The Common Pursuit (5 page)

Of course, it may be said that Milton cannot be held responsible for Victorian bents that made him congenial as an influence. But my point is that the critic has every ground for judging the Victorian poetic tradition to have been unsatisfactory in this and that way, and that consequently he has the duty so to judge. It was Mr Eliot who made us fully conscious of the weaknesses of that tradition, and he did so by 'altering expression'. And it seems plain to me that the altering could not have been done by a poet who hadn't arrived at the judgments about Milton expressed in Mr Eliot's early criticism, just as it seems plain to me that people who see in those judgments merely regrettable prejudices (now outgrown) don't, whatever they suppose, really appreciate Mr

Eliot's creative achievement* And there is, I am convinced, a clear significance in the association in that early criticism (which bore so closely on his technical preoccupations) of comments on the weaknesses of Victorian verse with the judgments on Milton and with the display of positive interest in poetry exemplifying 'the intellect at the tip of the senses'.

As for the possibility of Milton's becoming now a profitable study for poets, I should have been more shy about questioning such a suggestion when offered by Mr Eliot if he himself had appeared to offer it with any conviction. But the terms in which he phrases it are curiously large and general. And the lessons he proposes as the profit of frequenting Milton would, it seems to me, be more reasonably sought elsewhere. 'It [poetry] might also learn that the music of verse is strongest in poetry which has a definite meaning expressed in the propercst words'. To recommend, where that lesson has been judged to be necessary, the study of Milton seems to me merely inconsequent. And I find it hard to believe that salutary lessons in * verse structure' or in the avoidance of 'servitude to colloquial speech' are likely to be learnt from a master in whom 'there is always die maximal, never the minimal, alteration of ordinary language'—who departs so consistently and so far from speech that the sensitiveness and subtlety of rhythm that depend on an appeal to our sense of the natural run are forbidden him. The lesson of 'freedom within form', I am convinced, would be better learnt from the study of Mr Eliot's own verse.

And that point suggests to me that an effective concern for the future of English poetry must express itself in a concern for the present function of criticism 1 ; for itis the weakness of that function during the last twenty years that has permitted die most elementary and essential discriminations to pass unregarded, and the lessons to be ignored or unperceived.

1 Milton has been made the keep of an anti-critical defensive system. Replying, in a letter to the present writer, to the criticism passed on his Paradise Lost and Its Critics above, the late Professor Waldock said that of course lie hadn't drawn the consequences of his findings: he daren't; he was afraid enough about what he had done.

IN DEFENCE OF MILTON

TO-DAY, when the quality of the literary studies encouraged or permitted at the academic places of education has an obviously important bearing on the prospects of literary culture (that is, of humane culture generally), it is correspondingly important, and certainly not less important than it has been in less desperate times, to defend literature—to defend the classics and the literary tradition—against the academic mind. The professional student of letters, the 'authority'—authority also, it must be remembered, in matters of curricula, instruction and examination at the high seats of learning—is rarely qualified in relation to his subject with one very relevant kind of authority (I had almost said the indispensable kind, but things are as they are), a kind that is not constituted, and need not be asserted or claimed: he is rarely a good first-hand critic—or even a good second-hand one. This is a truth we are often reminded of by the evident limitations of justly respected scholars: a man may do work that exacts the gratitude of us all as readers of poetry who yet betrays a lack of any developed sensibility, any fineness of perception and judgment.

So when Dr Tillyard 1 adduces Sir Herbert Grierson (in a large and varied company of supporters—Dr Tillyard seems to think that numbers strengthen his case and recruits even from the Sunday newspaper) as pronouncing with peculiar authority on the critical questions concerning Milton's verse and its influence, one can only reply that the genuine respect in which one holds the editor of Donne doesn't confer on him authority of that kind:

Professor Grierson has one peculiar advantage in writing on Milton. Having edited and praised Donne he camiot be suspected of giving untested allegiance to the old poetic hierarchy of the seventeenth century in which the Metapliysicals were accorded an inferior place. It is this that gives a peculiar force to his defence of Milton against modern defamation. The defence is admirable in itsek: coming from the editor of

Donne it may penetrate ears which had otherwise been quite sealed up against it.

