VII. The Style of Secondary Epic
Forms and figures of speech originally the offspring of passion, but now the adopted children of power.
COLERIDGE.
The style of Virgil and Milton arises as the solution of a very definite problem. The Secondary epic aims at an even higher solemnity than the Primary; but it has lost all those external aids to solemnity which the Primary enjoyed. There is no robed and garlanded aoidos, no altar, not even a feast in a hall—only a private person reading a book in an armchair. Yet somehow or other, that private person must be made to feel that he is assisting at an august ritual, for if he does not, he will not be receptive of the true epic exhilaration. The sheer writing of the poem, therefore, must now do, of itself, what the whole occasion helped to do for Homer. The Virgilian and Miltonic style is there to compensate for—to counteract—the privacy and informality of silent reading in a man’s own study. Every judgement on it which does not realize this will be inept. To blame it for being ritualistic or incantatory, for lacking intimacy or the speaking voice, is to blame it for being just what it intends to be and ought to be. It is like damning an opera or an oratorio because the personages sing instead of speaking.
In a general and obvious sense this effect is achieved by what is called the ‘grandeur’ or ‘elevation’ of the style. As far as Milton is concerned (for I am not scholar enough to analyse Virgil) this grandeur is produced mainly by three things. (1) The use of slightly unfamiliar words and constructions, including archaisms. (2) The use of proper names, not solely nor chiefly for their sound, but because they are the names of splendid, remote, terrible, voluptuous, or celebrated things. They are there to encourage a sweep of the reader’s eye over the richness and variety of the world—to supply that largior aether which we breathe as long as the poem lasts. (3) Continued allusion to all the sources of heightened interest in our sense experience (light, darkness, storm, flowers, jewels, sexual love, and the like), but all over-topped and ‘managed’ with an air of magnanimous austerity. Hence comes the feeling of sensual excitement without surrender or relaxation, the extremely tonic, yet also extremely rich, quality of our experience while we read. But all this you might have in great poems which were not epic. What I chiefly want to point out is something else—the poet’s unremitting manipulation of his readers—how he sweeps us along as though we were attending an actual recitation and nowhere allows us to settle down and luxuriate on any one line or paragraph. It is common to speak of Milton’s style as organ music. It might be more helpful to regard the reader as the organ and Milton as the organist. It is on us he plays, if we will let him.
Consider the opening paragraph. The ostensible philosophical purpose of the poem (to justify the ways of God to Man) is here of quite secondary importance. The real function of these twenty-six lines is to give us the sensation that some great thing is now about to begin. If the poet succeeds in doing that sufficiently, we shall be clay in his hands for the rest of Book I and perhaps longer; for be it noted that in this kind of poetry most of the poet’s battles are won in advance. And as far as I am concerned, he succeeds completely, and I think I see something of how he does it. Firstly, there is the quality of weight, produced by the fact that nearly all the lines end in long, heavy monosyllables. Secondly, there is the direct suggestion of deep spiritual preparation at two points—O spirit who dost prefer and What in me is dark. But notice how cunningly this direct suggestion of great beginnings is reinforced by allusion to the creation of the world itself (Dove-like sat’st brooding), and then by images of rising and lifting (With no middle flight intends to soar . . . raise and support—Highth of this great argument) and then again how creation and rising come potently together when we are reminded that Heaven and Earth rose out of Chaos, and how in addition to this we have that brisk, morning promise of good things to come, borrowed from Ariosto (things unattempted yet), and how till one greater Man makes us feel we are about to read an epic that spans over the whole of history with its arch. All images that can suggest a great thing beginning have been brought together and our very muscles respond as we read. But look again and you will see that the ostensible and logical connexion between these images is not exactly the same as the emotional connexion which I have been tracing. The point is important. In one respect, Milton’s technique is very like that of some moderns. He throws ideas together because of those emotional relations which they have in the very recesses of our consciousness. But unlike the moderns he always provides a façade of logical connexions as well. The virtue of this is that it pulls our logical faculty to sleep and enables us to accept what we are given without question.
