litigious autocrat, a dry-as-dust justicer. The mockery is partially correct, for a certain icy rhetoric is, time and again, put into God's mouth; but several aspects of Paternal Deity are easily overlooked and the lack of sympathy with which the modern mind receives that rhetoric leads one often to overlook the majesty and beneficence which still go with it. And even in the very first speech He makes, where He spins out in a lofty tone an unconvincing argument about foreknowledge and freewill, He ends with these quietly thrilling words:
But mercy, first and last, shall brightest shine.3
Similarly His second speech, equally self-important and severe though still lofty, ends on a grandly moving note: it is about man's sin and its sole possible expiation:
He with his whole posterity must die; -
Die he or Justice must; unless for him
Some other, able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.
Say, Heavenly Powers, where shall we find such love?
Which of ye will be mortal, to redeem
Man's mortal crime, and, just, the unjust to save?
Dwells in all Heaven charity so dear?4
Behind the facade of the tedious weaver of logomachy, the contentious enforcer of His own wish and the stern upholder
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of the letter of the law, we feel - in connection with man's frailty - a fathomless heart mysteriously planning man's final good from the very beginning, a mighty mind of intrinsic grace subtly evoking on the highest level an urge towards the redemption of mortality.
Nor must we forget that in this Book III, which first presents God to us, Milton through an account of the symphony of the Angels raises up an image and concept of God which is truly magnificent:
Thee, Father, first they sung, Omnipotent,
Immutable, Immortal, Infinite,
Eternal King; thee, Author of all being,
Fountain of Light, thyself invisible
Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st
Throned inaccessible, but when thou shad'st
The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud
Drawn round about thee like a radiant shrine
Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear,
Yet dazzle Heaven, that brightest Seraphim
Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes.5
Here we have a general definition or description of God's nature. Two later passages serve as a commentary on the expression "Author of all being". One is related to Christ's work of creation. God bids His Son go with His Power:
My overshadowing Spirit and might with thee
I send along; ride forth, and bid the Deep
Within appointed bounds be Heaven and Earth.
Infinitude; nor vacuous the space,
Though I, uncircumscribed, myself retire,
And put not forth my goodness, which is free
To act or not. Necessity and Chance
Approach not me, and what I will is Fate!6
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This is philosophical poetry at its most pregnant-puissant. Neither the sophist nor the bore is speaking. And, if the autocrat is heard, there is nothing litigious about him: we are drawn irresistibly into immeasurable profundities that leave us emptied of ourselves yet filled beyond all aching and seeking. Nothing of the justicer's dust-dry dealing confronts us: what we meet is the all-silencing wisdom, the all-brood-ing perfection of the Ineffable. Poetry equally fine and intense and "epiphanic" lays bare in his true intent Milton the metaphysician of God in Book VIII where Adam and God converse on the subject whether Adam should have a mate as he desires. God asks Adam:
What think'st thou, then, of me and this my state?
Seem I to be sufficiently possessed
Of happiness, or not, who am alone
From all eternity? for none I know
Second to me or like, equal much less...7
Adam, contrasting to God Man's limited and imperfect individuality which needs "collateral love" and has to beget its like and multiply its image, says:
To attain
The highth and depth of thy eternal ways
All human thoughts come short. Supreme of Things!
Thou in thyself art perfect, and in thee
Is no deficience found...8
... No need that thou
Should'st propagate, already infinite,
And through all numbers absolute, though One...9
Thou, in thy secrecy although alone,
Best with thyself accompanied, seek'st not
Social communication - yet, so pleased,
Canst raise thy creature to what highth thou wilt
Of union or communion, deified...10
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These passages point to a Godhead at once transcendent and immanent and cosmic. In His essential being He is one without a second. Above all the references usually taken as balancing each other and hanging in "dubious battle" in the Unitarian-Trinitarian debate we may put the general expressions - "alone from all eternity" and "none... second... or like, equal much less" - which render God unique and unparalleled. The expressions are nominally related to the occasion of Adam's problem of a mate but in themselves they might go the whole way with the "Arian heresy" of Christ's inferior status in Milton's later prose treatise, De Doctrina Christiana.
Yes, Paternal Deity is, as another phrase has it, in His "secrecy... alone"; yet His unity is neither sterile nor self-blocked. He can be ever productive, and His oneness is essential, not numerical, not broken or abrogated by many-ness. Being infinite, He runs His unity through all multiplicity and holds all "numbers" realized eternally in Himself. And even what we may consider distinct from Him - the Deep of Chaos before Creation - is really pervaded by His infinity and is nothing except Himself in a special state - a state in which His being exists with all His goodness inactive in it, withdrawn, as it were, by the freedom He eternally enjoys to put it forth or no. And when He chooses to put it forth, Creation takes place, an imposition of form upon a crude confused inconsistence of stuff. The assertion of His formative will upon that part of His substance from which He has "retired" is the creative process. Creation is not ex nihilo, out of nothing, as most Christians hold, but out of His own Self or, if we like, out of nothing except His own Self - His concentrated Self acting upon His Chaos-Self within His own single yet multipotent boundlessness. And in whatever He does He is neither compelled by anything outside Him nor driven haphazardly: He is sole and whole master and everything is decided by His decree.
However, His mastery and decision are to be understood in connection with His power to suspend His active virtue.
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By suspending this virtue He not only can leave part of Himself an undivine blindly driven Chaos: He also can leave a part of Himself divinely free from His own mastery and decision. There is the phrase:
God in Heaven
Is centre, yet extends to all...11
Here we get a higher counterpart to what is done with regard to Chaos. In Chaos the God-essence grows passive, the goodness inactive: in Heaven a withdrawal into centricity is accomplished and yet it does not render the God-essence null in what is left outside the centre: the divine goodness extends everywhere in Heaven without sacrificing its concentration as Something Other or without everything being God in His supremacy. The result is, in the first place, God as a particular Person no less than a general Presence and, in the second place, the company of Angels - of "Gods", as Milton often calls them - in distinction from the one central Godhead. In relation to these Gods the central Divinity Himself grows passive, as it were, and transfers to them a freewill akin to His own, though on a minor and less widely powerful scale. He is still lord over all inasmuch as He can overrule whatever is willed by others; and others can freely will nothing else, than what He permits. But He does not directly initiate their willings: He curbs His own omnipotence, voluntarily allows others to will by themselves. Thus He remains sole and whole master without being a dictator. Although able to determine everything and to arrest any-thing, He refrains, and He allows His creatures to exercise in free action the divine essence He has put into them. But, in the very movement of refraining from letting His omnipotence hold active sway over everything, He brings to birth a certain weakness in those whom He grants freedom: their freedom to act as they wish in distinction from God is the same as a weakness in them by which, though divine, they can act undivinely and fall from grace.
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All this complicated position is not stated explicitly by Milton but it is hinted at by him and perhaps most interest-ingly when God is made to say that nought done by Satan or by Adam was "immutably foreseen" by Him. Evidently, if anything is immutably foreseen, it cannot help happening precisely as foreseen: otherwise God would be proved essentially fallible. And, if immutably foreseen, everything would be predestined. Milton specifically says that the Maker's relation either to the Angels or to human beings in Eden is not
As if Predestination overruled
Their will, disposed by absolute decree
Or high foreknowledge.12
However, Milton does suggest some kind of foreknowledge on God's part, and he is not very clear in distinguishing it from the power by which things would be "immutably foreseen". He leads God to state:
If I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.13
Here we seem to face a contradiction: the fault, although foreknown to be certain, was not certain because of the foreknowledge. But the contradiction can be partly resolved on our realising that the certainty known beforehand was a logical deduction from God's perfect knowledge of the nature of the agents concerned. The agents were free to choose among the possibilities open to them, but their nature was such that under a particular set of circumstances they would be certain to act in one way and not another: they would be bound by their own nature and would be free only in the sense that nothing outside that nature bound them. Thus the resolution of the contradiction depends on a change of the meaning of the word "free". I wonder whether Milton
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himself was quite aware of the change. The change introduces a sophistry in the speech of God; and, if we do not allow it and stick to a perfect freedom of choice among the possibilities open, the foreknowledge which God can have is, according to that phrase about nothing being immutably foreseen, a mutable one. We can characterise it as the foreknowledge which, by a voluntary self-limitation, catches only an extreme probability because of God's perfect awareness of the nature of the agents - an extreme probability which amounts to practical though not absolute certainty.
Before we proceed further, we may remark that Milton's God, being the single substance that variously disposes its own infinitude as divine centre, heavenly self-extension, chaotic self-suppression, creative form-imposition, is not at all the God of common Christian belief. A pantheism is here of a special sort. It is not a pantheism such as Western thinkers posit, restricting the Supreme Existence by negating the Deity as Person and as Lord of all. It does not identify God and Nature or even God and Supernature to the exclusion of an independent over-ruling status. Miltonic pantheism is akin to the ancient Indian or Vedantic type, the realistic Adwaita of the Upanishads and the Gita rather than the later illusionistic one, though even the illusionistic has the same fundamental multi-aspected theology and differs from the realistic only in its ultimate attitude to the world. Of course, Vedanta has several features not found in Milton. And it may be asserted that Milton's system remains undeveloped and contains elements which have not been worked into a final harmony. But its basis is avowedly an omni-presence of God in a literal and substantial sense: this sense conflicts with the general Christian doctrine that God is omnipresent only by having His power active everywhere as creator, sustainer, overseer and not by being essentially identical with everything He freely creates and sustains and oversees.
In regard to the problem of angelic or human freewill, Milton seems to be in line with the usual Christian thought.
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And, in consonance with that thought, man's freewill in his system is a necessary postulate in relation to - among other things - the punishment God metes out to him. But when we consider the content of the punishment we are brought up once more against a Milton wildly at loggerheads with conventional Christianity. For, the problem of "the other life" is the burning topic here. And the right answer would be the one with the best logic, considering what God's punishment is generally taken to be and that it should apply most to the inner rather than the outer being of man since it is the former which is primarily concerned in the free disobedience constituting man's sin against God. The punishment is clearly defined in the first few lines of the epic, when man's disobedience is said to have
With loss of Eden...14
"Death" is the central stroke and we find that, Adam's "whole posterity must die" in payment of his sin, and this sentence can be relaxed only if God's Son incarnates himself and by his self-sacrifice pays "death for death". But, as the result of Christ's redeeming "Man's mortal crime", what do we get in place of death? In other words - to quote the poem's opening again - how does
one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat?15
To understand the nature of man's punishment it is important to grasp the character of Christ's restoration or redemption of man.
In Book III the restorative act, the redemptive process, is expounded in an explicit form for the first time and the terms used at the poem's opening gain their elucidation. God's long speech to Christ has the verses:
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... be thou in Adam's room
The head of all mankind, though Adam's son.
As in him perish all men, so in thee,
As from a second root, shall be restored
As many as are restored; without thee, none.
His crime makes guilty all his sons; thy merit,
Imputed, shall absolve them who renounce
Their own both righteous and unrighteous deeds,
And live in thee, transplanted, and from thee
Receive new life. So Man, as is most just,
Shall satisfy for Man, be judged and die,
And dying rise, and, rising, with him raise
His brothers ransomed with his own dear life.16
An unmistakable meaning resides in the term "restored". The restoration is of the life that Man forfeited through Adam's sin: the fate of perishing, of dying, which this sin incurred is in principle annulled by the death of God made Man who rises from the grave and thus assures the rising of the whole death-doomed race of Adam by resort to the power of God made Man and by abnegation of all power of self expressed either in human virtue or in human vice.
Now comes the crucial question. Christ conquers death by his resurrection after being laid in the grave. He rises bodily from death and, as we learn from other passages of the same Book, he ascends to Heaven in physical form. Thus, after God's promise of grace and His demand for a sacrifice to appease Justice, Christ says:
I offer; on me let thine anger fall;...17
My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil.
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Pleased, out of Heaven shalt look down and smile,
While, by thee raised, I ruin all thy foes...18
Then, with the multitude of my redeemed
And reconcilement: wrath shall be no more...19
God speaks next. Towards the end of His speech we read of Christ's reward on his return, the despatch by him of Archangels to proclaim the Last Judgment, the hastening from everywhere of the living and of all the dead roused from their sleep by a peal, the judging of "bad men and Angels" who will be shut up in Hell for ever:
Meanwhile
The world shall burn, and from her ashes spring
New Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell...20
The "New Earth" would mean the regaining of the blissful Seat, Eden, on a wider scale than before - an event about which we read also in Book XII with a more direct reference:
for then the Earth
Than this of Eden...21
The terrestrial Paradise would continue till the time when all the happy just ones would go to Heaven in their new physical bodies. If these passages are taken along with the other in a literal sense, the terms definitely imply that Man's redemption is identical with Christ's conquest of death: he is freed from death by being enabled to rise, like Christ, physically from the grave and ultimately to ascend to Heaven as Christ does. No other kind of death-conquest is implied.
