Among My Books Volume Ii Part 27

"Therefore so abject is their punishment, Disfiguring not G.o.d's likeness but their own,"

has no a.n.a.logy with _eorum deformantium_, for the context shows that it is the _punishment_ which disfigures. Indeed, Mr. Ma.s.son so often finds constructions difficult, ellipses strange, and words needing annotation that are common to all poetry, nay, sometimes to all English, that his notes seem not seldom to have been written by a foreigner. On this pa.s.sage in "Comus,"--

"I do not think my sister so to seek Or so unprincipled in virtue's book And the sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever As that the single want of light and noise * * * * *

"(Not being in danger, as I trust she is not) Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts,"

Mr. Ma.s.son tells us, that "in very strict construction, _not being_ would cling to _want_ as its substantive; but the phrase pa.s.ses for the Latin ablative absolute." So on the words _forestalling night_, "i. e.

antic.i.p.ating. Forestall is literally to antic.i.p.ate the market by purchasing goods before they are brought to the stall." In the verse

"Thou hast immanacled while Heaven sees good,"

he explains that "_while_ here has the sense of _so long as_." But Mr.

Ma.s.son's notes on the language are his weakest. He is careful to tell us, for example, "that there are instances of the use of _s.h.i.+ne_ as a substantive in Spenser, Ben Jonson, and other poets." It is but another way of spelling _sheen_, and if Mr. Ma.s.son never heard a s...o...b..ack in the street say, "Shall I give you a s.h.i.+ne, sir?" his experience has been singular.[373] His notes in general are very good (though too long).

Those on the astronomy of Milton are particularly valuable. I think he is sometimes a little too scornful of parallel pa.s.sages,[374] for if there is one thing more striking than another in this poet, it is that his great and original imagination was almost wholly nourished by books, perhaps I should rather say set in motion by them. It is wonderful how, from the most withered and juiceless hint gathered in his reading, his grand images rise like an exhalation; how from the most battered old lamp caught in that huge drag-net with which he swept the waters of learning, he could conjure a tall genius to build his palaces. Whatever he touches swells and towers. That wonderful pa.s.sage in Comus of the airy tongues, perhaps the most imaginative in suggestion he ever wrote, was conjured out of a dry sentence in Purchas's abstract of Marco Polo. Such examples help us to understand the poet. When I find that Sir Thomas Browne had said before Milton, that Adam "was _the wisest of all men since_," I am glad to find this link between the most profound and the most stately imagination of that age. Such parallels sometimes give a hint also of the historical development of our poetry, of its apostolical succession, so to speak. Every one has noticed Milton's fondness of sonorous proper names, which have not only an acquired imaginative value by a.s.sociation, and so serve to awaken our poetic sensibilities, but have likewise a merely musical significance. This he probably caught from Marlowe, traces of whom are frequent in him. There is certainly something of what afterwards came to be called Miltonic in more than one pa.s.sage of "Tamburlaine," a play in which gigantic force seems struggling from the block, as in Michel Angelo's Dawn.

Mr. Ma.s.son's remarks on the versification of Milton are, in the main, judicious, but when he ventures on particulars, one cannot always agree with him. He seems to understand that our prosody is accentual merely, and yet, when he comes to what he calls _variations_, he talks of the "subst.i.tution of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or the Spondee, for the regular Iambus, or of the Anapaest, the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for the same." This is always misleading. The s.h.i.+ft of the accent in what Mr.

Ma.s.son calls "dissyllabic variations" is common to all pentameter verse, and, in the other case, most of the words cited as trisyllables either were not so in Milton's day,[375] or were so or not at choice of the poet, according to their place in the verse. There is not an elision of Milton's without precedent in the dramatists from whom he learned to write blank-verse. Milton was a greater metrist than any of them, except Marlowe and Shakespeare, and he employed the elision (or the slur) oftener than they to give a faint undulation or r.e.t.a.r.dation to his verse, only because his epic form demanded it more for variety's sake. How Milton would have _read_ them, is another question. He certainly often marked them by an apostrophe in his ma.n.u.scripts. He doubtless composed according to quant.i.ty, so far as that is possible in English, and as Cowper somewhat extravagantly says, "gives almost as many proofs of it in his 'Paradise Lost' as there are lines in the poem."[376] But when Mr.

Ma.s.son tells us that

"Self-fed and self-consumed: if this fail,"

and

"Dwells in all Heaven charity so rare,"

are "only nine syllables," and that in

"Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream,"

"either the third foot must be read as an _anapaest_ or the word _hugest_ must be p.r.o.nounced as one syllable, _hug'st_," I think Milton would have invoked the soul of Sir John Cheek. Of course Milton read it

"Created hugest that swim th' ocean-stream,"

just as he wrote (if we may trust Mr. Ma.s.son's facsimile)

"Thus sang the uncouth swain to th' oaks and rills,"

a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur precisely as in the Italian poets.[377]

"Gest that swim" would be rather a knotty _anapaest_, an insupportable foot indeed! And why is even _hug'st_ worse than Shakespeare's

"_Young'st_ follower of thy drum"?

In the same way he says of

"For we have also our evening and our morn,"

that "the metre of this line is irregular," and of the rapidly fine

"Came flying and in mid air aloud thus cried,"

that it is "a line of unusual metre." Why more unusual than

"As being the contrary to his high will"?

What would Mr. Ma.s.son say to these three verses from Dekkar?--

"And _knowing_ so much, I muse thou art so poor";

"I fan away the dust _flying_ in mine eyes";

"_Flowing_ o'er with court news only of you and them."

All such participles (where no consonant divided the vowels) were normally of one syllable, permissibly of two.[378] If Mr. Ma.s.son had studied the poets who preceded Milton as he has studied _him_, he would never have said that the verse

"Not this rock only; his omnipresence fills,"

was "peculiar as having a distinct syllable of overmeasure." He retains Milton's spelling of _hunderd_ without perceiving the metrical reason for it, that _d, t, p, b,_ &c., followed by _l_ or _r_, might be either of two or of three syllables. In Marlowe we find it both ways in two consecutive verses:--

"A hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse, Two hundred thousand foot, brave men at arms."[379]

Mr. Ma.s.son is especially puzzled by verses ending in one or more unaccented syllables, and even argues in his Introduction that some of them might be reckoned Alexandrines. He cites some lines of Spenser as confirming his theory, forgetting that rhyme wholly changes the conditions of the case by throwing the accent (appreciably even now, but more emphatically in Spenser's day) on the last syllable.

"A spirit and judgment equal or superior,"

he calls "a remarkably anomalous line, consisting of twelve or even thirteen syllables." Surely Milton's ear would never have tolerated a dissyllabic "spirit" in such a position. The word was then more commonly of one syllable, though it might be two, and was accordingly spelt _spreet_ (still surviving in _sprite_), _sprit_, and even _spirt_, as Milton himself spells it in one of Mr. Ma.s.son's facsimiles.[380]

Shakespeare, in the verse

"Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,"

uses the word admirably well in a position where it _cannot_ have a metrical value of more than one syllable, while it gives a dancing movement to the verse in keeping with the sense. Our old metrists were careful of elasticity, a quality which modern verse has lost in proportion as our language has stiffened into uniformity under the benumbing fingers of pedants.

This discussion of the value of syllables is not so trifling as it seems.

A great deal of nonsense has been written about imperfect measures in Shakespeare, and of the admirable dramatic effect produced by filling up the gaps of missing syllables with pauses or prolongations of the voice in reading. In rapid, abrupt, and pa.s.sionate dialogue this is possible, but in pa.s.sages of continuously level speech it is barbarously absurd. I do not believe that any of our old dramatists has knowingly left us a single imperfect verse. Seeing in what a haphazard way and in how mutilated a form their plays have mostly reached us, we should attribute such _faults_ (as a geologist would call them) to anything rather than to the deliberate design of the poets. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the two best metrists among them, have given us a standard by which to measure what licenses they took in versification,--the one in his translations, the other in his poems. The unmanageable verses in Milton are very few, and all of them occur in works printed after his blindness had lessened the chances of supervision and increased those of error. There are only two, indeed, which seem to me wholly indigestible as they stand. These are,

"Burnt after them to the bottomless pit,"

and

"With them from bliss to the bottomless deep."

This certainly looks like a case where a word had dropped out or had been stricken out by some proof-reader who limited the number of syllables in a pentameter verse by that of his finger-ends. Mr. Ma.s.son notices only the first of these lines, and says that to make it regular by accenting the word _bottomless_ on the second syllable would be "too horrible."

Certainly not, if Milton so accented it, any more than _blasphemous_ and twenty more which sound oddly to us now. However that may be, Milton could not have intended to close not only a period, but a paragraph also, with an unmusical verse, and in the only other pa.s.sage where the word occurs it is accented as now on the first syllable:

"With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell."

As _bottom_ is a word which, like _bosom_ and _besom_, may be monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to circ.u.mstances, I am persuaded that the last pa.s.sage quoted (and all three refer to the same event) gives us the word wanting in the two others, and that Milton wrote, or meant to write,--