cs lewis - a preface to paradise lost, Study notes of Poetry

Download cs lewis - a preface to paradise lost and more Study notes Poetry in PDF only on Docsity! A ap oa it Ns RN Lelia d A PREFACE at aL Ng LOST Tce ce ee eee Be ee eee Re eee RG en em ce Ws Saxon Beowulf? In what sense did Milton develop the Virgilian Epic? Was it a matter of technique only or did it embrace the style itself and even the subject matter? Professor C. S. Lewis's criticism has always been outstanding for first asking the right questions and then answering them with a lucidity and tight- ness of touch which, far from wearying his readers with learning, stimulates TT Re ee Ce Epic as a literary form resolves itself into a plea that ritual and splendor, and joy itself, have a right to exist oY “His emphasis on tradition leads Mr. Lewis to a preliminary consideration of epic poetry in general, which is both fresh and sound. But his most valiant service is to protect us against the many students of Milton who have not been able to see the woods far the trees.” Edward Wagenknecht, The New York Times ©. S. Lewis has been Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge since 1954 and is a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. CT eee eC Cee cod PO OE On eee SO eRe gc es ed English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, but also his books of Christian apologetics, The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity Lea war Las Can ace neo ad A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST by C. S. LEWIS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON OXFORD NEW YORK First published by Oxford University Press, London, 1942 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1961 This reprint, 1969 I'RINTED IN THJ-: UNITED STATJ-:5 OF AMERICA DEDICATION To CHARLES WILLIAMS DEAR w JLLIAMS, When I remember what kindness I received and what pleasure I had in delivering these lectures in the strange and beautiful hillside College at Bangor, I feel almost ungrateful to my Welsh hosts in offering this book not to them, but to you. Yet I cannot do otherwise. To think of my own lecture is to think of those other lectures at Oxford in which you partly anticipated, partly confirmed, and most of all clarified and matured, what I had long been thinking about Milton. The scene was, in a way, medieval, and may prove to have been historic. You were a vagus thrown among us by the chance of war. The appropriate beauties of the Divinity School pro­ vided your bac'cground. There we elders heard (among other things) what he had long despaired of hearing-a lecture on Comus which placed its importance where the poet placed it­ and watched 'the yonge fresshc folkes, he or she', who filled the benches listening first with incredulity, then with tolera­ tion, and finally with delight, to something so strange and new in their experience as the praise of chastity. Reviewers, who have not had time to re-read Milton, have failed for the most part to digest your criticism of him ; but it is a reasonable hope that of those who heard you in Oxford many will understand henceforward that when the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted. It gives me a sense of security to remember that, far from loving your work because you are my friend, I first sought your friendship because I loved your books. But for that, I should find it difficult to believe that your short Preface 1 to Milton is what it seems to me to be-the recovery of a true critical tradition 1 The Poetical Works of Milton. The World's Classics, 1940. v Innumerabili immortali Disegualmente in lor Ietizia eguali: Tasso, Gier. Lib, IX, 57· How so many learned heads should so far forget their Metaphysicks, and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures. BROWNE, Rel. Med. 1, xxx. I EPIC POETRY A perfect judge will read each work of wil With the same spirit that its author writ. POPE.. The first qualification for judging any piece of workman­ ship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is­ what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. After that has bee.n discovered the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about the cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing is to understand the ob­ ject before you : as long as you think the corkscrew was meant for opening tins or the cathedral for entertaining tourists you can say nothing to the purpose about them. The first thing the reader needs to know about Paradise Lost is what Milton meant it to be. This need is specially urgent in the present age because the kind of poem Milton meant to write is unfamiliar to many readers. He is writing epic poetry which is a species of narrative poetry, and neither the species nor the genus is very well under­ stood at present. The misunderstanding of the genus (narra­ tive poetry) I have learned from looking into used copies of our great narrative poems. In them you find often enough a num­ ber of not very remarkable lines underscored with pencil in the first two pages, and all the rest of the book virgin. It is easy to see what has happened. The unfortunate reader has set out expecting 'good lines'-little ebullient patches of delight­ such as he is accustomed to find in lyrics, and has thought he was finding them in things that took his fancy for accidental reasons during the first five minutes ; after that, finding that the 2 A PREFACE TO PARAD ISE LOST poem cannot really be read in this way, he has given it up. Of the continuity of a long narrative poem, the subordination of the line to the paragraph and the paragraph to the Book and even of the Book to the whole, of the grand sweeping effects that take a quarter of an hour to develop themselves, he has had no conception. The misunderstanding of the species (epic narrative) I have learned from the errors of critics, including myself, who sometimes regard as faults in Paradise Lost those very properties which the poet laboured hardest to attain and which, rightly enjoyed, are essential to its specific delightful­ ness (olK€ta �Soll1]). Our study of Milton's epic must therefore begin with a study of epic in general. I anticipate two incidental advantages from this procedure. In the first place, as we shall see, this approach was Milton's own. The first question he asked himself was not 'What do I want to say ?' but 'What kind of poem do I want to make ?'-to which of the great pre-existing kinds, so different in the expec­ tations they excite and fulfil, so diverse in their powers, so recognizably distinguished in the minds of all cultured readers, do I intend to contribute ? The parallel is not to be found in a modern author considering what his unique message is and what unique idiom will best convey it, but rather in a gardener asking whether he will make a rockery or a tennis court, an architect asking whether he is to make a church or a house, a boy debating whether to play hockey or football, a man hesi­ tating between marriage and celibacy. The things between which choice is to be made already exist in their own right, each with a character of its own well established in the public world and governed by its own laws. If you choose one, you lose the specific beauties and delights of the other : for your aim is not mere excellence, but the excellence proper to the thing chosen-the goodness of a rockery or a celibate being different from that of a tennis court or a husband. In the second place, this approach will force us to attend to that aspect of poetry which is now most neglected. Every poem can be considered in two ways-as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes. From the one point of view it is an expression of E PIC PO ETRY 5 and of the Hebrew tongue, who did not think himself thereby disqualified from pronouncing this judgement a proof of Milton's bad taste ; the rest of us, whose Greek is amateurish and who have no Hebrew, must leave Milton to discuss the question with his peers. But if any man will read aloud on alternate mornings for a single month a page of Pindar and a page of the Psalms in any translation he chooses, I think I can guess which he will first grow tired of. Warned by what Milton has said under the heading of Lyric, I would not hastily conclude that the Biblical models throughout the scheme represent the victory of his 'Puritan­ ism' over his 'Classicism' . Indeed it would be almost equally plausible to put the matter the other way round. If a strict Classicist might resent the intrusion of the Biblical models, a strict 'Puritan' might equally resent the degradation of the Word of God to the status of a source of precedents for literary composition-as if it were on a level with the work of unin­ spired and even heathen poets. The truth probably is that there is no struggle, and therefore no victory on either side. There is fusion, or integration. The Christian and the classical elements are not being kept in watertight compartments, but being organized together to produce a whole. Let us now consider Milton's (A) , the Epic. His distinction between 'Diffuse' and 'Brief' has already been referred to. More difficult is his contrast between following Aristotle and following Nature. The 'rules' of Aristotle for Epic, in so far as they are relevant here, amount to the precept of uniry. The epic poet must deal with a single action, like Homer (Poetics, cap. 23) : those who thought that all the adventures of Theseus would make one poem because Theseus was one man were mis­ taken. In Milton's mind there is apparently some other kind of epic contrasted with that which Aristotle recommended, and this other kind is oddly regarded as following 'nature' ; oddly, because later classicists tended to identify nature with the 'rules'. Now there was only one thing known to Milton which bore the name of epic and also differed in kind from the work of Homer and Virgil-the romantic or chivalrous epic of 6 A PREFACE TO PARAD ISE LOST Boiardo, Ariosto, and Spenser. This differs from the ancient works, firstly by its lavish use of the marvellous, secondly by the place given to love, and thirdly by the multiple action of inter­ woven stories. The third characteristic is the most immediately noticeable of the three, and I believe that it is what Milton is mainly referring to. It is not at first apparent why he should call it a following of nature. I am pretty sure that the com­ plete answer to the question is to be found somewhere in the Italian critics ; but in the meantime something like an answer I have found in Tasso. In his Discourses on the Heroic Poem Tasso raises the whole problem of multiplicity or unity in an epic plot, and says that the claims of unity are supported by Aristotle, the ancients, and Reason, but those of multiplicity by usage, the actual taste of all knights and ladies, and Ex­ perience (op. cit., m) . By 'experience' he doubtless means such unhappy experiences as that of his father who wrote an Amadis in strict conformity to the rules of Aristotle, but found that the recitation of it emptied the auditorium, from which 'he concluded that unity of action was a thing affording little pleasure'. Now usage and experience, especially when con­ trasted with precedent and reason, are concepts not very far from 'Nature' . I believe, therefore, with very little doubt, that Milton's hesitation between 'the rules of Aristotle' and 'fol­ lowing Nature' means, in simpler language, 'shall I write an epic in twelve books with a simple plot, or shall I write some­ thing in stanzas and cantos about knights and ladies and en­ chantments ?' The importance of this explanation, if true, is threefold. 1. Connecting it with his ideas of a possible theme ('what king or knight before the conquest'), we may surmise that the romantic subject was rejected at about the same time as the romantic form, the Spenserian or Italian type of epic. We tend perhaps to assume that if Milton's Arthuriad had been written it would have been the same sort of poem as Paradise Lost, but surely this is very rash ? A much more Spenserian Milton-the Milton of L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Comus-had to be partially repressed before Paradise Lost could be written: if you choose E PI C POETRY 7 the rockery you must abandon the tennis court. It is very likely that if Arthur had been chosen the Spenserian Mil­ ton would have grown to full development and the actual Milton, the 'Miltonic' Milton, would have been repressed. There is evidence that Milton's ideas for an Arthuriad were very 'romantic' indeed. He was going to paint Arthur etiam sub terris bella moventem (Mansus 8 1 ) , Arthur's wars 'beneath the earth'. I do not know whether this means strange adventures experienced by Arthur in some other world between his dis­ appearance in the barge and his predicted return to help the Britons at their need, or adventures in fairyland before he be­ came king, or some even wilder Welsh tale about the caldron of Hades. But it certainly does not suggest the purely heroic and military epic which we are apt to think of when Milton's Arthurian projects are mentioned. 