This distinction between the logical connexions which the poet puts on the surface and the emotional connexions whereby he really manipulates our imagination is the key to many of his similes. The Miltonic simile does not always serve to illustrate what it pretends to be illustrating. The likeness between the two things compared is often trivial, and is, indeed, required only to save the face of the logical censor. At the end of Book I the fiends are compared to elves. Smallness is the only point of resemblance. The first use of the simile is to provide contrast and relief, to refresh us by a transition from Hell to a moonlit English lane. Its second use becomes apparent when we suddenly return to where
far within
And in thir own dimensions like themselves
The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim
In close recess and secret conclave sat,
A thousand Demy-Gods on golden seats.
(II, 796.)
It is by contrast with the fairies that these councillors have grown so huge, and by contrast with the fanciful simile that the hush before their debate becomes so intense, and it is by that intensity that we are so well prepared for the opening of Book II. It would be possible to go further and to say that this simile is simply the point at which the whole purpose of transforming the fiends to dwarfish stature is achieved, and that this transformation itself has a retrospective effect on the hugeness of Pandemonium. For the logician it may appear as something ‘dragged in by the heels’, but in poetry it turns out to be so bound up with the whole close of the first Book and the opening of the second that if it were omitted the wound would spread over about a hundred lines. Nearly every sentence in Milton has that power which physicists sometimes think we shall have to attribute to matter—the power of action at a distance.
Examples of this subterranean virtue (so to call it) in the Miltonic simile will easily occur to every one’s memory. Paradise is compared to the field of Enna—one beautiful landscape to another (IV, 268). But, of course, the deeper value of the simile lies in the resemblance which is not explicitly noted as a resemblance at all, the fact that in both these places the young and the beautiful while gathering flowers was ravished by a dark power risen up from the underworld. A moment later Eden is compared to the Nysician isle and to Mount Amara. Unlearned readers may reassure themselves. In order to get the good out of this simile it is not at all necessary to look up these places in the notes, nor has pedantry any share in the poet’s motives for selecting them. All that we need to know the poet tells us. The one was a river island and the other a high mountain, and both were hiding places. If only we will read on, asking no questions, the sense of Eden’s secrecy, of things infinitely precious, guarded, locked up, and put away, will come out of that simile and enrich what Milton is all the time trying to evoke in each reader—the consciousness of Paradise. Sometimes, I admit, the poet goes too far and the feint of logical connexion is too outrageous to be accepted. In IV, 160–71 Milton wants to make us feel the full obscenity of Satan’s presence in Eden by bringing a sudden stink of fish across the sweet smell of the flowers, and alluding to one of the most unpleasant Hebrew stories. But the pretence of logical connexion (that Satan liked the flowers of Paradise better than Asmodeus liked the smell of burning fish) is too strained. We feel its absurdity.
This power of manipulation is not, of course, confined to the similes. Towards the end of Book III Milton takes Satan to visit the sun. To keep on harping on heat and brightness would be no use; it would end only in that bog of superlatives which is the destination of many bad poets. But Milton makes the next hundred lines as Solar as they could possibly be. We have first (583) the picture of the sun gently warming the universe, and a hint of the enormous distances to which this virtue penetrates. Then at line 588, by means of what is not much more than a pun on the word spot we have Galileo’s recent discovery of the sun-spots. After that we plunge into alchemy because the almost limitless powers attributed to gold in that science and the connexion of gold with the solar influence make a kind of mirror in which we can view the regal, the vivifying, the archchemic properties of the sun. Then, still working indirectly, Milton makes us realize the marvel of a shadowless world (614–20). After that we meet Uriel (Fire of God), and because the sun (as every child knew from Spenser and Ovid, if not from Pliny and Bernardus) is the world’s eye, we are told that Uriel is one of those spirits who are God’s eyes (650) and is even, in a special sense, God’s singular eye in this material world (660) and ‘the sharpest-sighted Spirit of all in Heav’n’ (691). This is not, of course, the sun of modern science; but almost everything which the sun had meant to man up till Milton’s day has been gathered together and the whole passage in his own phrase, ‘runs potable gold’.
