Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0003/00031.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 22KB | 388 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00031}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Dr. Samuel Johnson On Milton
Part IV}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Johnson, Dr. Samuel}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{little
poem
without
comus
how
therefore
epic
every
lost
milton
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1889}
$Log{See From Comus*0003101.scf
}
Title:       Dr. Samuel Johnson On Milton
Author:      Johnson, Dr. Samuel
Date:        1889

Part IV

     In 1750, April 5, "Comus" was played for her benefit.  She had so little
acquaintance with diversion or gayety, that she did not know what was intended
when a benefit was offered her.  The profits of the night were only one
hundred and thirty pounds, though Dr. Newton brought a large contribution; and
twenty pounds were given by Tonson, a man who is to be praised as often as he
is named.  Of this sum, one hundred pounds were placed in the stocks, after
some debate between her and her husband in whose name it should be entered;
and the rest augmented their little stock, with which they removed to
Islington.  This was the greatest benefaction that "Paradise Lost" ever
procured the author's descendants; and to this he who has now attempted to
relate his life had the honor of contributing a prologue.

     In the examination of Milton's poetical works I shall pay so much regard
to time as to begin with his juvenile productions.  For his early pieces he
seems to have had a degree of fondness not very laudable; what he has once
written he resolves to preserve, and gives to the public an unfinished poem,
which he broke off because he was "nothing satisfied with what he had done,"
supposing his readers less nice than himself.  These preludes to his future
labors are in Italian, Latin, and English.  Of the Italian I cannot pretend to
speak as a critic; but I have heard them commended by a man well qualified to
decide their merit.  The Latin pieces are lusciously elegant; but the delight
which they afford is rather by the exquisite imitation of the ancient writers,
by the purity of the diction, and the harmony of the numbers, than by any
power of invention or vigor of sentiment.  They are not all of equal value;
the elegies excel the odes; and some of the exercises on Gunpowder Treason
might have been spared.

     The English poems, though they make no promises of "Paradise Lost," have
this evidence of genius, that they have a cast original and unborrowed.  But
their peculiarity is not excellence; if they differ from the verses of others,
they differ for the worse; for they are too often distinguished by repulsive
harshness; the combinations of words are new, but they are not pleasing; the
rhymes and epithets seem to be laboriously sought and violently applied.

     That in the early parts of his life he wrote with much care appears from
his manuscripts, happily preserved at Cambridge, in which many of his smaller
works are found as they were first written, with the subsequent corrections.
Such relice show how excellence is acquired; what we hope ever to do with
ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

     Those who admire the beauties of this great poet sometimes force their
own judgment into false approbation of his little pieces, and prevail upon
themselves to think that admirable which is only singular.  All that short
compositions can commonly attain is neatness and elegance.  Milton never
learned the art of doing little things with grace; he overlooked the milder
excellence of suavity and softness; he was a lion that had no skill in
dangling the kid.

     One of the poems on which much praise has been bestowed is "Lycidas," of
which the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing.
What beauty there is we must therefore seek in the sentiments and images.  It
is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not
after remote allusions and obscure opinions.  Passion plucks no berries from
the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough
satyrs and "fauns with cloven heel." Where there is leisure for fiction there
is little grief.

     In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art,
for there is nothing new.  Its form is that of a pastoral; easy, vulgar, and
therefore disgusting, whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted;
and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind. When
Cowley tells of Hervey, that they studied together, it is easy to suppose how
much he must miss the companion of his labors and the partner of his
discoveries; but what image of tenderness can be excited by these lines?

     "We drove a-field, and both together heard
     What time the gray fly winds her sultry horn,
     Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night."

     We know that they never drove a-field, and they had no flocks to batten;
and though it be allowed that the representation may be allegorical, the true
meaning is so uncertain and remote, that it is never sought, because it cannot
be known when it is found.

     Among the flocks, and copses, and flowers appear the heathen deities:
Jove and Phoebus, Neptune and Aeolus, with a long train of mythological
imagery, such as a college easily supplies.  Nothing can less display
knowledge, or less exercise invention, than to tell how a shepherd has lost
his companion, and must now feed his flocks alone, without any judge of his
skill in piping; and how one god asks another god what has become of Lycidas,
and how neither god can tell.  He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy; he
who thus praises will confer no honor.