2. Milton's hesitation between the classical and the ro­ mantic types of epic is one more instance of something which runs through all his work ; I mean the co-existence, in a live and sensitive tension, of apparent opposites. We have already noted the fusion of Pagan and Biblical interests in his very map of poetry. We shall have occasion, in a later section, to notice, side by side with his rebelliousness, his individualism, and his love of liberty, his equal love of discipline, of hierarchy, of what Shakespeare calls 'degree'. From the account of his early reading in Smectymnuus we gather a third tension. His first literary loves, both for their style and their matter, were the erotic (indeed the almost pornographic) elegiac poets of Rome : from them he graduated to the idealized love poetry of Dante and Petrarch and of 'those lofty fables which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood' : from these to the philo­ sophical sublimation of sexual passion in 'Plato and his equal (i.e. his contemporary) Xenophon'. An original voluptuous­ ness greater, perhaps, than that of any English poet, is pruned, formed, organized, and made human by progressive purifica­ tions, themselves the responses to a quite equally intense aspiration-an equally imaginative and emotional aspiration -towards chastity. The modern idea of a Great Man is one 10 A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST worthless. Shall I then go to Mr. Eliot and ask him to tell me who the best contemporary poets are ? But this, again, will be useless. I personally may think Mr. Eliot a poet-in fact, I do -but then, as he has explained to me, my thoughts on such a point are worthless. I cannot find out whether Mr. Eliot is a poet or not; and until I have found out I cannot know whether his testimony to the poethood of Mr. Pound and Mr. Auden is valid. And for the same reason I cannot find out whether their testimony to his poethood is valid. Poets become on this view an unrecognizable society (an Invisible Church) , and their mutual criticism goes on within a closed circle which no out­ sider can possibly break into at any point. But even within the circle it is no better. Mr. Eliot is ready to accept the verdict of the best contemporary poets on his criticism. But how does he recognize them as poets ? Clearly, because he is a poet himself; for if he is not, his opinion is worthless. At the basis of his whole critical edifice, then, lies the judgement 'I am a poet.' But this is a critical judgement. It therefore follows that when Mr. Eliot asks himself, 'Am I a poet ?' he has to assume the answer 'I am' before he can .find the answer 'I am' ; for the answer, being a piece of criticism, is valuable only if he is a poet. He is thus compelled to beg the question before he can get started at all. Similarly Mr. Auden and Mr. Pound must beg the question before they get started. But since no man of high intellectual honour can base his thought on an exposed petitio the real result is that no such man can criticize poetry at all, neither his own poetry nor that of his neighbour. The republic of letters resolves itself into an aggregate of uncommunicating and unwindowed monads; each has unawares crowned and mitred himself Pope and King of Pointland. In answer to this Mr. Eliot may properly plead that the same apparently vicious circle meets us in other maxims which I should find it less easy to reject : as when we say that only a good man can judge goodness, or only a rational man can judge reasonings, or only a doctor can judge medical skill. But we must beware of false parallels. ( I ) In the moral sphere, IS CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? I I though insight and performance are not strictly equal (which would make both guilt and aspiration impossible) , yet it is true that continued disobedience to conscience makes con­ science blind. But disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose. The writer was trying to make good poetry. He was endeavouring to follow such lights as he had-a procedure which in the moral sphere is the pledge of progress, but not in poetry. Again, a man may fall outside the class of 'good poets' not by being a bad poet, but by writing no poetry at all, whereas at every moment of his waking life he is either obeying or breaking the moral law. The moral blindness consequent on being a bad man must therefore fall on every one who is not a good man, whereas the critical blindness (if any) due to being a bad poet need by no means fall on every one who is not a good poet. (2) Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all. The critique of a chain of reasoning is itself a chain of reasoning : the critique of a tragedy is not itself a tragedy. To say that only the rational man can judge reasonings is, therefore, to make the merely analytical proposition 'Only the rational man can reason', parallel to 'only the poet can make poetry', or 'only the critic can criticize', and not at all parallel to the synthetic proposition 'only the poet can criticize'. (3) As regards a skill, such as medicine or engineering, we must distinguish. Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result. It is for cooks to say whether a given dish proves skill in the cook ; but whether the product on which this skill has been lavished is worth eating or no is a question on which a cook's opinion is of no particular value. We may therefore allow poets to tell us (at least if they are ex­ perienced in the same kind of composition) whether it is easy or difficult to write like Milton, but not whether the reading of Milton is a valuable experience. For who can endure a doc­ trine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed ? 12 A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST Such are the results if we take the position in its full rigour. But of course if it is only meant that a good poet, other things being equal (which they often are not) , is reasonably likely, in talking about the kinds of poetry he has himself written well and read with delight, to say something more worth hearing than another, then we need not deny it. PR IMARY EPIC IS and honoured with wine and spontaneously beginning his tragic lay at the inner prompting of a goddess, we should never again forget the distinction. Turning to Beowulf, we find a slightly different situation. We hear nothing at all in this poem about poetry outside the court. But we can supplement Beowulf from other sources. In Bede's account of Caedmon (Eccl. His. rv, 24) we get the glimpse of a feast among men apparently of peasant's rank, where each sang in turn as the harp came to him. It is just conceivable that what each sang was a very short heroic lay, but there is no reason to suppose this. Certainly the Anglo-Saxons had songs of a very different type. Alcuin's letter to Hygebald in 797 is always quoted because, in deploring the use ofheathern poetry in religious houses, he mentions Hinieldus who is probably Hrothgar's son-in-law Ingeld. But it should also be remembered that he asks for 'the voice of the reader in the house rather than the laughter of the mob in the streets' (voces legentium in domihus tuis non ridentium turvam in plateis) . This 'laughter' would not be connected with heroic lays. No doubt, Alcuin may be referring to ribald conversation and not to poetry at all. But it seems to me very likely that he means comic poetry, and that comic, or at least light, poems were sung at the feast which Caedmon attended. This is admittedly conjecture ; but it would be very odd if the ancestors of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mr. Jacobs produced no funny stories. When we turn to Beowulf's picture of the court we are on surer ground. In lines 2 105 and following we have a per­ formance given by Hrothgar himself. We learn that he some­ times (hwilum) produced a gidd or lay which was sop and sarlic (true and tragic) , sometimes a tale of wonders (sellic spell) , and sometimes, with the fetters of age heavy upon him, he be­ gan to recall his youth, the strength that once was his in battle ; his heart swelled within him as he remembered the vanished winters. Professor Tolkien has suggested to me that this is an account of the complete range of court poetry, in which three kinds of poem can be distinguished-the lament for mutability (hu seo ]Jrag gewat) now represented by the Wanderer and the 16 A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST Setifarer, the tale of strange adventures, and the 'true and tragic' lay such as the Finnsburg poem, which alone is true epic. Beowulf itself contains elements of the sellic spell, but it is cer­ tainly sarlic and probably much of it was regarded as sop. With­ out pressing these distinctions too far, we can certainly con­ clude from this passage that the author of Beowulf is aware of different kinds of court poetry. Here, as in Homer, Epic does not mean simply whatever was sung in hall. It is one of the possible entertainments, marked off from the others, in Homer by the spontaneity and quasi-oracular character of the poet's performance, and in both Homer and Beowulf by tragic quality, by supposed historical truth, and by the gravity that goes with 'true tragedy'. Such, then, is epic as we first hear of it ; the loftiest and gravest among the kinds of court poetry in the oral period, a poetry about nobles, made for nobles, and performed on occa­ sion, by nobles (cf. fl. ix, x8g) . We shall go endlessly astray if we do not get well fixed in our minds at the outset the picture of a venerable figure, a king, a great warrior, or a poet inspired by the Muse, seated and chanting to the harp a poem on high matters before an assembly of nobles in a court, at a time when the court was the common centre of many interests which have since been separated ; when it was not only the Windsor Castle, but also the Somerset House, the Horseguards, the Covent Garden, and perhaps even, in certain respects, the West­ minster Abbey, of the tribe. But also, it was the place of fes­ tivity, the place of brightest hearths and strongest drink, of courtesy, merriment, news, and friendship. All this is a long way from Mr. John Milton printing a book to be sold in seventeenth-century London, but it is not irrelevant. From its early association with the heroic court there comes into Epic Poetry a quality which survives, with strange transformations and enrichments, down to Milton's own time, and it is a quality which moderns find difficult to understand. It has been split up, or dissociated, by rec;:ent developments, so that we now have to represent it by piecing together what seem to us quite unconnected ideas, but are really fragments of that old unity. PR IMARY E P I C This quality will b e understood by any one who really understands the meaning of the Middle English word solempne. This means something different, but not quite different, from modem English solemn. Like solemn it implies the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary. But unlike solemn it does not suggest gloom, oppression, or austerity. The ball in the first act of Romeo and Juliet was a 'solemnity'. The feast at the beginning of Gawain and the Green Knight is very much of a solemnity. A great mass by Mozart or Beethoven is as much a solemnity in its hilarious gloria as in its poignant crucijixus est. Feasts are, in this sense, more solemn than fasts. Easter is solempne, Good Friday is not. The Solempne is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for pomp-and the very fact that pompous is now used only in a bad sense measures the degree to which we have lost the old idea of 'solemnity'. To recover it you must think of a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people who enjoy them; in an age when every one puts on his oldest clothes to be happy in, you must re-awake the simpler state of mind in which people put on gold and scarlet to be happy in. Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a wide­ spread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occa­ sions, has any connexion with vanity or self-conceit. A cele­ brant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding the boar's head at a Christmas feast­ all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient; they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readi­ ness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual. This is the first fence we must get over. Epic, from the be­ ginning, is solempne. You are to expect pomp. You are to 'assist', as the French say, at a great festal action. I have stressed the point at this early stage because misunderstandings IV THE TECHNIQUE OF PRIMARY EPIC And the words of his mouth were as slaves spreading carpets of glory Embroidered with names of the Djinns-a miraculous weaving­ But the cool and perspicuous rye overbore unbelieving. KIPLING. The most obvious characteristic of an oral technique IS Its continual use of stock words, phrases, or even whole lines. It is important to realize at the outset that these are not a second­ best on which the poets fall back when inspiration fails them : they are as frequent in the great passages as in the low ones. In 103 lines of the parting between Hector and Andromache (justly regarded as one of the peaks of European poetry) phrases, or whole lines, which occur again and again in Homer are twenty-eight times employed (fl. VI, 390-493) . Roughly speaking, a quarter of the whole passage is 'stock'. In Beowulf's last speech to Wiglaf (Beow. 2794-820) 'stock' expressions occur six times in twenty-eight lines-again, they are about a quarter of the whole. This phenomenon has been explained often enough from the poet's side. 