The Common Pursuit

by F. R. Leavis

  The force of that 'therefore' seems to me illusory, and I find the logic specious. To say that the diversion strengthens anything is inapt and misleading; Miltonic similes don't focus one's perception of the relevant, or sharpen definition in any way: that, surely, is the point to be made about them. If they represent

  * imagery*, then it is the kind of imagery that goes with the

  * Miltonic music*. We are happy about the introduction of so much extraneous matter because the * Miltonic music' weakens our sense of relevance, just as it relaxes our grasp of sense. But

  this [musical] mastery is more conclusive evidence of his intellectual power than is his grasp of any * deas that he borrowed or invented. To be able to control so many words at once is the token of a mind of most exceptional energy.

  We have to remind ourselves that Milton's control of words manifests itself in die looseness about meaning illustrated by his 'night-founder'd', and that, if he unquestionably exhibits great energy, 'mind' is an ambiguous word. In fact, it seems to me that Mr Eliot is unconsciously exploiting the ambiguity, the impulsion towards doing so deriving from an uneasy awareness (betrayed in that insistence on 'intellectual') of criticism to be brought against Milton that, if duly considered, would make Mr Eliot s present claims tor him look odd.

  Other marks [of Milton's greatness] are his sense of structure, both in the general design of Paradise Lost and Samson, and in his syntax; and finally, and not the least, his inerrancy, conscious or unconscious, in writing so as to make the best display of his talents, and the best concealment of his weaknesses.

  That 'inerrancy* (I will leave aside for the time being the * sense of structure') is to me an astonishing proposition. Mr Eliot makes plain (in the next paragraph) that he covers with it the choice of subject: 'the complete suitability of Paradise Lost has not, I think, been so often remarked' [as that of the subject of Samson]. Yet the subject of Paradise Lost meant for Milton, inevitably and essentially, the undertaking to

  assert Eternal Providence And justify the wayes of God to men.

  One doesn't need to go to the argumentative speeches of God the Father in order to make the point that such an undertaking was one for which Milton had no qualifications. Those speeches do indeed exhibit him as (considering his offer) ludicrously unqualified to make even a plausible show of metaphysical capacity. But it is in the 'versification' everywhere that the essential inaptitude appears: the man who uses words in this way has (as Mr Eliot virtually says) no 'grasp of ideas', and, whatever he may suppose, is not really interested in the achievement of precise thought of any kind; he certainly hasn't die kind of energy of mind needed for sustained analytic and discursive thinking. That is why the ardours and ingenuities of the scholars who interpret Paradise Lost in terms of a supposed consistency of theological intention are so absurd, and why it is so deplorable that literary students should be required to take that kind of thing seriously, believe that it has anything to do with intelligent literary criticism, and devote any large part of their time to the solemn study of Milton's 'thought'. What the choice of subject illustrates is that lack of self-knowledge which gives us such obvious grounds for saying that in Milton we have to salute character rather than intelligence—for character he indisputably has: he massively is what he is—proud, unaccommodating and heroically self-confident. The lack of self-knowledge meets us, in Paradise Lost, in many forms. The choice of subject presents it in other ways than that which I have specified. Professor Waldock seems to me unanswerable when he says that 'Milton's central theme denied him the full expression of his deepest interests'. More, the theme cut clean against them:

  He can read the myth (or make a valiant attempt to do so) in terms of Passion and Reason, the twin principles of his own humanistic think-

  ing; but with all that, the myth obstinately remains, drawing him away from what most deeply absorbs him (effort, combat, the life of the 'wayfaring Christian') to the celebration of a state of affairs that could never have profoundly interested him, and that he never persuades us does.

