Volume Ii Part 27 (1/2)

”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