'These repetitions,' says Mr. Nilsson, 'are a great aid for the singer for whilst reciting them mechanically he is subconsciously forming the next verse' (Homer and Mycenae, p. 203) . But all art is made toface the audience. Nothing can be left exposed, however useful to the performer, which is not de­ lightful or at least tolerable to them. A stage set must be judged from in front. If the poet's ease were the sole consideration, why have a recitation at all ? Is he not very well already, with his wine at his elbow and his share in the roast pork ? We must therefore consider what these repetitions do for the hearers, not what they do for the poet. And we may observe that this is THE TE CHNIQ.UE OF PRIMARY E P I C 2 1 the only aesthetic or critical question. Music means not the noises it is nice to make, but the noises it is nice to hear. Good poetry means not the poetry men like composing, but the poetry men like to listen to or to read. If any one will make the experiment for a week or two of reading no poetry and hearing a good deal, he will soon find the explanation of the stock phrases. It is a prime necessity of oral poetry that the hearers should not be surprised too often, or too much. The unexpected tires us: it also takes us longer to understand and enjoy than the expected. A line which gives the listener pause is a disaster in oral poetry because it makes him lose the next line. And even if he does not lose the next, the rare and ebullient line is not worth making. In the sweep of recitation no individual line is going to count for very much. The pleasure which moderns chiefly desire from printed poetry is ruled out anyway. You cannot ponder over single lines and let them dissolve on the mind like lozenges. That is the wrong way of using this sort of poetry. It is not built up of isolated effects ; the poetry is in the paragraph, or the whole episode. To look for single, 'good' lines is like looking for single 'good' stones in a cathedral. The language, therefore, must be familiar in the sense of being expected. But in Epic which is the highest species of oral court poetry, it must not be familiar in the sense of being col­ loquial or commonplace. The desire for simplicity is a late and sophisticated one. We moderns may like dances which are hardly distinguishable from walking and poetry which sounds as if it might be uttered ex tempore. Our ancestors did not. They liked a dance which was a dance, and fine clothes which no one could mistake for working clothes, and feasts that no one could mistake for ordinary dinners, and poetry that unblushingly pro­ claimed itself to be poetry. What is the point of having a poet, inspired by the Muse, if he tells the stories just as you or I would have told them ? It will be seen that these two demands, taken together, absolutely necessitate a Poetic Diction ; that is, a language which is familiar because it is used in every part of every poem, but unfamiliar because it is not used outside 22 A P REFACE TO PARAD ISE LOST poetry. A parallel, from a different sphere, would be turkey and plum pudding on Christmas day ; no one is surprised at the menu, but every one recognizes that it is not ordinary fare. Another parallel would be the language of a liturgy. Regular church-goers are not surprised by the service-indeed, they know a good deal of it by rote ; but it is a language apart. Epic diction, Christmas fare, and the liturgy, are all ex­ amples of ritual-that is, of something set deliberately apart from daily usage, but wholly familiar within its own sphere. The element of ritual which some dislike in Milton's poetry thus comes into epic at the very beginning. Its propriety in Milton will be considered later; but those who dislike ritual in general-ritual in any and every department oflife-may be asked most earnestly to reconsider the question. It is a pattern imposed on the mere flux of our feelings by reason and will, which renders pleasures less fugitive and griefs more endurable, which hands over to the power of wise custom the task (to which the individual and his moods are so inadequate) of being festive or sober, gay or reverent, when we choose to be, and not at the bidding of chance. This is the common ground of all oral poetry. Against it we can now discern differences between one poem and another. The epic diction of Homer is not the same as that of Beowulf. It seems to me almost certain, from the language and metre, that the Greek epic was recited more quickly. It therefore needs more, and more complete, repetition. The actual operation of the Homeric diction is remarkable. The unchanging recurrence of his wine-dark sea, his rosy­ fingered dawn, his ships launched into the holy brine, his Poseidon shaker of earth, produce an effect which modern poetry, except where it has learned from Homer himself, cannot attain. They emphasize the unchanging human environment. They express a feeling very profound and very frequent in real life, but else­ where ill represented in literature. What is really in our minds when we first catch sight of the sea after a long absence, or look up, as watchers in a sickroom or as sentries, to see yet another daybreak ? Many things, no doubt-all manner of hopes and T H E T E C H N IQU E O F PRIMARY E P I C 25 eats turns into Miss T.' The epic diction, as Goethe said, is 'a language which does your thinking and your poetizing for you' (Eine Sprache die fiir dich dichtet und denkt). The conscious artistry of the poet is thus set free to devote itself wholly to the large-scale problems-construction, character drawing, inven­ tion ; his verbal poetics have become a habit, like grammar or articulation. I have avoided using such words as automatic or mechanical which carry a false suggestion. A machine is made out of inorganic materials and exploits some non-human power, such as gravitation, or the force of steam. But every single Homeric phrase was originally invented by a man and is, like all language, a human thing. It is like a machine in so far as the individual poet liberates, by using it, power other than his own ; but it is stored human life and human experience which he is liberating-not his own life and experience, but none the less human and spiritual. The picture of a Muse-a superpersonal figure, yet anthropomorphically conceived-is therefore really more accurate than that of some kind of engine. No doubt all this is very unlike the recipe for poetry which finds favour today. But there is no fighting against facts. Make what you can of it, the result of this wholly artificial diction is a degree of objectivity which no other poetry has ever surpassed. Homer accepts artificiality from the outset : but in the result he is something for which 'natural' is too weak an epithet. He has no more need to bother about being 'natural' than Nature herself. To a limited extent the technique of Beowulf is the same as that of Homer. It, too, has its reiterated expressions, under wolcnum, in geardum, and the life, and its 'poetical' names for most of the things the author wants to mention. One of its differences from Homer, indeed, is the number of synonymous words which the poet can use for the same thing : Homer has no list of alternatives to compare to the Beowulfian words for man-beorn, freca, guma, hailep, secg, wer. In the same way, Beowulf is fonder than Homer of partial repetition, of using slightly varied forms of a poetic phrase or compound. Thus, from the passage already mentioned, Wuldorcyninge does not, I think, occur elsewhere in the poem, but wuldres wealdend and A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST wuldres hyrde do. Wordum secge is similarly a partial repetition of wordum h£don, wordum wrixlan, and wordum n£gde; wyrdforsweop, of wyrd fornam, deap fornam, and gupdeap fornam. In part, this difference of technique goes with a shorter line, a language more full of consonants, and doubtless a slower and more em­ phatic delivery. It goes with the difference between a quanti­ tative metre and one which uses both quantity and stress accent, demanding their union for that characteristic of alliterative verse which is called weight. One of Homer's great passages is like a cavalry charge; one of Beowulf's, like blows from a ham­ mer or the repeated thunder of breakers on the beach. The words flow in Homer; in Beowulf they fall apart into massive lumps. The audience has more time to chew on them. Less help is needed from pure reiteration. All this is not unconnected with a deeper difference of tem­ per. The objectivity of the unchanging background which is the glory of Homer's poetry, is not equally a characteristic of Beowulf. Compared with the Iliad, Beowulf is already, in one sense, 'romantic'. Its landscapes have a spiritual quality. The country which Grendel haunts expresses the same things as Grendel himself: the 'visionary dreariness' of Wordsworth is foreshadowed. Poetry has lost by the change, but it has gained, too. The Homeric Cyclops is a mere puppet beside the sad, excluded ellorgast, or the jealous and joyless dragon, of the English poem. There is certainly not more suffering behind Beowulf than there is behind the Iliad; but there is a conscious­ ness of good and evil which Homer lacks. The 'proper' oral technique of the later poem, that which distinguishes it most sharply from Homer, is the variation or parallelism which most of us have first met in the Psalms. 'He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn; the Lord shall have them in derision.' The rule is that nearly everything must be said more than once. The cold prose about the ship in which Scyld's dead body was sent away (Beow. 50) is that nobody knew what became of it. The poetical rendering is that 'Men knew not to say for a truth, the talkers in the hall knew not, warriors under the sky knew not, who received that cargo.' v THE S UBJECT OF PRIMARY EPIC The Gods made a man called Kvdsir who was so wise you couldn't ask him any question he hadn't got an answer to. He travelled all over the world teaching men things, until he became the guest of two dwarfs. They got him talking and managed to kill him. Then they mixed honey with his blood and made such a mead of it that any­ body who drinks it becomes a poet. Abridgedfrom Bragaropur, LVII. In the foregoing account of Primary Epic the reader may have noticed that no mention is made of one characteristic which later critics have sometimes thought essential. Nothing has been said about greatness of subject. No doubt, the epics we have been considering do not deal with comic or idyllic matters ; but what of the epic theme as later ages have con­ ceived it-the large national or cosmic subject of super­ personal interest ? In my opinion the great subject ('the life of Arthur, or Jerusalem's fall') was not a mark of primary epic. It enters the epic with Virgil, whose position in this story is central and who has altered the very notion of epic; so much so that I believe we are now tempted to read the great subject into primary epic where it does not exist. But since this may be disputed, let us consider Beowulf and the Homeric poems from this point of VleW. The Odyssey is clearly out of the running. The mere fact that these adventures happened to Odysseus while he was returning from the Trojan War does not make that war the subject of the poem. Our interest is in the fortunes of an individual. Ifhe is a king, he is the king of a very small country, and there is hardly any attempt to make Ithaca seem important, save as the hero's home and estate are important in any story. There is no pre­ tence, indeed no possibility of pretending, that the world, or A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST the constant aimless alternations of glory and misery, which make up the terrible phenomenon called a Heroic Age, admit no such design. No one event is really very much more im­ portant than another. No achievement can be permanent : to­ day we kill and feast, tomorrow we are killed, and our women led away as slaves. Nothing 'stays put', nothing has a sig­ nificance beyond the moment. Heroism and tragedy there are in plenty, therefore good stories in plenty; but no 'large design that brings the world out of the good to ill'. The total effect is not a pattern, but a kaleidoscope. If Troy falls, woe to the Trojans, no doubt, but what of it ? 'Zeus has loosened the heads of many cities, and many more will he loosen yet' (ll. IX, 25) . Heorot has been built nobly, but in the end what of it ? From the very outset, 'High, horn-gabled, the hall rises, Waits the welter of war's surges, And the fire, its foe' (Beow. 8 I ) . Much has been talked of the melancholy of Virgil ; but an inch beneath the bright surface of Homer we find not melan­ choly but despair. 'Hell' was the word Goethe used of it. It is all the more terrible because the poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint. It comes out casually, in similes. As when the smoke ascends to the sky from a city afar Set in an isle, which foes have compassed round in war, And all day long they struggle as hateful Ares bids. (ll. xvm, 207.) Or again, As when a woman upon the body falls Of her husband, killed in battle before the city walls . . . . She sees him down and listens how he gasps his life away, And clings to the body, crying, amid the foes ; but they Beating her back and shoulders with butts of spears amain Pull her away to slavery to learn of toil and pain. (Od. vm, 523.) Notice how different this is from the sack of Troy in Aeneid n . This is a mere simile-the sort of thing that happens every day. The fall of Virgil's Troy is a catastrophe, the end of an epoch. T H E SUBJECT O F PR IMARY E P I C 3 1 Urbs antiqua ruit-'an ancient city, empress of long ages, falls'. For Homer it is all in the day's work. Beowulf strikes the same note. Once the king is dead, we know what is in store for us : that little island of happiness, like many another before it and many another in the years that follow, is submerged, and the great tide of the Heroic Age rolls over it : Laughter has left us with our Lord's slaying, And mirth and music. Many a spearshaft Shall freeze our fingers in frightened dawn, As our hands hold it. No harp's delight Shall waken warriors. The wan raven Keen for carrion, his call sending, Shall utter to the eagle how he ate his fill At War's banquet; the wolf shared it. (Beow. 3020.) Primary Epic is great, but not with the greatness of the later kind. In Homer, its greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux. It is all the more tragic because there hangs over the heroic world a certain futility. 