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But, if man's bodily resurrection is the saving grace and the significant prelude to his regaining of Eden on the one side and his subsequent entry into Heaven on the other, the question of questions is: 'What happens to his inner being, his 'spirit', when the body dies - what happens to it in the period between the body's death and the physical resurrection?"
Ordinarily, we should suppose this crucial query in a Christian context to be concerned with an after-life in Heaven or Hell or Purgatory. And the early fanciful flight of Milton's about Limbo prompts an idea of after-life. But, when Adam is condemned to die, no after-life of any sort at all figures in his anxious thoughts. He poses the mournful argument:
Yet one doubt
Pursues me still - lest all I cannot die;
Lest that, pure breath of life, the Spirit of Man
Which God inspired, cannot together perish
With this corporeal clod. Then, in the grave,
Or in some other dismal place, who knows
But I shall die a living death? O thought
Horrid, if true! yet why? It was but breath
Of life that sinned: what dies but what had life
And sin? The body properly hath neither.
All of me, then, shall die...22
The concern in this speech is: either in a grave or in some other dismal substitute of a place where the dead body lies, will the "spirit" survive alongside the perished "corporeal clod", and undergo in its company "a living death"? To Milton's Adam, to Milton's Man, the idea of survival as Christians commonly conceive it is irrelevant: the single pertinent idea to be resolved is the issue raised by the school of Mortalism which had some influence in Milton's day: "Does the spirit die with the body or does it stay alive with the lifeless flesh wherever the flesh is deposited?" Milton, in his De Doctrina Christiana (XIII) returns an unequivocal
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answer: "Inasmuch as the whole man is uniformly said to consist of body, spirit and soul (whatever be the distinct provinces severally assigned to these divisions), I will show that in death, first, the whole man, and secondly, each component part, suffers privation of life.... No reason can be assigned why if God has sentenced to death the whole man that sinned, the spirit, which is the principal part offending, should be alone exempt from the appointed punishment." The terms of this answer echo some of Adam's own:
It was but breath
And sin?
Adam's conclusion - "All of me, then, shall die" - is the same as Milton's in his doctrinal declaration. On the strength of it we should ascribe unqualified Mortalism to Milton of Paradise Lost.
Critics like Rajan are not sure on this point. They refer us to another passage which they regard as the only one bearing on Adam's "doubt". It is a speech of Christ:
On me let Death wreak all his rage.
Under his gloomy power I shall not long
Lie vanquished. Thou hast given me to possess
Life in myself for ever; by thee I live;
Though now to Death I yield, and am his due,
All that of me can die, yet, that debt paid,
Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave
His prey, nor suffer my unspotted soul
For ever with corruption there to dwell.
My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil.23
It is pleaded that the lines are not decisive. But they are actually part of a passage containing the long excerpt made by us, from which analogically we inferred that "restoration"
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for man can mean only resurrection like Christ's and no intermediate existence after death in another world. Our inference should hold unless we find elsewhere a statement to the contrary. None of the critics denying explicit Mortal-ism in the epic have produced such a statement. And they have failed to note that there is another passage which leaves no doubt of Milton's Mortalism in Paradise Lost. It occurs in Book XI, where God speaks of His two gifts to man:
I, at first, with two fair gifts
Created him, endowed - with Happiness
And Immortality; that fondly lost,
The other served but to eternise woe,
Till I provided Death; so Death becomes
His final remedy, and, after life
Tried in sharp tribulation, and refined
By faith and faithful works, to second life
Waked in the renovation of the just,
Resigns him up with Heaven and Earth renewed.24
Observe the three stages in man's existence mentioned here: (1) the present life, a term for refinement and preparation for the future; (2) the state of death which continues till what Christianity knows as the last trump, a state from which that trump will wake him and so a state resembling sleep; (3) the new or "second life" that will be ushered in by a double event, man's resurrection and the renewing of Heaven and Earth. Between the death and the resurrection there is no survival of man's spirit: there is only a long slumber-like subsistence of the spirit together with a similar condition of the body, a death of the spirit along with the body's death. Our lines clinch Milton the epic poet's Mortalism.