  The result, or concomitant, is discrepancy between theory and feeling; between the effect of a given crucial matter as Milton presents it, and the view he instructs us to take of it. His handling of the central episode of the myth provides notable illustration. After rendering Adam's fall with affecting pathos he gives, as Professor Waldock shows (it would be obvious enough in any case, if one read Milton at full cock of attention) a false account of it; Adam himself gives a false account of it to the Son; the Son accepts it, and it becomes the official account. The inconsistency can hardly be dismissed as not mattering in the * world to which Milton has introduced us', and it occurs at the centre of the poem, which, as Professor Waldock says,

  requires us, not tentatively, not half-heartedly , . . but with the full weight of our minds to believe that Adam did right, and simultaneously requires us with the full weight of our minds to believe that he did wrong.

  The Miltonists, of course, don't see the problem in this way; they busy themselves (and it would be an amusing spectacle if one didn't know that they were authorities to whom thousands of students are expected to apply themselves deferentially) with, determining, if a word can't be found to cover both Adam and Eve, just what Adam's sin is to be called—gregariousness, levity, uxoriousness, pride or lust.

  Conflict between feeling and theory is not the only way in which a radical lack of integration manifests itself in Paradise Lost. The weakness meets us in a characteristic that everyone has noticed—the personal quality that obtrudes itself in a good number of passages, some of them among the most admired. Professor Waldock illustrates the weakness (without calling it that) here:

  At no point in the poem is Milton himself more thoroughly with Adam than at this; he is bitterly, weepingly with him. It is as if the two,

  author and character, coalesce, and whose voice it is in that final exasperated indictment we hardly know:

  Thus it shall befall

  Him who to worth in Women overtrusting Lets her Will rule; restraint she will not brook, And left to herself, if evil thence ensue, She first his weak indulgence will accuse.

  (IX, 1182)

  Again:

  Milton seems to us often, as he writes of [Satan] to be giving of his own substance, but he can give of his own substance everywhere. In those altercations, for example, between Satan and Abdiel in Books V and VI we feel Milton now in the lines of the one, now in the lines of the other, but chiefly, without any doubt, in the lines of Abdiel.

  In these passages, where he seems 'to be giving of his own substance*, we have the clear marks of Milton's failure to realize his undertaking—to conceive it dramatically as a whole, capable of absorbing and depersonalizing the relevant interests and impulses of his private life. He remains in the poem too much John Milton, declaiming, insisting, arguing, suffering, and protesting.

  The best known example of his 'own substance' getting the upper hand and becoming a problem is in Satan. Not that the great Satan of die first two books isn't sufficiently dramatized; the trouble is quite other:

  It would be hard to quarrel with what Dr Tillyard has to say about Satan. Dr Tillyard is not with the * Satanists', but he does not see 'how we can avoid admitting that Milton did partly ally himself with Satan, that unwittingly he was led away by the creature of his own imagination* : and he feels (to my mind with perfect tightness) that 'it is not enough to say with Saurat that Satan represents a part of Milton's mind, a part of which he disapproves and of which he was quite conscious'. The feeling of most readers would surely be with Dr Tillyard that there is more than conscious recognition, more than conscious disapproval, in all this. The balance is disturbed; the poem, instead of being on an even keel, has a pronounced list, and Satan is the cause of it.

  And Professor Waldock points out that the Satan of the first two books appears no more, the Satan of the address to the Sun near the beginning of Book IV being a different one—different in con-

  ception.
But, not satisfied that this substitution restores the proper balance of sympathy, Milton, as Professor Waldock shows in detail, intervenes constantly to incite a disparaging view of Satan —to 'degrade' him, the extreme instance of the 'technique of degradation* being the pantomime trick in Book X by which the infernal host, breaking into applause, are made to hiss.

  What radical 'consistency*, what wholeness, do these criticisms, which Professor Waldock enforces with minute observation and analysis, leave to Paradise Lost ? Milton has so little self-knowledge and is so unqualified intellectually, that his intention (the intended significance of the poem) at the level of justifying the ways of God to Men', and what he actually contrives as poet to do, conflict, with disastrous consequences to both poem as such and intention. Satan, a major element in the poem, gets out of hand (and a closely related misfortune overtakes God the Father), with tie result that the 'balance is disturbed'—and very badly. As a result of the conflict between feeling and theory Milton's treatment of the Fall is such that Professor Waldock has to conclude: 'Paradise Lost cannot take the strain at the centre, it breaks there, the theme is too much for it'. And yet he seems to diinJc that Milton can be credited with 'architectonic'—just as Mr Eliot speaks of Milton's 'sense of structure'.

  Words used in that way seem to me to have no meaning. The attribution looks to me no better than a mere inert acquiescence in convention: 'architectonic' power has always been taken to be the mark of the Miltonic genius. But it is perhaps worth asking what gives the idea its plausibility—what makes it possible for Professor Waldock to say:

  Nothing of this... can, it seems to me, make much difference to the obstinate fact that Paradise Lost is an epic poem of singularly hard and definite outline, expressing itself (or so at least would be our first impressions) with unmistakable clarity and point.

  That 'epic poem', I think, gives the clue to a large part of the explanation: Paradise Lost is a classical epic—it is epic, classical and monumental: a strong traditional suggestion of qualities goes with those words. Actually, the undertaking to treat the chosen theme in an epic on the classical model illustrates very strikingly the peculiarities of the Miltonic genius that made strongly against

  clarity and outline (at least, in any complex whole), and made for inconsistency, muddle and vagueness. To put it in a positive way, it illustrates the peculiarities that lead us to say that the word for Milton is 'character' rather than 'intelligence*. On the one hand there was his heroic self-confidence, his massive egotism and his conviction that nothing but the highest enterprise was worthy of him: for the Renaissance poet and scholar the form must be the epic; for the dedicated voice of the chosen English people the theme must be the greatest of all themes. On the other hand, only a great capacity for unawareness—unawareness in the face of impossibilities, his own limitations, and the implicit criticism incurred by his intentions in the attempt to realize them—could have permitted him, after pondering such an undertaking, to persist in it.

  When he came to the war in Heaven even Milton, as Professor Waldock observes, seems to have had some difficulty in persuading himself that he was taking it seriously. Yet the war in Heaven is an essential part of the epic conception, and to-foresee the absurdity of the part would have been to forswear the whole.

  Having elaborated his criticisms, Professor Waldock, in the 'Conclusion* to his book, says that the poem *has enough left, in all conscience, to stay it against anything we can do*. But what has it left ? There are the first two books, which are of a piece and grandly impressive, and, in the others, numbers of'beauties* major and minor. But, surely, whatever is left, it cannot justify talk about 'architectonic', 'hard and definite outline', or Milton's 'sense of structure'. And if more is to be said by way of explaining illusions to the contrary, the Miltonic character may be invoked: it certainly suggests massiveness and a 'hard and definite outline', and in reading Paradise Lost we are rarely unconscious of the author. And it is natural to associate our sense of the whole characteristic enterprise with our sense of the character.

  The paradoxical association of this 'character' with a use of language that tends to the reverse of'hard and definite outline' has much to do with the strength of Milton's influence in the nineteenth century—his prepotence in taste and practice in the period of English poetry to which Mr Eliot's work put a decisive

  end. That his own technical preoccupations as a poet entailed a critical attitude towards Milton, Mr Eliot, in his recent paper, admits. I challenge his way of putting things because it seems to me, as I said, insidious—calculated, that is, not to promote critical light. 'And the study of Milton could be of no help: it was only a hindrance'.—As if it were a matter of deciding not to study Milton! The problem, rather, was to escape from an influence that was so difficult to escape from because it was unrecognized, belonging, as it did, to the climate of the habitual and 'natural'. Mr Eliot, who 'had the consciousness to perceive that he must use words differently' from Tennyson and Swinburne, had at the same time the consciousness that enabled him to name Milton for immediately relevant criticism. (That didn't mean, of course, that he had to give Milton much of his critical attention.)

  Along with this misleading formulation goes what I can only call a speciously judicial refusal to judge—

  And we can never prove that any particular poet would have written better poetry if he had escaped that influence. Even if we assert, what can only be a matter of faith, that Keats would have written a very great epic poem if Milton had not preceded him, is it sensible to repine for an unwritten masterpiece, in exchange for one which we possess and acknowledge ?

