by F. R. Leavis
interest in 'sound' as a poet, and a man may appreciate the 'music' of Milton's verse who hasn't ear enough to hum God Save the King I
'The emphasis is on the sound, not the vision, upon the word, not the idea'—that simple antithetic use of'sound' and 'vision' seems to me pregnant with fallacy; and I find it odd indeed that the author of Burnt Norton should have been content to leave us in that way with the word 'word' on our hands. What is the 'word' ? It is certainly not the pure sound—no poet can make us take his verbal arrangements as pure sound, whatever his skill or his genius. And once we recognize that meaning must always enter largely and inseparably into the effect, we see that to define the peculiarities that make Milton's use of language appear to be a matter of specializing in 'verbal music' isn't altogether a simple job.
We might start by challenging a proposition of Mr Eliot's: 'in reading Paradise Lost . . . our sense of sight must be blurred, so that our hearing may become more acute'. This proposition illustrates the insidiousness of die fallacy inherent in * sound', when the term is used for critical purposes as Mr Eliot uses it. To say that in responding to the Mutonic 'music' our hearing becomes specially acute is to suggest that some kind of sharp attentiveness is induced in us, and this seems to me the reverse of true. The Miltonic 'music' is not the music of die musician; what our 'hearing' hears is words; and the sense in which Milton's use of words is characterized by a 'musical' bias can be explained only in terms of a generally relaxed state of mind he induces in us. We say that the 'emphasis is on die sound' because we are less exactingly conscious in respect of meaning than when we read certain odier poets—say Mr Eliot, or the Wordsworth of The Ruined Cottage, or the Yeats of Sailing to Byzantium ; not because meaning doesn't give the 'sound' its body, movement and quality: it is not only our 'sense of sight' that is blurred. The state induced has analogies with intoxication. Our response brings nodiing to any arresting focus, but gives us a feeling of exalted significance, of energetic effordessness, and of a buoyant ease of command. In return for satisfaction of this order—rhythmic and 'musical'—we lower our criteria of force and consistency in meaning. In order to apply our normal criteria we have to check our response. That is what Mr Eliot meant when, some years ago, he said that 'we have to read
Milton twice, once for the sound and once for the meaning'— implying that the two kinds of reading cannot be given at the same time. In the recent paper he notes the tolerance of inconsistency. He quotes, as showing 'Milton's skill in extending a period by introducing imagery which tends to distract us from the real subject', this:
Thus Satan talking to his neerest Mate With Head uplift above the wave, and Eyes That sparkling blaz'd, his other Parts besides Prone on the Flood, extended long and large Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge As whom the Fables name of monstrous size, Titanian or Earth-born, that warr'd on Jove, Briarios or Typhon, whom the Den By ancient Tarsus held, or that Sea-beast Leviathan, whom God of all his works Created hugest that swim th'Ocean stream : Him haply slumbring on the Norway foam The pilot of some small night-founder'd Skiff, Deeming some Island, oft, as Sea-men tell, With fixed Anchor in his scaly rind Moors by his side under the Lee, while night Invests the Sea, and wished Mom delayes: So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay Chain'd on the burning Lake . ..
Mr Eliot comments:
There are, as often with Milton, criticisms of detail which could be made. I am not too happy about eyes that both blaze and sparkle, unless Milton meant us to imagine a roaring fire ejecting sparks: and that is too fiery an image for even supernatural eyes. The fact that the lake was burning somewhat diminishes the effect of the fiery eyes; and it is difficult to imagine a burning lake in a scene where there was only darkness visible.
These criticisms seem to me unanswerable, though, properly understood, they amount to more than criticism of mere detail— unanswerable, unless with the argument that if you read Milton as he demands to be read you see no occasion to make them. Very few admirers of Milton, I believe, have ever been troubled by 'sparkling blaz'd', or by the inconsistency that Mr Eliot notes.
Such things escape critical recognition from the responsive reader as they escaped Milton's—and for the same reason: response to the 'Miltonic music' (which, therefore, they don't disturb) is a relaxation of attentiveness to sense. And if we are to talk of imagery, we must note that it is more than a weakness of visual imagery that Mr Eliot calls attention to. To talk of 'imagery' with any precision is a critical undertaking of some difficulty, since the term covers such a variety of things; so I will make my point with a quotation:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulncss!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel. . .
The strength that distinguishes Keats so radically from Tennyson can be localized in the un-Tennysonian 'moss'd cottage-trees', The imagery going with that strength cannot be easily classified. It is more than merely tactual, though the distinctively tactual * plump' clearly owes its full-bodied concrctencss to the pervasive strength in the use of words represented by 'moss'd cottage-trees' (as does 'swell the gourd', the simple statement that is so much more than a statement in the Kcatsian context).
This strength caimot be taken stock of in any Sitwellian analysis of'texture'. It is a matter, among other things, of die way in which the analogical suggestions of die varied complex efforts and motions compelled on us as we pronounce and follow the words and hold diem properly together (meaning, diat is, has from first to last its inseparable and essential part in the effect of the 'sound') enforce and enact the paraphrasable meaning. The action of the packed consonants in' moss'd cottage-trees' is plain enough: there stand the trees, gnarled and sturdy in trunk and bough, their leafy entanglements thickly loaded. It is not fanciful, I think, to find that (the sense being what it is) the pronouncing of * cottage-trees* suggests, too, the crisp bite and the flow of juice as the tcedi close in the ripe apple. The word 'image' itself tends to encourage
the notion that imagery is necessarily visual, and the visualist fallacy (we have it in Imagism—it is present in Pound's 'phano-peia' and 'melopeia') is wide-spread. But if we haven't imagery— and non-visual imagery—in the kinds of effect just illustrated, then imagery hasn't for the critic the importance commonly assigned to it.
And to take from Keats one more illustration of an un-Miltonic effect, it seems to me that we have a very obvious non-visual image here:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook ...
As we pass across the line-division from 'keep' to 'steady* we are made to enact, analogically, the upright steadying carriage of the gleaner as she steps from one stone to the next. And such an enactment seems to me properly brought under the head of'image'. This effect, I say, is un-Miltonic: the rhythmic habit of Milton's verse runs counter to such uses of stress and movement. 1 And Milton's preoccupation with 'music' precludes any strength in the kinds of imagery that depend on what may be called a realizing use of the body and action of the English language—the use illustrated from Keats. It may be said that apart from such a use there may be a strength of visual imagery. But this is just what, with unanswerable justice, Mr Eliot denies Milton. What then has he 5
He has his 'music'. In this 'music', of course, the rhythm plays an essential part—the Grand Style movement that, compelling with its incantatory and ritualistic habit a marked bodily response, both compensates for the lack in the verse of any concrete body,
1 So that the expressive felicity of the versification in the Mulciber passage (Bk. 1,1. 738) is exceptional:
and how he fell
From Heav'n, they fabl'd, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o're the Chrystal Battlements: from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve, A Summers day; and with the setting Sun Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star On Lenrnos th'Aegaean lie ...
such as is given by strength in imagery, and lulls the mind out of its normal attentiveness. It is the lack of body—'body' as I have illustrated it from Keats—that, together with the lack, in the sense, of any challenge to a sharp awareness, makes us talk about 'music'—makes us say that the 'emphasis is on the sound'. Again, it is 'upon the word, not the idea': that is, we have the feeling that the 'medium' is for the poet what musical sound is for the composer ; our sense of it as something that employs (and flatters) the skill of the vocal organs, and gives diat order of satisfaction, remains uppermost. We remain predominantly aware of eloquence and declamation; our sense of words as words, things for the mouth and ear, is not transcended in any vision—or (to avoid the visualist fallacy) any realization —they convey.
'Declamation', significantly, is the word Mr Eliot uses for the Miltonic mode:
It may be observed also, that Milton employs devices of eloquence and of the word-play in which poets in his time were practised, which perpetually relieve the mind, and facilitate the declamation.
The passage Mr Eliot quotes in illustrating his point provides a good opportunity for questioning his earlier proposition that 'Milton's poetry is poetry at the farthest possible remove from prose'. If it is so far removed from prose it is not so (it seems to me) in the sense of exhibiting in concentration the distinctively poetic uses of language. If called upon to instance poetry at the farthest possible remove from prose I might reasonably adduce Mr Eliot's Marina, in reading which, if one supposes oneself to be faced with something at all in the nature of the prose uses of language, one will be defeated. The use of language is exploratory-creative, nothing could be further removed (and in a comprehending approach to the poem one has to be aware of this) from any process that can be thought of as one of'putting* something—ideas or thoughts or a theme—'into words'.
But the Miltonic mode, for all the 'maximal... alteration of ordinary language'—'distortion of construction', the foreign
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idiom, 'the use of a word in a foreign'way' and so on—presented nothing radically alien or uncongenial to the eighteenth-century mind. It is a mode, I have noted, that we naturally think of as eloquence; the eloquence can, as the passage quoted by Mr Eliot
reminds us, take on without any disconcerting change a decided strength of declamation:
My sentence is for open Warr: of Wiles More unexpert, I boast not: then let those Contrive who need, or when they need, not now. For while they sit contriving, shall the rest, Millions that stand in Armes and longing wait The Signal to ascend, sit lingring here Heav'ns fugitives...
In these speeches in Hell we have—it is a commonplace—a kind of ideal parliamentary oratory. It is also a commonplace that Milton's peculiar powers have found here an especially congenial vein. And it is safe to venture that no parts of Paradise Lost have been unaffectedly enjoyed by more readers. The fact that a mind familiar with Paradise Lost will, without making any sharp distinctions, associate the < Miltonic music'—'God-gifted organ voice of England'—with a mode of strong rhetorical statement, argument and exposition, 1 running to die memorable phrase, is of the greatest importance historically (I am thiiking of the question of Milton's influence).
But I have to pursue my examination of the weakness; the weakness noted by Mr Eliot (though he won't call it flatly that) in the extract from him given above:
The fact that the lake was burning somewhat diminishes the effect of the fiery eyes; and it is difficult to imagine a burning lake in a scene where there was only darkness visible. But with this kind of inconsistency we are familiar in Milton.
Earlier Mr Eliot has said:
I do not think that we should attempt to see very clearly any scene that Milton depicts: it should be accepted as a shifting phantasmagory. To complain, because we first find the arch-fiend * chain'd on the burning lake and in a minute or two see him making his way to the shore, is to expect a kind of consistency which the world to which Milton has introduced us does not require.
1 Though in this mode too, as Mr Eliot notes, there is no sharp challenge to a critical or realizing awareness—there is the relaxation of the demand for consistency characteristic of rhetoric: 'It might, of course, be objected that " millions that stand in arms" could not at the same time "sit lingring"/
I have to insist that, in reading Milton, it isn't merely a matter of our not seeing very clearly; the weakness of realization that he exhibits can't be limited to the visual field. If we are not bothered by the absence of visual consistency, that is because, while we are submissively in and of Milton's world, our criteria of consistency in general have become very unexacting. The kind of consistency which that world 'does not require' turns out, when examined with any attention, to be decidedly comprehensive. If the weakness of visualization becomes, when we consider it, an aspect of something more general—a weakness of realization (a term the force of which I have tried to make plain), this, in its turn, we have to recognize as something more than a characteristic of imagery and local expression: it affects the poet's grasp of his themes, conceptions and interests.
The instances of visual inconsistency that Mr Eliot remarks are drawn from Milton's Hell. What they illustrate is Milton's failure to give us a consistently realized Hell at all. I will adduce on this point the commentary of Mr A. J. A. Waldock (so finding an opportunity to recommend his Paradise Lost and Its Critics 1 —it seems to me by far the best book on Milton I have read). He points out that, because of Milton's inconsistencies of conception and imagination, his Hell 'loses most of its meaning'.
It is obvious that as the conclave proceeds Hell, for all the effective pressure it exerts on our consciousness, has as good as vanished. The livid flames become mere torches to light the assembly of the powers. A little later, when there is leisure, Milton recollects his duty, resumes his account of the infernal landscape and adds further items to his (somewhat meagre) list of tortures. But as he had just proved to us in the clearest way how little the rebels are inconvenienced by their situation, it is impossible for us to take these further lurid descriptions very seriously. The plain fact of it, of course, is that Milton's Hell is very much a nominal one . ..
Yet conditions, even while the action is in progress, are (theoretically) bad enough: 'torture without End still urges' (1,67); 'these raging fires Will slack'n, if his breath stir not their flames' (II, 2); in spite of which organized field sports are possible. The reason for these and other vaguenesses in the picture is fairly evident: Milton was trying his best to accomplish two incompatible things at the same time ... Hell
1 Published by the Cambridge University Press.
therefore as a locality has to serve a double duty: it is a place of perpetual and increasing punishment in theory; and it is also in the practice of a poem, an assembly ground, a military area, a base for operations. The two conceptions do not very well agree ...
All this amounts, I cannot help thinking, to a radical criticism of Paradise Lost —a more damaging criticism than Professor Waldock himself recognizes (my main criticism of him is that he doesn't draw the consequences of his findings). It cannot be disposed of with the explanation that Milton's work doesn't require visual consistency. The inconsistency plainly touches essence, and touches it most seriously; for surely, in such an undertaking as that of Paradise Lost the conception of Hell must be, in a majorway, significant—if the poem attains to significance at the level of the promise. The weakness, so far from being merely a * limitation of visual power', is—to take up a word that Mr Eliot offers us with an odd insistence—intellectual.
The emphasis is on the sound, not the vision, upon the word, not the idea; and in the end it is die unique versification tnat is the most certain sign of Milton's intellectual mastership.
One can only comment that it may be the most certain sign, but
that, as a justification for attributing intellectual mastership, it surely doesn't amount to much. Mr Eliot himself notes that it is the nature of the 'versification' to induce a relaxed concern for meaning—for 'the idea'. He illustrates the point (though he doesn't say so) in a footnote to a line of the long simile he quotes (the one reproduced above):
The term night-founder d, which I presume to be of Milton's invention, seems unsuitable here. Dr Tillyard has called my attention to the use of the same adjective in Comus, 1. 483 :
Either someone like us night-foundered here
where, though extravagant, it draws a permissible comparison between travellers lost in the night, and seafarers in extremity. But when, as here in Paradise Lost, it is transferred from travellers on land to adventurers by sea, and not to the men but to their skiff, the literal meaning of founder immediately presents itself. A foundered skiff could not be moored, to a whale or to anything else.
The weakness is profoundly characteristic, and it would be easy
to find other instances demanding similar comment. And I myself see Mr Eliot's instance as being significantly of the passage to which it belongs—the simile of which he says:
What I wish to call your attention to is the happy introduction of so much extraneous matter. Any writer, straining for images of hugeness, might have thought of the whale, but only Milton could have included the anecdote of the deluded seaman without our wanting to put a blue pencil through it. We nearly forget Satan in attending to the story of the whale; Milton recalls us just in time. Therefore the diversion strengthens, instead of weakening, the passage.