A great deal of what is mistaken for pedantry in Milton (we hear too often of his ‘immense learning’) is in reality evocation. If Heaven and Earth are ransacked for simile and allusion, this is not done for display, but in order to guide our imaginations with unobtrusive pressure into the channels where the poet wishes them to flow; and as we have already seen, the learning which a reader requires in responding to a given allusion does not equal the learning Milton needed to find it. When we have understood this it will perhaps be possible to approach that feature of Milton’s style which has been most severely criticized—the Latinism of his constructions.
Continuity is an essential of the epic style. If the mere printed page is to affect us like the voice of a bard chanting in a hall, then the chant must go on—smoothly, irresistibly, ‘upborne with indefatigable wings’. We must not be allowed to settle down at the end of each sentence. Even the fuller pause at the end of a paragraph must be felt as we feel the pause in a piece of music, where the silence is part of the music, and not as we feel the pause between one item of a concert and the next. Even between one Book and the next we must not wholly wake from the enchantment nor quite put off our festal clothes. A boat will not answer to the rudder unless it is in motion; the poet can work upon us only as long as we are kept on the move.
Roughly speaking, Milton avoids discontinuity by an avoidance of what grammarians call the simple sentence. Now, if the sort of things he was saying were at all like the things that Donne or Shakespeare say, this would be intolerably tiring. He therefore compensates for the complexity of his syntax by the simplicity of the broad imaginative effects beneath it and the perfect rightness of their sequence. For us readers, this means in fact that our receptivity can be mainly laid open to the underlying simplicity, while we have only to play at the complex syntax. It is not in the least necessary to go to the very bottom of these verse sentences as you go to the bottom of Hooker’s sentences in prose. The general feeling (which will usually be found to be correct if you insist on analysing it) that something highly concatenated is before you, that the flow of speech does not fall apart into separate lumps, that you are following a great unflagging voice—this is enough to keep the ‘weigh’ on you by means of which the poet steers. Let us take an example:
If thou beest he—but O how fall’n! how chang’d
From him who in the happy Realms of Light
Cloth’d with transcendent brightness didst outshine
Myriads though bright: If he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope
And hazard in the Glorious Enterprise,
Joynd with me once, now misery hath joynd
In equal ruin: into what Pit thou seest
From what highth fal’n.
(I, 84.)
This is a pretty complicated sentence. On the other hand, if you read it (and let the ghost of a chanting, not a talking, voice be in your ear) without bothering about the syntax, you receive in their most natural order all the required impressions—the lost glories of heaven, the first plotting and planning, the hopes and hazards of the actual war, and then the misery, the ruin, and the pit. But the complex syntax has not been useless. It has preserved the cantabile, it has enabled you to feel, even within these few lines, the enormous onward pressure of the great stream on which you are embarked. And almost any sentence in the poem will illustrate the same point.
The extremely Latin connexions between the sentences serve the same purposes, and involve, like the similes, a fair amount of illusion. A good example is nor sometimes forget, in III, 32. In this passage Milton is directly calling up what he indirectly suggests throughout, the figure of the great blind bard. It will, of course, be greatly enriched if the mythical blind bards of antiquity are brought to bear on us. A poet like Spenser would simply begin a new stanza with Likewise dan Homer or something of the sort. But that will not quite serve Milton’s purpose: it is a little too like rambling, it might suggest the garrulity of an old gentleman in his chair. Nor sometimes forget gets him across from Sion and the flowery brooks to Blind Thamyris with an appearance of continuity, like the stylized movement by which a dancer passes from one position to another. Yet not the more in line 26 is another example. So are sad task Yet argument (IX, 13) and Since first this subject (IX, 25). These expressions do not represent real connexions of thought, any more than the prolonged syllables in Handel represent real pronunciation.
