The Common Pursuit (2 page)

I put this last word in inverted commas because it is the one I used, a decade and a half ago, in a passage that has been a good deal cited for derision. The passage opens a discussion of Milton's verse that is to be found in my Revaluation. The deriders represent it as showing me in a posture of comically servile deference to authority: Mr Eliot, in his well-known pontifical way, says * Milton's no good', and I, innocently supposing that to settle the matter, proclaim Milton's annihilation to the world. And now Mr Eliot goes back on his tip, leaving me exposed in my discomfiture for the amusement of his less snobbish—his judicious and real—admirers.

Actually, that passage states briefly certain historical facts, the recognition of which seems to me to be entailed in any intelligent response to Mr Eliot's poetry. The facts (as I saw and see them) are that, when Mr Eliot began to write, Milton had long been prepotent as an influence in taste and practice, and that, as a result of Mr Eliot's work, he ceased to be. That, at any rate, is what the passage says. The brief statement has for support, in other parts of the book, a good deal of particular observation and analysis, illustrating the ways in which the Miltonic 'prepotence' is manifested. Mr Eliot himself,in the paper under discussion,explicitly recognizes that his achievement in poetry entailed as an essential condition a critical attitude towards Milton. What I object to in that part of his argument is the way he puts the case: *the study of Milton could be of no help: it was only a hindrance'. That frank and simple statement seems to me insidious. And, as I shall explain, I

associate it with an attitude about Milton's influence in the past that amounts, I think, in its poised liberality, to a surrender of the function of criticism: 'we can never prove that any particular poet would have written better poetry if he had escaped that influence'. What, however, I have to turn to immediately is Mr Eliot's account of the Miltonic fact—I mean, his analysis of Milton's own characteristic use of language. Perhaps 'analysis' may be judged to be the wrong word for what Mr Eliot gives us; but his undertaking certainly commits him to offering an analysis, and what he does offer is not only surprisingly superficial, but also vitiated by familiar confusions and fallacies. He recognizes a'fault' in Milton, a 'weakness of visual imagination' that is apparent in his imagery. This weakness, however, mustn't be accounted a disadvantage: it is offset by a strength of which we can see it to be a condition—a strength of'music*. And Mr Eliot in developing his case proceeds to work the time-honoured abuse of'music' and 'musical' with an apparent wholeness of conviction that I find astonishing in so distinguished a critic—and in the author of his poetry.

We must, then, in reading Paradise Lost, not expect to see clearly; our sense of sight must be blurred, so that our hearing may become more acute. Paradise Lost like Finnegans Wake (for I can think of no work which provides a more interesting parallel: two great books by musicians, each writing a language of his own based upon English) makes this peculiar demand for a readjustment of the reader's mode of apprehension. The emphasis is on the sound, not the vision, upon the word, not the idea; and in the end it is the unique versification that is the most certain sign of Milton's intellectual mastership.

I don't know whether Mr Eliot is a 'musician' or not, but in discussing Four Quartets it would be very much to the point to adduce the poet's evident interest in music. But has 'musicians' in the parenthesis above any function but that of supporting, illegitimately, the pretensions of'music' and 'musical', as he employs them, to be respectable instruments of criticism, and not mere confusing substitutes for the analysis he leaves unperformed ? It is true in suggestion to say that, in Milton's use of language, the 'emphasis is on the sound', but if one aims at advancing the business of critical thinking one must insist that this 'sound' is an entirely different thing from the musician's. Milton's interest in sound as a musician was an entirely different thing from his

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'.