  What we can say, and must, in so far as we are bent on getting recognition for Keats's greatness, is that, if he hadn't been capable of putting the beautiful first Hyperion behind him, with the remark that 'Milton's verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's humour', he wouldn't have been capable of the qualities that are the strength of the ode To Autumn and of the induction to the revised Hyperion, that constitute the proof of his major genius, and that make Tennyson's, put side by side with his, a decidedly minor one.

  The reference to Tennyson has much point. For there is something decidedly Tennysonian about the handling of the medium in Hyperion, any representative passage of which, as I have noted elsewhere (Revaluation, pp, 267-8), offers the critic, in its way of being at the same time Tennysonian and Miltonic, an admirable way of bringing home the fact of Milton's predominance in the Victorian age—for in Tennyson we have the Victorian main

  current. Milton in Tennyson, as in Keats, is associated with Spenser, and Tennyson had his specific original genius: 'he knew', says Mr Eliot, * everything about Latin versification that an English poet could use* and had a 'unique and unerring feeling for the sounds of words'. Tennyson himself defined his ambition as being to bring English as near to the Italian as possible, and his 'music' ('the emphasis... on the sound,.. . upon the word, not the idea') has a highly distinctive quality. But he, like Milton, had other than musical preoccupations; he aspired to be among 'the great sage-poets of all time'. In the ease with which he reconciled the two bents we see the Miltonic inheritance—as in the readiness with which the nobly-phrased statement of'thought' and moral attitudes in sonorous verse (the 'emphasis ... on the sound') was accepted as the type of serious poetic expression.

  It would take a long separate essay to provide the historical backing for these last suggestions (obviously valid as they appear to me) in an examination of the Miltonic influence as it passes through the eighteenth century, appears in varied forms in the great poets of the Romantic period (it asserts itself plainly in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron), and emerges from that period to a subtle predominance in the Victorian age. It must be enough here to adduce the case of Matthew Arnold. Arnold was not an original poetic genius; he was a very intelligent man with a talent of the kind that provides evidence of what cultivated people in a given age feel to be 'natural' in modes of poetic expression. The
Tennysonian Palace of Art had no attractions for him, and he states in his criticism a view of the function of the poet that postulates something very different from the poetry of the Victorian 'otherworld':

  every one can see that a poet. . . ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in poetry; and life and the world being in modern times very complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it,...

  But Arnold's characteristic poetic achievement may fairly be represented by The Scholar-Gipsy. This is a charming poem, but the significance it holds for us is that Arnold so clearly intended it to be much more than charming. He offers the Scholar, with unmistakable moral unction, as the symbol of a spiritual superi-

  ority; a superiority that makes him an admonition and an ideal for 'us 5 , who, in this 'iron time', suffer

  the sick fatigue, the languid doubt, Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.

  The Scholar-Gipsy, we are insistently told, had 'one aim, one business, one desire'; his powers were 'firm to their mark'. But it is mere telling; the 'aim' and the 'mark' are mere abstract postulates: 'thou hadst—what we, alas, have not'. And that is clearly all that Arnold knows about it. He exhibits the Scholar as drifting about the Oxford countryside in an eternal week-end. 'For early didst thou leave the world'—and what the poem actually offers is a charm of relaxation, a holiday from serious aims and exacting business.

  And what the Scholar-Gipsy really symbolizes is Victorian poetry, vehicle (so often) of explicit intellectual and moral intentions, but unable to be in essence anything but relaxed, relaxing and anodyne. Arnold himself was an adverse critic of die prevailing tradition, but he was not the 'man of genius' by whom alone 'expression is altered'. He has his own personal style, it is true; but the notion of distinctively poetic expression that informs it is quite normally and ordinarily Victorian. Various influences are to be seen in the diction and phrasing of The Scholar-Gipsy, but the significant clue is to be seen in such obvious reminders of Milton as this: