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A perfect judge will read each work of wit

With the same spirit that its author writ.

pope.

The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship 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 been 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 object 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 understood at present. The misunderstanding of the genus (narrative poetry) I have learned from looking into used copies of our great narrative poems. In them you find often enough a number 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 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 delightfulness (οἰκεία ἡδονή). 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 expectations 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 hesitating 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 opinions and emotions; from the other, it is an organization of words which exists to produce a particular kind of patterned experience in the readers. Another way of stating this duality would be to say that every poem has two parents—its mother being the mass of experience, thought, and the like, inside the poet, and its father the pre-existing Form (epic, tragedy, the novel, or what not) which he meets in the public world. By studying only the mother, criticism becomes one-sided. It is easy to forget that the man who writes a good love sonnet needs not only to be enamoured of a woman, but also to be enamoured of the Sonnet. It would, in my opinion, be the greatest error to suppose that this fertilization of the poet’s internal matter by the pre-existing Form impairs his originality, in any sense in which originality is a high literary excellence. (It is the smaller poets who invent forms, in so far as forms are invented.) Materia appetit formam ut virum femina. The matter inside the poet wants the Form: in submitting to the Form it becomes really original, really the origin of great work. The attempt to be oneself often brings out only the more conscious and superficial parts of a man’s mind; working to produce a given kind of poem which will present a given theme as justly, delightfully, and lucidly as possible, he is more likely to bring out all that was really in him, and much of which he himself had no suspicion. That concentration on the male parent of Paradise Lost, the Epic Form, which I intend to practise is the more desirable because excellent helps to the study of the raw material inside the poet—the experiences, character, and opinions of the man Milton—already exist in the work of Miss Darbishire and Dr Tillyard.

Milton’s own approach is to be learned from a passage in the Preface to the Reason of Church Government, Book ii (Bohn’s Edn., Vol. ii, p. 478). The question before him is whether to write (A) an Epic; (B) a Tragedy; (C) a Lyric. The discussion of (A) begins with the words “whether that epic form”: the discussion of (B) with “or whether those dramatic constitutions”; that of (C) with “or if occasion shall lead” The whole scheme may be set out as follows:

	(A) Epic.
		I.	(a) The diffuse Epic [Homer, Virgil, and Tasso].
			(b) The brief Epic [the Book of Job].
		II.	(a) Epic keeping the rules of Aristotle.
			(b) Epic following Nature.
		III.	Choice of subject [“what king or knight before the conquest”].
	(B) Tragedy.
			(a) On the model of Sophocles and Euripides.
			(b) On the model of Canticles or the Apocalypse.
	(C) Lyric.
			(a) On the Greek model [“Pindarus and Callimachus”].
			(b) On Hebrew models [“Those frequent songs throughout the Law and the Prophets”].

(A), the Epic, is our primary concern, but before we consider it in detail one feature which runs through the whole scheme demands our attention. It will be noticed that Classical and Scriptural models are mentioned under each of the three heads, and under one head, that of tragedy, the Biblical model seems to be dragged in, as they say, “by the heels”. This is less true of the Biblical model for epic. Milton’s classification of Job as a sub-species of epic (with the differentia “brief”) may be novel, but it is reasonable, and I have no doubt at all that this is the form he believed himself to be practising in Paradise Regained, which has affinities to Job in its theme as well as in its lay-out. Under the third heading (Lyric) the Hebrew models come in with perfect propriety, and here Milton has added an interesting note. Almost as if he had foreseen an age in which ‘Puritanism’ should be the bear seen in every bush, he has given his opinion that Hebrew lyrics are better than Greek “not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition.” That is, he has told us that his preference for the Hebrew is not only moral and religious, but aesthetic also.^[2] I once had a pupil, innocent alike of the Greek 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 ‘Puritanism’ 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 uninspired 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 unity. 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 mistaken. 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 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 interwoven 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 complete 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 Experience (op. cit., iii). 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 contrasted 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 “following Nature” means, in simpler language, “shall I write an epic in twelve books with a simple plot, or shall I write something in stanzas and cantos about knights and ladies and enchantments?” 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 the rockery you must abandon the tennis court. It is very likely that if Arthur had had been chosen the Spenserian Milton 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 81), Arthur’s wars “beneath the earth.” I do not know whether this means strange adventures experienced by Arthur in some other world between his disappearance in the barge and his predicted return to help the Britons at their need, or adventures in fairyland before he became 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 romantic 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 philosophical sublimation of sexual passion in “Plato and his equal (i.e. his contemporary) Xenophon.” An original voluptuousness greater, perhaps, than that of any English poet, is pruned, formed, organized, and made human by progressive purifications, 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 who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development—one either as pacific as Tolstoi or as military as Napoleon, either as clotted as Wagner or as angelic as Mozart. Milton is certainly not that kind of great man. He is a great Man. “On ne montre pas sa grandeur,” says Pascal, “pour être à une extrémité, mais bien en touchant les deux à la fois et remplissant tout l’entre-deux.”

3. By observing how Milton subdivides the Epic into its sub-species, we are again brought face to face with the problem of Forms—with the virginal materia inside the poet hesitating, as it were, between different suitors. When he wrote the Reason of Church Government the different types of poem were all present to Milton’s mind, all different, all attractive, each offering its own unique opportunities, but each also demanding peculiar sacrifices. His sentence about epic is really a short history of epic poetry. To know what he was talking about, to feel as he felt, and so, in the end, to know what he was really choosing when he finally chose and what kind of thing he was making when he acted on that final choice, we also must attend to epic. The biography of the literary kind will help our reading of Paradise Lost at least as much as the biography of the poet.

[2]	The unpopular passage in P.R. iv, 347 (“Sion’s songs to all true tasts excelling”) is better understood if we remember that it reflects a literary opinion which Milton had, in some form or other, held all his life.