An Introduction to the Prose and Poetical Works of John Milton. Джон Мильтон
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soul, as distinguished from relative, temporal truth, the former being more or less 'cabined, cribbed, confined' in all men. As Paracelsus is made to express it, in Browning's poem 'Paracelsus,' 'There is an inmost centre in us all, where truth abides in fulness; … and "to know" rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, than in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.'
To continue with De Quincey: 'What you owe to Milton [and he has the 'Paradise Lost' specially in his mind] is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power, that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards—a step ascending as upon a Jacob's ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth; whereas the very first step in power is a flight—is an ascending into another element where earth is forgotten. … The very highest work that has ever existed in the literature of knowledge is but a provisional work: a book upon trial and sufferance, and quamdiu bene se gesserit. Let its teaching be even partially revised, let it be but expanded, nay, even let its teaching be but placed in a better order, and instantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the literature of power, surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable amongst men. For instance, the "Principia" of Sir Isaac Newton was a book militant on earth from the first. In all stages of its progress it would have to fight for its existence; first, as regards absolute truth; secondly, when that combat is over, as regards its form or mode of presenting the truth. And as soon as a La Place, or anybody else, builds higher upon the foundations laid by this book, effectually he throws it out of the sunshine into decay and darkness; by weapons won from this book he superannuates and destroys this book, so that soon the name of Newton remains as a mere nominis umbra, but his book, as a living power, has transmigrated into other forms. Now, on the contrary, the "Iliad," the "Prometheus" of Æschylus—the "Othello" or "King Lear,"—the "Hamlet" or "Macbeth,"—and the "Paradise Lost," are not militant, but triumphant forever as long as the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak. They never can transmigrate into new incarnations. … All the literature of knowledge builds only ground-nests, that are swept away by floods, or confounded by the plough; but the literature of power builds nests in aërial altitudes of temples, sacred from violation, or of forests inaccessible to fraud.'
I would not give these extended quotations from De Quincey were it not that there may be many students who will read this book, and who will not have access to the works of De Quincey. Those who have, should read all that he says on the subject. The distinction which he makes between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power was never before so clearly and eloquently made, and it is a distinction which needs to be especially emphasized in these days of excessive knowledge-mongery, apart from education. Literature is largely made in the schools a knowledge subject. The great function of literature, namely, to bring into play the spiritual faculties, is very inadequately recognized, and the study of English Literature is made too much an objective job—the fault of teachers, not students. When the literature is studied as a life-giving power, students are always more interested than when everything else except the one thing needful receives attention—the sources of works of genius, the influences under which they were produced, their relations to history and to time and place, and whatever else may be made to engage the minds of students in the absence of the teacher's ability to bring them into a sympathetic relationship with the informing life of the works 'studied'—with that which constitutes their absolute power.
Another important feature of the 'Paradise Lost' to which I would call attention, and of which much should be made in the study of the poem, as a condition of assimilating its educating power, is the verse, which more fully realizes Wordsworth's definition and notion of harmonious verse, given by Coleridge in the third of his 'Satyrane's Letters,' than any other blank verse in the language. The definition, it is evident, was meant to apply more particularly to non-dramatic blank verse. Wordsworth's definition is, as given by Coleridge, that 'harmonious verse consists (the English iambic blank verse above all) in the apt arrangement of pauses and cadences and the sweep of whole paragraphs,
"with many a winding bout
Of linkèd sweetness long drawn out,"
and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence or antithetic vigor of single lines, which are indeed injurious to the total effect, except where they are introduced for some specific purpose.'
In my 'Primer of English Verse' (Ginn & Co., Boston), I have presented the two grand features of Milton's blank verse, namely: (1) The melodious variety of his cadences closing within verses, this being one of the essentials of 'true musical delight' which Milton mentions, in his remarks on 'The Verse,' 'the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another'; and (2) the melodious and harmonious grouping of verses into what may, with entire propriety, be called stanzas—stanzas which are more organic than the uniformly constructed stanzas of rhymed verse. The latter must be more or less artificial, by reason of the uniformity which is maintained. But the stanzas of Milton's blank verse are waves of melody and harmony which are larger or smaller, and with ever varied cadences, according to the propulsion of the thought and feeling which produces them, which propulsion may be sustained through a dozen verses or more, or may expend itself in two or three. No other blank verse in the language exhibits such a masterly skill in the variation of its pauses—pauses, I mean, where periodic groups, or logical sections of groups, terminate after, or within, it may be, the first, second, third, or fourth foot of a verse. There are five cases where the termination is within the fifth foot.
Stanza is quite exclusively applied to uniform groups of rhymed verses, but it can be with equal propriety applied to the varied groups of blank verses, especially those of the 'Paradise Lost.' For the proper appreciation of the individual verses in Milton's blank verse, they must be read in groups—a group sometimes, perhaps generally, beginning within a verse and ending within a verse. These groups are due to the unifying action of feeling, just as much as rhymed stanzas are, and, indeed, often, if not generally, more so.
The autobiographical passages which have been brought together from the prose and poetical works, occupying 103 pages of the book, exhibit the man, Milton, better than could any regular biography of the same extent. The latter could give more of the details of his outward life and experiences, but could not so reflect his personality, his inmost being. He was most emphatically a person. He realized in himself what is expressed in the following verses from Tennyson's 'Œnone':
'Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
Yet not for power (power of herself
Would come uncalled for), but to live by law,
Acting the law we live by without fear;
And, because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.'
He also realized in himself what he says in his 'Areopagitica': 'He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.'
What he says of himself in reply to the base and scurrilous and utterly unfounded charges against his private character is more than what Mark Pattison truly characterizes as 'a superb and ingenuous egotism'; is more than an apologia pro vita sua; it was also prompted by the consideration that what he was agonizingly contending for in the cause of civil, political, and religious liberty might suffer, if his private character were not freed from the charges made against it. In the extended autobiographical passage in the 'Second Defence of the People of England,' he assigns two other reasons for acquitting himself of the charges made against his private character, namely, 'that those illustrious worthies, who are the objects of my praise, may know that nothing could afflict me with more shame than to have any vices of mine diminish the force or lessen the value of my panegyric upon them; and that the people of England, whom fate