It must also be noticed that while Milton’s Latin constructions in one way tighten up our language, in another way they make it more fluid. A fixed order of words is the price—an all but ruinous price—which English pays for being uninflected. The Miltonic constructions enable the poet to depart, in some degree, from this fixed order and thus to drop the ideas into his sentence in any order he chooses. Thus, for example,
soft oppression seis’d
My droused sense, untroubl’d though I thought
I then was passing to my former state
Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve.
(VIII, 291.)
The syntax is so artificial that it is ambiguous. I do not know whether untroubled qualifies me understood, or sense, and similar doubts arise about insensible and the construction of to dissolve. But then I don’t need to know. The sequence drowsed—untroubled—my former state—insensible—dissolve is exactly right; the very crumbling of consciousness is before us and the fringe of syntactical mystery helps rather than hinders the effect. Thus, in another passage, I read
Heav’n op’nd wide
Her ever-during Gates, Harmonious sound
On golden Hinges moving.
(VII, 205.)
Moving might be a transitive participle agreeing with gates and governing sound; or again the whole phrase from harmonious to moving might be an ablative absolute. The effect of the passage, however, is the same whichever we choose. An extreme modern might have attempted to reach it with
Gates open wide. Glide
On golden hinges . . .
Moving . . .
Harmonious sound.
This melting down of the ordinary units of speech, this plunge back into something more like the indivisible, flowing quality of immediate experience, Milton also achieves. But by his appearance of an extremely carpentered structure he avoids the suggestion of fever, preserves the sense of dignity, and does not irritate the mind to ask questions.
Finally, it remains to judge this style not merely as an epic style, but as a style for that particular story which Milton has chosen. I must ask the reader to bear with me while I examine it at its actual work of narration. Milton’s theme leads him to deal with certain very basic images in the human mind—with the archetypal patterns, as Miss Bodkin would call them, of Heaven, Hell, Paradise, God, Devil, the Winged Warrior, the Naked Bride, the Outer Void. Whether these images come to us from real spiritual perception or from pre-natal and infantile experience confusedly remembered, is not here in question; how the poet arouses them, perfects them, and then makes them re-act on one another in our minds is the critic’s concern. I use the word ‘arouses’ advisedly. The naif reader thinks Milton is going to describe Paradise as Milton imagines it; in reality the poet knows (or behaves as if he knew) that this is useless. His own private image of the happy garden, like yours and mine, is full of irrelevant particularities—notably, of memories from the first garden he ever played in as a child. And the more thoroughly he describes those particularities the further we are getting away from the Paradisal idea as it exists in our minds, or even in his own. For it is something coming through the particularities, some light which transfigures them, that really counts, and if you concentrate on them you will find them turning dead and cold under your hands. The more elaborately, in that way, we build the temple, the more certainly we shall find, on completing it, that the god has flown. Yet Milton must seem to describe—you cannot just say nothing about Paradise in Paradise Lost. While seeming to describe his own imagination he must actually arouse ours, and arouse it not to make definite pictures, but to find again in our own depth the Paradisal light of which all explicit images are only the momentary reflection. We are his organ: when he appears to be describing Paradise he is in fact drawing out the Paradisal Stop in us. The place where he chiefly does so (IV, 131–286) is worth examination in detail.