'And here I sit in Troy,' says Achilles to Priam, 'affiicting you and your children.' Not 'protecting Greece', not even 'winning glory', not called by any vocation to affiict Priam, but just doing it because that is the way things come about. We are in a different world here from Virgil's mens immota manet. There the suffering has a meaning, and is the price of a high resolve. Here there is just the suffering. Perhaps this was in Goethe's mind when he said, 'The lesson of the Iliad is that on this earth we must enact Hell.' Only the style-the unwearying, unmoved, angelic speech of Homer-makes it endurable. Without that the Iliad would be a poem beside which the grimmest modern realism is child's play. Beowulf is a little different. In Homer the background of accepted, matter-of-fact despair is, after all, a background. In Beowulf that fundamental darkness comes out into the fore­ ground and is partly embodied in the monsters. And against those monsters the hero fights. No one in Homer had fought A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST against the darkness. In the English poem we have the characteristic theme of Northern mythology-the gods and men ranged in battle against the giants. To that extent the poem is more cheerful at heart, though not on the surface, and has the first hint of the Great Subject. In this way, as in several others, it stands between the Iliad and Virgil. But it does not approach Virgil very closely. The monsters only partly embody the darkness. Their defeat-or its defeat in them-is not permanent or even long lasting. Like every other Primary Epic it leaves matters much as it found them : the Heroic Age is still going on at the end. V I R G I L AND T H E SUBJECT O F SECONDARY E P I C 35 remoter past. The heroes whose adventures we are to follow are the remnant (reliquias) of some earlier order, destroyed be­ fore the curtain rose ; survivors, and, as it were ghosts, hunted (and here wideness in space comes in again) maria omnia circum, while Juno bars them from Latium, Leading them far, for-wandered, over alien foam; So mighty was the labour of the birth of Rome. The labour, the moles, is the point. These men are not fighting for their own hand like Homeric heroes ; they are men with a vocation, men on whom a burden is laid. The more obvious instances of this enlargement of Virgil's subject have, no doubt, often been noticed-the glimpses of the future in Jove's prophecy in Book I , or in the vision of Anchises, or in the shield, or again the connexion of the whole fourth Book with the Punic Wars. Perhaps the most moving of all these forward links is the visit of Aeneas to the site of Rome in Book vm. The backward links are of equal importance in determining the poetical quality of the Aeneid. If l am not mis­ taken it is almost the first poem which carries a real sense of the 'abysm of time'. Priscus, vetus, and antiquus are key-words in Virgil. In Books VI to vm-the true heart of the poem-we are never allowed to forget that Latium-Lurkwood, the hiding place of aged Saturn-has been waiting for the Trojans from the beginning of the world. The palace of King Latinus is very unlike any house in Homer : 'Awful with woods and piety of elder days,' Where carved in ancient cedar their old sires appear In order : father !talus and grey Sabine Bearing his hook in token how he loved the vine, And Saturn old and Janus with his double face . . . (vn, I 8o.) There is a poetry that reiterated readings cannot exhaust in all these early Italian scenes ; in the first sight of the Tiber, the lonely prayer to that unknown river, and the long river journey on which the ships startle those hitherto unviolated A P REFACE TO PARADISE LOST forests. I do not know a better example of imagination, in the highest sense, than when Charon wonders at the Golden Bough 'so long unseen' ; dark centuries of that unhistoried lower world are conjured up in haif a line (vi, 409) . But Virgil uses something more subtle than mere length of time. Our life has bends as well as extension : moments at which we realize that we have just turned some great corner, and that everything, for better or worse, will always hence­ forth be different. In a sense, as we have already seen, the whole Aeneid is the story of just such a transition in the world­ order, the shift of civilization from the East to the West, the transformation of the little remnant, the rcliquias, of the old, into the germ of the new. Hence the sadness of farewells and the alacrity of new beginnings, so conspicuously brought to­ gether at the opening of Book 111, dominate the whole poem. Sometimes the sense of paes ofereode is made explicit, as when the Trojans arrive at Actium and find themselves at last, be­ yond hope, disengaged from the Greek world, and this im­ portant moment is underlined by a change of season, Meanwhile the sun had rolled through the delaying year And icy winter, roughening the dark waves, was here. (m, 285.) Sometimes it is an infinitesimal change of language which may pass the reader's conscious mind unnoticed, but which doubtless plays its part in colouring his total experience, as when the old Aegean hatreds have slipped far enough behind for crafty Ulysses to become unfortunate Ulysses. Perhaps one of Virgil's most daring successes is the appearance of Creusa's ghost in Book u. The sad, ineffectual creature, shouldered aside by destiny, must come to prophesy the wife who will replace her and the fortunes of her husband in which she will have no share. If she were a living woman it would be inexcusable cruelty. But she is not a woman, she is a ghost, the wraith of all that which, whether regretted or unregretted, is throughout the poem drifting away, settling down, into the irrevocable past, not, as in elegiac poets, that we may luxuriate in melan- V I R G I L AND THE SUBJECT OF SECONDARY E P I C 37 choly reflections on mutability, but because the fates of Jove so order it, because, thus and not otherwise, some great thing comes about. Aeneas himself is mistaken for a ghost in the next book. In a sense he is a ghost of Troy until he becomes the father of Rome. All through the poem we are turning that corner. It is this which gives the reader of the Aeneid the sense of having lived through so much. No man who has once read it with full perception remains an adolescent. This theme of the great transition is, of course, closely con­ nected with the Virgilian sense ofVocation. Nothing separates him so sharply from Homer, and that, sometimes, in places where they are superficially most alike. Aeneas' speech en­ couraging his men in Book I ( I g8) is closely modelled on Odysseus' speech in Odyssey xn (2o8) . Both remind their fol­ lowers that they have been in tighter places before. But Odysseus speaks simply as any captain to any crew ; safety is the goal. Aeneas adds something quite un-Homeric : One day it will be pastime to recall this woe, Through all these freaks of fortune and hard straits we go Right onward to the promised home, the Latian earth, Where we shall rest and Ilium have her second birth. (I, 206.) Vicit iter durum pietas ; with this conception Virgil has added a new dimension to poetry. I have read that his Aeneas, so guided by dreams and omens, is hardly the shadow of a man beside Homer's Achilles. But a man, an adult, is precisely what he is : Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy. You may, of course, prefer the poetry of spontaneous passion to the poetry of passion at war with vocation, and finally re­ conciled. Every man to his taste. But we must not blame the second for not being the first. With Virgil European poetry grows up. For there are certain moods in which all that had gone before seems, as it were, boys' poetry, depending both for its charm and for its limitations on a certain naivety, seen alike in its heady ecstasies and in its heady despairs, which we cer­ tainly cannot, perhaps should not, recover. Mens immota V I I THE STYLE OF SECONDARY EPI C Forms and figures of speech originally the offspring of passion, but now the adopted children of power. COLERIDGE. The style of Virgil and Milton arises as the solution of a very definite problem. The Secondary epic aims at an even higher solemnity than the Primary ; but it has lost all those external aids to solemnity which the Primary enjoyed. There is no robed and garlanded aoidos, no altar, not even a feast in a hall -only a private person reading a book in an armchair. Yet somehow or other, that private person must be made to feel that he is assisting at an august ritual, for if he does not, he will not be receptive of the true epic exhilaration. The sheer writing of the poem, therefore, must now do, of itself, what the whole occasion helped to do for Homer. The Virgilian and Miltonic style is there to compensate for-to counteract-the privacy and informality of silent reading in a man's own study. Every judgement on it which does not realize this will be inept. To blame it for being ritualistic or incantatory, for lack­ ing intimacy or the speaking voice, is to blame it for being just what it intends to be and ought to be. It is like damning an opera or an oratorio because the personages sing instead of speaking. In a general and obvious sense this effect is achieved by what is called the 'grandeur' or 'elevation' of the style. As far as Milton is concerned (for I am not scholar enough to analyse Virgil) this grandeur is produced mainly by three things. ( 1 ) The use of slightly unfamiliar words and constructions, in­ cluding archaisms. (2) The use of proper names, not solely nor chiefly for their sound, but because they are the names of THE STYLE O F SECONDARY E P I C splendid, remote, terrible, voluptuous, o r celebrated things. They are there to encourage a sweep of the reader's eye over the richness and variety of the world-to supply that largior aether which we breathe as long as the poem lasts. (3) Con­ tinued allusion to all the sources of heightened interest in our sense experience (light, darkness, storm, flowers, jewels, sexual love, and the like) , but all over-topped and 'managed' with an air of magnanimous austerity. Hence comes the feeling of sensual excitement without surrender or relaxation, the ex­ tremely tonic, yet also extremely rich, quality of our experience while we read. But all this you might have in great poems which were not epic. What I chiefly want to point out is some­ thing else-the poet's unremitting manipulation of his readers­ how he sweeps us along as though we were attending an actual recitation and nowhere allows us to settle down and luxuriate on any one line or paragraph. It is common to speak of Milton's style as organ music. It might be more helpful to regard the reader as the organ and Milton as the organist. It is on us he plays, if we will let him. Consider the opening paragraph. The ostensible philoso­ phical purpose of the poem (to justify the ways of God to Man) is here of quite secondary importance. The real function of these twenty-six lines is to give us the sensation that some great thing is now about to begin. If the poet succeeds in doing that sufficiently, we shall be clay in his hands for the rest of Book 1 and perhaps longer ; for be it noted that in this kind of poetry most of the poet's battles are won in advance. And as far as I am con­ cerned, he succeeds completely, and I think I see something of how he does it. Firstly, there is the quality of weight, produced by the fact that nearly all the lines end in long, heavy mono­ syllables. Secondly, there is the direct suggestion of deep spiritual preparation at two points-0 spirit who dost prefer and What in me is dark. But notice how cunningly this direct sug­ gestion of great beginnings is reinforced by allusion to the creation of the world itself (Dove-like sat' st brooding) , and then by images of rising and lifting ( With no middle flight intends to soar . . . raise and support-Highth of this great argument) and then again 42 A PREFACE TO P ARADISE LOST how creation and rising come potently together when we are reminded that Heaven and Earth rose out of Chaos, and how in addition to this we have that brisk, morning promise of good things to come, borrowed from Ariosto (things unattempted yet), and how till one greater Man makes us feel we are about to read an epic that spans over the whole of history with its arch. All images that can suggest a great thing beginning have been brought together and our very muscles respond as we read. But look again and you will see that the ostensible and logical con­ nexion between these images is not exactly the same as the emotional connexion which I have been tracing. The point is important. In one respect, Milton's technique is very like that of some moderns. He throws ideas together because of those emotional relations which they have in the very recesses of our consciousness. But unlike the moderns he always provides a fa�ade of logical connexions as well. The virtue of this is that it pulls our logical faculty to sleep and enables us to accept what we are given without question. This distinction between the logical connexions which the poet puts on the surface and the emotional connexions where­ by he really manipulates our imagination is the key to many of his similes. The Miltonic simile does not always serve to illustrate what it pretends to be illustrating. The likeness be­ tween the two things compared is often trivial, and is, indeed, required only to save the face of the logical censor. At the end of Book I the fiends are compared to elves. Smallness is the only point of resemblance. The first use of the simile is to provide contrast and relief, to refresh us by a transition from Hell to a moonlit English lane. Its second use becomes apparent when we suddenly return to where far within And in thir own dimensions like themselves The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim In close