Of course, the general Christian reaction would be, in Adam's words: "O thought horrid!" But Adam was horrified only by the prospect of having his spirit consciously tied up with the dead decaying body. He in fact welcomed the alternative of the spirit's death. The common Christian
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recoils because he is appalled by the tremendous length of time during which he would be totally extinct if Mortalism were true. But Milton, with the comparison of sleep in his mind, was quite placid: when we wake up in the morning after unbroken sleep, do we consider the length of time spent in sleep to be horrid? It is as if no time at all was spent - the morning awakening is almost instantaneous after the falling asleep at night. Mortalism has no fears: it is neither an intermediate waiting nor an endless extinction, it is but the moment before the resurrection.
Perhaps we may ask Milton: "How can a substance like the spirit die?" Here we enter the whole philosophy of Milton regarding Body and Spirit. This philosophy is clearly formulated in Book V when the visiting Angel explains how it is that he is able to eat of earthly food with creatures like Adam and Eve:
O Adam, one Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not depraved from good, created all
Such to perfection; one first matter all,
Endued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
As nearer to him placed or nearer tending
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit works, in bounds
Proportioned to each kind. So from the root
Springs lightly the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More airy, last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit
Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed
To vital Spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual, give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding, whence the Soul
Reason receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive, or Intuitive; discourse
Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,
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Differing but in degree, of kind the same.
Wonder not, then, what God for you saw good
If I refuse not, but convert, as you,
To proper substance; time may come when men
With Angels may participate, and find
No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare:
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit,
Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend
Ethereal, as we, or may at choice
Here or in Heavenly Paradises dwell;
If ye be found obedient, and retain
Unalterably firm his love entire
Whose progeny you are...25
This passage should be taken in association with what we have concluded from Milton about God's Self. God in His specific Godliness concentrates Himself in supreme transcendence, the central Divinity; but, in an unformed state, all is God, for He is the one infinite being. When He applies His creative will to make form, all existences come forth: they "proceed" from Him, as our quotation puts it, in a vast variety but all linked by their common being-stuff, so to speak, the "one first matter", and constituting an ordered hierarchy. Within this hierarchy there can be progression from one degree to another, right up to Godhead, so long as things are "not depraved from good". Body and Spirit are, therefore, the same "matter", but only different grades or intensities of it. Body is not inherently mortal: it can enjoy immortality if it retains the goodness given it by God. In fact, immortality is an attribute of the bodies of Adam and Eve, side by side with happiness. Conversely, mortality is not impossible to Spirit, except when - as we shall shortly see - they happen to be Heavenly and can only be annihilated by God. Earthly spirits are immortal if they stay "good": the moment they lose the God-granted goodness they can be as mortal as earthly bodies.
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Thus Mortalism is perfectly logical for Milton, once depravity sets in. And, naturally, what we may term Immortalism is just as logical, provided depravity is absent. Nor is that all, on the positive side. Within the Immortalism of both body and spirit, there is the wide range of progress opened up by Milton: human bodies can all turn to spirit, gain wings and move about freely in earthly or heavenly Paradises.
Here is a doctrine, however crude, of physical transformation, by which the human form can be completely spiritualized and live a divine life, the life of "Gods". Of course, to Milton, such a life was possible to unfallen Man and cannot be lived now by any means: it can come about only at the Resurrection for those who have passed their days virtuously before death. But the concept is of curious interest in view of the "Integral Yoga" propounded by modern India's greatest spiritual figure, Sri Aurobindo who, by the way, was educated at Milton's own University, Cambridge, and has written, among other things, the sole full-blown epic that, after Paradise host's 10,565 lines, has seen the light in English: Savitri, A Legend and a Symbol, whose lines add up to 23,837. Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga envisages a total transformation - not only the liberation of our inner being into the Infinite and Eternal but also a divinisation of our entire nature culminating in a spiritualised earthly body. The bodily transformation would be the result of a descent or manifestation of the archetypal form of man, the divine original "truth-body", known to the ancient Vedanta as the kāraṇa śarīra, "the causal body", secretly underlying the sūkṣma śarīra, "the subtle body" as well as the sthula śarīra, "the gross body".
