The Common Pursuit (3 page)

But the Miltonic mode, for all the 'maximal... alteration of ordinary language'—'distortion of construction', the foreign

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idiom, 'the use of a word in a foreign'way' and so on—presented nothing radically alien or uncongenial to the eighteenth-century mind. It is a mode, I have noted, that we naturally think of as eloquence; the eloquence can, as the passage quoted by Mr Eliot

reminds us, take on without any disconcerting change a decided strength of declamation:

My sentence is for open Warr: of Wiles More unexpert, I boast not: then let those Contrive who need, or when they need, not now. For while they sit contriving, shall the rest, Millions that stand in Armes and longing wait The Signal to ascend, sit lingring here Heav'ns fugitives...

In these speeches in Hell we have—it is a commonplace—a kind of ideal parliamentary oratory. It is also a commonplace that Milton's peculiar powers have found here an especially congenial vein. And it is safe to venture that no parts of Paradise Lost have been unaffectedly enjoyed by more readers. The fact that a mind familiar with Paradise Lost will, without making any sharp distinctions, associate the < Miltonic music'—'God-gifted organ voice of England'—with a mode of strong rhetorical statement, argument and exposition, 1 running to die memorable phrase, is of the greatest importance historically (I am thiiking of the question of Milton's influence).

But I have to pursue my examination of the weakness; the weakness noted by Mr Eliot (though he won't call it flatly that) in the extract from him given above:

The fact that the lake was burning somewhat diminishes the effect of the fiery eyes; and it is difficult to imagine a burning lake in a scene where there was only darkness visible. But with this kind of inconsistency we are familiar in Milton.

Earlier Mr Eliot has said:

I do not think that we should attempt to see very clearly any scene that Milton depicts: it should be accepted as a shifting phantasmagory. To complain, because we first find the arch-fiend * chain'd on the burning lake and in a minute or two see him making his way to the shore, is to expect a kind of consistency which the world to which Milton has introduced us does not require.

1 Though in this mode too, as Mr Eliot notes, there is no sharp challenge to a critical or realizing awareness—there is the relaxation of the demand for consistency characteristic of rhetoric: 'It might, of course, be objected that " millions that stand in arms" could not at the same time "sit lingring"/

I have to insist that, in reading Milton, it isn't merely a matter of our not seeing very clearly; the weakness of realization that he exhibits can't be limited to the visual field. If we are not bothered by the absence of visual consistency, that is because, while we are submissively in and of Milton's world, our criteria of consistency in general have become very unexacting. The kind of consistency which that world 'does not require' turns out, when examined with any attention, to be decidedly comprehensive. If the weakness of visualization becomes, when we consider it, an aspect of something more general—a weakness of realization (a term the force of which I have tried to make plain), this, in its turn, we have to recognize as something more than a characteristic of imagery and local expression: it affects the poet's grasp of his themes, conceptions and interests.

The instances of visual inconsistency that Mr Eliot remarks are drawn from Milton's Hell. What they illustrate is Milton's failure to give us a consistently realized Hell at all. I will adduce on this point the commentary of Mr A. J. A. Waldock (so finding an opportunity to recommend his Paradise Lost and Its Critics 1 —it seems to me by far the best book on Milton I have read). He points out that, because of Milton's inconsistencies of conception and imagination, his Hell 'loses most of its meaning'.

It is obvious that as the conclave proceeds Hell, for all the effective pressure it exerts on our consciousness, has as good as vanished. The livid flames become mere torches to light the assembly of the powers. A little later, when there is leisure, Milton recollects his duty, resumes his account of the infernal landscape and adds further items to his (somewhat meagre) list of tortures. But as he had just proved to us in the clearest way how little the rebels are inconvenienced by their situation, it is impossible for us to take these further lurid descriptions very seriously. The plain fact of it, of course, is that Milton's Hell is very much a nominal one . ..

Yet conditions, even while the action is in progress, are (theoretically) bad enough: 'torture without End still urges' (1,67); 'these raging fires Will slack'n, if his breath stir not their flames' (II, 2); in spite of which organized field sports are possible. The reason for these and other vaguenesses in the picture is fairly evident: Milton was trying his best to accomplish two incompatible things at the same time ... Hell

1 Published by the Cambridge University Press.

therefore as a locality has to serve a double duty: it is a place of perpetual and increasing punishment in theory; and it is also in the practice of a poem, an assembly ground, a military area, a base for operations. The two conceptions do not very well agree ...

All this amounts, I cannot help thinking, to a radical criticism of Paradise Lost —a more damaging criticism than Professor Waldock himself recognizes (my main criticism of him is that he doesn't draw the consequences of his findings). It cannot be disposed of with the explanation that Milton's work doesn't require visual consistency. The inconsistency plainly touches essence, and touches it most seriously; for surely, in such an undertaking as that of Paradise Lost the conception of Hell must be, in a majorway, significant—if the poem attains to significance at the level of the promise. The weakness, so far from being merely a * limitation of visual power', is—to take up a word that Mr Eliot offers us with an odd insistence—intellectual.

The emphasis is on the sound, not the vision, upon the word, not the idea; and in the end it is die unique versification tnat is the most certain sign of Milton's intellectual mastership.

One can only comment that it may be the most certain sign, but that, as a justification for attributing intellectual mastership, it surely doesn't amount to much. Mr Eliot himself notes that it is the nature of the 'versification' to induce a relaxed concern for meaning—for 'the idea'. He illustrates the point (though he doesn't say so) in a footnote to a line of the long simile he quotes (the one reproduced above):

The term night-founder d, which I presume to be of Milton's invention, seems unsuitable here. Dr Tillyard has called my attention to the use of the same adjective in Comus, 1. 483 :

Either someone like us night-foundered here

where, though extravagant, it draws a permissible comparison between travellers lost in the night, and seafarers in extremity. But when, as here in Paradise Lost, it is transferred from travellers on land to adventurers by sea, and not to the men but to their skiff, the literal meaning of founder immediately presents itself. A foundered skiff could not be moored, to a whale or to anything else.

The weakness is profoundly characteristic, and it would be easy

to find other instances demanding similar comment. And I myself see Mr Eliot's instance as being significantly of the passage to which it belongs—the simile of which he says:

What I wish to call your attention to is the happy introduction of so much extraneous matter. Any writer, straining for images of hugeness, might have thought of the whale, but only Milton could have included the anecdote of the deluded seaman without our wanting to put a blue pencil through it. We nearly forget Satan in attending to the story of the whale; Milton recalls us just in time. Therefore the diversion strengthens, instead of weakening, the passage.

The force of that 'therefore' seems to me illusory, and I find the logic specious. To say that the diversion strengthens anything is inapt and misleading; Miltonic similes don't focus one's perception of the relevant, or sharpen definition in any way: that, surely, is the point to be made about them. If they represent

* imagery*, then it is the kind of imagery that goes with the

* Miltonic music*. We are happy about the introduction of so much extraneous matter because the * Miltonic music' weakens our sense of relevance, just as it relaxes our grasp of sense. But

this [musical] mastery is more conclusive evidence of his intellectual power than is his grasp of any * deas that he borrowed or invented. To be able to control so many words at once is the token of a mind of most exceptional energy.

We have to remind ourselves that Milton's control of words manifests itself in die looseness about meaning illustrated by his 'night-founder'd', and that, if he unquestionably exhibits great energy, 'mind' is an ambiguous word. In fact, it seems to me that Mr Eliot is unconsciously exploiting the ambiguity, the impulsion towards doing so deriving from an uneasy awareness (betrayed in that insistence on 'intellectual') of criticism to be brought against Milton that, if duly considered, would make Mr Eliot s present claims tor him look odd.

Other marks [of Milton's greatness] are his sense of structure, both in the general design of Paradise Lost and Samson, and in his syntax; and finally, and not the least, his inerrancy, conscious or unconscious, in writing so as to make the best display of his talents, and the best concealment of his weaknesses.

That 'inerrancy* (I will leave aside for the time being the * sense of structure') is to me an astonishing proposition. Mr Eliot makes plain (in the next paragraph) that he covers with it the choice of subject: 'the complete suitability of Paradise Lost has not, I think, been so often remarked' [as that of the subject of Samson]. Yet the subject of Paradise Lost meant for Milton, inevitably and essentially, the undertaking to

assert Eternal Providence And justify the wayes of God to men.

One doesn't need to go to the argumentative speeches of God the Father in order to make the point that such an undertaking was one for which Milton had no qualifications. Those speeches do indeed exhibit him as (considering his offer) ludicrously unqualified to make even a plausible show of metaphysical capacity. But it is in the 'versification' everywhere that the essential inaptitude appears: the man who uses words in this way has (as Mr Eliot virtually says) no 'grasp of ideas', and, whatever he may suppose, is not really interested in the achievement of precise thought of any kind; he certainly hasn't die kind of energy of mind needed for sustained analytic and discursive thinking. That is why the ardours and ingenuities of the scholars who interpret Paradise Lost in terms of a supposed consistency of theological intention are so absurd, and why it is so deplorable that literary students should be required to take that kind of thing seriously, believe that it has anything to do with intelligent literary criticism, and devote any large part of their time to the solemn study of Milton's 'thought'. What the choice of subject illustrates is that lack of self-knowledge which gives us such obvious grounds for saying that in Milton we have to salute character rather than intelligence—for character he indisputably has: he massively is what he is—proud, unaccommodating and heroically self-confident. The lack of self-knowledge meets us, in Paradise Lost, in many forms. The choice of subject presents it in other ways than that which I have specified. Professor Waldock seems to me unanswerable when he says that 'Milton's central theme denied him the full expression of his deepest interests'. More, the theme cut clean against them:

He can read the myth (or make a valiant attempt to do so) in terms of Passion and Reason, the twin principles of his own humanistic think-

ing; but with all that, the myth obstinately remains, drawing him away from what most deeply absorbs him (effort, combat, the life of the 'wayfaring Christian') to the celebration of a state of affairs that could never have profoundly interested him, and that he never persuades us does.

The result, or concomitant, is discrepancy between theory and feeling; between the effect of a given crucial matter as Milton presents it, and the view he instructs us to take of it. His handling of the central episode of the myth provides notable illustration. After rendering Adam's fall with affecting pathos he gives, as Professor Waldock shows (it would be obvious enough in any case, if one read Milton at full cock of attention) a false account of it; Adam himself gives a false account of it to the Son; the Son accepts it, and it becomes the official account. The inconsistency can hardly be dismissed as not mattering in the * world to which Milton has introduced us', and it occurs at the centre of the poem, which, as Professor Waldock says,

requires us, not tentatively, not half-heartedly , . . but with the full weight of our minds to believe that Adam did right, and simultaneously requires us with the full weight of our minds to believe that he did wrong.

The Miltonists, of course, don't see the problem in this way; they busy themselves (and it would be an amusing spectacle if one didn't know that they were authorities to whom thousands of students are expected to apply themselves deferentially) with, determining, if a word can't be found to cover both Adam and Eve, just what Adam's sin is to be called—gregariousness, levity, uxoriousness, pride or lust.

Conflict between feeling and theory is not the only way in which a radical lack of integration manifests itself in Paradise Lost. The weakness meets us in a characteristic that everyone has noticed—the personal quality that obtrudes itself in a good number of passages, some of them among the most admired. Professor Waldock illustrates the weakness (without calling it that) here:

At no point in the poem is Milton himself more thoroughly with Adam than at this; he is bitterly, weepingly with him. It is as if the two,

author and character, coalesce, and whose voice it is in that final exasperated indictment we hardly know:

Thus it shall befall

Him who to worth in Women overtrusting Lets her Will rule; restraint she will not brook, And left to herself, if evil thence ensue, She first his weak indulgence will accuse.