language',' but has formed what Butler calls 'a Babylonish Dialect, in itself harsh and barbarous, but made by exalted genius and extensive learning the vehicle of so much instruction and so much pleasure that, like other lovers, we find grace in its deformity 3. Whatever be the faults of his diction he cannot want the praise 272 of copiousness and variety; he was master of his language in its full extent, and has selected the melodious words with such diligence that from his book alone the Art of English Poetry might be learned. After his diction something must be said of his versification*. 273 'The measure,' he says, 'is the English heroick verse without rhyme 5. Of this mode he had many examples among the may be found in 'Warble his native wood-notes wild.' L'Allegro, 1. 134.] 'Many, if not most of Milton's odd constructions, are to be sought in the Divina Commedia, I think, rather than in the ancients.' LOWELL, Letters, ii. 433. I 'Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no language.' JONSON, Works, 1756, vii. 128. See also The Rambler, No. 121. Hudibras, i. I. 93. 3 'Milton's style in his Paradise Lost is not natural; 'tis an exotic style. As his subject lies a good deal out of the world it has a particular propriety in those parts of the poem; and when he is on earth, wherever he is describing our parents in Paradise, you see he uses a more easy and natural way of writing.' POPE, Spence's Anec. p. 174. 'Milton is never quaint, never twangs through the nose, but is everywhere grand and elegant, without resorting to musty antiquity for his beauties. On the contrary, he took a long stride forward, left the language of his own day far behind him, and anticipated the expressions of a century yet to come.' CoWPER, Works, vi. 294. * Johnson examines Milton's versification in The Rambler, Nos. 86, 88, 90, 94. Milton,' wrote Cowper, of all English poets that ever lived had certainly the finest ear.' In another letter he speaks of 'the unacquainted ness of modern ears with the divine harmony of Milton's numbers and the principles upon which he constructed them.' Works, v. 269; vi. 12. 'The poet's peculiar excellence, above all others, was in his exquisite perception of rhythm, and in the boundless variety he has given it both in verse and prose. Virgil comes nearest to him in his assiduous study of it, and in his complete success.' LANDOR, Longer Prose Works, ii. 206. 'More than once,' writes F. T. Palgrave, 'did Tennyson impress upon me that Milton must have framed his metre upon that "ocean-roll of rhythm," which underlies the hexameters of Virgil; quoting, as a perfect example, the four lines, "Continuo ventis surgentibus..." (Geor. i. 356), in which the rising of a storm is painted.' Tennyson's Life, ii. 500. 'Milton certainly modelled his English verse on Virgil, as Tennyson observed to me some forty years ago.' E. FITZGERALD, More Letters, p. 218. 'Dobson's Latin translation of Paradise Lost [post, POPE, 195] is about the greatest feat ever performed in modern Latin verse, and it shows by a crucial experiment how little Milton really has in common with Virgil.' GOLDWIN SMITH, Lectures and Essays, 1881, p. 324. See also Courthope's Hist. of Eng. Poetry, 1993, iii. 444. 5 The measure is English,' &c. Preface to Paradise Lost. Italians, and some in his own country. The Earl of Surrey is said to have translated one of Virgil's books without rhyme, and besides our tragedies a few short poems had appeared in blank verse3; particularly one tending to reconcile the nation to Raleigh's wild attempt upon Guiana, and probably written by Raleigh himself. These petty performances cannot be supposed to have much influenced Milton, who more probably took his hint from Trisino's Italia Liberata; and, finding blank verse easier than rhyme, was desirous of persuading himself that it is better". 274 Rhyme,' he says, and says truly, 'is no necessary adjunct of true poetry'.' But perhaps of poetry as a mental operation metre or musick is no necessary adjunct; it is however by the musick of metre that poetry has been discriminated in all languages, and in languages melodiously constructed with a due proportion of long and short syllables metre is sufficient. But one language cannot communicate its rules to another; where metre is scanty and imperfect some help is necessary. The musick of the English heroick line strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together; this co-operation can be only obtained by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another as a distinct system of sounds, and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme. The variety 2 Post, MILTON, 275. 