     This poem has yet a grosser fault.  With these trifling fictions are
mingled the most awful and sacred truths, such as ought never to be polluted
with such irreverent combinations.  The shepherd likewise is now a feeder of
sheep, and afterwards an ecclesiastical pastor, a superintendent of a
Christian flock.  Such equivocations are always unskilful; but here they are
indecent, and at least approach to impiety, of which, however, I believe the
writer not to have been conscious.

     Such is the power of reputation justly acquired, that its blaze drives
away the eye from nice examination.  Surely no man could have fancied that he
read "Lycidas" with pleasure, had he not known the author.

     Of the two pieces, "L'Allegro" and Il Penseroso," I believe opinion is
uniform; every man that reads them reads them with pleasure.  The author's
design is not, what Theobald has remarked, merely to show how objects derive
their colors from the mind, by representing the operation of the same things
upon the gay and the melancholy temper, or upon the same man as he is
differently disposed; but rather how, among the successive variety of
appearances, every disposition of mind takes hold on those by which it may be
gratified.

     The cheerful man hears the lark in the morning; the pensive man hears the
nightingale in the evening.  The cheerful man sees the cock strut, and hears
the horn and hounds echo in the wood; then walks, not unseen, to observe the
glory of the rising sun, or listen to the singing milkmaid, and view the
labors of the ploughman and the mower; then casts his eyes about him over
scenes of smiling plenty, and looks up to the distant tower, the residence of
some fair inhabitant; thus he pursues real gayety through a day of labor or of
play, and delights himself at night with the fanciful narratives of
superstitious ignorance.

     The pensive man, at one time, walks unseen to muse at midnight; and at
another hears the sullen curfew.  If the weather drives him home, he sits in a
room lighted only by glowing embers; or by a lonely lamp outwatches the north
star, to discover the habitation of separate souls, and varies the shades of
meditation by contemplating the magnificent or pathetic scenes of tragic and
epic poetry.  When the morning comes, a morning gloomy with rain and wind, he
walks into the dark trackless woods, falls asleep by some murmuring water, and
with melancholy enthusiasm expects some dream of prognostication, or some
music played by aerial performers.

     Both Mirth and Melancholy are solitary silent inhabitants of the breast,
that neither receive nor transmit communication: no mention is therefore made
of a philosophical friend or a pleasant companion.  The seriousness does not
arise from any participation of calamity, nor the gayety from the pleasures of
the bottle.

     The man of cheerfulness, having exhausted the country, tries what towered
cities will afford, and mingles with scenes of splendor, gay assemblies, and
nuptial festivities; but he mingles a mere spectator, as, when the learned
comedies of Jonson, or the wild dramas of Shakespeare, are exhibited, he
attends the theatre.

     The pensive man never loses himself in crowds, but walks the cloister or
frequents the cathedral.  Milton probably had not yet forsaken the church.

     Both his characters delight in music; but he seems to think that cheerful
notes would have obtained from Pluto a complete dismission of Eurydice, of
whom solemn sounds only procured a conditional release.

     For the old age of Cheerfulness he makes no provision; but Melancholy he
conducts with great dignity to the close of life.  His cheerfulness is without
levity, and his pensiveness without asperity.

     Through these two poems the images are properly selected and nicely
distinguished; but the colors of the diction seem not sufficiently
discriminated.  I know not whether characters are kept sufficiently apart.  No
mirth can, indeed, be found in his melancholy; but I am afraid that I always
meet some melancholy in his mirth.  They are two noble efforts of imagination.

     The greatest of his juvenile performances is the "Mask of Comus," in
which may very plainly be discovered the dawn or twilight of "Paradise Lost."
Milton appears to have formed very early that system of diction and mode of
verse which his maturer judgment approved, and from which he never endeavored
nor desired to deviate.

     Nor does "Comus" afford only a specimen of his language; it exhibits
likewise his power of description and his vigor of sentiment, employed in the
praise and defence of virtue.  A work more truly poetical is rarely found;
allusions, images, and descriptive epithets embellish almost every period with
lavish decoration.  As a series of lines, therefore, it may be considered as
worthy of all the admiration with which the votaries have received it.

     As a drama it is deficient.  The action is not probable.  A mask, in
those parts where supernatural intervention is admitted, must indeed be given
up to all the freaks of imagination; but, so far as the action is merely
human, it ought to be reasonable, which can hardly be said of the conduct of
the two brothers; who, when their sister sinks with fatigue in a pathless
wilderness, wander both away together in search of berries too far to find
their way back, and leave a helpless lady to all the sadness and danger of
solitude.  This, however is a defect overbalanced by its convenience.

[See From Comus: As a drama it is deficient.]

     What deserves more reprehension is, that the prologue spoken in the
wildwood by the attendant Spirit is addressed to the audience; a mode of
communication so contrary to the nature of dramatic representation, that no
precedents can support it.

     The discourse of the Spirit is too long; an objection that may be made to
almost all the following speeches; they have not the springhtliness of a
dialogue animated by reciprocal contention, but seem rather declamations
deliberately composed, and formally repeated on a moral question.  The auditor
therefore listens as to a lecture, without passion, without anxiety.

     The song of Comus has airiness and jollity; but, what may recommend
Milton's morals as well as his poetry, the invitations to pleasure are so
general that they excite no distinct images of corrupt enjoyment, and take no
dangerous hold on the fancy!

     The following soliloquies of Comus and the Lady are elegant, but tedious.
The song must owe much to the voice if it ever can delight.  At last the
brothers enter with too much tranquillity; and, when they have feared lest
their sister should be in danger, and hoped that she is not in danger, the
elder makes a speech in praise of chastity, and the younger finds how fine it
is to be a philosopher.

     The descends the Spirit in the form of a shepherd; and the brother,
instead of being in haste to ask his help, praises his singing, and inquires
his business in that place.  It is remarkable that at this interview the
brother is taken with a short fit of rhyming.  The Spirit relates that the
lady is in the power of Comus; the brother moralizes again; and the Spirit
makes a long narration, of no use because it is false, and therefore
unsuitable to a good being.

     In all these parts the language is poetical and the sentiments are
generous; but there is something wanting to allure attention.

     The dispute between the Lady and Comus is the most animated and affecting
scene of the drama, and wants nothing but a brisker reciprocation of
objections and replies to invite attention and detain it.

     The songs are vigorous and full of imagery; but they are harsh in their
diction and not very musical in their numbers.

     Throughout the whole the figures are too bold, and the language too
luxuriant for dialogue.  It is a drama in the epic style, inelegantly splendid
and tediously instructive.

     The Sonnets were written in different parts of Milton's life, upon
different occasions.  They deserve not any particular criticism; for of the
best it can only be said that they are not bad; and perhaps only the eighth
and the twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender commendation.  The
fabric of a sonnet, however adapted to the Italian language, has never
succeeded in ours, which, having greater variety of termination, requires the
rhymes to be often changed.

     Those little pieces may be despatched without much anxiety; a greater
work calls for greater care.  I am now to examine "Paradise Lost;" a poem
which, considered with respect to design, may claim the first place, and with
respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind.

     By the general consent of critics, the first praise of genius is due to
the writer of an epic poem, as it requires an assemblage of all the powers
which are singly sufficient for other compositions.  Poetry is the art of
uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.
Epic poetry undertakes to teach the most important truths by the most pleasing
precepts, and therefore relates some great event in the most affecting manner.
History must supply the writer with the rudiments of narration, which he must
improve and exalt by a nobler art, must animate by dramatic energy, and
diversify by retrospection and anticipation; morality must teach him the exact
bounds and different shades of vice and virtue; from policy, and the practice
of life, he has to learn the discriminations of character and the tendency of
the passions, either single or combined; and physiology must supply him with
illustrations and images.  To put these materials to poetical use, is required
an imagination capable of painting nature and realizing fiction.  Nor is he
yet a poet till he has attained the whole extension of his language,
distinguished all the delicacies of phrase and all the colors of words, and
learned to adjust their different sounds to all the varieties of metrical
modulation.

     Bossu is of opinion that the poet's first work is to find a moral, which
his fable is afterwards to illustrate and establish.  This seems to have been
the process only of Milton; the moral of other poems is incidental and
consequent; in Milton's only it is essential and intrinsic.  His purpose was
the most useful and the most arduous; "to vindicate the ways of God to man;"
to show the reasonableness of religion, and the necessity of obedience to the
divine law.

     To convey this moral there must be a fable, a narration artfully
constructed, so as to excite curiosity and surprise expectation.  In this part
of his work Milton must be confessed to have equalled every other poet.  He
has involved in his account of the fall of man the events which preceded and
those that were to follow it: he has interwoven the whole system of theology
with such propriety, that every part appears to be necessary; and scarcely any
recital is wished shorter for the sake of quickening the progress of the main
action.

     The subject of an epic poem is naturally an event of great importance.
That of Milton is not the destruction of a city, the conduct of a colony, or
the foundation of an empire.  His subject is the fate of worlds, the
revolutions of heaven and of earth; rebellion against the supreme King, raised
by the highest order of created beings; the overthrow of their host and the
punishment of their crime; the creation of a new race of reasonable creatures,
their original happiness and innocence, their forfeiture of immortality, and
their restoration to hope and peace.

     Great events can be hastened or retarded only by persons of elevated
dignity.  Before the greatness displayed in Milton's poem all other greatness
shrinks away.  The weakest of his agents are the highest and noblest of human
beings, the original parents of mankind; with whose actions the elements
consented; on whose rectitude or deviation of will depended the state of
terrestrial nature and the condition of all the future inhabitants of the
globe.

     Of the other agents in the poem, the chief are such as it is irreverence
to name on slight occasions.  The rest were lower powers;

     " - of which the least could wield
     Those elements, and arm him with the force
     Of all their religions;

powers which only the control of Omnipotence restrains from laying creation
waste and filling the vast expanse of space with ruin and confusion.  To
display the motives and actions of beings thus superior, so far as human
reason can examine them, or human imagination represent them, is the task
which this mighty poet has undertaken and performed.

     In the examination of epic poems much speculation is commonly employed
upon the characters.  The characters in the "Paradise Lost" which admit of
examination are those of angels and of man; of angels good and evil; of man in
his innocent and sinful state.

     Among the angels, the virtue of Raphael is mild and placid, of easy
condescension and free communication; that of Michael is regal and lofty, and,
as may seem, attentive to the dignity of his own nature.  Abdiel and Gabriel
appear occasionally, and act as every incident requires; the solitary fidelity
of Abdiel is very amiably painted.

     Of the evil angels the characters are more diversified.  To Satan, as
Addison observes, such sentiments are given as suit "the most exalted and most
depraved being." Milton has been censured by Clarke^1 for the impiety which
sometimes breaks from Satan's mouth; for there are thoughts, as he justly
remarks, which no observation of character can justify, because no good man
would willingly permit them to pass, however transiently, through his own
mind.  To make Satan speak as a rebel, without any such expressions as might
taint the reader's imagination, was indeed one of the great difficulties in
Milton's undertaking; and I cannot but think that he has extricated himself
with great happiness.  There is in Satan's speeches little that can give pain
to a pious ear.  The language of rebellion cannot be the same with that of
obedience.  The malignity of Satan foams in haughtiness and obstinacy; but his
expressions are commonly general, and no otherwise offensive than as they are
wicked.

[Footnote 1: Author of the "Essay on Study."]

     The other chiefs of the celestial rebellion are very judiciously
discriminated in the first and second books; and the ferocious character of
Moloch appears, both in the battle and the council, with exact consistency.

     To Adam and to Eve are given, during their innocence, such sentiments as
innocence can generate and utter.  Their love is pure benevolence and mutual
veneration; their repasts are without luxury, and their diligence without
toil.  Their addresses to their Maker have little more than the voice of
admiration and gratitude.  Fruition left them nothing to ask; and innocence
left them nothing to fear.

     But with guilt enter distrust and discord, mutual accusation, and
stubborn self-defence: they regard each other with alienated minds, and dread
their Creator as the avenger of their transgression.  At last they seek
shelter in his mercy, soften to repentance, and melt in supplication.  Both
before and after the fall the superiority of Adam is diligently sustained.

     Of the probable and the marvellous, two parts of a vulgar epic poem,
which immerge the critic in deep consideration, the "Paradise Lost" requires
little to be said.  It contains the history of a miracle, of creation and
redemption; it displays the power and the mercy of the Supreme Being: the
probable therefore is marvellous, and the marvellous is probable.  The
substance of the narrative is truth; and, as truth allows no choice, it is,
like necessity, superior to rule.  To the accidental or adventitious parts, as
to every thing human, some slight exceptions may be made; but the main fabric
is immovably supported.