recess and secret conclave sat, A thousand Demy-Gods on golden seats. (n, 796.) THE STYLE OF SECONDARY E P I C 45 imaginations with unobtrusive pressure into the channels where the poet wishes them to flow ; and as we have already seen, the learning which a reader requires in responding to a given allusion does not equal the learning Milton needed to find it. When we have understood this it will perhaps be possible to approach that feature of Milton's style which has been most severely criticized-the Latinism of his constructions. Continuity is an essential of the epic style. If the mere printed page is to affect us like the voice of a bard chanting in a hall, then the chant must go on-smoothly, irresistibly, 'upborne with indefatigable wings'. We must not be allowed to settle down at the end of each sentence. Even the fuller pause at the end of a paragraph must be felt as we feel the pause in a piece of music, where the silence is part of the music, and not as we feel the pause between one item of a concert and the next. Even between one Book and the next we must not wholly wake from the enchantment nor quite put off our festal clothes. A boat will not answer to the rudder unless it is in motion ; the poet can work upon us only as long as we are kept on the move. Roughly speaking, Milton avoids discontinuity by an avoid­ ance of what grammarians call the simple sentence. Now, if the sort of things he was saying were at all like the things that Donne or Shakespeare say, this would be intolerably tiring. He therefore compensates for the complexity of his syntax by the simplicity of the broad imaginative effects beneath it and the perfect rightness of their sequence. For us readers, this means in fact that our receptivity can be mainly laid open to the un­ derlying simplicity, while we have only to play at the complex synta.'C. It is not in the least necessary to go to the very bottom of these verse sentences as you go to the bottom of Hooker's sentences in prose. The general feeling (which will usually be found to be correct if you insist on analysing it) that something highly concatenated is before you, that the flow of speech does not fall apart into separate lumps, that you are following a great unflagging voice-this is enough to keep the A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST 'weigh' on you by means of which the poet steers. Let us take an example : If thou beest he-but 0 how fall'n ! how chang'd From him who in the happy Realms of Light Cloth'd with transcendent brightness didst outshine Myriads though bright : If he whom mutual league, United thoughts and counsels, equal hope And hazard in the Glorious Enterprise, Joynd with me once, now misery hath joynd In equal ruin : into what Pit thou seest From what highth fal'n. This is a pretty complicated sentence. On the other hand, if you read it (and let the ghost of a chanting, not a talking, voice be in your ear) without bothering about the syntax, you receive in their most natural order all the required impressions -the lost glories of heaven, the first plotting and planning, the hopes and hazards of the actual war, and then the misery, the ruin, and the pit. But the complex syntax has not been useless. It has preserved the cantabile, it has enabled you to feel, even within these few lines, the enormous onward pressure of the great stream on which you are embarked. And almost any sentence in the poem will illustrate the same point. The extremely Latin connexions between the sentences serve the same purposes, and involve, like the similes, a fair amount of illusion. A good example is nor sometimes forget, in m, 32. In this passage Milton is directly calling up what he in­ directly suggests throughout, the figure of the great blind bard. It will, of course, be greatly enriched if the mythical blind bards of antiquity are brought to bear on us. A poet like Spenser would simply begin a new stanza with Likewise dan Homer or something of the sort. But that will not quite serve Milton's purpose : it is a little too like rambling, it might sug­ gest the garrulity of an old gentleman in his chair. Nor some­ times forget gets him across from Sion and the flowery brooks to THE STYLE O F SECONDARY E P I C 47 Blind Thamyris with an appearance of continuity, like the stylized movement by which a dancer passes from one position to another. Yet not the more in line 26 is another example. So are sad task Yet argument (IX, 1 3) and Since first this subject (1x, 25). These expressions do not represent real connexions of thought, any more than the prolonged syllables in Handel represent real pronunciation. It must also be noticed that while Milton's Latin con­ structions in one way tighten up our language, in another way they make it more fluid. A fixed order of words is the price­ an all but ruinous price-which English pays for being un­ inflected. The Miltonic constructions enable the poet to depart, in some degree, from this fixed order and thus to drop the ideas into his sentence in any order he chooses. Thus, for example, soft oppression seis'd My droused sense, untroubl'd though I thought I then was passing to my former state Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve. (vm, 29 1 .) The syntax is so artificial that it is ambiguous. I do not know whether untroubled qualifies me understood, or sense, and similar doubts arise about insensible and the construction of to dissolve. But then I don't need to know. The sequence drowsed­ untroubled-my former state-insensible-dissolve is exactly right; the very crumbling of consciousness is before us and the fringe of syntactical mystery helps rather than hinders the effect. Thus, in another passage, I read Heav'n op'nd wide Her ever-during Gates, Harmonious sound On golden Hinges moving. (vn, 205.) Moving might be a transitive participle agreeing with gates and goveming sound; or again the whole phrase from harmonious to moving might be an ablative absolute. The effect of the passage, so A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST trees, yet higher ( I 42) springs up the green, living wall of Para­ dise. And now a moment's rest from our looking upward ; at a wave of the wand we are seeing the whole thing reversed-we are Adam, King of Earth, looking down from that green ram­ part into this lower world ( I44-5)-and, of course, when we return it seems loftier still. For even that wall was not the real top. Above the wall-yes, at last, almost beyond belief, we see for once with mortal eyes the trees of Paradise itself. In lines I 47-9 we get the first bit of direct description. Of course, the trees have golden fruit. We always knew they would. Every myth has told us so ; to ask for 'originality' at this point is stark insensibility. But we are not allowed to go on looking at them. The simile of the rainbow ( I50-2) is introduced, and at once our glimpse of Paradise recedes to the rainbow's end. Then the theme of serialism· is picked up again-the air is growing purer every minute ( 1 53) ; and this idea (Quan la douss aura uenta) at once passes into a nineteen-line exploitation of the most evocative of the senses, suddenly countered by the stench of Satan ( 1 67) . Then a pause, as if after a crashing piece of orchestration, and we go back to the images of gradual ap­ proach, Satan still journeying on ( I 72) . Now the obstacles grow more formidable and it presently turns out (as the Trojans had found on sighting Italy) that the real entrance is on the other side ( 1 79) . What follows is concerned with the main theme of the story and may be omitted here. We return to Paradise at 205. We are in at last, and now the poet has to do something in the way of description; well for him that the Paradise­ complex in us is now thoroughly awake and that almost any particular image he gives us will be caught up and assimilated. But he does not begin with a particular image, rather with an idea-in narrow room Nature's whole wealth. The 'narrow room', the sense of a small guarded place, of sweetness rolled into a ball, is essential. God had planted it all (2IO) . Not created it, but planted it-an anthropomorphic God out of Ezekiel xxxi, the God of our childhood and man's, making a toy garden as we made them when we were children. The earliest and lowest levels are being uncovered. And all this realm was studded T H E S T Y L E O F S E CONDARY E PI C once with rich and ancient cities ; a pleasant soil ( 2 14) , but the mountain of Paradise, like a jewel set in gold, far more pleasant (2 1 5) so that an emotion stolen from the splendour of the cities now flows into our feeling of Paradise. Then come the trees, the mythical and numinous trees, and vegetable gold from the garden of Hesperus (2 1 7-22) . Then the rivers, which like Alph plunge into darkness and rise from it through pores at the bidding of kindly thirst (228) , and Paradise again reminds us of a human body ; and in contrast with this organic dark we have crisped brooks above (237) and the hard, bright suggestions of pearl and gold (238) . Finally, from line 246 to 265, we get actual description. It is all, most rightly, generalized, and it is short. A reader who dislikes this kind of poetry would possibly ex­ press his objection to Milton's Paradise by saying it contained 'all the right things'-odorous gums, golden fruit, thornless roses, murmuring falls-and would prefer something he had not expected. But the unexpected has here no place. These references to the obvious and the immemorial are there not to give us new ideas about the lost garden but to make us know that the garden is found, that we have come home at last and reached the centre of the maze-our centre, humanity-'s centre, not some private centre of the poet's. And they last only long enough to do so. The representation begins swelling and trembling at 264 with the nervous reiteration of airs in order that it may burst in the following lines-may flow over into a riot of mythology where we are so to speak, drenched. That is the real climax ; and then, having been ernparadised, we are ready at line 288 to meet at last the white, erect, severe, voluptuous forms of our first parents. V I I I DEFENCE OF THIS STYLE One hand a Mathematique Christall swayes, Which, gathering in one line a thousand ra_yes From her1 bright eyes, Confusion bumes to death, And all estates of men distinguishetlz. By it Morallitie and Comelincsse Themselves in all their sightly figures dresse. Her other hand a launell rod applies, To beate back Barbarisme and Avarice, That follow' d, eating earth and excrement And human limbs; and would make proud asctml To seates of gods, were Ceremonie slaine. CHAPMAN : Hero and Leander, 111, 1 3 1 . I believe I am right in saying that the reaction of many readers to the chapter I have just finished might be expressed in the following words. 'You have described exactly what we do not call poetry. This manipulation of the audience which you attribute to Milton is just what distinguishes the vile art of the rhetorician and the propagandist from the disinterested activity of the poet. This evocation of stock responses to con­ ventional situations, which you choose to call Archetypal Patterns, is the very mark of the cheap writer. This calculated pomp and grandiosity is the sheer antithesis of true poetic sin­ cerity-a miserable attempt to appear high by mounting on stilts. In brief, we always suspected that Milton was bogus, and you have confirmed our suspicion. Habemus confitentem reum.' I hardly expect to convert many of those who take such a view ; but it would be a mistake not to make clear that the difference between us is essential. If these are my errors they are not errors into which I have fallen inadvertently, but the very lie in the soul. If these are my truths, then they are basic truths the loss of which means imaginative death. 1 Those of the goddess Ceremony. D E F E N CE O F THIS STYLE 55 sponse Dr. I. A. Richards means a deliberately organized atti­ tude which is substituted for 'the direct free play of experi­ ence'. In my opinion such deliberate organization is one of the first necessities of human life, and one of the main functions of art is to assist it. All that we describe as constancy in love or friendship, as loyalty in political life, or, in general, as perse­ verance-all solid virtue and stable pleasure-depends on organizing chosen attitudes and maintaining them against the eternal flux (or 'direct free play') of mere immediate ex­ perience. This Dr. Richards would not perhaps deny. But his school puts the emphasis the other way. They talk as if im­ provement of our responses were always required in the direc­ tion of finer discrimination and greater particularity ; never as if men needed responses more normal and more traditional than they now have. To me, on the other hand, it seems that most people's responses are not 'stock' enough, and that the play of experience is too free and too direct in most of us for safety or happiness or human dignity. A number of causes may be assigned for the opposite belief. ( 1 ) The decay of Logic, re­ sulting in an untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not. (2) A Romantic Primitivism (not shared by Dr. Richards himself) which prefers the merely natural to the elaborated, the un-willed to the willed. Hence a loss of the old conviction (once shared by Hindoo, Platonist, Stoic, Christian, and 'humanist' alike) that simple 'experience', so far from being something venerable, is in itself mere raw material, to be mastered, shaped, and worked up by the will. (3) A confusion (arising from the fact that both are voluntary) between the organization of a response and the pretence of a response. Von Hugel says somewhere, 'I kiss my son not only because I love him, but in order that I may love him.' That is organization, and good. But you may also kiss children in order to make it appear that you love them. That is pretence, and bad. The distinction must not be overlooked. Sensitive critics are so tired of seeing good Stock responses aped by bad writers that when at last they meet the reality they mistake it for one more instance of posturing. They are rather like a man I knew who A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST had seen so many bad pictures of moonlight on water that he criticized a real weir under a real moon as 'conventional' . (4) A belief (not unconnected with the doctrine of the Unchanging Human Heart which I shall discuss later) that a certain ele­ mentary rectitude of human response is 'given' by nature her­ self, and may be taken for granted, so that poets, secure of this basis are free to devote themselves to the more advanced work of teaching us ever finer and finer discrimination. I believe this to be a dangerous delusion. Children like dabbling in dirt ; they have to be taught the stock response to it. Normal sex­ uality, far from being a datum, is achieved by a long and deli­ cate process of suggestion and adjustment which proves too difficult for some individuals and, at times, for whole societies. The Stock response to Pride, which Milton reckoned on when he delineated his Satan, has been decaying ever since the Romantic Movement began-that is one of the reasons why I am composing these lectures. The Stock response to treachery has become uncertain ; only the other day I heard a re­ :Spectable working man defend Lord Haw-Haw by remarking coolly (and with no hint of anger or of irony) , 'You've got to remember that's how he earns his pay.' The Stock response to <l.eath has become uncertain. I have heard a man say that the only 'amusing' thing that happened while he was in hospital was the death of a patient in the same ward. The Stock re­ sponse to pain has become uncertain ; I have heard Mr. Eliot's comparison of evening to a patient on an operating table praised, nay gloated over, not as a striking picture of sensi­ bility in decay, but because it was so 'pleasantly unpleasant'. Even the Stock response to pleasure cannot be depended on ; I have heard a man (and a young man, too) condemn Donne's more erotic poetry because 'sex', as he called it, always 'made him think of lysol and rubber goods'. That elementary recti­ tude of human response, at which we are so ready to fling the unkind epithets of 'stock', 'crude', 'bourgeois', and 'con­ ventional', so far from being 'given' is a delicate balance of trained habits, laboriously acquired and easily lost, on the maintenance of which depend both our virtues and our D E FENCE O F THIS STYLE 57 pleasures and even, perhaps, the survival of our species. For though the human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye) the laws of causation are. When poisons become fashionable they do not cease to kill. The examples I have cited warn us that those Stock re­ sponses which we need in order to be even human are already in danger. In the light of that alarming discovery there is no need to apologize for Milton or for any other pre-Romantic poet. The older poetry, by continually insisting on certain Stock themes-as that love is sweet, death bitter, virtue lovely, and children or gardens delightful-was performing a service not only of moral and civil, but even of biological, importance. Once again, the old critics were quite right when they said that poetry 'instructed by delighting', for poetry was formerly one of the chief means whereby each new generation learned, not to copy, but by copying to make,2 the good Stock responses. Since poetry has abandoned that office the world has not bettered. While the moderns have been pressing forward to conquer new territories of consciousness, the old territory, in which alone man can live, has been left unguarded, and we are in danger of finding the enemy in our rear. We need most ur­ gently to recover the lost poetic art of enriching a response without making it eccentric, and of being normal without being vulgar. Meanwhile-until that recovery is made-such poetry as Milton's is more than ever necessary to us. There is, furthermore, a special reason why mythical poetry ought not to attempt novelty in respect of its ingredients. What it does with the ingredients may be as novel as you please. But giants, dragons, paradises, gods, and the like are themselves the expression of certain basic elements in man's spiritual ex­ perience. In that sense they are more like words-the words of a language which speaks the else unspeakable-than they are like the people and places in a novel. To give them radically new characters is not so much original as ungrammatical. That 2 'We Jearn how to do things by doing the things we are learning how to do,' as Aristotle observes (Ethics, u, i). 6o A P REFACE TO PA RADISE LOST imitated'. If he had not been blind himself, he would still (though with less knowledge to guide him) have put just those elements of a blind man's experience into the mouth of Sam­ son : for the 'disposition of his fable' so as to 'stand best with verisimilitude and decorum' requires them. On the other hand, whatever is calm and great, whatever associations make blind­ ness venerable-all this he selects for the opening of Book 111. Sincerity and insincerity are words that have no application to either case. W'! want a great blind poet in the one, we want a suffering and questioning prisoner in the other. 'Decorum is the grand masterpiece.' The grandeur which the poet assumes in his poetic capacity should not arouse hostile reactions. It is for our benefit. He makes his epic a rite so that we may share it ; the more ritual it becomes, the more we are elevated to the rank of participants. Precisely because the poet appears not as a private person, but as a Hierophant or Choregus, we are summoned not to hear what one particular man thought and felt about the Fall, but to take part, under his leadership, in a great mimetic dance of all Christendom, ourselves soaring and ruining from Heaven, ourselves enacting Hell and Paradise, the Fall and the re­ pentance. Thus far of Milton's style on the assumption that it is in fact as remote and artificial as is thought. No part of my defence depends on questioning that assumption, for I think it ought to be remote and artificial. But it would not be honest to suppress my conviction that the degree to which it possesses these qualities has been exaggerated. Much that we think typically 'Poetic Diction' in Paradise Lost was nothing of the sort, and has since become Poetic Diction only because Milton used it. When he writes of an optic glass ( 1 , 288) we think this is a poetical periphrasis because we are remembering Thomson or Akenside ; but it seems to have been an ordinary expression in Milton's time. When we read ruin and combustion ( 1 , 46) we naturally exclaim aut Miltonus aut diabolus ! Yet the identical words are said to occur in a document of the Long Parliament. Alchymy (n, 5 1 7) sounds like the Miltonic vague : it is really D E F E N C E O F THIS STYLE 6r almost a trade name. Numerous as applied to verse (v, 1 50) sounds 'poetic', but "was not. If we could read Paradise Lost as it really was we should see more play of muscles than we see now. But only a little more. I am defending Milton's style as a ritual style. I think the older critics may have misled us by saying that 'admiration' or 'astonishment' is the proper response to such poetry. Certainly if 'admiration' is taken in its modern sense, the misunderstanding becomes disastrous. I should say rather that joy or exhilaration was what it produced-an overplus of robust and tranquil well-being in a total experience which con­ tains both rapturous and painful elements. In the Dry Salvages Mr. Eliot speaks of 'music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all'. Only as we emerge from the mode of consciousness in­ duced by the symphony do we begin once more to attend ex­ plicitly to the sounds which induced it. In the same way, when we are caught up into the experience which a 'grand' style communicates, we are, in a sense, no longer conscious of the style. Incense is consumed by being used. The poem kindles admirations which leave us no leisure to admire the poem. When our participation in a rite becomes perfect we think no more of ritual, but are engrossed by that about which the rite is performed; but afterwards we recognize that ritual was the sole method by which this concentration could be achieved. Those who in reading Paradise Lost find themselves forced to attend throughout to the sound and the manner have simply not dis­ covered what this sound and this manner were intended to do. A schoolboy who reads a page of Milton by chance, for the first time, and then looks up and says, 'By gum !' not in the least knowing how the thing has worked, but only that new strength and width and brightness and zest have transformed his world, is nearer to the truth than they. I X THE DOCTRINE OF THE UNCHAN GIN G HUMAN HEART 'Men do mightily wrong themselves when they refuse to be present in all ages a11d ruglect to see the beauty of all kingdoms.' TRAHERNE. We have hitherto been concerned almost exclusively with the form of Paradise Lost and it is now time to turn to its matter. Here also the modern reader finds difficulties. Mr. Brian Hone, the cricketer and schoolmaster, once told me that he had reconciled his boys to the need we find for notes in reading Milton by pointing out how many notes Milton would need if he read a modern book. The device is a happy one. If Milton returned from the dead and did a week's reading in the literature of our own day, consider what a crop of questions he might bring you. It would carry you far afield to make him understand how liberal, sentimental, and complacent had become terms of disapproval, and before you had finished you would find that you had embarked on the exposition of a philosophy rather than on merely lexical questions. Now when we read Paradise Lost the positions are reversed. Milton is on his own ground, and it is we who must be the learners. How are these gulfs between the ages to be dealt with by the student of poetry ? A method often recommended may be called the method of The Unchanging Human Heart. Accord­ ing to this method the things which separate one age from another are superficial. Just as, if we stripped the armour off a medieval knight or the lace off a Caroline courtier, we should find beneath them an anatomy identical with our own, so, it is held, if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from Sidney his code of honour, from Lucretius his Epicurean D O CTRINE O F THE UNCHANGING HUMAN HEART 65 Human Heart is one more instance of the L.C.M. view of the universal-the idea that an engine is most truly an engine if it it neither driven by steam nor gas nor electricity, neither stationary nor locomotive, neither big nor small. But in reality you understand enginehood or humanity or any other uni­ versal precisely by studying all the different things it can be­ come-by following the branches of the tree, not by cutting them off. We must therefore turn a deaf ear to Professor Saurat when he invites us 'to study what there is of lasting originality in Milton's thought and especially to disentangle from theo­ logical rubbish the permanent and human interest' (Milton, p. I I I ) . This is like asking us to study Hamlet after the 'rubbish' of the revenge code has been removed, or centipedes when free of their irrelevant legs, or Gothic architecture without the pointed arches. Milton's thought, when purged of its theology, does not exist. Our plap must be very different-to plunge right into the 'rubbish', to see the world as if we believed it, and then, while we still hold that position in our imagination, to see what sort of a poem results. In order to take no unfair advantage I should warn the reader that I myself am a Christian, and that some (by no means all) of the things which the atheist reader must 'try to feel as if he believed' I actually, in cold prose, do believe. But for the student of Milton my Christianity is an advantage. What would you not give to have a real, live Epicurean at your elbow while reading Lucretius ? X MILTON AND ST. A U G USTINE Maysterful mud and highe pr_)'de, I hete thee, am heterly hated here. PEARL, 401 . Milton's version of the Fall story is substantially that of St Augustine, which is that of the Church as a whole. By studying this version we shall learn what the story meant in general to Milton and to his contemporaries and shall thus be the more likely to avoid various false emphases to which modern readers are liable. The doctrines are as follows. I . God created all things without exception good, and be­ cause they are good, 'No Nature (i.e. no positive reality) is bad and the word Bad denotes merely privation of good,' (De Gil'. Dei, XI, 2 I , 22) . Hence Milton's God says of Adam, 'I made him just and right' and adds 'such I created all th' Etherial Powers' (P.L. m, g8) . Hence the angel says 'One Almighty is from whom All things proceed . . . If not depraved from good, created all Such (i.e. good) to perfection' (v, 46g). 2. What we call bad things are good things perverted (De Civ. Dei, XIV, I I ) . This perversion arises when a conscious creature becomes more interested in itself than in God (ibid. XIV, I I ) , and wishes to exist 'on its own' (esse in semet ipso, XIV, I 3) · This is the sin of Pride. The first creature who ever com­ mitted it was Satan 'the proud angel who turned from God to himself, not wishing to be a subject, but to rejoice like a tyrant in having subjects of his own' (xiv, I I ) . Milton's Satan exactly conforms to this description. His prime concern is with his own dignity ; he revolted because he 'thought himself im­ paired' (P.L. v, 665) . He attempts to maintain that he exists 'on his own' in the sense of not having been created by God, M I LTON AND ST . AUGUSTINE 'self-begot, self-raised by his own quickening power' (v, 86o). He is a 'great Sultan' ( r , 348) and 'monarch' (n, 467) , a blend of oriental despot and Machiavellian prince (rv, 393) . 