I am obliged to comment that on Donne himself Professor Grierson speaks only with a limited kind of authority, the limitations being apparent in (to take a recent piece of evidence) this sentence from the Preface to the Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse:

Palgrave's chief and best guide was Tennyson, on whose fine ear the metres of the 'metaphysicals' must have grated as did those of his friend Browning; and a distinguished poet of our own day has in a recent lecture indicated clearly that his judgment is more in agreement with that of Tennyson than with that of tne admirers of Donne,

If anyone should think that this remark, with the reference to A. E. Housman, is susceptible of something less disqualifying than the obvious interpretation I refer him to the Introduction (so valuable in various ways) to Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, and especially to the passage (see p. xxxiii) in which Professor Grierson agrees with Professor Gregory Smith that 'the direct indebtedness of the courtly poets to Ben Jonson is probably . . . small.'

I do not recall these things wantonly, but in order to make, with all due respect to Professor Grierson, a necessary point. At the worst, perhaps, I shall be taken as returning the note of impatience and asperity perceptible in his comments on my own criticism. What is there to say, then, except that the scholar who commits himself to such pronouncements, distinguished authority on seventeenth-century matters as he certainly is, has no claim to be treated as a critical authority on the verse of the period—or any verse ?

But I must add at once that Professor Grierson, who has all the scholarly virtues, is incapable of original critical extravagance or of any of the kinds of critical originality for which Dr Tillyard's book is remarkable, and he must, I imagine, if he has read the book, have been at least as surprised as myself when he came to p. 8 of it. We read there, after the appropriate quotation:

That is the opening of L y Allegro, and it is one of the most puzzling passages in the whole of Milton; what possessed him that he should

write such bombast j By what strange anticipation did he fall into the manner of the worst kind of eighteenth-century ode ? If Milton meant to be noble, he failed dreadfully. If, however, he knew what he was doing, he can only have meant to be funny. And if he meant to be funny, to what end ? There is nothing in the rest of the poem that suggests humour—at least of the burlesque sort.

I must permit myself to comment, in defence of Milton, that these remarks, it seems to me, can only have the effect of discrediting the writer's very large critical pretensions. Did anyone ever before find that passage puzzling ? I do not myself rank L'Allegro (or II Penserosd) very high among Milton's works, but it never occurred to me to have doubts about his intention or touch in that opening paragraph, which seems to me, in relation to the change that follows, obviously successful. As for the * strange anticipation' that Dr Tillyard descries, I can only say that the de-serial makes the modesty that he expresses elsewhere about his qualifications to discuss eighteenth-century verse appear well-judged.

But it is no mere academic deficiency, no mere lack of ability to perceive, that can explain so fantastic an exhibition. The explanation comes when Dr Tillyard imparts his discovery that the themes of L 9 Allegro and II Penseroso were derived from one of Milton's Latin Prolusions. If there had been no such discovery of a 'solution* would there have been any problem to solve? The answer is plain. The discoverer, that is, convicts himself of something worse than a deficiency, he exhibits a characterist c that has to be defined in terms of opposition to disinterestedness—a characteristic that we cannot imagine as impairing the scholarship of Professor Grierson, whom (as I have intimated) I take as representing the academic virtues.

The accumulation of scholarship—'work on'—about and around the great things of literature is in any case, for all the measure one may recognize of the relevant and illuminating, a matter for misgiving. Dr Tillyard regrets, in his Preface, that he has had 'no room to refer to more than a fraction of the recent work on Milton' that has interested him. The problem, as a university teacher should be especially aware, is to ensure that the libraries and reading-lists of such work shall not, in effect, be die reverse of an aid and an encouragement to humane education and

the vitalizing currency of the classics. In these conditions anything approaching the spirit that sets out to establish the indispens-ability of fresh impedimenta and seeks fresh impedimenta with a view to establishing, if possible, their indispensability, is peculiarly to be deplored. Dr Tillyard's interest in his projects shows, it seems to me, neither the critic's nor the scholar's disinterestedness. A concomitant effect apparent in the book is that of his never really knowing what, in the way of discussible theme, he is offering to do. A major explicit undertaking is to unsettle the traditional notion of Milton as a lonely genius, maintaining in his age an aloof and majestic self-sufficiency. In so far as Dr Tillyard is likely to be influential (and that he is an accepted authority is a reason for discussing him) I think this aim deplorable. He supposes himself to be defending Milton, but it seems to me an odd defence that offers to rob the English tradition—for such is explicitly Dr Tillyard's aim—of that unique heroic figure. In fact, I must here come to Milton's defence (and tradition's) myself, and assert that Dr Tillyard nowhere produces anything that can be called a reason. He merely produces a Milton of his own—very much his own—and with a truly notable assurance commends him to us as the up-to-date substitute for the great Milton. For Dr Tillyard's Milton has no greatness, and is very much preoccupied with being up to date:

When Dr Leavis, after an excellent analysis of a passage in Cotnus, proceeds to pillory the style of Paradise Lost as exhibiting a shocking decline in vitality and flexibility, he takes no account of what the changing ideas of the age demanded. Being likewise so insistent that poets should be 'aware of the contemporary situation', is he altogether just ? If the changes Milton made in his style correspond to the general trend, ought he to be grudged the virtue of this 'awareness* ? (p. 137.)

I should have been better pleased if Dr Tillyard had pointed out the blunder in my analysis. As for my alleged insistence that poets should be 'aware of the contemporary situation,' I assure him that, if (and the suggestion surprises me) I have indeed used the phrase, it was certainly without any suspicion of what it would look like in the context given it by him, and that I will make a point of leaving it alone for die future. To attempt to suggest what this virtue of'awareness' is as Dr Tillyard conceives it and attributes it

to Milton is to invite the charge of parody. I will confine myself to some representative quotations:

And when he comes to Paradise Lost he must needs once again bow to public opinion and write in a style remote from the virtuousness of his epitaph on Hobson. (p. 121.)

Anyhow the whole onus of choosing it (the style of Paradise Lost) is commonly thrust on Milton. If some readers can realize that he chose it for the very opposite reason, in order to be at one with his age, they may look on it with initial favour rather than with their present repugnance, (p. 122.)

Quite rightly he stuck to his own convictions [Dr Tillyard is dealing with Milton's failure to conform to fashion in the matter of the heroic couplet], but I am certain that he disliked going against the best contemporary practice, (p. 204.)

That 'best' and the certitude are admirable; the critic who aspires to awareness should ponder them and the ease with which the apparently discrepant criteria—that of the 'best' and that of the 'rightly'—are (time aiding) reconciled and glide into one. Milton went against the best contemporary practice, but he must (we do him die justice to grant) have felt that it was wrong to do so; and in any case, from the point of view of to-day's best contemporary opinion it is seen, not merely that he was right to stick to his convictions, but that his convictions were right. This is rather a complicated instance. Perhaps a simpler illustration is to be found in a modern poet who has been more immediately influential than Milton was. Mr Eliot, one gathers, is so important a figure in modern poetry because, in tackling his problems of style, he accepted contemporary opinion and, in each of his various changes of manner, bowed once again to public opinion in order to be at one with his age.

For all I know, Dr Tillyard will see nothing absurd in this suggestion, for Mr Eliot has been accepted by the age, which indeed has got as far as Mr Auden, and it is some years since the best opinion—the kind of opinion with which a critic practising in the spirit that Dr Tillyard applauds as Milton's would cultivate solidarity—has, for the most part, ceased charging Mr Eliot with literary Bolshevism. And a preoccupation with solidarity is something I have to insist on as a main characteristic of Dr Tillyard's criticism. It is so radical a habit that he tends to rest on it even in

those places where his consciousness of applying, and even of showing a certain pioneering audacity in developing, the latest critical apparatus—of confounding the 'modern' critic with an ultra-modernity—is most apparent. For example, the essay in which he undertakes to confute my account of Milton's Grand Style by showing (with the support of Lascelles Abercrombie, William James, A. E. Housman, Gilbert Murray and Miss Maud Bodkin) l that Milton is, or may be plausibly argued to be, remarkable for 'primitive feeling', or *a richer share than Donne of those fundamental qualities of mind that appear to have immediate contact with the forces of life' 2 —this essay begins (p 43):