"But this is enough, perhaps more than enough, to say about the Prosody and Harmony of the art. Let us in every one's mouth, all told in his favour. The public, too, was getting heartily tired of the overdone subtleties and fancies of Donne, Crashaw, and the rest of the Marinist school, and accepted the first good change that presented itself, and that was Waller, Denham, and their copyists. 1 It has been doubted whether even Milton himself could have given a clear exposition of his own Prosody and Harmony. I think the passages in the text to which this note is appended go a great way to remove that doubt, and that we have here the best exposition and clearest account of the Miltonic method that has yet been given. We could hardly expect less if my contention as to the true authorship of this Romance be correct. There have been two or three happy attempts made by critics; for instance, De Quincey speaks of the "slow planetary wheelings" of Milton's verse, and Professor Raleigh, most recent of all, admirably puts it thus: "His verse [Milton's], even in its least admirable passages, does not sing, nor trip with regular alternate stress; its movement suggests neither dance nor song, but rather the advancing march of a body of troops skilfully, handled, with incessant changes in their disposition, as they pass over broken ground. He can furnish them with wings when it so pleases him" (p. 193). Exactly so; and it would be difficult to find a better instance than the Armada epic of Nova Solyma. Of course it is Milton's heroics that are thus criticised. His lyrics have dance and song movement and their own peculiar grace, as all the world knows, and so have the Latin lyrics of this Romance. Wordsworth's definition of harmonious verse is also very good, and would doubtless have received Milton's hearty approbation. Wordsworth says: "Harmonious verse consists (the English iambic blank verse above all) in the apt arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs With many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out, and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence or antithetic vigour of single lines; which are indeed injurious to the total effect, except where they are introduced for some specific purpose." Dr. Garnett, too, expressed the true Miltonic idea of poetical harmony very correctly in his Life of Milton (p. 166), thus: "The organ-like solemnity of his verbal music is obtained partly by extreme attention to variety of pause, but chiefly, as Wordsworth told Klopstock, and as Mr. Addington Symonds points out more at length, by the period, not the individual line, being made the metrical unit, 'so that each line in a period shall carry its proper burden of sound, but the burden shall be differently distributed in the successive verses,' Ch. III] THE MAKING OF POETS 267 now consider the groundwork, beginning at the very foundation. "As soon as beginners have acquired a good stock of words from the best authors, we try to impart life and discernment to this formless mass. We do not expect maturity of judgment and vigour of execution to come at once. We rather try to stimulate the sparks of kindling genius-boyish wit and smartness, for instance, when harmless, such as the examples I just read to you. For these conceits and double meanings abound in fun and merriment, and are most acceptable to boyish minds, whose first tendency lies that way. Thus Virgil' most realistically introduces little Iulus making his joke about eating their tables, and the great poet himself, when a boy, composed verses of this character in his Culex and other pieces. These quips, produced by impulse and temperament rather than by carefully taking thought, are, we think, stimulating to the mind; but all laborious compositions, such as anagrams, chronograms, and such like, which can never be the free inspiration of an active mind, we utterly reject and contemn. "To epigrams we add descriptions of natural objects, odes, idylls, and hymns; sometimes the subject is given, Hence lines which taken singly seem almost unmetrical, in combination with their associates appear indispensable parts of the general harmony." What admirable literary insight! This is exactly the plan that Milton himself (if my contention be true) says expressly in the text was the one he put before him in his literary work. It is not unworthy of a second hearing with the Latin appended. "In fine, every poem, as a whole, must be so blended together responsively in its several parts, that the stream of verse with all its windings and turnings is ever seen to be flowing in one and the same channel." "Ac denique integrum poema, per singularum partium tractus sibi undique respondere et quasi in eodem alveo per omnes flexuras fluere oportet " (Nova Solyma, p. 144). Aeneid, vii. 116. * Miltonic. This excludes some possible authors of Nova Solyma—— Phineas Fletcher and others. Anagrams were much in fashion in 1600-50, 268 ADVICE TO BEGINNERS [Bk. III, Ch. III at other times they choose their own. Some of our quickest lads delight in bringing forth a new literary bantling every day. This kind of poetry requires a good choice of refined words well put together, and a certain restrained energy patent to the dullest reader. "We next advance to the highest branch of true poetry, the heroic, as it is called, whose part it is to magnify in noble words and in the loftiest style the deeds that history tells, and, more than that, to round them off with just restraint. For it is not every one of fiery and forceful genius that turns out to be a good poet; more often is the true poet a man who has been blessed by nature with a well-balanced mind, an intellect great but sober withal.1 'The poet must not be so modest as to dare nothing, nor so extravagant as to dare everything. Never to rise from the ground is as much a fault as to be ever on Fancy's wing. Each vigorous passage, each brilliant phrase, should have its counterpart to tone it down. There should be no affectation, no undue exaggeration. The whole poem should be instinct with a splendid, noble, and decorous spirit, yet one that will grandly stoop to the commonest things.2 Right proportion and an equable flow should be preserved throughout, and above all should this be the case where the grand and sublime are portrayed. "There are also many other precepts of the art which others have handed down with sufficient exactness." 1 Milton himself, assuredly. The author, in his reflections on true poetry, is clearly a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian in his conceptions of the poetic art. The Platonist lays stress on the Divine rapture, the inspiration which is a kind of heaven-sent madness, and makes that a great test of poetic power; while, in the Aristotelian doctrine, study took the place of inspiration. In the Elizabethan age Spenser was the Platonist poet par excellence, Ben Jonson the Aristotelian, laying stress on art as opposed to natural genius. Milton, we know, followed Spenser and Plato, I CHAPTER IV EPIC POETRY-JOSEPH'S ARMADA EPIC WILL now show you some examples which the gifted genius of Joseph has composed. They are rather novel, and possibly you may not have met with such." 1 1 It has been noticed elsewhere how frequently both Milton and our author keep referring to the novelty of their effusions: "Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," "things new and somewhat daring," "things not attempted hitherto by Christian poets," and many other passages; and yet, after all, there seems nothing strikingly novel except his celestial machinery and angelic artillery and personified abstractions, and many precedents for such strange poetical conceptions could have been found among the Italian neo-Latin poets, and even among some of the German neo-Latin versifiers, and no doubt Milton knew of them all. What he rather meant was, I believe, that they were effusions new and unattempted in his own country and by Christians of the Reformed Religion. The chief foreign influence in Milton's age was the Italian, and Milton, as a friend from boyhood of Diodati and possibly his home circle, and withal a first-rate Italian scholar, would be under this influence as much as any man of learning in the country, probably more so. Among the neo-Latinists, Valmarana, Donadeus, Sebastianus Maccius Durantinus, and a multitude of vernacular Italian poets and dramatists besides, had treated Scriptural subjects in similar fashion, and Milton knew it; but they had not been so treated by Englishmen and Protestants, and were thus both new and daring. There is little doubt that Milton was habituated, from his early youth, to Italian poetry, and drew many new conceptions therefrom, and acquired also that love of new and varying metres which is so marked both in his published poems and in Nova Solyma. But Landor (Works, viii. 390) surely goes too far in this direction when he says that "there is no verse whatsoever in any of his poems for the metre of which he has not an Italian prototype." There is some mistake here, for the Hymn to the Nativity is "his own metre," says Keightley, and he was So saying, he went to his desk, where he kept the best productions of his pupils in their different subjects, and, searching through the successful poetical exercises, he took out one entitled Philippica, and as he saw that the title rather puzzled them, he explained that the subject of the poem was the naval attack on England atrociously undertaken by Philip, King of Spain, and so successfully and worthily resisted. These names roused their attention, and with great eagerness they wished to examine the book for themselves; but the master, turning over the first page and pointing to the second, told them that there was to be found the poetical explanation of the title, which he would read to them: I sing Hesperian1 pomp and boast, I sing the puny barques so brave O God on high, my Muse inflame! This exordium, or introduction, has three parts: the Argument, or summary of the whole book, the Invocation, and the Conclusion. continually trying new experiments in his metrical translations of the Psalms, and there are several Latin metres in Nova Solyma that I have not been able to discover anywhere else. His own fine musical ear was the source from which they came. So the text is true after all, for they would be novel and daringly tentative themes in the mouth of a fellow-countryman and fellow-Christian, though usual enough in semi-pagan, Popish lands beyond the sea. 1 Milton, in his Latin poem On Gunpowder Plot, line 102, written when just seventeen, uses the word Hesperia in an exactly similar connection: And mindful to avenge Hesperia's scattered fleet. Hispania always meant Spain, but Hesperia was ambiguous and was used both for Spain and Italy. Hesperia is preferred both here and by Milton because the Pope's influence is hinted at. |