Just as the doctrine, in Paradise Lost, of God's literal and substantial omnipresence has broad affinities to the Vedantic multi-aspected pantheism, so also the doctrine of body turning all to spirit has a broad suggestion of the profoundest modern development from the Vedantic vision of man's triple-bodied existence.
As to what would be the nature of the body turned all to
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spirit, Milton offers several vivid descriptions when he tells us of the matter composing the Angels, the Spirits, whether obedient or rebellious. First we hear of the marvellous capacities of their pure essence:
For Spirits, when they please,
Can either sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure,
Not tied or manacled with joint or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but, in what shape they choose,
Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure,
Can execute their airy purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfil.26
Next we learn of their invulnerability and are told again of their capacities. A further elaboration is made on the theme of their being "Not tied or manacled with joint or limb, / Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones". The positive aspect of this freedom is now briefly sketched, with the consequence of being invulnerable as well as infinitely plastic:
Spirits that live throughout
Vital in every part - not, as frail Man,
In entrails, heart or head, liver or reins,
Cannot but by annihilating die;
Nor in their liquid texture mortal wound
Receive, no more than can the fluid air:
All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,
All intellect, all sense; and as they please
They limb themselves, and colour, shape, or size
Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.27
Finally, we come to know of the wonderful relationship among themselves, that the Spirits are capable of. Adam asks Raphael:
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Love not the Heavenly Spirits, and how their love
Express they - by looks only, or do they mix
Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?28
Milton continues:
To whom the Angel, with a smile that glowed
Celestial rosy-red, Love's proper hue,
Answered - "Let it suffice thee that thou know'st
Us happy, and without love no happiness.
Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy'st
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars.
Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, union of pure with pure
Desiring, nor restrained conveyance need
As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul..."29
We may well end our survey of the metaphysics of Paradise Lost with these words and particularly one phrase from the passage. This phrase quintessences the beatific life of the Spirits and does it with a Dantesque economy of mingled sweet and severe:
Let it suffice thee that thou know'st
We find in the expression a felicitous balance to the one which, though emanating from the mouth of Satan, is still revelatory of the Archangelic in him, representative of "a mind not to be changed by place or time":30
Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering...31
Strength that saves one from being miserable, love that leads
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one to being happy - the two in their highest form would make the perfect life in the Miltonic vision, their highest form which would show them as part of a constant communion with Divinity. Such a life Milton saw not only in Heaven eternally but also on earth at the end of time and mingling even throughout time with earthly existences in an unremitting movement towards God:
Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep:
All these with ceaseless praise his works behold
Both day and night...32
Milton's "spiritual Creatures" provide the followers of Sri Aurobindo, of whom the present author is one, with a model for the fulfilment of their own Yogic attempt here and now at turning their bodies "all to spirit". They may regard those unseen millions as kindred to their own archimages, so to speak, active secretly upon earth and waiting to be turned in them all to body.
1.Bk. III, 474-5.
2.Ibid., III, 490-2.
3.Ibid., III, 132-4.
4.Ibid., III, 210-17.
5.Ibid., III, 372-82.
6.Bk. VII, 165-73.
7.Bk. VIII, 403-7.
8.Ibid., VIII, 412-6.
9.Ibid., VIII, 419-21.
10.Ibid., VIII, 427-31.
11.Bk. IX, 107-8.
12.Ibid., IX, 114-6.
13.Ibid., IX, 118-20.
14.Bk. I, 3-4.
15.Ibid., I, 4-5.
16.Bk. III, 285-96.
17.Ibid., III, 237-8.
18.Ibid., III, 251-9.
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19.Ibid., III, 261-5.
20.Ibid., III, 334-6.
21.Bk. XII, 463-5.
22.Bk. X, 782-92.
23.Bk. III, 241-51.
24.Bk. XI, 57-66.
25.Bk. V, 469-503.
26.Bk. I, 423-31.
27.Bk. VI, 344-53.
28.Bk. VIII, 615-7.
29.Ibid., VIII, 618-29.
30.Bk. I, 254.
31.Ibid., I, 157-8.
32.Bk. IV, 677-80.
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