3· From this doctrine of good and evil i t follows (a) That good can exist without evil, as in Milton's Heaven and Para­ dise, but not evil without good (De Civ. Dei, xrv, I r ) . (b) That good and bad angels have the same Nature, happy when it adheres to God and miserable when it adheres to itself (ibid. xrr, 1 ) . These two corollaries explain all those passages in Milton, often misunderstood, where the excellence of Satan's Nature is insisted on, in contrast to, and aggravation of, the perversion of his will. If no good (that is, no being) at all re­ mained to be perverted, Satan would cease to exist; that is why we are told that 'his form had yet not lost All her original brightness' and still appeared as 'glory obscur'd' (P.L. r , 59 1 ) . 4· Though God has made all creatures good H e foreknows that some will voluntarily make themselves bad (De Civ. Dei, xrv, n) and also foreknows the good use which He will then make of their badness (ibid . ) . For as He shows His benevolence in creating good Natures, He shows His justice in exploiting evil wills. (Sicut naturarum bonarum optimus creator, ita voluntatum malarum justissimus ordinator, xr, 1 7.) All this is repeatedly shown at work in the poem. God sees Satan coming to pervert man ; 'and shall pervert', He observes (m, 92) . He knows that Sin and Death 'impute folly' to Him for allowing them so easily to enter the universe, but Sin and Death do not know that God 'called and drew them thither, His hell-hounds to lick up the draff and filth' (x, 620 et seq.) . Sin, in pitiable ignorance, had mistaken this Divine 'calling' for 'sympathie or som con­ natural force' between herself and Satan (x, 246). The same doctrine is enforced in Book 1 when Satan lifts his head from the burning lake by 'high permission of all-ruling Heaven' ( I , 2 1 2) . As the angels point out, whoever tries to rebel against God produces the result opposite to his intention (vrr, 6 1 3) . At the end of the poem Adam is astonished at the power 'that all this good of evil shall produce' (xn, 470) . This is the exact re­ verse of the programme Satan had envisaged in Book 1, when A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST God lets him have it. Thus in Milton God says that man's powers are 'lapsed', 'forfeit', and 'enthralled' (P.L. m, q6) . In Book IX we are told that after the Fall understanding ceased to rule and the will did not listen to understanding, both being subjected to usurping appetite (Ix, I I 2 7 et seq.) . When Reason is disobeyed 'upstart Passions catch the government' (xu, 88). I I. This Disobedience of man's organism to man is specially evident in sexuality as sexuality now is but would not have been but for the Fall (XIv, I 6- Ig) . What St. Augustine means here is, in itself, so clear and yet so open to misunderstanding if not given in full, that we must not pass it over. He means that the sexual organs are not under direct control from the will at all. You can clench your fist without being angry and you can be angry without clenching your fist ; the modifica­ tion of the hand preparatory to fighting is controlled directly by the will and only indirectly, when at all, by the Passions. But the corresponding modification of the sexual organs can neither be produced nor dismissed by mere volition.l This is why Milton places a scene of sexual indulgence immediately after the Fall (Ix, 1 0 1 7-45) . He doubtless intended a contrast between this and the pictures of unfallen sexual activity in IV and vrr (5oo--2o) . But he has made the unfallen already so voluptuous and kept the fallen still so poetical that the con­ trast is not so sharp as it ought to have been. It is my hope that this short analysis will prevent the reader from ever raising certain questions which have, in my opinion, led critics into blind alleys. We need not ask 'What is the Apple ?' It is an apple. It is not an allegory. It is an apple, just as Desdemona's handkerchief is a handkerchief. Every­ thing hangs on it, but in itself it is of no importance. We can also dismiss that question which has so much agitated some great critics. 'What is the Fall ?' The Fall is simply and solely Disobedience-doing what you have been told not to do : and it results from Pride-from being too big for your boots, for- 1 No doubt, the Saint's physiology was superficial. I take it that the in­ voluntary salivation of the mouth in the presence of attractive food is an equally good illustration of the disobedience of our members. M I LTON AND ST . AUGUSTINE getting your place, thinking that you are God. This i s what St. Augustine thinks and what (to the best of my knowledge) the Church has always taught; this Milton states in the very first line of the first Book, this all his characters reiterate and vary from every possible point of view throughout the poem as if it were the subject of a fugue. Eve's arguments in favour of eat­ ing the Apple are, in themselves, reasonable enough ; the answer to them consists simply in the reminder 'You mustn't. You were told not to.' 'The great moral which reigns in Mil­ ton,' said Addison, 'is the most universal and most useful that can be imagined, that Obedience to the will of God makes men happy and that Disobedience makes them miserable.' Dr. Tillyard amazes me by calling this a 'rather vague explana­ tion' (Milton, p. 258) . Dull, if you will, or platitudinous, or harsh, or jej une : but how vague ? Has it not rather the deso­ lating clarity and concreteness of certain classic utterances we remember from the morning of our own lives ; 'Bend over'­ 'Go to bed'-'Write out I must do as I am told a hundred times' -'Do not speak with your mouth full.' How are we to account for the fact that great modern scholars have missed what is so dazzlingly simple ? I think we must suppose that the real nature of the Fall and the real moral of the poem involve an idea so uninteresting or so intensely disagreeable to them that they have been under a sort of psychological necessity of passing it over and hushing it up. Milton, they feel, must have meant something more than that! And here once again, the doctrine of the unchanging human heart comes into play. If there is no God, then Milton's poem, as interpreted by Addison, has no obvious relation to real life. It is therefore necessary to sweep away the main thing Milton was writing about as a mere historical accident and to fix on quite marginal or subsidiary aspects of his work as the real core. For there can be no serious doubt that Milton meant just what Addison said : neither more, nor less, nor other than that. If you can't be interested in that, you can't be interested in Paradise Lost. And how are we to be interested in that ? In two ways, I think. That decreasing number of readers to whom poetry A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST is a passion without afterthought, must just accept Milton's doctrine of obedience as they accept the inexplicable pro­ hibitions in Lohengrin, Cinderella, or Cupid and Psyche. It is, after all, the commonest of themes ; even Peter Rabbit came to grief because he would go into Mr. McGregor's garden. The more common sort of readers must go a longer way round. They must try by an effort of historical imagination to evoke that whole hierarchical conception of the universe to which Milton's poem belongs, and to exercise themselves in feeling as if they believed it ; they must give up the 'unchanging human heart' and try instead to live through some of its real changes. To this idea of Hierarchy which deserves a book, I will now de­ vote a chapter. H IE R A R CHY 75 cosmic hierarchy of the Platonic theologians, specially, I think, that of Abrabanel. Every being is a conductor of superior love or agape to the being below it, and of inferior love or eros to the being above. Such is the loving inequality between the intelli­ gence who guides a sphere and the sphere which is guided.1 This is not metaphor. For the Renaissance thinker, not less but more than for the schoolman, the universe was packed and tingling with anthropomorphic life ; its true picture is to be found in the elaborate title pages of old folios where winds blow at the comers and at the bottom dolphins spout, and the eye passes upward through cities and kings and angels to four Hebrew letters with rays darting from them at the top, which represent the ineffable Name. Hence we are only on the border­ line of metaphor when Spenser's Artegall reproves the levelling giant by telling him that all things were created 'in goodly measure' and 'doe know their certaine bound', so that hills do not 'disdaine' vallies nor vallies 'envy' hills ; in virtue of the same grand Authority who causes kings to command and sub­ jects to obey. This is for Spenser more than a fanciful analogy. The social hierarchy has the same source as the cosmic, is in­ deed the impression of the same seal made upon a different kind of wax. The greatest statement of the Hierarchical conception in its double reference to civil and cosmic life is, perhaps, the speech of Ulysses in Shakespeare's Troilus. Its special importance lies in its clear statement of the alternative to Hierarchy. If you take 'Degree' away 'each thing meets in mere oppugnancy', 'strength' will be lord, everything will 'include itself in power'. In other words, the modern idea that we can choose between Hierarchy and equality is, for Shakespeare's Ulysses, mere moonshine. The real alternative is tyranny; if you will not have authority you will find yourself obeying brute force. Hierarchy is a favourite theme with Shakespeare. A failure to accept his notion of natural authority makes nonsense, for example, of The Taming of the Shrew. It drives the Poet Laureate 1 Abrabanel, Dialoghi d'Amore. Trans. Friedeburg-Secley and Barnes under the title Philosophy of Love by Leone Ebreo. Soncino Press, 1 937, p. 183. A P REFACE TO PARADISE LOST into describing Katharina's speech of submission as 'melan­ choly clap-trap'. It drives modern producers into making Katharina give the audience to understand that her submission is tactical or ironical. There is not a hint of this in the lines Shakespeare has given her. If we ask what Katharina's sub­ mission forebodes, I think Shakespeare has given us his answer through the lips of Petruchio : 'Marry, peace it bodes, and love and quiet life, An awful rule and right supremacy, And, to be short, what not, that's sweet and happy ?' The words, thus taken at their face value, are very startling to a modern audi­ ence ; but those who cannot face such startling should not read old books. If the poet had not meant us to rejoice in the cor­ rection of Katharina he would have made her a more amiable character. He certainly would not have gone out of his way to show us, beneath the mask of her pretended hatred of men, her jealous bullying of her sister. Nor is evidence lacking from other plays to prove that Shakespeare accepted the doctrine of 'right supremacy' in its full extent. 'Headstrong liberty' (of women from men) 'is lashed with woe,' as we learn in the Comedy if Errors. A child is to its parent 'but as a form in wax', says Theseus. A child attempting to argue with a father-and that father, the sage Prospero-receives for sole answer, 'What? I say, my foot my tutor ?' Even Lear is seen in a wrong light if we do not make more than modern concessions about parental and royal authority. Even Macbeth becomes more in­ telligible if we realize that the wife's domination over the hus­ band is a 'monstrous regiment'. It seems to me beyond doubt that Shakespeare agreed with Montaigne that 'to obey is the proper office of a rational soul'. Now if once the conception of Hierarchy is fully grasped, we see that order can be destroyed in two ways : ( I ) By ruling or obeying natural equals, that is by Tyranny or Servility. (2) By failing to obey a natural superior or to rule a natural in­ ferior-that is, by Rebellion or Remissness. And these, whether they are monstrosities of equal guilt or no, are equally mon­ strosities. The idea, therefore, that there is any logical incon­ sistency, or even any emotional disharmony, in asserting the H I E R A R C H Y 77 monarchy of God and rejecting the monarchy of Charles I I is a confusion. We must first inquire whether Charles II is, or is not, our natural superior. For if he is not, rebellion against him would be no departure from the hierarchical principle, but an assertion of it; we should obey God and disobey Charles for one and the same reason-just as even a modern man might obey the law and refuse to obey a gangster for one and the same reason. And lest even so very obvious a truth as this should escape his readers, Milton has made it explicit in two contrasted passages. The first of these is the debate between Satan and Abdiel in Book v. Both parties are sound Aristotelians, but the point is that Satan is wrong about matter of fact. Satan's argument is hampered by the fact that he particularly wants to avoid equality among his own faction. and therefore has to turn aside for a moment to explain (789 et seq.) that 'Orders and Degrees Jarr not with liberty.' He is not very explicit on the subject, et pour cause. The passage is one of those where (rightly and in­ deed inevitably) an element of grim comedy is permitted. But Satan's main contention is clear. He is maintaining that the vice-regency of the Son is a tyranny in the Aristotelian sense. It is unreasonable to assume monarchy 'over such as live by right His equals' (792) . Abdiel's