'He translated the second and fourth books of Virgil [Aeneid] into blank verse. This is the first composition in blank verse extant in the English language. The diction is often poetical, and the versification varied with proper pauses.' WARTON, Hist. of Eng. Poetry, ed. 1871, iv. 35. 3 Warton mentions Abraham Fleming's 'blank-verse translation of the Bucolics and Georgics, in alexandrines, in 1589.' Ïb. iv. 39. [This poem, De Guiana Carmen Epicum, signed G. C., is prefixed to A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana performed and written in the year 1596 by Laurence Keymis Gent. Contained in Hakluyt's Voyages (1598-1600), vol. iii. p. 668. It consists of about 200 lines in blank verse. Raleigh is certainly not the author. Cunningham (Lives of the Poets, vol. i. p. 163 n.) states that of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer1; and there are only a few skilful and happy readers of Milton who enable their audience to perceive where the lines end or begin. 'Blank verse,' said an ingenious critick', 'seems to be verse only to the eye3. Poetry may subsist without rhyme, but English poetry will 275 not often please; nor can rhyme ever be safely spared but where the subject is able to support itself. Blank verse makes some approach to that which is called the 'lapidary style "'; has neither the easiness of prose nor the melody of numbers, and therefore tires by long continuance. Of the Italian writers without rhyme, whom Milton alleges as precedents, not one is popular; what reason could urge in its defence has been confuted by the ear'. or short in our language as in any other.' COWPER, Southey's Cowper, vi. 346. 'Je crois la rime nécessaire à tous les peuples qui n'ont pas dans leur langue une mélodie sensible, marquée par les longues et par les brèves, et qui ne peuvent employer ces dactyles et ces spondées qui font un effet si merveilleux dans le latin.' VOLTAIRE, Œuvres, xxxv. 435. 'This I had the honour to tell Dr. Johnson; and I said: "Quin, the actor, taught it me; and called it The Pause of Suspension."" PIOZZI, Auto. 1861, ii. 138. MRS. 2 Mr. Locke of Norbury Place. Boswell's Johnson, iv. 43. 3 Coleridge, in Biog. Lit. 1847, ii. 86, giving an extract from Wordsworth's Brothers, as first published, and referring to one line, continues:— 'If any ear could suspect that these sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have been founded.' 4 Post, ROSCOMMON, 30; DRYDEN, 20, 265; SOMERVILE, 8; THOMSON, 47; DYER, II; SHENSTONE, 31; YOUNG, 160; AKENSIDE, 17. 5 Ante, MILTON, 27. "Some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme.' Preface to Paradise Lost. Trissino is commonly regarded as the inventor of blank verse in Italy, in his Sofonisba printed in 1524. It LIVES OF POETS. I was, I think, first introduced into "Till barbarous ages, and more bar- Debased the majesty of verse to But Italy, reviving from the trance With pauses, cadence, and well- And all the graces a good ear affords, Restored a silver, not a golden age.' For Roscommon's attack on rhyme see English Poets, xv. 91. 7 'Those two divine excellencies of music and poetry are grown in a manner to be little more but the one fiddling and the other rhyming, and are indeed very worthy the ignorance of the friar and the barbarousness of the Goths that introduced them among us.' TEMPLE, Works, 1757, iii. 454. 276 But whatever be the advantage of rhyme I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer 1, for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is; yet like other heroes he is to be admired rather than imitated. He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse, but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme. 277 The highest praise of genius is original invention. Milton cannot be said to have contrived the structure of an epick poem, and therefore owes reverence to that vigour and amplitude of mind to which all generations must be indebted for the art of poetical narration, for the texture of the fable, the variation of incidents, the interposition of dialogue, and all the stratagems that surprise and enchain attention. But of all the borrowers from Homer Milton is perhaps the least indebted 2. He was naturally a thinker for himself, confident of his own abilities 3 and disdainful of help or hindrance; he did not refuse admission to the thoughts or images of his predecessors, but he did not seek them. From his contemporaries he neither courted nor received support; there is in his writings nothing by which the pride of other authors might be gratified or favour gained, no exchange of praise nor solicitation of support. His great works were performed under discountenance and in blindness, but difficulties vanished at his touch; he was born for whatever is arduous; and his work is not the greatest of heroick poems, only because it is not the first. 'I am not persuaded the Paradise Lost would not have been more nobly conveyed to posterity, not perhaps in heroic couplets, although even they could sustain the subject if well balanced, but in the stanza of Spenser or of Tasso, or in the terza rima of Dante, which the powers of Milton could easily have grafted on our language.' BYRON, Works, 1854, ix. 91. 'To this metre, as used in the Paradise Lost, our country owes the glory of having produced one of the only two poetical works in the grand style which are to be found in the modern languages; the Divine Comedy of Dante is the other.' MATTHEW ARNOLD, On Translating Homer, 1896, p. 72. * His widow 'being asked whether he did not often read Homer and Virgil, she understood it as an imputation upon him for stealing from those authors, and answered with eagerness that he stole from nobody but the Muse who inspired him; and being asked by a lady present who the Muse was, replied it was God's grace, and the Holy Spirit that visited him nightly.' Newton's Milton, Pref. p. 80. 'There is scarce any author who has written so much, and upon such various subjects, and yet quotes so little from his contemporary authors.' Ib. p. 72. Swift went beyond him in scarcely ever 'taking a single thought from any writer, ancient or modern.' Post, SWIFT, 141. 3 Ante, MILTON, 26, 138, 231. 'Milton has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his original.' DRYDEN, Works, xi. 210. APPENDIX I (PAGE 85) 'The writing of deeds and charters was one of the employments of the regular clergy. After the dissolution of religious houses the business of a scrivener became a lay profession; and 14 Jac. [1617] a company of scriveners was incorporated, about which time they took themselves to the writing of wills, leases, &c. Francis Kirkman, in The Unlucky Citizen, 1673, relates that almost all the business of the city in making leases, mortgages, &c., and procuring money on securities of ground and houses, was transacted by these men, who hence assumed the name of money scriveners. The furniture of a scrivener's shop was a sort of pew for the master, desks for the apprentices, and a bench for the clients to sit on till their turn came.' HAWKINS, Hist. of Music, 1776, iii. 367. See also Masson's Milton, i. 24. Johnson in his Dictionary defines money-scrivener as 'one who raises money for others.' For the griping scrivener' see Dryden's Works, xii. 369. 'Among the psalm-tunes composed into four parts by sundry authors, and published by Thomas Ravenscroft in 1633, there are many, particularly that common one called York Tune, with the name John Milton; the tenor of this tune is so well known that within memory half the nurses in England were used to sing it by way of lullaby; and the chimes of many country churches have played it six or eight times in four and twenty hours from time immemorial.' HAWKINS, Hist. of Music, iii. 368. See also Aubrey's Brief Lives, ii. 62; Phillips' Milton, p. 4; T. Warton's Milton's Poems, p. 523; Masson's Milton, i. 50; and N.& Q. 8 S. v. 346. APPENDIX J (PAGE 86) It was from the elder brother, Edward, that this account is derived. In 1694 he published Letters of State written by Mr. John Milton ... To which is added An Account of his Life. Together with several of his Poems. John Phillips lived by his pen, often sinking into obscenity. For many years he was 'in the closest intimacy with Titus Oates.' Masson's Milton, v. 259, 382; vi. 462, 767. Aubrey describes him as 'very happy at jiggish poetry.' Brief Lives, ii. 152. Edward, though he wrote a licentious book (Masson's Milton, v. 383), was generally decent in his writings. He was a tutor in the families of Evelyn and of the Earls of Pembroke and Arlington. b. vi. 763. Evelyn recorded under Oct. 24, 1663 :-' Mr Edward Philips came to be my son's preceptor; this gentleman was nephew to Milton who wrote against Salmasius's Defensio, but was not at all infected with his principles.' Diary, i. 399. For his History of Poetry see Milton, 42. His chief performance is the fourth edition of Baker's Chronicle.' Masson's Milton, vi. 481. |