CHAPTER X MILTON'S ART IT is quite obvious that a chapter with the above caption is a bold undertaking and one that is doomed from the beginning to partial or complete failure. Even a book would not exhaust the subject of Milton's art, especially in these days when it would be likely to consist in large measure of statistical tables. Then, again, there is practically nothing new to be said about a topic upon which critics great and small have exhausted themselves from the days of Patrick Hume to those of Professor Masson. Yet to close a study such as the present without an attempt to sum up the general artistic powers of the great poet with whom it has dealt, would be to leave the whole undertaking somewhat in the air; a result in which it would be cowardly to acquiesce without a struggle or at least a dignified effort. But what now do we mean by saying that Milton was a great artist? We may mean many things, but we certainly mean that he was careful in selecting and ordering the materials out of which he composed his works, and that he was particular in joining these materials together and in preparing them for the joining process. To speak more concretely, we mean that he took great pains with his choice and evolution of theme, that he thought out the details of his composition from a logical point of view, and that in addition to this care about the thought-matter of his poems or their substance, he paid great attention to the word-matter, whether from the points of view of diction, syntax, metrical rhythm, or harmony; that is to say, to the form of his poems. This is, of course, a commonplace statement, but the twofold division it contains will furnish us with a good point of departure. With regard to his choice of materials, Milton, as we have observed, showed the caution that befits the scholar and the man, who, conscious of great powers, is determined to excel supereminently. He was never a hasty writer. Up to the time of the composition of the “Epitaphium Damonis," i.e. his thirty-second year, he had produced what is, on the whole, a small body of verse for a poet so gifted, and had for a considerable portion of it relied upon external stimulation to production rather than upon inward prompting. In other words, if Lawes had not been Milton's friend and if King had not died, the minor poems would not now be preferred by some critics to "Paradise Lost." During the twenty years of prose writing, computing roughly, external stimulation was again the rule, as is evidenced both by the pamphlets and by the sonnets. "Paradise Lost" is the first important work representing Milton's own creative impulse, and "Samson Agonistes is the second, for Ellwood suggested "Paradise Regained" and the theological, historical, and grammatical treatises are hardly to be considered in this connection. As we have seen and as it has been frequently shown for the past two hundred years, Milton brought to bear on each subject, whether chosen by himself or not, the full weight of his learning and the full force of his conscience. We have ocular proof that he was a careful reviser and that he improved what he altered; he packed whatever he wrote with erudition, sifted and fitted in to his purpose; and he studied the technic and the details of his art. He innovated and experimented, and in short prefaces explained his methods of composition. The result is that the more minute the student, the more he becomes convinced that Milton could have given a reason for every detail of his work, even for his minor variations from the normal types of his blank verse lines. This is not to say that Milton composed with meticulous care when the impulse of composition was upon him, but that the rules of his art had become a second nature to him and that his taste was as perfect as a finite man's can be. In other words, the more one studies Milton the more loath one becomes to find fault with a passage, a line, a word, the more one comes to believe that Milton as an artist is practically flawless. But we have already examined in some detail Milton's themes and have commented upon their evolution as well as upon the great use he made of the work of other men in carrying out his own designs. We have mentioned also, time and again, the power by which the substance of his works is fused into a poetic whole -the power of his shaping imagination. An attempt to describe Milton's imagination would be impertinent, for it would require an almost equal imagination for its successful accomplishment. It may, however, be noted that Milton's imagination seems to affect the substance of his works by limiting it to that which is noble, sublime, strenuous, or elementally pure and therefore charming. Humor is thus practically excluded as well as the intimate human note to be found in Dante and Shakspere. Pathos and sympathy exist, as, for example, in the exquisite closing passage of “Paradise Lost"; but the normal majesty of the action in each of the greater poems reduces these qualities to a minimum. In the same way, however much we may admire, with Tennyson, the paradisaic charm of the descriptions of Eden, we must admit that it is the product of an imagination that does not haunt the earth that lesser mortals tread. Milton's genius moves more freely in empyrean |