reply is double. In the first place he denies Satan's right to criticize God's actions at all, because God is his creator. As creator He has a super-parental right of doing what He will without question-'my foot my tutor ?' In the second place, granting Satan's definition of tyranny, he denies Satan's facts ; the Son is not of the same nature as the angels and was indeed the instrument by whom they were made. Of course, if He is not their natural equal, 'un­ succeeded power' (8 r 8) on His part (the word unsucceeded links the passage with Aristotle) would not be tyranny, but just rule. And this is so obvious that Satan, in attempting to reply, is re­ duced to the ridiculous and incoherent theory that the angels were 'self-begot' with the kindly assistance of a chimaera called 'fatal course' (858) . The other passage comes at the beginning of Book xu. We 8o A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST reverence none neglects' (m, 737) ; or Adam smiling with 'superior love' on Eve's 'submissive charms' like the great Sky­ Father smiling on the Earth-Mother (rv, 498) ; or the beasts, duteous at the call of Eve as at Circe's (rx, 52 1 ) . The significance of all this seems to m e very plain. This is not the writing of a man who embraces the Hierarchical principle with reluctance, but rather of a man enchanted by it. Nor is this at all surprising. Almost everything one knows about Milton prepares us for such an enchanting and makes it certain that Hierarchy will appeal to his imagination as well as to his conscience, will perhaps reach his conscience chiefly through his imagination. He is a neat, dainty man, 'the lady of Christ's' ; a fastidious man, pacing in trim gardens. He is a grammarian, a swordsman, a musician with a predilection for the fugue. Everything that he greatly cares about demands order, proportion, measure, and control. In poetry he con­ siders decorum the grand masterpiece. In politics he is that which of all things least resembles a democrat-an aristocratic re­ publican who thinks 'nothing more agreeable to the order of nature or more for the interest of mankind, than that the less should yield to the greater, not in numbers, but in wisdom and in virtue' (Defensio Secunda. Trans. Bohn. Prose Wks., Vol. 1 , p. 256) . And soaring far beyond the region of politics he writes, 'And certainly Discipline is not only the removal of disorder ; but if any visible shape can be given to divine things, the very visible shape and image of virtue, whereby she is not only seen in the regular gestures and motions of her heavenly paces as she walks, but also makes the harmony of her voice audible to mortal ears. Yea, the angels theinselves, in whom no disorder is feared, as the apostle that saw them in his rapture describes, are distinguished and quaternioned into their celestial prince­ doms and satrapies, according as God himself has writ his imperial decrees through the great provinces of heaven. The state also of the blessed in paradise, though never so perfect, is not therefore left without discipline, whose golden surveying reed marks out and measures every quarter and circuit of New Jerusalem.' Mark well the reason. Not because even saved souls HIERARCHY 8I \\-ill still be finite ; not because the withdrawing of discipline is some privilege too high for creatures. No ; there will be disci­ pline in Heaven 'that our happiness may orb itself into a thousand vagancies of glory and delight, and with a kind of eccentrical equation be, as it were, an invariable planet of joy and felicity' (Reason of Church Government, I, cap. 1 . Prose H1ks. Bohn, Vol. n, p. 442) . In other words, that we may be 'regu­ lar when most irregular we seem'. Those to whom this con­ ception is meaningless should not waste their time trying to enjoy Milton. For this is perhaps the central paradox of his vision. Discipline, while the world is yet unfallen, exists for the sake of what seems its very opposite-for freedom, almost for extravagance. The pattern deep hidden in the dance, hidden so deep that shallow spectators cannot see it, alone gives beauty to the wild, free gestures that fill it, just as the decasyl­ labic norm gives beauty to all the licences and variations of the poet's verse. The happy soul is, like a planet, a wandering star ; yet in that very wandering (as astronomy teaches) invariable ; she is eccentric beyond all predicting, yet equable in her eccentricity. The heavenly frolic arises from an orchestra which is in tune ; the rules of courtesy make perfect ease and freedom possible between those who obey them. Without sin, the uni­ verse is a Solemn Game : and there is no good game without rules. And as this passage should settle once and for all the question whether Milton loved from his heart the principle of obedience, so they should also set at rest that imaginary quarrel between the ethical and the poetic which moderns often un­ happily read into the great poets. There is no distinction here. The whole man is kindled by his vision of the 'shape of virtue'. Unless we bear this in mind we shall not understand either Comus or Paradise Lost, either the Faerie Q.ueene or the Arcadia, or the Divine Comedy itself. We shall be in constant danger of supposing that the poet was inculcating a rule when in fact he was enamoured of a perfection. X I I THE THEOLOGY OF PA R A D ISE L O S T 1 They laid to my charge things that I knew not. PSALM XXV, II. In so far as Paradise Lost is Augustinian and Hierarchical it is also Catholic in the sense of basing its poetry on conceptions that have been held 'always and everywhere and by all'. This Catholic quality is so predominant that it is the first impression any unbiased reader would receive. Heretical elements exist in it, but are only discoverable by search : any criticism which forces them into the foreground is mistaken, and ignores the fact that this poem was accepted as orthodox by many genera­ tions of acute readers well grounded in theology. Milton studies owe a great debt to Professor Saurat, but I believe that with the enthusiasm incident to a pioneer he has pressed his case too far. He tells us that 'Milton's God is far from the God of popular belief or even orthodox theology. He is no Creator external to His creation, but total and perfect Being which includes in Himself the whole of space and the whole of time' (p. 1 1 3) ; ' . . . matter is a part of God' (p. 1 1 4) . 'Paradise Lost identifies God with the primitive, infinite abyss' (p. 1 1 5) . He is 'utterly non-manifested : as soon as action ap­ pears in the world Milton speaks of the Son and no longer of God' (p. 1 1 7) ; His 'unity is incompatible . . . with Trinity' (p. 1 1 6) ; the 'creation of the Son took place on one particular day' (p. 1 1 9) ; and He is 'the sole manifestation of the Father' (p. 1 20) , who remains 'absolutely unknowable' (p. 1 2 1 ) . By crea- 1 On this subject the reader should consult Professor Sewell's admirable Study in Milton's Christian Doctrine. To note all the minor agreements and differences between Professor Sewell's view and my own would demand more footnotes than the modest scope of the present chapter justifies. T H E THEO LOGY O F PA R A D ISE L O S T No doubt Milton may have thought-though he talks of it less, perhaps, than any other Christian poet-that sexual love provided an analogy for, or was even a real ectype of, celestial and Divine Love. If so, he was following St. Paul on Marriage (Eph. v, 23 et seq . ) , St. John on the Bride (Rev. XXI, 2) , several passages in the Old Testament, and a huge array of medieval poets and mystics. (c) 'God is . . . Total Being which includes in Himself the whole of time.' To support this Professor Saurat quotes from De Doctrina that God 'knows beforehand the thoughts and ac­ tions of free agents . . . the foreknowledge of God is nothing but the wisdom of God or that idea He had of everything before he decreed anything'. This is nothing to the purpose. I have never heard of any Christian, any Unitarian, any Jew, any Mohammedan, or any Theist, who did not believe the same. If such a doctrine of foreknowledge implied that God contains in Himself the whole of time (whatever that may mean) , then this implication would not be heretical, but com­ mon to all Theists. But I do not see any such consequence. Professor Saurat also quotes P.L. VII, 154 ('I in a moment will create Another World' ) and 1 76 ('Immediate are the acts of God', etc.) . These passages mean that Divine Acts are not really in time, though we are compelled to imagine them as if they were-a doctrine which the reader can study in Boethius (De Cons. Phil. v, Pros. vi) , St. Augustine (De Civ. Dei, XI, 6, 2 1 ) , o r Thomas Browne (Rel. Med. 1 , XI) . How i t should imply that God 'includes all time' except in the sense in which Shake­ speare includes (i.e. ordains, while not entering) the dramatic time in Hamlet, I do not know. It is certainly not heretical. The question about space is more difficult and will be dealt with below. 3· Those which are heretical and occur in the De Doctrina, but not in Paradise Lost. Only one doctrine falls under this heading. Milton was an Arian ; that is, he disbelieved in the coeternity and equal deity of the three Persons. Milton is an honest writer. After spending chapters 11 to IV of the first Book of De Doctrina on 86 A P RE FACE TO PARADISE LOST God, he begins cap. v 'on the Son' with prefatory remarks which make it clear that he is now beginning to say something unorthodox, with the implication that he has hitherto been stating common beliefs. His Arianism, in so far as it here con­ cerns us, is stated in the words 'All these passages prove the existence of the Son before the world was made, but they conclude nothing respecting His generation from all eternity.' Professor Saurat suggests that this heresy appears in Paradise Lost, v, 603, when the Father announces to the angels 'This day have I begot whom I declare My onely Son.' Now if this is taken literally it means that the Son was created after the angels. But that is impossible in Paradise Lost. We learn in III, 390, that God created the angels by the agency of the Son, and Abdiel refutes Satan by making the same assertion in v, 835-to which the best answer Satan can bring is that 'we weren't there to see it being done' . The puzzle would be insoluble if Milton had not given us the solution in De Doctrina, I, v, where he says that 'beget', when used of the Father in relation to the Son, has two senses, 'the one literal, with reference to the production of the Son, the other metaphorical, with reference to His exalta­ tion' (Bohn, Prose Wks, vol. IV, p. 8o) . And it is obvious that 'This day I have begot' must mean 'This day I have exalted,' for otherwise it is inconsistent with the rest of the poem.3 And if this is so, we must admit that Milton's Arianism is not asserted in Paradise Lost. The place (n, 678) where we are told that Satan feared no created thing except God and His Son merely illustrates the same illogical idiom which makes Eve one of her own daughters (Iv, 324) ; if it were taken in any other way it would make the Father, as well as the Son, a 'created thing'. The expressi· 'n 'of all Creation first' applied to the Son in m, 383, is a translation of St. Paul's TTpwTIJTOKos' m:faYJs' wrlaEws' (Col. I, I5) · A writer anxious to avoid the Arian heresy might indeed have avoided Milton's translation ; but we should not from this passage, nor from any passage in the whole poem, 3 The zeal question between Professor Saurat and Sir Herbert Grierson on this point is whether a sense which contradicts the rest of the poet's story is more, or less, probable than one that agrees with it. T H E T H E O L O G Y O F P A R A D ISE L O S T have discovered the poet's Arianism without the aid of external evidence.4 4· Those which are possibly heretical and do really occur in Paradise Lost. (a) 'God includes the whole of Space.' The important pas­ sage is vn, r66 et seq., where the Father commands the Son to create the World. The Son is to 'bid the Deep be Heav'n and Earth'. The Deep is 'boundless' because 'I am who fill infini­ tude' ; then come the crucial words, nor vacuous the space Though I incircumscrib'd myself retire And put not forth my goodness, which is free To act or not. One of Professor Saurat's great contributions has been to dis­ cover the doctrine in the Zohar which was almost certainly present in Milton's mind when he wrote those verses. This doc­ trine appears to be that God is infinitely extended in space (like ether), and therefore in order to create-to make room for anything to exist which is not simply Himself-he must contract, or retire, His infinite essence. I do not think such an idea likely to have struck two writers independently, and I therefore allow to Professor Saurat that Milton has been in­ fluenced by the Zohar when he speaks of God 'retiring Himself'. It remains to define the sense in which this is heretical. To say that God is everywhere is orthodox. 'Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith the Lord' (Jer. xxm, 24) . But it is heresy to say that God is corporeal. If, therefore, we insist on defining (which, to the best of my belief, no Christian has ever been obliged to do) the mode of God's omnipresence, we must not so define it as to • I do not say anything in the text about the fact that P.L. has so few references to the Holy Ghost, because I suppose that no reader of the poem would notice this till it had been pointed out to him or draw any theological inference from it if he did. He is mentioned in the invocation to Book I, and His operations in the Church are dealt with pretty fully in Book xu (484- 530) . More than this no one would have expected. The Holy Ghost is not matter for epic poetry. We hear very little of Him, or of the Trinity at all, in Tasso.