It begins (131) so on he fares. On is the operative word. He is going on and on. Paradise is a long way off. At present we are approaching only its border. Distance means gradualness of approach. It is now nearer (133). Then come the obstacles; a steep wilderness with hairy sides (135). Do not overlook hairy. The Freudian idea that the happy garden is an image of the human body would not have frightened Milton in the least, though, of course, the main point is that the ascent was grotesque and wild (136) and access denied (137). But we want something more than obstacle. Remember that in this kind of poetry the poet’s battles are mainly won in advance. If he can give us the idea of increasing expectancy, the idea of the Paradisal light coming but not yet come, then, when at last he has to make a show of describing the garden itself, we shall be already conquered. He is doing his work now so that when the climax comes we shall actually do the work for ourselves. Therefore, at line 137, he begins playing on the note of progression—upward progression, a vertical serialism. Overhead is insuperable height of trees (138). But that is not enough. The trees are ladder-like or serial trees (cedar, pine, and fir) with one traditionally eastern and triumphal tree (the palm) thrown in (139). They stand up like a stage set (140) where Milton is thinking of silvis scaena coruscis. They go up in tiers like a theatre (140–2). Already, while I read, I feel as if my neck ached with looking higher and higher. Then quite unexpectedly, as in dream landscapes, we find that what seemed the top is not the top. Above all these trees, yet higher (142) springs up the green, living wall of Paradise. And now a moment’s rest from our looking upward; at a wave of the wand we are seeing the whole thing reversed—we are Adam, King of Earth, looking down from that green rampart into this lower world (144–5)—and, of course, when we return it seems loftier still. For even that wall was not the real top. Above the wall—yes, at last, almost beyond belief, we see for once with mortal eyes the trees of Paradise itself. In lines 147–9 we get the first bit of direct description. Of course, the trees have golden fruit. We always knew they would. Every myth has told us so; to ask for ‘originality’ at this point is stark insensibility. But we are not allowed to go on looking at them. The simile of the rainbow (150–2) is introduced, and at once our glimpse of Paradise recedes to the rainbow’s end. Then the theme of serialism is picked up again—the air is growing purer every minute (153); and this idea (Quan la douss aura venta) at once passes into a nineteen-line exploitation of the most evocative of the senses, suddenly countered by the stench of Satan (167). Then a pause, as if after a crashing piece of orchestration, and we go back to the images of gradual approach, Satan still journeying on (172). Now the obstacles grow more formidable and it presently turns out (as the Trojans had found on sighting Italy) that the real entrance is on the other side (179). What follows is concerned with the main theme of the story and may be omitted here. We return to Paradise at 205. We are in at last, and now the poet has to do something in the way of description; well for him that the Paradise-complex in us is now thoroughly awake and that almost any particular image he gives us will be caught up and assimilated. But he does not begin with a particular image, rather with an idea—in narrow room Nature’s whole wealth. The ‘narrow room’, the sense of a small guarded place, of sweetness rolled into a ball, is essential. God had planted it all (210). Not created it, but planted it—an anthropomorphic God out of Ezekiel xxxi, the God of our childhood and man’s, making a toy garden as we made them when we were children. The earliest and lowest levels are being uncovered. And all this realm was studded once with rich and ancient cities; a pleasant soil (214), but the mountain of Paradise, like a jewel set in gold, far more pleasant (215) so that an emotion stolen from the splendour of the cities now flows into our feeling of Paradise. Then come the trees, the mythical and numinous trees, and vegetable gold from the garden of Hesperus (217–22). Then the rivers, which like Alph plunge into darkness and rise from it through pores at the bidding of kindly thirst (228), and Paradise again reminds us of a human body; and in contrast with this organic dark we have crisped brooks above (237) and the hard, bright suggestions of pearl and gold (238). Finally, from line 246 to 265, we get actual description. It is all, most rightly, generalized, and it is short. A reader who dislikes this kind of poetry would possibly express his objection to Milton’s Paradise by saying it contained ‘all the right things’—odorous gums, golden fruit, thornless roses, murmuring falls—and would prefer something he had not expected. But the unexpected has here no place. These references to the obvious and the immemorial are there not to give us new ideas about the lost garden but to make us know that the garden is found, that we have come home at last and reached the centre of the maze—our centre, humanity’s centre, not some private centre of the poet’s. And they last only long enough to do so. The representation begins swelling and trembling at 264 with the nervous reiteration of air s in order that it may bur st in the following lines—may flow over into a riot of mythology where we are so to speak, drenched. That is the real climax; and then, having been emparadised, we are ready at line 288 to meet at last the white, erect, severe, voluptuous forms of our first parents.