Christopher Ricks - Miltons Grand Style

• E. & S.

  Essays and Studies of the English Association

• E. in C.

  Essays in Criticism

• E.L.H.

  E.L.H. A Journal of English Literary History

• O.E.D.

  Oxford English Dictionary

• P.M.L.A.

  Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

References to Milton's early editors are abbreviated as follows:

• Bentley:

  Richard Bentley, Paradise Lost (1732)

• Hume:

  Patrick Hume, Poetical Works of Milton, Annotations by P. H. (1695)

• Newton:

  Thomas Newton, Paradise Lost (1749)

• Pearce:

  Zachary Pearce, A Review of the Text of Paradise Lost (1733)

• Richardson:

  Jonathan Richardson, Father and Son, Explanatory Notes on Paradise Lost (1734)

LIKE many years, 1958 saw the publication of a stern letter from Dr. F. R. Leavis. He announced that he was still unwilling to join the conspiracy of silence about Milton, and with much justification he deplored the habitual way in which the Miltonistsand the Miltonists command the academic worldvirtually ignore the case that has been made against Miltoneven while they make a show of discussing it.

Certainly it is true that the twentieth-century attacks on Milton's style have not been directly and satisfactorily answered. Equally certainly, the Miltonists praise of Milton has not gone very far towards showing what exactly is good about the style of Paradise Lost. Perhaps it is natural to feel some impatience about the whole matter. Even Professor William Empson saw nothing evasive in saying I can sympathize with a critic who feels he cannot take seriously a proof that the poem is badit is so evidently not bad. But if, as Dr. Johnson thought, it is the duty of criticism to improve opinion into knowledge, then it is hard to be satisfied with opinion. Moreover, Milton's style is still an interesting challenge to the verbal criticism which now seems one of the most important and useful ways of approaching literature.

Milton, then, can provoke a crisis of conscience. Is it possible to reconcile one's honest opinion thatParadise Lost is supremely well written with one's opinion that verbal

The traditionalists need feel no difficulty. Professor F. T. Prince has referred to the fact that Milton's poetry does not respond to this kind of analysis and appreciation [New Criticism], and that his work has therefore always been ranked low by the founders and followers of this school. But is it a fact that Milton's poetry doesnt respond to New Criticism? It is certainly the opposite of a fact that Milton has always been ranked low by such critics. Mr. Empson? Mr. Cleanth Brooks?

Yet it is the anti-Miltonists who have provided what is, in some ways, the most useful approach to Milton. Not, I think, that their criticisms are true, but in taking seriously Milton's use of words, they force the same kind of seriousness on their opponents. From Dr. Leavis and Mr. T. S. Eliotthe foremost though not the only modern anti-Miltonistsone can perhaps construct a positive understanding of Milton's style. The grittiness of their method may one day produce a pearl.

Dr. Leavis's essay on Milton's Verse was originally published as an article in Scrutiny in 1933, though it did not appear in book-form (in Revaluation) till 1936, So it precedes Mr. Eliot's full-length piece. Dr. Leavis attacked the inescapable monotony of the ritual, insisting that the pattern, the stylized gesture and movement, has no particular expressive work to do, but functions by rote, of its own momentum, in the manner of a ritual. To say that Milton's verse is magniloquent, he urged, is to say that it is not doing as much as its impressive pomp and volume seem to be asserting; that mere orotundity is a disproportionate part of the

In studying Dr. Leavis's argument, one must first notice that he is not above a pretty blatant bullying: It should be obvious at once to any one capable of being convinced at all; or It would be of no use to try and argue with any one who contended that; or It needs no unusual sensitiveness to language to perceive that. It is important that we should not just knuckle under. But it is also important that we shouldnt assume that bullying necessarily conceals poor arguments.

The second point is larger: the Shakespearian use of English. Dr. Leavis has always insisted on this exploratory-creative use of wordswhat Mr. Eliot called that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually