Milton's Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style

Milton's poetry is one of the glories of the English language, and yet it owes everything to Milton's widespread knowledge of other languages: he knew ten, wrote in four, and translated from five. In Milton's languages, John K. Hale first examines Milton's languagerelated arts in verse-composition, translations, annotations of Greek poets, Latin prose and political polemic, giving all relevant texts in the original and in translation. Hale then traces the impact of Milton's multilingualism on his major English poems. Many vexed questions of Milton studies are illuminated by this approach, including his sense of vocation, his attitude to print and publicity, the supposed blemish of Latinism in his poetry, and his response to his literary predecessors. Throughout this first full-length study of Milton's use of languages, Hale argues convincingly that it is only by understanding Milton's choice among languages that we can grasp where Milton's own unique English originated.

MILTON'S LANGUAGES

MILTON'S LANGUAGES The impact of multilingualism on style

JOHN K. HALE University of Otago

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521583534 © John K. Hale 1997 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1997 This digitally printed first paperback version 2005 A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Hale, John K. Milton's languages: the impact of multilingualism on style / John K. Hale. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 58353 5 (hardback) 1. Milton. John, 1608-1674 - Style. 2. Milton, John, 1608-1674 - Knowledge - Language and languages. 3. English language — Early modern, 1500—1700 Style. 4. Multilingualism — England. I. Title. PR3594.H35 1997 821'.4-dc20 96-44205 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-58353-4 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-58353-5 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-02237-8 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-02237-1 paperback

For my family, with fondest love: Ken and Betty Hale (died iggo and Beatrice Hale Elizabeth Beatrice Rachel Hale Katharine Margaret Kenealey Hale and John David Francis Hale

Contents

Preface List of abbreviations

xi xiv

Introduction: Milton's languages in the context of renaissance multilingualism

i

P A R T ONE: M I L T O N ' S E X E R C I S I N G OF HIS LANGUAGES l

1

The multilingual self presented in Milton's Poems, 1645

9

2

The development and quality of Milton's multilingual verse

27

3

The Italian journey (1638-9) and language-choice

51

4

Milton's arts of language: translating and philology

67

5

Milton's Latin prose

82

Conclusion to part one: multilingualism in Milton's Latin prose

99

PART TWO: MULTILINGUALISM AND THE MAJOR ENGLISH POEMS

6

Latin and Milton's other languages in the style of Paradise Lost

105

7

Milton's languages and the voices of Paradise Lost

131

8 9

Multilingualism and epic Multilingualism and the style of temperance in Paradise Regained

10

Hebrew meets Greek in Samson Agonistes IX

146 165 180

x 11

Contents The impact of Milton's languages upon his mature English verse styles

Appendix: translating Milton's Latin poems into English Notes Bibliography General index Index ofpassages from Milton

194 203 208 236 242 244

Preface

The book's premises are threefold. First, because learning foreign languages is enjoyable, and Milton enjoyed doing so, my own enjoyment of language-learning gives a suitable angle of address to 'Milton's languages'. Secondly, while more languages are studied nowadays, Milton's ten included classical or extinct ones which are less studied in the English-speaking world; which means that readers of his English need help to recover what his mind was like in so far as it moved among his languages. Thus, thirdly, a study from the inside of its processes, rather than a mere assimilating of their product in the drab form of English footnotes, is timely. But what are my credentials for the undertaking, since nobody can know Milton's languages exactly to the same extent and in the same way as he did? My Greek and Latin are of long standing and reputable. My Italian is similar. Hebrew, I have had to learn for this project; which means a loss of disinterestedness, as well as the wine being new and raw. Is it only special pleading, nonetheless, to think my known incapacity equips me as well as competence would to enter into Milton's mental processes, the 'quick forge and working-house' of his polyglot versatility? One other credential should be mentioned. Like most students of Classics (Literae Humaniores) till this century, I was compelled to write Latin and Greek verses, in the manner of approved ancient models like Ovid or Euripides. I found this a barren exercise in itself. But it has left me with a vivid sense of how good Milton and a few others were in this arcane field of combat; and it has left me with a grateful willingness to explain what value can be found within the process of verse-composing. Composing is hard, for the remarkable reason that Virgil and Ovid and Horace purposely made it harder, by refining the norms of rhythm to reflect more clearly the underlying muscle of Latin in verse. Milton's success in these lists is not merely praiseworthy. It mattered so greatly in his milieu that it will be valued wrongly in ours unless emphasized. XI

xii

Preface

In a work on languages the problem of method, of how best to present them in translation, becomes acute. I give originals and translations, hoping that the reader will not plump for one or the other. I hope that instead the reader will move between the two. The translations of Milton are purposely drawn from several translators, including myself, so that the varieties (and defects) of translating can be felt on the pulse. An appendix illustrates the problem and my solution of it, for those who are interested. For the Bible, on the other hand, I keep to the King James Version. Modern versions may be more correct, but they are less resonant and less close to Milton's world and oracy. The Latin Bible poses a special problem: did Milton work exclusively from the Junius-Tremellius-Beza (Protestant) version, or did he move between that and a Vulgate? And in both cases, which printing did he favour? Even if this could be determined, I myself could not, through not having access to enough Bibles to decide the matter. Accordingly, I explain my choices at each point where they matter. The somewhat eclectic method of quotation, then, is meant to help readers stand away from any single version, so as to share my own excitement in following Milton's practice of the language-arts which he so esteemed, and applied to the needs of his many-sided life. With respect to languages he was both a theorist and a pragmatist. He was a user of them and a player amongst them. Because of this lifelong diversity of engagement with them, and because he played upon them as if they were musical instruments, we meet a Milton here who differs from current versions. The work harnesses most of the intellectual arts I have ever exercised. It seeks especially to combine the essentials of what I respect as enduring work on poetry, namely scholarship and criticism, together with a sufficiency of theory, inductively arrived at and pragmatically employed. The debts incurred in a work using many languages and many kinds of scholarship are likewise many, and I gladly acknowledge them. Outweighing even acknowledgement, though, is my gratitude to everyone who gave me time and help, and who implicitly or explicitly encouraged me. It has been a long road. Among them are: Agathe Thornton; Anthea Morrison and Ann Moss (Durham); Maurice Andrew and George Knight; Roger Collins; Robin Hankey, in fact the entire Classics Department of the University of Otago; the neo-Latin Seminars at Otago; my colleagues and pupils in

Preface

xiii

the English Department of Otago; Kevin Lee (Sydney); Frank Woodhouse, Philip J. Ford, Helena M. Shire, Ingrid Smets, Zweder von Martels and Philip Hardie (Cambridge); Gordon Campbell (Leicester); Jozef IJsewijn (Louvain); James Binns (York); Roy Flannagan (Ohio); John Carey, Dennis Burden, Don MacKenzie and Tony Nuttall (Oxford); Harold Jenkins; Tom Corns (North Wales); David Reid, Neil Keeble and Robin Sowerby (Stirling); Michael Spiller (Aberdeen); Roger Green (St Andrews); Stella Revard (Southern Illinois); Paul Stanwood (British Columbia); Stuart and Jean Strachan; Stuart Sellar; Leo Miller; my original teachers at Oxford, especially Eric Gray, John Gould, E. R. Dodds and Eduard Fraenkel; and many more. I thank conference and seminar audiences who helped me improve work in progress, in Dunedin, Christchurch, Perth, Delhi, Vallombrosa, London, Bangor, Stirling, Vancouver and San Diego. And I thank the editors and readers for the Cambridge University Press, especially Linda Bree. Not only did I receive help from these good and great people, but, as the formula rightly has it, the mistakes which remain are my very own. In a work covering several languages, centuries and fields of scholarship, there will surely be mistakes. I hope readers will alert me to such, perhaps privately however, rather than with a trumpet in the market-place. Some portions of the book have been printed in a fuller form by journals, especially Milton Quarterly, Milton Studies and Renaissance Studies. I

thank their editors for confidence and advice: nothing is perfect, especially first versions. Chapter 3 in particular is substantially the same as printed in Milton in Italy. Contexts, Imagesy Contradictions, edited by Mario Di Cesare for Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, and I thank MRTS

for permission to use the material here. I am grateful to the staff of libraries in which I have worked for book: especially the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington; Cambridge University Library; the Bodleian Library; the British brary; the Library of the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Library of the University of Illinois.

the the Lithe

I dedicate the finished enterprise to my family, the dead as well as the living. One and all, in varied ways, they enabled me to conceive this work and finish it. Dunedin, University of Otago

Abbreviations

Gordon Campbell (ed.), John Milton. The Complete Poems (London: Everyman, 1980) Carey and Fowler John Carey and Alastair Fowler (ed.), The Poems of John Milton (London: Longman, 1968) The Works of John Milton, General editor Frank ColWorks Allen Patterson, The Columbia Edition, 18 vols. + 2 index vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-40) Darbishire Helen Darbishire (ed.), The Poetical Works ofJohn Milton, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1952) EpFam Epistolarum Familiarium, Milton's 'Familiar Letters', as printed in ColWorks vol. xn The Faerie Queene Merritt Y. Hughes (ed.), John Milton. Complete Poems Hughes and Major Prose (New York: Macmillan, 1957) A Greek-English Lexicon, Compiled by Henry George LSJ Liddell and Robert Scott, revised by Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie, with a supplement (Oxford University Press, 1968) MacKellar Walter MacKellar (ed.), The Latin Poems of John Milton, Cornell Studies in English 15 (New Haven: Yale University Press for Cornell University, 1930) The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2 OED vols. (Oxford University Press, 1971) P. W. Glare (ed.), The Oxford Latin Dictionary (OxOxLD ford University Press, 1982) William Riley Parker, Milton. A Biography, 2 vols. Parker (Oxford University Press, 1968) Proceedings of the British Academy PBA Paradise Lost PL Campbell

List of abbreviations PR RES Samson Variorum

YPW

xv

Paradise Regained Review of English Studies Samson Agonistes Douglas Bush (ed.), A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), vol. 1 Don M. Wolfe et al. (eds.), 8 vols., Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82)

INTRODUCTION

Milton's languages in the context of renaissance multilingualism

Multilingualism: the ability to use three or more languages, either separately or in various degrees of code-mixing . . . different languages are used for different purposes, competence in each varying according to such factors as register, occupation, and education.1 It is a truth universally acknowledged that Milton's formal education emphasized languages, especially Latin and Greek, and further that he practised and applied his languages (some ten of them) lifelong, in the course of reading or translating or composing. It is less often asked what exactly his possession of languages meant to him in the vicissitudes of a busy life, whether as ends in themselves or for access to texts in their original, and whether as means to thought or as resources of stylistic choice. These questions deserve a sustained exploration. To supply it, we should first see Milton in the most pertinent context, namely renaissance multilingualism. Here is a humanist who wrote poems in four languages (Latin, Greek and Italian as well as his mother-tongue) and whose voluminous prose is almost half in Latin; a lifelong polyglot whose writings evince knowledge of three Semitic languages and further modern languages. How far does Milton typify his milieu, how far does he transcend or ignore or flout it? A provisional sense can be gained by situating him in relation to a number of key linguistic or languages-related issues. These include: (a) the Questione della Lingua, the question whether (or when) to write in Latin or the mother-tongue; (b) languages as access to the springs of religion and thought for the Christian humanist; (c) the practice and norms of humanist education; (d) related broader questions of Imitatio2 and intertextuality. Imitatio, here, means 'emulation', not slavish copying. In order to emulate the exemplary poets and thinkers of the multilingual past, the renaissance humanist strove to use their thought as texture without perpetrating pastiche. The resulting intertextuality is the index of

2

Introduction

the emulation but also its criterion; that is to say, while the ancients are a felt presence, recognized in diction and allusion and much else, the humanist has failed utterly if the reader's attention is held by nothing but the debts. Afifthlanguage-issue is more speculative: (e) the question, was the past to which languages gave access more of a burden than an opportunity to the humanist, leading one home or into exile, and as double vision, was it a source of curse or blessing? Finally, (f) was Milton's attitude to languages typical or exceptional in his age, so that we may perceive the purposes for which he acquired and maintained them? LATIN AND THE VERNACULARS

Latin was the sine qua non of an educated person. It was a triple gateway: to preferment, to the intellectual life of antiquity, and to active membership of the European intelligentsia. Nonetheless, the grandeur of Rome's long history made its language potentially overwhelming. The dilemma of the renaissance humanist was, how to absorb and exploit antiquity through its languages without being dwarfed by these languages' axiomatic, definitive greatness. Would one succeed better by writing in Latin, the actual words of the ancients, or in the mothertongue? And if in Latin, which Latin? Cicero's alone, or something more mixed? Or if in the mother-tongue, how should one purge it of a grossness felt when comparing it with Roman exemplars? Moreover, which version of it was to be used, in times when regional variations stood out more than later when nation-states had made vernaculars more uniform? Since the issues impinged on different populations in different ways and at different epochs, I summarize the crucial developments chronologically so as to place Milton's individual resolution of the dilemma. This has to be done in a European as much as in an English context, for three reasons: internationalism inheres in language-study; it inheres peculiarly in the choices of a renaissance multilinguist; and certainly Milton himself saw the question in European terms. I begin my necessarily cursory account with Italy. Italy first confronted (and so named) the Questione della Lingua, the language-question. From 1300 to 1550, from Dante through Landino and Bembo to Ariosto, Italians argued whether or when to use their volgare. Italians spent time, talent and energy on the Questione. One should not oversimplify the range of their positions, nor ironize their choice of Latin prose to explain their choice of Italian for verse. What counts is,

Introduction

3

that despite renaissance Italy's having so many, vying vernaculars the vernacular was preferred, even as early as Dante. As for Milton, since in general he knew Italian literature and culture intimately, and Ariosto is the particular predecessor whom he cites3 in making his own declaration for the mother-tongue, he may have known more of the Italian debate. A modern analogy helps clarify the issue. It resembles that posed for postcolonial nation-states, of the 'cultural cringe', which is antipodeans' metaphor for the 'cultural inferiority complex' which they may feel towards the older and richer culture of Britain or Europe. Henry James felt a version of this, the complex fate of being an American drawn to Europe's older culture yet repelled by it. Similarly, the sheer dominance of Latin culture for many renaissance poets might arouse anxiety and a concern with positioning, to accept and exploit their complex fate. Every generation of the Renaissance had to think the Questione through, so gravitational did the pull of Latin remain till after Milton. It was Latin which enabled the humanist to study and teach anywhere; Erasmus in England, Buchanan in France. No humanist ever voted for the vernacular at the expense of Latin's portability, and we usually notice a sense of sacrifice or regret about the choice of one language over another for one's most important work. In Italy, at any rate, the struggle over the Questione was long and difficult, and even to some extent precarious. In France, the sixteenth century saw the emergence of the French language as not merely one possible and less esteemed option for poetic utterance. In a struggle that was shorter than that of Italian, but still an agonized one, French in the sixteenth century supplanted Latin for verse. Even though as in Italy the regional tongues were still far apart, the Pleiade movement centring on Dorat, Du Bellay and Ronsard achieved a French prose and verse which settled the Questione permanently in favour of a purified vernacular. Yet the supplanting was not done without loss and paradox. The loss and paradox may actually interest us more than the outcome. Because we know Latin died, there is the danger of becoming Whig historians intoning deterministically over its demise. Buchanan, who wrote in Latin and could not have joined in as francophone, worked amicably with the Pleiadistes. Du Bellay called French his wife and Latin his mistress. He says, 'The one is beautiful, the other pleases more', perhaps because he is less tied to Latin than to the mother-tongue. He expressed this, and many of his best thoughts on the topic, in Latin, no doubt to savour the paradoxes of interplay between the medium and

4

Introduction

message. One such paradox is that in representing themselves as the first champions of classical standards for literature in French the Pleiadistes belittled their own originality. Paradox itself pleases, and dignifies the linguistic self. And 'the rivalry of the two [languages] intensifies their linguistic and cultural interaction...' so that 'read from inside, as it were, the texts of the humanists and their vernacular counterparts seem to draw from their very uncertainties, from their protean shifts of style and intellectual context, an unfailing supply of colour and energy5.4 In other countries, there were other outcomes. In Germany, 'Latin was more easily accepted as the main language of culture and intellectual life. Many Germans, unlike the French, considered their native tongue to be barbarous.'5 In general, the smaller the country, or the less self-confident the language-community, the readier it was to talk and think in Latin and thus tap into wider resources. The English position was both more and less clear than the French. It had established its vernacular by 1500 as the language of law and government, and by 1540 of the church as well, supplanting both Latin and French. Yet if publishing in Latin be the yardstick, it was on the increase until the Civil War. Especially does this hold for the publishing of Latin verse, from the two university presses. J. W. Binns has shown6 how Latin verse was written at university not solely as an exercise but to gain attention and consequent preferment. Unlike his friend Charles Diodati, unlike his older friend Alexander Gil, unlike Herbert and Marvell and Crashaw and Cowley, Milton (though not averse to fame) wrote no Latin verse for the teeming anthologies on royal occasions. He seems to have rejected this, along with other career paths, in the 1630s. We can speak of 'rejection' because he wrote much Latin verse, and kept it, yet none was published though the means and fashion would prompt this. We cannot say for sure why this talent was not to be shown on a wider stage in those years, while his English verse was. But we may infer that it seemed not to belong to his search for his major vocation, and perhaps that he did not want the display of his Latin talent to serve Cambridge in the years of Archbishop Laud's predominance. (I return to this in chapter 2.) In 1628 at Cambridge, if not before, Milton addressed the Questione, 'At a vacation Exercise in the College'. As he put it in Poems, 1645, 'The Latin speeches ended, the English thus began: - Hail, native language . . .' (Hughes, p. 30). There follows a 54-line digression, or rather invocation, asking help from the personified mother-tongue. Although Latin is not criticized nor rejected, he is very explicitly turning away from

Introduction

5

Latin, towards English, for help with serious future subjects: 'some graver subject' (line 30), such as a glimpse of the gods in heaven (33-46) or 'heroes old5 (47). The fact that the passage is a digression, and is bilingual on the subject of a bilinguaPs choice, shows what is on his mind at the age of twenty-one. The moment is prophetic of Milton's eventual, mature choice of poetic tongue. Nonetheless, he continued to write in Latin verse after Cambridge. He experienced on his pulse the value of Latin for poetry and other purposes when he went to Italy in 1638. If he had been disposed to reject Latin as too Laudian a medium (contrast Crashaw), it opened different doors for him in Italy, such that he rapidly resurrected his poemata and composed more. But much latelier in the private academies of Italy, whither I was favoured to resort [I perceived] that some trifles I had in memory . .. met with acceptance above what was looked for, and other things which I had shifted in scarcity of books and conveniences to patch up amongst them, were received with written encomiums, which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps . . .{Reason of Church Government, Hughes, pp. 668-9).

He says it was this encouragement, received for his Latin verses in Italy, which clarified if it did not engender his sense of vocation, and its sense of English as its direction and medium. It was in Italy that he finally gave up Latin for major verse, doing so from a position of strength. With the Italians' own example all round him it was one of the most deliberate and responsible choices even he ever made: he knows what he is giving up, namely the chance to speak in poetry to his Italian friends and to the intelligentsia of Europe, since English to them was the unknown tongue of a small offshore people. Paradox invigorates his Latin verse renunciation of Latin verse: Omnia non licet uni, Non sperasse uni licet omnia.7 (One person can't do everything, nor even hope to do everything.) Moreover, paradox is not all, because this is a counterfactual wish that one could do everything, and could in this case hold both native-language and international audiences rapt. The thought of doing something for his country merges with doing it for glory, which however is a circumscribed glory. The poem is a farewell to more than its subject, his closest friend: I shall argue later that he lays Latin verse-making itself in Diodati's grave.

6

Introduction

This process of choice during his twenties and thirties will be explored further in chapter 3. Already, though, we sense its dialectical quality, the twists and turns, the reassessment of pros and cons. Before leaving Italy Milton has chosen his medium by thinking what is his most-desired audience, and then the rest follows by decorum. He chose Latin or English accordingly thereafter: he chose Latin for European or pedagogic consumption, English for the History of Britain. The choice of tongue reveals fundamentals about the particular act of thought. Though that is obvious, in these days of reading-in-translation it is readily forgotten. Let me make it explicit. If choice was Milton's great theme, and 'reason was but choosing', it included language-choice. Languagechoice was both precondition and part of the utterance. Time and again, he makes a theme out of his language-choice. He does it for purposes which we can, for the moment, summarize as sense of occasion, mimesis and paradox. LANGUAGES FOR READING AND FOR OTHER USES

Granted then that renaissance humanists were ipso facto bilingual, and experienced the cognate tensions of choice when composing, in their reading most were in fact /m/Mingual. As my epigraph has it, they possessed the 'ability to use three or more languages, either separately or in various degrees of code-mixing . . . [so that] different languages are used for different purposes, competence in each varying according to such factors as register, occupation, and education'. Obviously Greek even more than Latin fed their obsession with classical antiquity, by giving direct (not shaky because derivative) access to the authors who had civilized Rome itself. Milton's Greek was very high-powered: witness that he made emendations in the text of Euripides which modern scholarship has confirmed and accepted. But Christian humanists, who sought pietas litterata ('learned piety' or 'educated faith')8 for themselves or influence on the Reformation at large, had to have equal access to the three 'sacred languages' - Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The first two of these were the languages of the two Testaments. Greek was furthermore the tongue of the Septuagint, and Latin of the Vulgate: both these translations had (and retain) special standing in biblical hermeneutics. Biblical scholars in large numbers, others in smaller numbers, acquired the three languages for use together on the Bible.

Introduction

7

Milton was among them, but acquired also Aramaic and Syriac. Aramaic is the original language of some later writings of the Old Testament, not very different from biblical Hebrew.9 Syriac is the language of an influential transmission of the New Testament.10 Here, Milton's language-acquisition exceeds the ordinary. His reading knowledge of the five classical languages was most purposive, pursuing alike the austerities of literary scholarship and the countless applications to religion (which in turn embraced both spirituality and controversy). More still, the languages of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem were not separate. Latin absorbed much Greek. Hebrew and Aramaic entered Greek in the Septuagint and (differently) in the New Testament. All march on into the Vulgate's Latin. The three languages interact, kaleidoscopic and specific in effect. Milton moves freely among the interactions, for example using Septuagint Greek within his own Greek psalm version. The wealth and complexity of interactions among these original tongues gives him powerful choice. Italian, to him the most interesting of the vernaculars, worked to similar effect but extended his choice still wider. Besides standing closest to Latin, for instance in pronunciation, Italian had most renewed its poetic and expressive resources from Latin. Milton not only wrote Italian sonnets, but learnt to impart a Latin density and gravitas to his English verse style from the work of Delia Casa and Tasso. Milton also went back to the first champion of the volgare, Dante, for intertextuality and architecture alike. Just as Dante had let Virgil and Latin shape his narrative and texture respectively, so did Milton, albeit differently (see chapters 6-8). Italian was thus fundamental to his vocation as a poet. Italian gave a rationale and confidence to this vocation. Beyond these tongues, Milton also read French.11 He may have spoken French on his travels through France, but the best visible evidence of his using French is provided by a number of entries from French historians which he made in his Commonplace Book. Spanish was attributed to him by an Italian friend, Francini.12 German or Dutch have been ascribed to him by modern writers, along with Old English. The last-named may well be wishful thinking. In principle, one might wish for the multilingual poet to have entered into his mother-tongue's earliest recorded form. In particular, too, Miltonists have wished to relate his Satan to that of the Genesis 'B'. Evidence is sparse, but there is some. In the History of Britain he misunderstands passages of Latin chroniclers which a knowledge of Old English would have clarified for him.13 As for German, there is only slight evidence for

8

Introduction

his knowing it. Better evidence records that he was read to in Dutch.14 His languages may, then, amount to ten: English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch. Impressed, as we should be, we should then ask: do his ten languages known, and four composed in, have any parallel in his world? They do. Language-acquisition and language-display both made part of that world. Witness the Oxbridge anthologies, honouring royalty with multilingual tributes. These centred on Latin with Greek, but further flaunted more outre accomplishments, like Turkish and Persian. Witness, too, such display-pieces as are found in the writings of the muchtravelled Thomas Coryat - Italian verses flattering James's queen. Precisely because these Englishmen's displays are gauche or fulsome or eccentric, if not all three, they make Milton look abstemious and judicious, in that for Poems, 1645 he prepares poems in only four of his languages, thoughtfully balanced into two pairings (see chapter 1). More serious multilinguists still found it worth writing in several different languages. Naturally enough, since continental multilinguists lived among overlapping language-areas, they were more numerous, and more serious about multilingual praxis than the English showmen and dilettantes. Thus when it is recorded of Elizabeth Jane Weston, who settled in Prague, that she was fluent in German, Czech and Italian as well as the more usual English, Latin and French, we would guess that she had occasion to use all of them, in life as in her poetry.15 The Dutch, then as now, excelled. Thus the poet P. C. Hooft brought together at meetings in his castle a distinguished company who composed each in a different preferred language. 'Barlaeus wrote almost exclusively in Latin; Hooft mainly in Dutch, but also . . . in Latin, French and Italian.' Constantijn Huygens 'wrote not only in Dutch but also in Latin, French and Italian and occasionally in Spanish, Greek, English and German'. A comparable German polyglot is Georg Rudolph Weckherlin: he wrote a cycle of poems in four languages- German, French, English and Latin.16 Moreover, we know the varied purposes for which some continental multilinguals used their languages. Forster (pp. 39—40) movingly describes how Hooft tried to express his grief for the death of Brechje Spiegels by writing her epitaph in six different languages; not satisfied with any, he reverted to Dutch, the mother-tongue for the simple essence of his praise for lost love. Equally, the seriousness of Huygens and Weckherlin is sensed in their self-restraint, their awareness that the many tongues are not of equal standing for the poet using them. Precisely this, again, emerges from the comparison of these notable

Introduction

9

continental polyglot poets with Milton. They are differently polyglot, and purposefully so. The multilingual reading or writing comes from within them, not from externalities of display or coterie. And just as the needs of his intellectual life had made Milton already of this serious, pragmatic class of multilinguist, so political need would have done so. It is symptomatic that Weckherlin's successor as Secretary for the Foreign Tongues in Whitehall was Milton himself. His activities as a translator or composer of state papers is not a focus of this study, but his readiness to do such things for the Parliament in his country's long crisis typifies - as much as his patriotism or ideology - his kind of multilingualism. THE PRACTICE AND NORMS OF HUMANIST EDUCATION

Humanist education was grounded in the ancient tongues but also in the principles and practice of ancient rhetoric. Because Latin was begun young, composition in particular would begin in Latin (and then Greek) as soon as in English. To compose Latin verse was second nature to such as Marvell and Milton. In the case of Marvell it is even possible that where his lines exist in both Latin and English he composed them in Latin first;17 and though we cannot check this for Milton, the education they underwent would make the budding humanist more at home in Latin for some purposes than in the mother-tongue. Latin was the medium of instruction as well as its content, and the work was oral as much as written - indeed increasingly so, as pupils progressed up the school and on to university. As formal education proceeded they did more and more discrete things with their Latin. The comparison today would be with a country such as India, where 'English-Medium5 on a school's front door is a great selling-point, and English is perceived as the avenue to almost every professional career. This Latin education was largely for the sake of developing proficiency in rhetoric. Rhetoric included both creative writing and dramatic performance in Latin, giving the pupil a command of topics, figures, levels of style, stances towards subject and audience, and a sense of audience, along with knowledge of a pantheon of exemplary ancient exponents. The lack of division (curricular or theoretical) between poetry and rhetoric, since both alike were persuasive eloquence, enabled poetic speech to be rhetorical and oratory to be poetic, at first in Latin but really in whatever language was being used. All this Milton absorbed - much like everyone who underwent the

io

Introduction

training. When later in life he conducted controversy, he used all the familiar methods in the familiar manner. I do not share modern misgivings about Milton's rhetoric as excessive, since polemic was (and is) polemical. The aim of lawyers, for example, is to win cases, and of politicians to win votes; and if personal abuse helps, so be it. Assuredly, the force of rhetoric was one of the most influential, if not the single most influential, part of the legacy of antiquity in the Renaissance. So when Milton waxed polemical, Latin became for him, not a musical instrument, but a cosh. Another emphasis of his language-learning needs to be recaptured here. To learn a language, the student was made not only to translate from original language to target language, and the reverse, but even to go round a circle of languages, finally back to the original.18 Such retranslating is hard but not stultifying (unless one is gifted or cursed with photographic memory): the pre-existence of an authoritative original provides a check and model for how one is to think one's way into the language, its thought-forms and idioms. The value of the 'circle' method is that where words and ornaments are bound to be left behind, the thought is seized, ready to be expressed in whatever tongue. Paradoxically, then, so verbal an exercise trains one in skills of thought, as much as skills of words. Certainly all Milton's psalm versions show his grasp of the thought, first and foremost. Then, as paraphrast, he incorporates words of other translators, or makes up his own expansions. These five-finger exercises gave to him the freedom of a great many ways of thinking and creating, albeit not more than to others who had had the same training. But as he outgrew such exercises of pedagogy he did not outgrow care for the words themselves; far from it, for his verse-translating moves towards literalism. He is not content after all with giving only the bald sense of a Psalm or a Horace ode: he presses English to a variously conceived maximum of fidelity. In this, whether we like the product or loathe it, he outgoes his contemporaries (see chapter 4). He is heeding Horace's topos of the 'fidus interpres', 'faithful interpreter', by coming to favour its 'fidus' element. This has a bearing on the text-studded texture of Paradise Lost it makes the poem sometimes odd, more often sublime, and always distinctive (see chapters 6 and 7). IMITATIO AND INTERTEXTUALITY

By practising Imitatio, the renaissance humanist sought to build something original and personal from inherited materials, and to do it by

Introduction

11

methods and in media which the prior tradition had refined. Even when inventing a new genre or approaching a totally new subject, one went back to the known and proven exemplars; for the Romans had done likewise, resorting to the Greeks and to earlier Romans. One 'stood on the shoulders of the giants'. Standing there, one was not dwarfed if the personal contribution was original enough and expressed with skill enough. After all, Horace's new genres owed much to his inheritance, and Horace was one of the giants. Milton never questioned this set of ideas, but perhaps the languageissue implicitly did. If the mother-tongues could achieve Imitatio, would they not achieve it actually better than Latin could, in that their very rawness or their impurities presented a challenge to a bold spirit? And did they not offer greater scope for originality, right down at the cellular level, of words, phrases, lines of verse - the levels where poetry is alive or most dead? Moreover, to do great things for the mother-tongue was to do them for the mother-land, wherever (as in Milton's case) language and nation coincided. Yet as we have seen, the humanists went on writing in Latin for some purposes. Imitatio worked variously. Though the vernaculars were increasingly favoured for the highest endeavours, like poetry, some ambivalence lingered. It can be seen in actions which have a dash of compensation to them. So, for example, Milton writing in Latin sometimes signed himself 'Of London' (not the expected patriotic 'Englishman'). This was either to parallel the local more than national affiliation of his Italian addressees (their campanilismo, attachment to their own bell-tower), or else to mimic 'Roman', the name of a city and empire but not country. Or perhaps he had both motives, but at any rate he used Latin to play an Italian role and aspiration. To give a later example, when he was in government employ, drafting and revising letters to foreign powers, he fought a lone battle for classical Latin phraseology (and lost it).19 We do not hear of him, as we do of Ariosto, that he tried to w/dearn his Latin verse skill. A clear pride in his Latin performances stands out in his publishing. Choice of languages for Imitatio resulted in complexities, paradoxes, changes and revisions of mind within the clear main current flowing away from Latin. 'The texts of the humanists and their vernacular counterparts seem to draw from their very uncertainties, from their protean shifts of style and intellectual context, an unfailing supply of colour and energy.'20 So it was with Milton also. The present study, by addressing all his languages rather than giving automatic primacy to his

12

Introduction

English, gives the inside story of his many-sided response to the challenges of Imitatio. For an example, let us take intertextuality. This is precisely the aspect of neo-Latin poetry which deters and baffles us, because the degree of verbal allusiveness to the ancients either seems servile or vanishes in translation. It is time that literary theory rescued it, as being the most intertextual poetry known to Europe. Intertextuality works at such a local level that it is the nuts and bolts of Imitatio: in the feeling of palimpsest in individual words, phrases and lines of verse, the poetic texture honours the ancient world and the post-Roman reception. One can create such palimpsest more readily in Latin, by using Virgil's own words, and phrases, or even whole lines.21 But therefore the task is harder in a romance vernacular, and still harder in English. Does one then do what is harder, or what can be more complete? It is not, or at least it was not, a foregone conclusion. Buchanan, as much as Milton, chose with integrity, when he continued to write (both prose and verse) in Latin. It was that integrity which enabled Milton to read and use Buchanan.22 From my own perspective I see Milton as choosing what gave him the more options. English gave him almost all the options which Latin gave, and some which Latin could not. As this is one of the main thrusts of the present study, I summarize and explain it straightaway. To summarize, first, imitating in Latin posed one dilemma, while imitating in English posed another. Using Latin words and metres to emulate Roman exemplars like Virgil, Ovid, Horace, he would so readily call into view their words that too much might show through the palimpsest; not necessarily dwarfing him, but obscuring his own sense or distracting from it (like a simile whose vehicle crushes its tenor). The challenge was to ensure that his thought commanded more attention than did the words or allusions. Theory, too, might cramp one's style. Latin composition was supposed to achieve copia (expressive abundance), by means of amplijicatio (apposite expansion of one's theme). Much neo-Latin verse, and Milton's own earlier specimens of it, moved sluggishly because - what with the aid of dictionaries, thesauri and vocabulary-books to facilitate the copia - it systematically repeated its thought in the name of elegant variation. Even Buchanan, whose Latin can be very succinct on occasion, prefers amplitude in his celebrated psalm versions. Reading a neo-Latin writer whose sole strength is copia is like eating a meal of marshmallows. Composing in English produced the reverse dilemma. In English, Milton could not summon up Virgil or others so easily or casually,

Introduction

13

because he could not use so many Latin-derived words within English. The task was apparently far harder than in Latin. Yet Milton gains the option to foreground the thought and not the words, or the interaction of thoughts with words, and both options enable an interaction of infinite variety. The more stringent needs of English Imitatio were, finally, more liberating. Moreover, whereas words may fail to evoke, names will probably do so. This is among the reasons why Milton's use of names for allusion, though splendid and apt in his Latin, carries greater weight in his English. Classical names in Lycidas simply stand out more than they can in the Epitaphium Damonis.

Milton is 'playing5 among his languages. He does it all the time, with increasing force and point. Latin is a palimpsest of Greek, but a vernacular may be one of both, to which may be added Hebrew and the romance vernaculars and whatever else English had then gone to for its wordstock (older English, Celtic). The same holds for names, allusions, thoughts and their interactions. It is in English that Milton can choose connotation most precisely and richly. Thereby he can direct the reader's attention with authority; that is, with a whole multilingual and multicultural cloud of witnesses, and yet without loss of clarity. It is a very purposeful playing; but still a spirit of play is felt. What every English writer does willy-nilly, Milton does to an extreme, the extreme of his mature high style. There, he works most significantly, yet not solely, by Latinism. MULTIPLE VISION AND THE SINGLE MIND

So far the Questione della Lingua has been discussed as if it were essentially similar for all within a time and place. In a paper to the Copenhagen Neo-Latin Congress, however, Ann Moss23 contested this, arguing that a deeply personal, sometimes anxious dimension was entailed by the fact of bilingualism. She supported this by the modern distinction between 'compound' and 'coordinate' bilingualism. In thefirst,the two languages are 'learnt in the same context and are more or less interdependent', while in the second they are 'learnt separately and are more or less independent'. She argued that Du Bellay's form of bilingualism was the second, and that it caused anxiety because he felt more gap between his two languages than was healthy. Further, she argued that because Montaigne as a child had been subjected by his father to the bizarre experiment of learning to speak Latin before French (with amazing

14

Introduction

subterfuges to prevent the boy acquiring French on the sly) Montaigne emerged with a double vision of everything under the sun. I find it implausible to think of any humanist, let alone a French one, as a 'coordinate' bilingual, and certainly not Milton, for whom his languages merged and meshed both when learning and then later when writing. Be all that as it may, I take from Moss's thesis the point that humanists differ at the core in terms of the Questione; and that they did not need to choose once and for all (especially as Latin was their 'mistress'!) Thus thoughts about the relations of self and other, and the possibility of separate linguistic selves or at least personae, are very usefully brought to focus by her hypothesis. Do Milton's languages suggest how he thought, how he viewed himself through languages, where he was at home, what humanist roles he felt equipped to play (or avoid)? He was, surely, in the main anyway, 'compound' and at-home. The latter finding makes Milton ordinary, not visionary or very modern; not very like Montaigne, but a citizen of multilingual sectarian Europe. But the idea of his being a compound multilingual needs probing. Precisely because he could think in Latin or English, or both or neither, he cared about their differences and limits, and about those of his other languages. He will emerge from a later chapter as a tireless experimenter with translation, seeking or pushing its limits. He asks, like the French humanists, what is a 'fidus interpres'? And no wonder. If the biblical part of his inheritance made him incline to prize the gist above the original styling (lumping), his humanism inclined him to prize difference (splitting again). A continual intimate dialectic is unfolded, corresponding to two cultural poles of his being. Languagequestions generally, as well as the Questione more acutely, represent Milton's address to the philosophical dilemma (part of the Fall perhaps) of the One and the Many. By now we are examining issues which involve more than languages. Here is another. Harold Bloom exempted Milton, alone, from the 'anxiety of influence'. Influences there were, but he coped with them or used them to advantage. Linguistically, however, Milton did evince some anxiety. He avoided French for some reason. He was anxious about language-choice, about the discourtesy of abusing the Pope in Latin to Italian friends, about the long delay in beginning the great promised poem, about the correctness of his own and others' Latin. I surmise he knew some of these were matters of fact not opinion, within his chosen professionalism. More important, I am led by studying his multilingualism to an

Introduction

15

increased sense of his emulation of one predecessor more than others, namely Dante. Dante came early in the history of the Questione and decided it for others than himself: Milton came late, and had it easier. Dante wrote in Latin about the Tightness of the volgare: so did Milton. Dante in his greatest poem included passages in other languages, and Milton wrote in four. In the Divina Commedia Dante Latinized his Italian poem from top to bottom - from the inclusion of Virgil as his guide and master, to the coining of words direct from Latin, to quotation of much liturgical and scriptural Latin, not to mention his infinite gradations of interaction, including coining. Milton Latinized in some of these and in many other ways. An austere playing among languages, and a strenuous desire thereby to teach about faith, morals and the cosmos itself, are fundamental to both poets and to few others. Among its other objectives, then, our study will argue that Dante as multilingual gave much to Milton. Almost anything about Dante's languages will suggest lines of enquiry into Milton's. Here is the equiponderant multilingual ego whom Milton, in his vernacular poems, is emulating. TYPICAL OR EXCEPTIONAL?

It emerges that in the main Milton was typical of his time, in the sense of being touched by widespread renaissance contentions. He responded to all the main themes and issues of that age, including the ones which centred on languages or related to them. At times, indeed, he was a quite ordinary man of his time, as with his controversializing or his Greek verses. Yet he was altogether extraordinary where the contentions touched 'a fine spirit to fine issues', and in concluding I shall dwell on that spirit as revealed in his language-arts and their uses. Languages grant access for their reader to intellectual and spiritual diversity. Milton seized his chances, in an all-round way worthy of humanist aspiration. Languages in use release the speaker or writer into new roles, and a modified self. Milton relished this release, at times for its own sake, often later to play a series of humanist roles. Surveying the number of his languages and of the genres in which he wrote (and not forgetting sub-genres like satire and insult within his major work), I infer that he relished the entering by his languages into as many personae as possible. They show he shared the renaissance eagerness for versatility. He was indefatigable and thrifty in his languages. He kept up his philology and languages and their arts, and applied them all somewhere

16

Introduction

in his life. Indeed, he did this to an exceptional extent, and with exceptional diversity and all-round competence. He stands out less in any one language-art than for the number of them and for the standard he maintained. When Milton first showed interest in language-options he invented a new version of language-choice, in a striking multilingual gesture. About 1628 he switched from performing his Latin prose oration for Christ's College (Prolusion VI) into English verse, moving from acceptance of an imposed tongue to explicit choosing of another.24 He thereby made a statement about his languages, and about himself; a statement about his range of choice, not to mention a prophetic juxtaposing of the two genres which would create his contemporary reputation — Latin oratorical prose and English verse. So it continued. Whenever afterwards he wrote a poem in one of his foreign languages, to the other things which decorum required him to match together, such as subject, style, occasion, audience and stance, he added the choice of tongue. He had permanently enlarged his repertoire of ways to achieve decorum. At least during his apprenticeship, he could get nearer to the exemplars by literally speaking their language. Later, his relationship to them and to his languages altered: rather than inhabiting their languages, he domiciled them in his own. They are what gives his English much of its distinction, in both senses of 'distinction'. So here is the further and final option for his decorum, adopted from a position of multilingual strength. Consequently, the study of his multilingualism and its associated language-arts initiates new enquiries for us. It provides fresh evidence on existing ones. By making us heed the multilingual voice in the three great English poems, it defamiliarizes them. The more aware one is of the variety of Milton's language-knowledge and language-skills, the more meaning one finds within his writings, in whichever language. There is little loss of existing meanings. But the ensuing enquiries should help to restore and uphold meanings which were more apparent to Milton's original readers than can be the case now. Whether or not the reader agrees with all the interpretations offered now, I offer them as the kind of meaning which can be retrieved by philological scholarship.

PART

ONE

Milton's exercising of his languages

CHAPTER I

The multilingual selfpresented in Milton's

Poems, 1645

In 1645 Milton had reached the notional 'mid-point5 of his life.1 A small tradition exists of poems describing- or composed a t - a poet's mid-point en route to the biblical lifespan of three score years and ten. Chief among these is Dante's beginning to the Divine Comedy. 6nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita', 'midway in the journey of our life'. This may have been in Milton's mind, as it certainly was for Longfellow and Updike later, in presenting himself for the first time to a general public by name as a poet. Hitherto, when he had published poems in print, they were mostly contributions to anthologies. In the case ofA Masque (1637) his name does not even appear in the credits. In the printing ofEpitaphiumDamonis (1640) his name remained thickly veiled, as 'I. M.'2 In 1645, previous named publication had been of prose only. What is the significance, then, of the mid-point 'statement' which he makes by putting his full name to these multilingual poems, in that form and at that time? Two views dominate the debate about Milton's action. Biographers see an intent to launder his public image, as if the 'presenting' mattered more than the 'self'.3 That is, to borrow Erving Goffman's terms, the 'impression' made was to outweigh any 'expression' of personality.4 Other writers, being more interested in the fully expressed Miltonic self and voice of Paradise Lost, see the Poems as premonitory.5 As for editors and general readers, they naturally assess the poems individually, in the context of their time of composition, not that of the time of first named printing. For present purposes, however, I have examined the 1645 volume page by page, to do justice to both aspects of the 'selfpresentation', to impression and expression alike and to their interactions. I find that Milton's languages provide energy and themes for both aspects. They give him much that is 'impressive' to present, thereby to 'express' an intelligent self. Furthermore, besides (obviously) employing his tongues to produce

20

Milton's exercising of his languages

the verse of twenty years which is gathered up in Poems, 1645, Milton as self-editor draws attention to the tongues. He does this in a complex, witty way which suggests how manifold was the resource of his multilingualism. Imaginative worlds, personae for writing, a cultivation of idealizing friendship - his languages made him free possessor of all these. He may even have worked out a rationale. For Aristotle in the Kicomachean Ethics theoretical wisdom and abstract contemplation were superior to practical wisdom and political science; yet the needs of the latter arena, that of humans living in society, must be met too. A similar balance is desiderated in the Roman and humanist debates between otium and negotium, between 'leisure5 and 'business5, between 'cultivated private life5 and 'responsible civic life5.6 Milton knew of the debate and the balance, and though he does not discuss it concerning his languages, I apply the distinction when appropriate. I consider first the issues of self-presentation as far as these involve languages. Then, passing over the merits or otherwise of the individual poems (as they are discussed in the next chapter), I illustrate from the collection as a whole how multilingualism made him free possessor, lifelong, of worlds and activities he never ceased to value. SELF-PRESENTATION THROUGH THE LANGUAGES OF POEMS, I 645

Self-presentation starts at once, on the title-page. By proclaiming the contents as 'Poems . . . both English and Latin5 (my emphases), the title-page alerts readers to the fact that the book is actually two books. Though the English poems are named first, the Latin ones have their own title-page and page-numbering. That makes a clear proclamation of language-flair; but is the conception of a bilingual book to be credited to Milton or to his publisher, Humphrey Moseley? And how unusual was the conception? As to the former point, Milton himself called the book a 'little twin volume, with twin frontage5 ('Ad Rousium5,1—2, of early 1647).7 His tone is of modest pride that hisfirstpoetic offspring is twins, namely bilingual. Indeed, there is some wit to the image of twinning: joy at a double safe birth must exceed the usual, and I would sooner suspect Milton of such wit. But whoever had the idea, the ode shows that Milton stands by it. It seems likeliest to be the author who conceives the volume as bilingual, since he had published anonymous verse in both languages before 1645 ('On Shakespeare5, A Masque, Lycidas and the Hobson poems in English,

The multilingual self in Milton's Poems, 1645

21

the EpitaphiumDamonis in Latin) and had earned plaudits from friends for his accomplishment in both tongues. Self-belief, belief in the bilingual voice, is fundamental to the ode to Rouse. And why not be proud, if no one had offered such a volume before? To be precise, no individual had, and certainly not with this equal weighting between the mother-tongue and the tongue of civilized European discourse. Bilingual volumes by divers hands abounded, since Oxford and Cambridge burst into multilingual print with anthologies whenever princes were born or married, died or stubbed the royal toe. The balancing of English with ancient tongues is found in Justa Edovardo King (1638), to which Milton had of course contributed Lycidas, so that we might guess he drew thence the idea for his own bilingual volume. Nonetheless, volumes of verse composed by a single author and assembled into a book by the author remained rare in the England of 1645. Humphrey Moseley was encouraging such volumes, bringing out specimens by Quarles (1642) and Waller (1645). Milton's schoolfriend Alexander Gil published his Parerga (Latin with Greek) in 1632, which could further have prompted Milton for Poems, 1645. The climate of taste in England before the Civil War did favour the display in print of a writer's languages, witness the multilingual flourishes of Harington and Coryat. Yet not one of these volumes sustains the serious original verse in two languages, with the two balanced, that distinguishes Milton's self-collection in 1645. He does what the others only glimpse. Accordingly, it is again natural to credit to Milton himself the conception which makes an impression of cultivation and originality through a balanced bilingualism. Moreover, the bilingual impression created by the title-page has soon to be revised. The book is mwtolingual. The readerfindsItalian sonnets as a supporting sequence inside the sequence of English ones, and Greek poems similarly amid the Latin. The book thus declares an aptitude, and enthusiasm, for languages. It declares that this poet has unusual options. In case it is still doubted whether the declarations are Milton's own or Moseley's, I would answer 'Milton's' for these further reasons. He had kept these poems, for some years. In supplying them for the book he must have known he would be judged by them, for instance by their competence and aptness. Besides, the idea of including Italian sonnets within an English series - and within a continuous numbering - is unprecedented: it is a creatively daring idea unlikely to be conceived by Milton's publisher. Evidence and probability concur.

22

Milton's exercising of his languages

In that case, we can go on to observe that Milton has timed the changes of tongue with care, to apt effect. The Greek poems are placed immediately after 'Ad Patrem', 'To My Father', where he thanks his father for enabling him to learn languages, so that the placing confirms the gratitude.8 And when he moves into Italian for love sonnets, they hinge on the reminder that Italian is the 'language in which Love himself takes pride': 'Questa e lingua di cui si vanta Amore' (Canzone 15).9 That neatly reinforces the poems' message, that he speaks Italian because his lady is Italian: he explores medium and meaning together, in a play of multilingual wit.10 So far, the impression given is of a poet who takes pride in his linguistic accomplishments. They give him the freedom to express a multiple self, one that varies with the language-roles adopted for each occasion. The pride is justified by the quality of the expression: free self-expression, for a poet's first volume, is a natural, irreducible good. What else is a first volume for? The freedom which his languages give Milton, he passes on to his readers by the double structure, as the freedom to begin with either half. Cultivated humanist readers of the time might value Poemata above Poems, He was also giving readers the freedom to judge his languageperformances. When later the humanist Salmasius faulted some of his Latin expressions he took the attack seriously.11 He was risking loss of face. The frontispiece shows similar multilingual resource, but through a more combative wit. The sour-faced, elderly man depicted by the engraver William Marshall is said to be the poet 'at age 20'! Incensed, Milton got Marshall to add a Greek epigram composed especially. It said: 'Anyone would say this portrait was drawn by an ignorant engraver if you compared it with the face of the original; but you who are my friends and know me will not even recognize me here: so laugh to scorn this rotten portraitist.'12 So Marshall has been made to engrave his own condemnation. In other words, Milton converts the displeasing portrait into another act of multilingual wit. Only Greek would communicate it to the readers he wanted without alerting the engraver himself. Thus the self shown forth is ambitious and versatile. And since none of the accomplishments is faked, but all are truly there, we may question the need for any disjunction of self and image (expression and impression) in respect of the multilingual Milton in 1645. Should not a bird sing? His pride in competence is flanked by good editorial judgement. Out ofpoems which individually might often be paralleled in

The multilingual self in Milton's Poems, 1645

2

3

other seventeenth-century poet-humanists, good judgement makes a collection without peer. This impact results from the number of the languages, and their discerning ordonnance. VALUES FOUND IN MULTILINGUAL PERFORMANCE

To move on from questions of self-presentation in Poems, 1645,1 ask what value we can infer he found in multilingual performance there. The first of the freedoms which languages gave Milton is the imaginative worlds ofpredecessors in other languages than English. The point would be trite except that even though he has by now decided to write henceforth in the mother-tongue13 he emulates authors who are not English: they are Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew. Thus in editing Poems, 1645 ^ ls Virgil he quotes on the title-page: Baccare frontem Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro, Virgil, Eclog. 7. (Circle the forehead with ivy lest an evil tongue harm the future poet [or less literally] let not the voice of envy ruin this hopeful early work.)14 Virgil provides the organizing theme of the 'rising poet' (Vati futuro5). Virgil, moreover, provides him with a second important freedom of access, namely to a persona or given role as poet. Both parts of the 'twin volume' shape to a climax with pastoral lament that is heavily indebted to Virgil: Lycidas, for the English half, Epitaphium Damonis for the Latin. The two pastorals are indebted not only to Virgil, though, but to all ancient pastoral lament, whether Latin or Greek. In fact, his access to classical antiquity through its languages enables him to imitate for purposes of occasion whichever ancient writers are most apt: Ovid for the Elegiae, Martial for the epigrams which follow them, the Silvae of Statius for his own Latin Sylvae. He is more exuberant outside the dignitas of Latin, blending the Italian of Dante and Petrarch (whom he revered as 'praisers of Beatrice and Laura') in his own Italian poems. More exuberantly still, he puts the Hebrew or Greek of Psalm 114 into Homeric Greek: this is a transcultural long-jump of a kind which (albeit sobered) anticipates his mature English style, as he detects points of intersection between Homer and King David. The instance of Statius helps us sense the spirit of this language-use, a spirit of identification and accurate recovery. Whereas 'Silvae' was a

24

Milton's exercising of his languages

common enough title for miscellanies in the Renaissance, Milton edits those Latin poems which are not in elegiac couplets into a group, Sylvae, that is made self-aware by the allusion to Statius at the fountainhead of this procedure. To Statius (45?~96?) the name 'Silvae' meant five things about the poems so designated: they were (a) written quickly and were (b) less polished than they might have been because (c) written for the needs of occasion, hence (d) varied in subject and (e) varied in metre. Milton strikes a similar note of deprecative virtuosity. This in turn makes any necessary apology for juvenilia. (Further apology is seen, as Milton includes a statement of his age when composing the poems which are more juvenile in theme or restricted in occasion.)15 More positively, he is using the date-protected juvenilia to confirm the theme of the rising- in this case, the improving-poet. The debts to Statius make a general point about Milton's multilingualism: the debts confirm its self-awareness, as inwardness with diverse culture and as editorial judgement. Another freedom is shown in evidence that looks at first like blatant self-congratulation, but viewed another way promotes understanding of what languages were to him, lifelong. The evidence comes from the numerous commendations which precede the poems in both halves of the collection. Every reader notices their number (eight), and their bulk (seven pages for each half). They certainly belong to the self-editing, for only Milton could have supplied the assorted tributes. What purpose do they serve? Blurbs were, and are, useful when written by influential people. The thinking is, presumably, that praise from discerning persons imputes discernment to the person praised. Yet this would only increase the disappointment if the thing praised did not measure up to the praise. Milton's performances do match the praise. More to the present point, they sometimes reciprocate it, when the performances address or allude to people whose commendations have been cited (Manso, Salsilli, Dati). Thus commenders and commended are integrated in an active relationship, which indeed becomes a theme. Furthermore, the poems vindicate the criteria of the praise because they bear witness to the same values. This is particularly so in their multilingual jaunting because that celebrates, just as it enables, humanist friendships. These cross the boundaries of culture and even religious allegiance. Not only did his Italian Catholic friends get him composing Latin verse again after a long lull. He missed their companionship, as a letter of 1647 attests: 'Very sad to me . . . was that departure [from Florence]. It planted stings in my heart which now rankle there deeper

The multilingual self in Milton's Poems, 1645

2

5

every time I think of departing from so many good friends, living so pleasantly with each other in one city; far off indeed, but to me most dear'.16 This is not a platitude of humanist amicitia, but the engaging reality. The commendations, then, suggest a reason for the existence of the Poems themselves. Whether or not many copies were sold, we do know that Milton made good use of his complimentaries. He sent them to libraries, in search (according to the 'Ode to Rouse') of fame with posterity. He sent others to friends, especially in Italy, in search of something else - not fame now, but friendship, appreciation, recognition. Though he came to regret abusing the Papacy in some of the poems, he sent the copies off to Italy anyway.17 Did he even go into print for the sake of the complimentaries?18 Was he among the first poets who extended courtesy, from gifting manuscript poems to exploiting print for the same purpose on a grander scale? Latin in particular counted here. He probably did not risk sending his Italian poems to Italian friends, but he did to his English friend with the Italian name, Diodati. Poems to Diodati in Latin are a feature of the Poemata, while there is nothing comparable in the English part of the volume. Though no equiponderant friendship ever came his way after Diodati died, a similar ease of companionship achieved across language as well as distance is sensed in the Latin letters and poems; through and because of the Latin. Last among the gifts or freedoms which languages bestow is the opportunity for strenuous play. In the Introduction I suggested that a vital part of Milton's emulation was of Dante, and that it included Dante's kind of austere multilingual playing. Dante is a felt presence in the Italian sonnets, naturally, but he contributes something more fundamental: a spirit of encounter, and sometimes of wrestling, not only with contemporary issues and persons but with the same issues, deepened, in dead exemplars. Thus Virgil is almost a character and certainly a guide in these Poems, as he was in the Divina Commedia. Statius, not a highly regarded author in general, is a model for Milton's Poemata just as he found his way into Dante's Purgatorio. So an ardour and a fervour pervade Milton's 'serious playing'. Throughout, he is heeding that humanist topos, serio ludere. It explains why the poet wears so many masks, for different occasions and genres, and equally why the number of languages displayed is large. This is fundamental to understanding Milton's life, as well as his voluminous work, for it explains why he is so contentious in religious debate, and

26

Milton's exercising of his languages

how. The humanist as scholar and linguist - as 'philologist', in the broader German sense of Philologie - must do each thing thoroughly. That includes doing it with a maximum of vigour and rigour, and rigour includes getting the minutiae right. Not to get them right is to forsake philaletheia, the love of truth. This of course explains the heat with which later classicists smelt out false quantities in his scansion: this was their philaletheia, mixed up as it had been for Milton himself with the delight of battle and the joy of knowing better. It was already motivating Salmasius, battling Milton in the 1650s. Childish as some manifestations of serio ludere and philological emulation do seem, they must be viewed in Milton's own way if he and his writings are to be understood. The Poems of 1645 gi ye a n instructive instance of such humanist role-playing because in them what is being expressed and conveyed is a pure joy in playing among the languages. Such playing is not less joyous because it is serious, emulative, and strenuous. Impression and expression serve each other.

CHAPTER 2

The development and quality of Milton's multilingual verse

Such being the multilingual self which Milton presented in his Poems, 1645, what had been the process of which this was the product? How did he come to this stature as a poet in several tongues? Indeed, how good are his best performances? The first two questions are answered most naturally from his Latin verses because these are most numerous and continue longest. Nonetheless, evaluation - the third question - should include his Greek and Italian verses. Conveniently, some of the principal criteria which emerge from discerning his development in Latin carry across to the other two languages. At the same time, though, differing language-choices reveal differing first principles as well as recurrent ones; for instance, the question of audiences differs for Italian, as a living not a classical tongue. In the end, the differences may count more, in that they lead beyond evaluating to the Questione della Lingua, subject of chapter 3. That question is not simple, because Latin as the language of international discourse and friendship possessed an inherent multilingual appeal: the power of that appeal is seen in all the chapters of part one, not only the present one. Latin supplied a continuing creative tension of choice. THE LATIN POEMS! CONTEXTS OF UNDERSTANDING

A dilemma besets neo-Latin poetry for modern readers. In so far as poets depart from Roman practice they look incorrect, either inauthentic or ignorant. Yet in so far as they keep to Roman practice they look servile. Thus both Latinists and non-Latinists, though for opposite reasons, may dismiss this body of verse. The problem is compounded by the decrease in the number of scholars who can read Latin at all, since this sort of verse depends on qualities like copia ('fullness5, 'plenitude') and amplificatio 27

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('apposite expansion' of one's theme) which translation dilutes, and betrays into understandable boredom. There is not much one can do about the last problem, an extreme case oftraduttore traditore (The translator is a traducer), except to urge that the Latin-less reader at least try out the sound of the original. The main dilemma is solved in principle by invoking Imitatio, as the personal extending of the ancients' legacy - neo-Latin verse being a signal example of 'standing on the shoulders of giants' like Ovid and Virgil. Yet I prefer here to resolve the dilemma by considering it in practice, Milton's developing practice of five main aspects of this Imitatio. In ascending order the five are: diction; prosody; eclecticism, of allusion and thought together; tone; and what I call a 'presumptive ground of approval' emerging from all this precriticism. 'Precriticism' means, the recovery of relevant conditions of understanding this type of verse, recovery which -just as when we approach a Roman poet, but in some ways more so — must precede evaluation. Even in a super-vivacious, super-confident piece like the 'Ode to Rouse', his last Latin poem,1 we collide with the dilemma of diction at its sixth word, 'fronde'. Milton, apostrophizing the copy of Poems, 1645 which was sent to Rouse but went astray, speaks of its 'double leaf, 'fronde gemina'. But, said Thomas Warton, who knew his Latin, the word should be 'fronte', the double 'edge' of a Roman papyrus-roll, not the double 'leaf of a printed book. He duly emended what he saw as incorrect Latin, if not anachronism into the bargain.2 Since both the printed text, and the manuscript copy sent to Rouse himself, read 'fronde' the error, if it is such, is Milton's responsibility. So why, we must ask, has he not said it as his exemplars would have? First of all, it was a book not a roll which went missing, and the book — Poems, 1645 - is the whole topic and ground of contact between the parties to this epistolary act. But Warton is being doubly obtuse, since the 'twin' leaf also alludes to the most original feature of the book's contents, its bilingualism proclaimed in twin title-pages. Yet he is not totally wrongheaded, since he raises the key issue: 'fronte' would have pictured Milton's work as papyrus, hence established the English subject as more fully Roman, so dignifying it further. Milton, however, must have felt his surrounding Latin did that enough, and wanted the reference more actual and pictorial. Just because the Latin starts offby establishing an English subject as Roman, it can afford next to display the subject as not solely similar but distinctive - as Milton proudly knew his volume to be. Besides, dignity is not precisely the tone Milton wants, in a partly playful

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poem. I shall come back to tone shortly. But for diction, fully half its pleasure lies in its playing upon sameness and difference; the Roman within the English, the English reality transformed or defamiliarized by Latin. The local effects please by the sheer variety of such interactions. A graver objection to neo-Latin diction is that in keeping to classical usage it puts the clock back. Moreover, to change the metaphor, the diction has gone slack because it imitates the lexis of too long a period some 150 years perhaps, therefore much too synchronously. No one in antiquity spoke, or wrote, like that. The only answers are the obvious ones, (a) The entire Renaissance wanted to 'put the clock back5, (b) The poet in particular sought to revive the utterance of the greatest exemplars in each kind, and primarily by their authoritative diction. And (c) people did write like that, in antiquity itself: later Latins went back to 'golden', normative periods for each genre, doing as Greeks before them had done, Greeks like Apollonius Rhodius reinventing Homeric diction. 'Vos exemplaria Graeca', said Horace to the young Roman; 'follow the Greek exemplars'. In turn following Horace, the renaissance tiro followed the best advice. 'Fronde' turns an old word into the new name, new image, of a new thing. Lastly, (d) no slackness is involved: poets made life, if anything, harder for themselves, because what they imitated was lexis within each genre. Prosody presents the same dilemma, in a tougher form because the purists have a still stronger case (while the outsider cannot care less). Though humanist poets modelled their scansion on their Roman exemplars', they could not do it with full accuracy; for since they could not reconstruct all Roman pronunciation, they could not hear the whole of the Romans' verse rhythms. Besides, again, they licensed for their own composing a wide range of usage, ignoring changes in pronunciation over the 150 years between (say) Lucretius and Martial. They are misconceivedly eclectic. Yet since every humanist did these things, can they be simply solecisms? As Philip Ford writes, of the exactly comparable instance of Buchanan: What is surprising is that scholars should continue to evaluate neo-Latin according to classical rules rather than according to its own, verifiable standards. It is as if one were to judge a Palladian villa according to the criteria of a classical temple; for Palladio, no less than the renaissance poet, based his works on classical precedent and theory.3 That is well said. It is liberating too, because so we may judge prosody on its merits, namely the sound of the verse itself and how sound supports

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sense. Prosodic rules cannot be greater than the sound-sense wholes from which they are an abstraction. To take a simple example, when Milton writes (Elegia iv. 25)* Quamque Stagirites generoso magnus alumno the final e would by the Roman rules be lengthened, by position before double consonant following, hence unmetrical (~ " w , not the required dactyl,- - - ) . True, Roman poets sometimes left such afinalopen vowel short in that situation; but humanists did it regularly, not sometimes. That shows they did not hear the words as Romans did. Yet our need, surely, is to hear the sounds as the humanists did.5 This line hinges, not on the insignificant e (of a humble suffix, '-que', 'and'), but on the resounding paired polysyllables, swelling up at the line's middle: 'Stagirites generoso', linking the great Aristotle with the great spirit of his pupil Alexander. Or take a subtler prosodic 'distortion', that of thefinal0 in verbs. CO' in Amo, Moneo, and so on, was normally long in Golden Latin, yet not always; but alas, humanists shorten this 0 more freely than Roman practice had done in the normative period. The answer, as before, is that humanists had their own practice, which if it works should not be blamed, not even though they thought their practice was right in theory too. It does work, because they shorten this 0 more in the lower genres than the high, thus heeding after all the Roman sensibility: such asperities are more frequent in humanist satire than in epic hexameter, and therefore the humanists preserve the required decorum, the spirit if not the letter of Roman prosody. We must take the humanist practitioners as wefindthem; and we shall find them eclectic. They combine things as a Roman did not, because the Roman could not: he was still living a development of Latin which the humanists loved in its completed form.6 And further, they join things of their own to these selections. Selection, indeed, is the key. I examine the Rouse ode, again, for Milton's eclectic way with allusion, and with the ideas which allusions together bring into view. In the ode, Milton's first strophe gives a rapid allusive sketch of his poetic life to date. It is rapid because ode requires that, and because allusion speeds it along: he says, for instance, that he performed songs for his neighbours 'with a Daunian quill' (line 10, 'pectine Daunio'). Why 'Daunian'? Doesn't the epithet slow down the line, more vapid than rapid? Editors gloss Daunia as south-east Italy, hence a synecdoche for 'Italian'. This misses the sharp exactitude of

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'Daunio'. It names the home region of the greatest exemplar of Latin ode, Horace.7 Although Horace's Daunia was poor and scruffy, it was his region and he was proud of it; proud, too, to have overcome its disadvantages. Milton aligns his ode, thus, with Horace's exemplary ones, glancing at his English provinciality (from a Roman standpoint). 'Daunio' provides not padding, but a sunburst of suggestion. And that is not all. Taken alone, 'Daunio' is eclectic in the literal, etymological sense of being 'selected' with care, from a rich armoury of poetry read by Milton. But it comes linked with Britain: he sings with Italian help 'to his neighbours [fellow-countrymen, 'vicinis' (line 12)]'. It comes in a metre which does not follow Horace, but the more corybantic Greek odist, Pindar. Milton's own note of explanation mentions the metrics of Catullus, who was freer in his odes than other Romans; but Milton outdoes Catullus too, and in a direction that is Greek. This is made plain in the next stanza, the antistrophe: the river Thames is first mythologized as a river-god (18-19), then linked with Oxford as a home of the Muses, and a 'sacred band' of dancerworshippers. The reference may not be to Oxford's scholars, dancing along the High Street in full academic fig to worship the Muses, though such a conceit is diverting, but to the more central idea of Bodley's Library keeping safe the best works of mind as a holy treasure belonging to the Muses. At all events, that is the idea which is driven home in the third strophe, by a fanfare of eklexis. Bodley's treasure excels that of Delphi which Ion guarded, because Rouse is 'quaestor gazae nobilioris' (55), 'custodian of a nobler treasure' than Ion had been. Now to be a 'quaestor' was to hold a Roman magistracy. But 'gazae' is an oriental loan-word into Latin: does it glance at the huge accession of oriental books to Bodley in the seventeenth century? As for Delphi, the other term of this extended comparison, it was the 'navel' of the Greek world (omphalos ges). All these cultural allusions, now assembled like the treasures themselves, are to be surpassed. Diction and allusion are deliberately eclectic in order to embody the point, the praise of Bodley as a holy treasure-house. But isn't this preposterous, or at least top-heavy? Doesn't the hyperbole collapse, and the tone falter? No, because of the context. The context is of a Greek ecstatic joy, expressing relief after a Roman confession: the second strophe has spoken of an 'expiation' needed by England, because not only the lost copy of Milton's poems but a great deal else, human lives included, in fact all civilitas - civility, in the broad sense of civilized life and value — has been at risk through 'civil' war.

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Allusions, to Horace's poems about the enormity of civil war, and to families sundered, engender a Roman abhorrence. Allusions do not merely reflect or support the thought. They are the thought. The eclectic allusions are syncretistic thought: what unites us (like books and the culture they access) outweighs what divides us. This idea well suits a librarian and his library, which had a sworn duty to carry on no matter who was ruling Oxford or England.8 It also suits the multilingual Milton, not jubilant as a partisan of the winning side in the First Civil War, but glad that it is over, and he can get back to his studies. Tone keeps coming into analyses of other, more particular features of style. Tone, though not comprehensively definable, is irreducible. It includes how one reads aloud for meaning and expression by responding to directives in the text - directives such as diction, rhythm and allusion, which together impel the voice towards description or feeling, where these are seen as two ends of a scale. Tone guides as to whether the poet seeks to surprise or fulfil expectation. Tone is carried by function-words as much as by magniloquence. It is easiest to know where it goes wrong, in the writing or the rendering. The more concentrated the poem is, the more tone matters, because it will alter - as in Horace's Odes - more nimbly, even within a single word. So much in general, but tone is not nimble for the most part, in Milton's Latin. (What he might have done, had he written Latin in his last great phase, who knows? Dramatic U-turns abound in Paradise Lost: 'Thus they relate / Erring...') Things move in general more slowly, and with a loving amplitude, in his Latin because he then still revered copia. But changes of tone do not have less importance just because we can sense their approach. Key transitions of tone are prepared for by diction with thoroughness - as consolation approaches through digression in the latter part of the Epitaphium Damonis (140-78, and again 180-97). The conviction gained by tonal transition is comparable towards the close of Lycidas. The twists and turns of tone between the parts of the Rouse ode are what make it ecstatic, yet keep it light; in the whole effect, so enthusiastic and engaging. If the reader wonders why praise keeps coming into 'precriticism', it is not so much clandestine as inherent. Precriticism entails seeing the artefact from the poet's standpoint, hence in the case of neo-Latin verse looking down his pen at its colossal intertextuality, and seeing it this way first. To do so identifies the features of a poem which most merit attention. Thence begins the implied value-judgement; yet that is still relative, namely relative to the worth of the whole. I certainly think it

Milton's multilingual verse

33

right to let this body of poetry put its best foot forward in the present study, having been ignored or abused for so long. In what follows, I am not claiming equal merit for each poem, far from it. As a chronological sketch shows, Milton's Latin moved from mechanical beginnings through many sorts of exercising, to just a few poems of distinctive conception. His extant Latin verses were composed in three quite separate periods of his life. More than half come from his school and Cambridge years, and in Poems, 1645 he dated many in partial excuse. But a second body of work received no excuse: the six poems composed under the stimulus of his reception - as a Latin poet - in Italy, 1638-40. A solitary last poem follows Poems, 1645, the extraordinary 'Ode to Rouse'. Consequently, most of thefirstgroup represent the learning of skills whose successes come later. Nonetheless, for the theme of the development in his knowledge and use of his languages, we need the full context. That is thefinalprecritical point, or condition of understanding. The Latin verses move him, from simpler to more compound acts of eclecticism; from set exercises in known patterns of Imitatio, to interlingual acts of appropriation, moments of self-discovering choice. THE LATIN POEMS! PLAYING WITH OVID 9

The process of self-discovery begins early, in the engagement with Ovid, in metre, manner and matter. Though one would not expect sober Milton to choose sexy Ovid as exemplar, he often does so. Indeed, the Ovidian Elegiae receive prominent placing in Poems, 1645. This whole paradox alerts us to something seminal in the choice. The engagement is no straight-line graph. It resembles zigzags, or probes from a moving centre. Throughout these (incompatible) acts of appropriation I see him as playing with Ovid. We must grasp all that is meant by saying Milton 'plays with' Ovid, because if the metaphor is to be properly heuristic it needs taking both seriously and diversely. We play games either strenuously or casually, with detachment or passion; hence self-expressively, provided we recognize that play can uncover new selves. I have seen pacifists play snowballs aggressively, bank managers shine at cheating-games. The younger Milton plays with Ovid in ways that are exploratory, eristic, unexpected. Ovid takes him to extremes, including incompatible ones. Each elegy is a new game, a new pushing of limits. I take them in order of writing (which is not quite their order in 1645), to show the development more clearly.

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To play any game, one learns its rules and develops the necessary skills. We can watch Milton, aged about 14, learning the arduous rules of elegiac couplets. 'Carmina Elegiaca' is a school exercise which survives in manuscript. It survives complete with scansion errors, corrected; and other errors, some caught, some not. The manuscript, which turned up with the Commonplace Book in 1874, started off ebulliently on the theme of 'getting up early5: Surge, age, surge, leves, iam convenit, arcere somnos ('Arise, haste, arise! Now that the time isright,arrest your gentle slumbers').10 However, subsequent thought revealed that 'arcere' was unmetrical (not being dactylic where a dactyl is required). So Milton substituted 'excute' ('shake off slumbers). It is pure exercise, for it says nothing and says it repetitously. The set theme hardly sounds Ovidian, either; but the metre is, and its rules are. 'Apologus de Rustico et Hero511 seems to be a slightly later exercise. It renders a familiar fable into elegiacs with no errors, some nice turns of phrase, but no surprises. It is in the manner yet not the metre of Phaedrus: the metrics, again, are Ovidian. Both exercises, then, imitate Ovid as to metre and diction, not ideas or spirit. The next known elegiacs engage with more of Ovid. They are Elegiae II and III from 1645™ composed at the age of seventeen to lament the deaths of two Cambridge worthies. These are probably set verses, for occasions which someone else decreed should be written upon, and to that extent they are again exercises. But now Milton rises to the occasion. For one thing, the two laments are distinct, in purport and tone as in length. The lament for the dead beadle (II, 'In Obitum Praeconis') says suitable things correctly, but also coolly. To say 'Death, the ultimate Beadle, cruelly hustles you along, fellow-beadle' has a touch of Ovid's detached, playful spirit, found especially in the frisky repetition mid-line: Ultima praeconum praeconem te quoque saeva Mors rapit . . . 13 The lament for Lancelot Andrewes (III, 'In Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis') enlists Ovid's material and spirit more overtly. It ends in a blaze of glory: Milton wakes from a vision of another sort, the vision of Andrewes in bliss among saints - a decorous, pious thought. But last of all he wishes he could often dream like this. He echoes a prominent line of Ovid's:

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Talia contingant somnia saepe mihi (68) echoes Proveniant medii sic mihi saepe dies, in which Ovid wishes many more such midday sleeps befall him with Corinna. Respectively the lines say, 'May dreams like these often befall me!' and 'May middays often turn out like this for me!514 Whereas critics have worried, or scoffed, that Milton's heavenly bliss should be expressed in words shaped by pagan erotic bliss, erotic bliss is still bliss, and Ovid its outstanding celebrator. Milton contests with Ovid to propose, like Guyon to Mammon, 'another bliss'.15 What is more, even this early he draws on his other languages to do it, naming 'nablia' as the music of heaven just before the ending - the Hebrew name of a Hebrew harp, (nebel) one of very few Jewish imports to Rome and Latin at the time. Ovid makes a startling explicit entry to the final stage of the vision, only to find himself (like Shakespeare's Bottom) 'translated'. In Elegia I Milton responds to a chosen, not set occasion, being a verse-letter of news to his closest friend, Diodati. Since Ovid had written verse-letters in elegiacs from exile, Milton's poem is to be read as a comparison piece, of Ovid's literal and hated exile with Milton's metaphorical and delightful 'exile', from Cambridge to London. Yes, fate could be crueller than this. Just as he turned Ovid's levity to gravity in III, he now turns Ovid upside down the other way. The poem bubbles along describing the pleasures of London life, chiefly play-going and a sociable street-gazing. The plays sound less English than Roman (Plautus or Seneca), so Milton is Romanizing. But rather, he is combining Ovid and other Romans with his Englishness, to make a city which is an 'amalgam' of reality and literature. Thus a play-scene that sounds especially Ovidian could equally be Shakespearian, that of the girl who is in love without knowing it:16 Quid sit amor nescit, dum quoque nescit amat (36).17 (She knows not love, and while she knows not, loves)[my version]. Here is an appreciative Ovidian flourish, in the way syntax achieves chiasmus not despite but through the symmetry of the pentameter's prosody ('amor nescit'/'nescit amat'). The poem has brought up a fundamental principle of neo-Latin creativity, in that phrase the 'amalgam of reality and literature'. Imitatio, whether it be of Ovid or any other classical exemplar in Latin, empowers

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the neo-Latin poet, to create a landscape and characters and attitudes and themes which transfigure both the exemplar and the poet's own reality. They come from a world which never existed because instead it combines the worlds which existed through the whole of the classical tradition; what the Romans took over from the Greeks, together with the further legacy of Rome. When humanist poets bring in their own life too, they clothe it and enrich it with these colossal riches of experience. What Gordon Williams so aptly says of the Greco-Roman world of Roman comedy applies equally to the ambience of Ovidian elegy, and further to all neo-Latin poetry. What happens here - and elsewhere in Plautus - is that the dramatist transfers the action from a setting in a Greek city to a world that is neither Greek nor Roman, but both - a purely imaginary world . . . [He] made full use of the tension between the Greek milieu and the Roman audience.18 So in the quick sketches of plays seen in London Milton is not consulting his diary entries under Tlays Seen Whilst Rusticated', but creating a composite London from reading Plautus and Terence, and perhaps from seeing Latin college plays. More overtly Ovidian is the passage where Milton praises London for its beautiful women. Not only does Ovid release an unusual thought in Milton, Milton makes it his own. Ovid had written that 'Rome has as many nubile girls as the sky has stars', as an excited fornicative parenthesis; the tenor is the welcome number of the women. But Milton (as at the ending of III) appropriates the thought to alter the feeling, into a slower comparison of female beauty to that of the stars; the tenor has become panegyric of London. Without claiming that he surpasses Ovid here (since anyone in their right mind would prefer the latter's prodigal swiftness), Milton turns Ovid's indelicate thought to one almost transcendentally delicate. Moreover, he heads for the most challenging points of the Imitatio. Accordingly, out of Imitatio issues an individual, esemplastic, Latin voice. The remaining four Elegiae are more assured and ambitious in this appropriating of Ovid. In IV (aged 18) he writes another verse-letter about exile, this time to a friend, Thomas Young. Young is Milton's former tutor, and is now undergoing religious exile (though 'expatriation' would be a more accurate name for it) in Germany, and is at risk from the Thirty Years War: the Ovidian theme of exile emphasizes the contrast in gravity of the issues underlying the exile, which are Milton's own choice of issues. The contrast is handled adeptly. The poem starts in

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quiet Ovidian playfulness, addressing the letter as it sets off overseas, but builds to a prophetic comforting of Young. The prophetic element takes over from the Ovidian, citing biblical Yahweh-rescues in a Virgilian more than Ovidian sonority. The metre and diction remain Ovidian, nonetheless, making the poem a very striking and personal combining of exemplars, across genres and even cultures. In Elegia VII (age 19) Milton strives to outdo Ovid in a totally different way.19 He writes of being shot by Cupid's arrow, and describes the Cherubino-like erotic flutter which follows. He plays Ovid at his own game now. Although he loses, naturally, the point here is that he goes to another extreme in his playing with Ovid. A palinode is again written and placed just as Ovid did it. It rejects this erotic, in the name of academic (Platonic) austerity - Greek restoring the balance. In Elegia V (age 20) he goes in yet another direction, not that of witty reversals but to another extreme. The extreme is of pagan joy in nature naturing, nature seen as divine, with the help of a deity-crowded countryside.20 The poem plays with the spirit of Ovidian polytheism. In Elegia VI (age 21, and conscious of this age of maturity) he writes to Diodati again. Again he writes about how each spends his time, which brings out the contrast with the earlier letter; for Milton talks especially about poetry, both in general as a vocation with an associated austere regimen, and about recent poems in particular.21 A Roman type of conversation is conducted, with much of Horace now, yet it remains Ovidian in metre and diction. For good measure, though, it ranges back to Greece (Pindar, mentioned in lines 23-6); then sideways to the birth of Christ, subject of the poem he has just written (the Nativity Ode, on his 21st birthday). Finally, the 'conversation' with Diodati comes up to the European, multilingual present since its signing-off point is to mention he is sending Diodati his recent poems in Italian.22 In this whole sustained, extreme, wide-ranging playing with Ovid Milton is exploring himself and his languages. The playing encourages him to seek out points of contact. Connection underlines difference, yet here with a joy in the difference. The Latin of these Elegiae*3 shows a Milton more relaxed than elsewhere. They show a Milton who is ready to follow a genre and exemplar for not simply metre and diction but thought and attitude. Milton uses Ovid as a lever or hypothesis, a poetical weight-lifting sport.

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We cannot be sure that before he was twenty-one Milton's Latin composing inclined as heavily towards elegiacs as the selection and arrangement of 1645 suggest; but the existence of manuscript elegiacs, together with a further group of elegiac epigrams, does imply that he was most regular in practice of elegiacs. If so, it is easy to see why. They were beloved of teachers, and were the most exacting of metres; a tautology perhaps. Milton, nonetheless, went in search of other technical difficulties, and practised quite numerous other exercises, to judge by the poems he selected and how he arranged them for 1645. In this search he was obeying technical challenges, which appeal - as 'the fascination of what's difficult' - to multilingual poets who are worth their salt. He obeyed a more spiritual challenge, too: what did those Roman exemplars in each kind and metre have to say, to him and through him, and how might he reply to them? Is it merely fanciful to see in the succession of metres and masters within his Sylvae a sort of dead poets' society, a speaking for himself in answer to their best achievement? That achievement is assessed not dismissively, but from a base of understanding, of which Imitatio made a part. At any rate, their diversity and their sequence alike demand attention. I address diversity, first, and sequence in the next section. He wrote other elegiacs, but short ones, epigrams; having not Ovid only but Catullus or Martial as exemplar. The caustic invectiveepigrams are early, set-pieces on the Gunpowder Plot. Epigrams as praise-poetry, of the singer Leonora Baroni, come from his Italian journey. He is attempting most of the traditional uses of Latin elegiacs. Twice, though, he writes in the ode metres of Horace. The stanzaform is peculiarly demanding when he writes on the death of a Vice-Chancellor. Their stanza-form is Alcaics, beloved of Horace. (twice over) The first two lines combine iambic with dactylic, so that the line speeds up after the caesura. The third line slows things down, being mainly iambic throughout (two regulation metra); whereupon, in most elegant contrast, the fourth and final line is mainly dactylic, yet the close varies even that, into trochaic. The accomplishment, of getting Latin into such a metre, was considerable for Horace: because the metre is Greek, and suits Greek more easily, Horace had risen to the challenge.24

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I hope the reader can sense the firm beauty of this varied structure: it resembles the structures of Mozart or Beethoven for keyboard, because these too depend on pacing, entail rhythm, and encourage melody. So Milton girded up his loins. Just feel the zest as he rolls out the last fourth line, the resounding dactylic close for the vision of yet another Cambridge worthy gone to heaven, Interque felices perennis (steady and solemn, Elysio spatiere campo.25 (freer, -~~-ww-~- x)

~ - x)

This zest shows the love of difficulty, and helps explain the unprecedented pyrotechnical metres of the 'Ode to Rouse' at the end of this oeuvre. In opposite vein - perhaps ringing the changes - he imitates the hexameter of Juvenalian satire (harsh, not Horatian-kindly) in his longest Latin poem, In Quintum Novembris.26 Because its Satan-journey foreshadows that of Paradise Lost, this long and limp action has been overrated. In the present connection its interest lies rather in local, stylistic effects. To the manner and tone ofJuvenal Milton - unprecedentedly, I think — adds a neo-Latin exemplar, Buchanan: he owes words, subject, tone and scorn to that poet's attack on the Franciscan order.27 Beyond that, he coins more Latin words of his own in this poem than in all his other poems together.28 Despite or because the poem is intellectually null, Milton's creative talentsflowinto words and images of his own; 'Mavortigenae', 'Tricoronifer', 'panificos [deos]'29 and so on, almost all of them resounding epithets which match the tone perfectly grandiose but mocking, inflating the object in order to scorn it. He is unsubtle, but zestful: even if his Protestant sympathies are having a self-indulgent workout, the language enjoys a glorious freedom. So does the metre; not through invention, though, but through his most varying exploitation of antiquity-sanctioned hexameter practices. Examples include the spondaic Et mendicantum series longissima. fratrum

(58)

(stressing that the mendicants make a long crocodile) and the Greek clausula Orgia cantantes in Echionio Aracyntho.

(65)

Latin avoided four-syllable words at a line-end, excepttor Greek names. 30 These virtuosities must be recalled when we consider the development rather than diversity of his Imitatio in this arena; for he later restricts

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vocabulary and metrical virtuosity in moving closer to Virgil (and he will move from end-stopped lines to verse-paragraph). Here he avails himself of the freer Latinity practised by satire, to have fun. His next hexameters, nonetheless, are philosophical and Lucretian. Arguing that the universe does not decay though it will burn up in a final conflagration, Milton plunders Lucretius for words, phrases, ideas, cadences, thesis, indeed just about everything. How does it come about that the indignant Protestant of In Quintum Novembris takes up here with the atheistic Epicurean? Philip Hardie has shown how much Paradise Lost owes to Lucretius for its conception as an epic of knowledge;31 but the affinity begins much earlier, in this Latin poem of rational scorn. Some of the Latin well suits a poet who was of £a very satirical temper', and so trilled or growled his rs:32 hear them growl in Heu quam perpetuis erroribus acta fatiscit Avia mens hominum, tenebrisque immersa profundis . . . (Alas! how persistent are the errors by which the wandering mind of man is pursued and overwearied, and how profound is [his] darkness)33 Not only the topos, but the words, foreground Lucretius ('fatiscit/Avia'). Milton has struck gold here, and mines it throughout.34 I bypass the remaining metres and their exemplars. The metres include iambics, scazontes and so on; often as mediated through the ebullient, youthful exemplar Catullus. These are bypassed, because it should be clear by now that Milton went amongst his Latin and other authors to experiment; to try out sound and scope and tone and vision. He even - surprisingly for such a dogmatic and vocationally driven Protestant - experimented with other people's visions, by taking them over for the duration of a poem; and not in small doses or half-heartedly either, but to an extreme, in intensely imaged multicultural fusings of perception. Such experimentation is unique to his Latin poems. It gives them their unique importance to the reader who is mainly interested in this Milton for the sake of the later sage. Yet equally it guides those - fit audience though few indeed - who are prepared to read this body of poetry for its own merits. Milton is trying things out, in continual new combinations and tones, which leads him to his best moments; best in terms of Latin poetry and perception alike.

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THE LATIN EXEMPLARS! RISING TOWARDS VIRGIL, AND BEYOND

Within Milton's 'playing' with Ovid and the others, there is a hierarchy as well as a deliberately cultivated diversity. One cannot miss a gravitational pull within the second half of the Poemata, the iSylvae\ towards Virgil. First, we meet hexameters based on other exemplars. But then, 'Ad Patrem', written straight after Cambridge, begins a series of Virgilian hexameters. Mansus and Epitaphium Damonis close the whole collection with Virgilian hexameters. But indeed, Virgil is even more conscious to Milton's mind in the editing and self-presenting of the 1645 volume. A choice is being made. To understand that choice, we should remember certain things about Virgil's reputation and influence. For a thousand years he was regarded as a sage, prophet or magus. One of his eclogues was interpreted to foretell Messiah's birth. He appears in medieval romances as a wonder-worker. Dante chooses him as the best of the pagans to guide him in the afterlife. Still in the Renaissance his text was used for divination, in the sortes Virgilianae (fortune-telling by seeing where the text randomly opened). It is said that when Charles I opened up his copy of Virgil he read of a severed head, rolling. To renaissance poets, though they demythologized him, his life as a poet gave a normative shape to vocation. The aspiring poet should follow Virgil by starting with pastoral, and come to epic last; as Spenser therefore did.35 Milton cannot have been unaware of Virgil in writing smaller poems before his big pastorals in English then Latin. His hopes of attaining to epic or tragedy (equal highest genres since Aristotle linked them) were linked with his emulation of Virgil. So was his practice of referring within a poem to ones he had written before and to the higher ones he hopes to write. Though other ancients could have provided the same guidance, it was Virgil whose career was schematized in the Virgilian 'rota'. Virgil's sequence of genres had become a hierarchy and career-model for poets, with associated schemas of decorum and diction.36 It was natural for Milton so to edit his Latin poems in 1645 as to make a Virgilian gravitation appear towards its later groupings, and most strongly on the title-page and in the final poem. We see what he wants us to see. He wants that gravitation to be felt by us because he first felt it. But this gravitation can be felt in local details, too; in the detail we explained precritically (diction, prosody, allusion and eclecticism), and in tone as the oeuvre and its volume conclude on Epitaphium Damonis. I

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take these seriatim once more, to show how Milton's Latin poems grow towards Virgil, in the writing and the 1645 placement. Diction shows Milton's growing into Virgil both negatively and positively. Most of Milton's Latin coinages occur early: in his latest, most Virgilian poem I found no coinages. This restraint is matched by the increase in Virgilian diction and usage. Much of it comes from the choice of subject and model, for example from the use of a refrain like that of Eclogue VIII, but also in rephrased half-lines from Eclogues VII and VIII. Though these of course are not separable from the choice of model, the whole Imitatio, they are recognizedby the reader in this verbal detail.37 Prosody demonstrates more fully how Virgil was gaining possession of Milton's Latin ear. Consider, for example, the verse-paragraphing. It gains in shape and coherence by diminishing. The average length of a verse-paragraph moves from 25 lines (In Quintum Novembris) through 23 ('Ad Patrem') to 11*5 in the Epitaphium. Milton is learning to curb his copia. Moreover, the quality of the paragraphing improves in that epitaph; for now paragraphs are defined by the refrain, but also move from really short to long to longer as the passion rises; indeed finally it so rises that the refrain drops away. The verse-paragraphing has become onomatopoeic. Manifestly a debt is owed to Virgil here, because the poem's shape is based on Eclogue VIII. The case is similar with the development from more to fewer end-stopped verses. To identify mid-line pausing as larger than the habitual, required caesura-pause will involve subjectivity (nor can the punctuation 0^1645 be trusted far).38 Nevertheless, whether one relies on 1645 or on one's own sense of major pausing, thefiguresmove from fewer to more numerous. My counting showed a trend from seven in 225 lines of In Quintum Novembris to eighteen in 218 lines of the Epitaphium -

compare (and contrast) the ten in 70 lines of Virgil's Eclogue VII Verse-paragraphing, and mimetic suppleness within it, seem not to have come readily to Milton, or he saw little need for them; even so, he moves dramatically towards Virgilian practice in the Epitaphium. It is the same if we measure a subtler relationship of sound to rhythm, the degree of symmetry between accent (word-stress) and ictus (quantitative length of syllable) in the fourth foot of the hexameter. Milton moves towards a proportioning like Virgil's.39 Allusion tells the same story. Virgilian allusion stands out most in the Epitaphium, being foregrounded as the borrowing or adapting of whole phrases, even half-lines, from the Eclogues. And yet it is his best, and his most independent Latin poem to date: that is the paradox.

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Milton's development is towards Virgil and autonomy together. He does not emulate Virgil too early; he does it late, when ripe. No doubt the preexistent hierarchy (the rota) helped. Nonetheless, Milton enters into, and endorses, the general judgement of hierarchies. He does it without servility or haste. He does it more as he grows into it and appropriates it. Nor had he finished with Virgil as mentor. Virgil, whose influence is proclaimed from the title-page onwards in Poems, 1645, had been deeply absorbent of Homer yet changed him when composing the Aeneid. In doing this he was Milton's own best model of how to absorb both Virgil and Homer for his own epic. FROM LATIN TO GREEK

In many respects Milton's Greek poems work as his Latin ones do, or fail as they fail. He chooses an ancient exemplar and metre, and pours into that mould thoughts of his own. His conception of the required diction and prosody is again synchronous, and this time surely to excess. The diction, for instance, may range within one poem between Homer and Hesychius, approaching 1500 years of language-change!40 The charge of pastiche is more relevant to this dictionary-hunting than to the mere 150 years of synchronicity in his Latin verse. Even so, he captures selected portions of a Greek spirit, which not only enliven these few and simple pieces but point to a crucial interlingual development over the years to 1645. To call them Tew and simple pieces', and to recognize they contain more blunders than the whole of Milton's Latin, is to make their difference from his Latin plain enough. Some explanation of the fact is needed, since Milton's Greek scholarship (as we shall see) was extended and high-powered. The natural cause is the one which Milton implies when sending his Homeric version of Psalm 114 to his friend who had taught him Greek: 'since I left your school, this is thefirstand only thing I have composed in Greek'.41 He did much less of this kind of composing, and was usually rusty when he did. The reason he gives is lack of audience; 'in this a g e . . . Greek composition runs a risk of singing mostly to the deaf. It is an extreme instance of the fit-audience-though-few syndrome. It did not make him less of an occasional poet. Certainly if he had no occasions, he would write no poems. But twice out of three times he rose splendidly to a Greek occasion. One is for the Psalm mentioned. The other is beneath the botched portrait in Poems, 1645, where the Greek

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epigram engraved by the botcher conveyed self-ridicule to those, alone, who did read Greek. At the least, then, his interlingual wit stayed awake in his Greek. Accordingly, a more sympathetic precriticism than was needed for the Latin poems may uncover points of interest even in the worst of his published Greek ones.42 THE GREEK POEMS

The little poem about the philosopher's words to the king who was having him executed has a strong theme, and some strong things about its embodiment. The theme resembles the paradoxes of wisdom; of Socrates to the jury, or Christ before Pilate, or Diogenes speaking from his barrel to Alexander the Great: 'You need me more than I need you.' The young Milton thrilled to the heroic sang-froid just as the mature one did. And Greek, this sort of Greek, befits the thought. The diction and metre are Homeric, that is, they recall the acme of 'heroic' verse, songs about heroes heroically fashioned. There was a long tradition of writing in predominantly Homeric Greek, as did Parmenides or Apollonius Rhodius, a Greek which included later words and malformed Homeric. Milton certainly shared that last trait. Yet the emulation itself was sanctioned and high-aspiring. Some elements, moreover, win praise. Beginning 'O ana, ei oleseis me' he shows a good ear, for he is observing Homer's apparent hiatus between 'O' and 'ana'.43 He does it long before that was explained by Dr Bentley as the relic of a lost letter, digamma (re;, wau) - something observed by the oral composer and bards, but omitted in the written versions whose dialects lacked that sound. The third word, 'oleseis', is picked up in the poem's last word, 'olesas': if you 'destroy me' your city's best defence will have been 'destroyed'. It is a kind of pun, interlingually speaking: there is no word in English to cover the respective applications of this verb ollumi, first 'kill' then 'lose'. Throughout, he achieves a Homerical weight and swing in the metre; as in the closure, Toidnd' *ek pole'6snperi6num6n 'alkar o'lessas. (because you have made an end to so famous a protection of the city).44 His next Greek poem, of anything up to ten years later, is again Homeric, in metre and in other respects. But this time a covering letter explains the attempt quite fully. Though the poem is a Psalm version, he speaks of it as an 'Ode'. This may be simply a broad term for 'poem' as

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'song5; but it may rather be because if any genre is higher than epic it will be ode (as later in his Latin the Rouse ode has a higher style even than the Epitaphiurri). If so, he hedges his bets, in that the 'ode5 is in Homeric hexameters. The ode has joint authorship, he says, belonging not to himself only but 'also to the truly divine poet5, 'whose ode I was adapting to the rule of Greek heroic verse5 ('ad Graeci carminis Heroici legem . . . concinnabam5). The metaphors propose an interlingual enterprise, in fact; a finding of points shared between King David, Homer and himself, points not peripheral but fundamental to a vision. This process and its product are of course my own topic in little. Here is a signal example of both, the earliest perhaps where he became conscious of his own multilingual powers and chances. For the letter speaks of the combining as mysterious. It came 'with no deliberate intention, certainly, but from I know not what sudden impulse before daybreak5 ('nescio quo impetu5). Milton's changes to the original tell us the most. They are most obviously expansions: the laconic parallelism of the Hebrew, reflected in the terse King James version, becomes a resonant Homeric, hinging rather on energetic verbs and amplitude of epithetizing. Epithets are a paramount feature of Homeric style, and Milton is enjoying himself. 'The mountains5 become 'boundless5 ('apeiresia5):45 what a fine adjective, since except when airborne you can not see the 'bounds5 of a mountain. (And contrast the epithetizing of his earlier English version a la Sylvester, whose 'froth-becurled5 waves are fancy not imagination.)46 More dynamically, Egypt5s 'strange people5 gets an interpretative supercharge, into 'a people hateful and barbarous of speech5, with all the Greek disdain for non-Greek-speakers in 'barbarophonon5, 'saying bar-bar, unintelligibly5.) Verbs are revised the most dynamically. God now 'thunders out greatness5, rocks 'weep5 with living water for Israel in the wilderness (lines 17, 22). Best of all, to mimic the universality of 'Judah was his Sanctuary5 (AV) he finds a special effect, the striking tmesis. En de theos laoisi mega kreion basileuen means literally, 'Among, God, the peoples, in great might, he ruled.5 The verb is the compound em-basileuein; but because the inflection of Greek preserves the interlaced figure from the ambiguity it would have in English, Milton can place the word 'God5 literally 'among5 the peoples of the earth. The splitting of the verb is most Homeric, and a similar effect occurs at Odyssey 15. 413.

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Milton has forged a splendid paradox. The idea of a sole God, dwelling among his chosen people on earth, and rescuing them by visionary wonders on their long pilgrimage to the land he promised them, could hardly be less like the anthropomorphic limitary godlings of Homer (whom Fate, moira, governs, not they it). The strange, exciting feature of line 4 - and by extension of the whole poem, mysteriously given to Milton - is this: the least Homeric of ideas rings out from the most Homeric expression. Yoking the sound of Homer to the vision of David, he has himself sung a new song to the Lord. He has also for the first time found how to fuse Hellenic with Hebraic, at points where both are themselves intensely. It happened first in late 1634 in Greek: it lies at the heart of Samson Agonistes (see chapter 10). The tone and level of occasion of the 1645 epigram (Hughes, p. 142) are very much lower. Iambics were the metre of spoken interchange, especially of insult. As something has been said of them already, I make only this point. The epigram has been faulted for not advancing in the second two lines beyond the punch of the first two; and for being anticlimactic, therefore. This is unfair. The second pair does advance, from saying that anyone would reject this rotten likeness to bidding 'you my friends', please laugh the artist to scorn; a different address, which is an imperative aimed at action. Thus in detail as well as in opportunism the lines perfectly suit their occasion, purpose, and twin audiences.

Whereas with the Latin and even the Greek poems we could discern development (and progress) over time, the Italian poems belong to one act of composing, at whose sequence we can only guess. They are as we read them in Poems, 1645:fivesonnets enfolding a canzone, the whole six in turn enfolded by the sequence of the English sonnets (of which they are numbered II-VI). I therefore consider their development in another sense, that of their development of a single central idea, the idea of language as love - a new form of playing. The Italian poems require different assessment here for the further reason that they are Milton's only known experiment in playing on a living language. He is playing tunes on a language whose criteria of performance do not come from codified or traditional rules but from the actual practice of its speechcommunity. The issue of audience, or rather audiences, bulks larger. I perceive at least five audiences, considered one by one here. A first audience is situated within the poems, as addressees or recipients or

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listeners (whether named or implied). Another is constituted by the language-community of Italian, from 1630 till now. A third is the languagecommunity of English. A fourth is Milton's friend with the Italian name and lineage, Charles Diodati. Last comes Milton himself, the experimental language-player of the 1630s who goes public in 1645. Of the five audiences, the second may hold the greatest interest, for it shows us Milton's emulation uniquely extended to a living language that is not his own. Nonetheless, the fourth and fifth hold as great a significance. Our sense of internal audience is being deliberately varied. Possibly because the love-situation stays much the same through the six poems, Milton varies his stance and means of address, foregrounding it to become a play of wit and virtual theme. Itfitswell with his overt theme, of the learning to love his Italian lady through the use of Italian itself. 'Donna leggiadra' concentrates at once on address to the lady. By these opening words, he praises her. Then he names her, but obliquely in the approved (witty, protective) way of such sonnet-cycles; she is 'Emilia' because her name honours Emilia the region of Reno and Rubicon.48 Finally he commits himself to a stance, pronominally, choosing the familiar or intimate ta-form (line 4). By exploiting these formulas of the Italian sonnet tradition he is amplifying his sense of the lady as audience, because he is always implying emotion and commitment. But the following sonnet so extends its simile and prosopopoeia, of his Italian as a fragile exotic plant lovingly nurtured by a shepherdess, that its address to the lady is barely noticed ('te', line 8). Greater heed is paid in the terzetti ('sestet') to those who listen in, his fellow countrymen who hear his Italian but do not understand it. Most heed is paid to personified Amor, subject of lines 11-12. The canzone, next, shows the compatriots more forcefully, as mocking his attempts at Italian, but surges past them, asking the canzone directly to answer for him. He speaks Italian because 'his lady says it is the language in which Amor takes pride'. That is a climax at mid-point of the sequence (of which it is the mid-line, too). Not only is she hinting encouragement: he is extending the sense of audience very widely, from this song (canzone) to all song. The last three sonnets pivot on further stances and directions of address to audience; for instance, we meet Diodati again, his Italian name giving a fine opening flourish to IV. By such means the sense of a varying audience becomes not simply a source of variation or continuity or entertainment but of thematic energy, for this risky performance. It really is risky, because he is experimenting with a medium and its possible voices whose standards are the birthright of other people, not his, nor equally shared.

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The Italian language-community, these poems5 second audience, outweighs the shadowy personages of the poems: what has it made of Milton's experimenting? Significantly, he did not seek to know. In Poems, 1645, his action of publishing these poems amidst his English sonnets set them in the half of the double volume which would not be sent to, and read by, Italian friends. He wanted English readers for them (see next paragraph). Italian appraisals all come later. By and large, they dislike V and enjoy VI49; V as a late and flaccid Petrarchanism (the conceit of the tale of the sigh), but VI as a strong thought, in the heroic mould of Horace and Tasso, and thus surpassing the usual 'gioco letterario' (literary sport oxjeu d'esprit) of Italian written by stranieri.50 For VI they are made to look through the Italian lens, whereas in V the slightness of content makes them stare at the dirt on it. I suggest, however, that Milton aimed steadily at a particular segment of this native-speaker audience; an ideal Italian audience, being his sense of what his greatest predecessors in the Italian love-idiom had achieved. He is trying out the voices of Petrarch, Dante, Tasso, by the very direct method of writing on subjects like theirs and using words and images like theirs. This not only explains his once-again synchronous diction (drawn this time from the 300 years of the greatest Italian love-poetry, a category embracing for him Dante's Divine Comedy). It also shows us where this experimentation was aiming, what it was emulating. No other contemporary poetry comes anywhere near the importance of these Italian poets for Milton as exemplar and antagonist in his best English poetry. To repeat by the converse, English poets come nowhere near the importance of these Italians for his own English poetry. The English language-community was aimed at in two main ways. As said above, the general public were targeted in 1645 to be impressed by this multilinguist, who switched without warning within an English sonnet-sequence, into Italian which strongly justified the purpose of doing so - to express love of the Italian lady. This could hardly fail to impress, either. Testimony is lacking, but the competition was not severe. Earlier printed poems in Italian by English writers are awkward, quaint or ridiculous.51 Another English audience was their first reader, the friend to whom they were sent; the same Diodati who is apostrophized nobly in one of them. Milton says in a verse-letter to Diodati that 'Tu mihi, cui recitem, judicis instar eris' (Elegia Sexta, 90).52 It is a fascinating remark in the present context: after sending Diodati the manuscript of the poems 'in your ancestral language', he says that Diodati, 'you to whom I am to

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recite them5, shall be 'like a judge' of them. The details need probing, more than anyone has done. Italian is Diodati's 'ancestral' tongue ('patriis'): how well does that mean he knows and speaks it? Elsewhere, Milton insists his friend is English, while stressing his Italian (Luccan) origins and European connection. I suggest that Diodati was born the cosmopolitan Milton himself became, but that his multilingualism was not so much of a goal for Milton, the better linguist. He would understand this Italian verse, but not from a base of threatening native-speaker fluency, nor from rivalry in versifying it. I take this view partly because of the next words, 'judicis instar\ The unusual word 'instar' intends some qualification - he is not simply and absolutely to be the judge - but what qualification is it? 'Instar' could mean 'equivalent to' a judge, or 'in effect' a judge. I take it to imply that his friend will be less than a hanging judge, anyway, and that Milton knows he will need mercy as well as justice. The reciting will in any case continue a longstanding multilingual friendship with a teasing rivalry to it. Lastly, note that sending the poems is not the part that matters to Milton, but the reciting. And 'cui recite' appears to mean, 'to whom I am to recite them' or 'intend to recite them': the subjunctive implies purpose and perhaps desire. Milton is keen to try them out on the fittest and trustiest audience he knows of. And as for the performing aloud, though he recited Latin verses too as a matter of course, the yardstick of oral performance of these concoctions in a living language implies a certain pride and confidence after all. (If only something more could be found out about Diodati, it might explain much about Milton's attitude to languages in the whole period up to Diodati's death, if not beyond.) The final audience is Milton himself, the multilingual performer. If I am right in arguing that the poems owe more to Dante even than to Petrarch, the risky emulation of such exemplars, in such a vernacular, may be the first signal that Milton knows where the best of all audiences and judges is; in that poet who wrote first and best about the Questione della Lingua, who wrote poems in several tongues, and who made Virgil a character and guide in his greatest poem. With suitable modesty, these six slight poems hold something prophetic, to which I return in chapter 8. CONCLUSION

Milton's verses in his other tongues demonstrate such qualities as skill, pride, and deference. They show such tendencies as experiment,

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improvization, revision and retention (both in memory and on paper). The languages and the periods of his earlier life receive each a different treatment, which results not just from varying competence but from personal and cultural factors. Distinctions notwithstanding, all alike show a youthful zeal for languages themselves, as instruments on which fine music has been played and he must make some too. 'Playing' is our best heuristic metaphor for what is going on: a playful, strenuous, competitive game, played with the living and the great dead alike.

CHAPTER 3

The Italian journey (1638-9) and language choice

In Italy Milton received acclaim for his poems in several languages, yet came back resolved to write in English for the English. Why should his enjoyment of Italy change a polyglot poet into a monoglot? The question can be restated in terms derived from Leonard Forster's study of multilingualism in literature.1 Forster distinguishes two kinds of polyglot, whom we may call 'occasional and 'romantics'. Whereas the first select the tongue most apposite to a poem's occasion, heeding decorum in the choice, the second select in such a way as to declare spiritual allegiance to a single or mother tongue. Occasionals predominate among the older polyglots, such writers as Huygens or Weckherlin, while romantics (as might be expected) cluster during and after the Romantics. Accordingly, Milton might be placed as an early-modern, transitional figure. One could hypothesize that the experience of Italy revealed to him his English identity and an allegiance to English; and that, just as Germany propelled Wordsworth to write of his native Cumbria, Italy turned an occasional polyglot into a romantic one. Yet the tempting hypothesis is over-schematic. Instead, though making use of Forster's distinction, I proceed more inductively, examining passages which illustrate the polyglot poet's choices - before, during, and in the wake of the Italian visit. There emerges a winding and individualistic 'journeying' among his languages, in which that metaphor of journeying explains more than is gained by the simple supposition that Italy triggered a doctrinaire patriotic monoglottism. In his moments of choice may be understood, not so much why he chose English, as how he chose it; with what elements of a maturing personality. But indeed, to answer questions about how he chose (questions on which his writings about the Italian experience tell us a good deal) may after all illuminate why.

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LANGUAGE-CHOICES BEFORE I 6 3 8 : LATIN, ITALIAN, GREEK

Three poems from before 16382 show Milton's awareness of choice of tongue, while also displaying his unusual range of choice. They are the poem to his father ('Ad Patrem'), Sonnet 4, and Psalm 114 - in Latin, Italian, and Greek respectively. Milton writes 'Ad Patrem' as his only possible, and fitting gift in return for his father's gifts:3 Hoc utcunque tibi gratum, pater optime, carmen Exiguum meditatur opus, nee novimus ipsi Aptius a nobis quae possint munera donis Respondere tuis, quamvis nee maxima possint Respondere tuis . . .

(6-10)

(Whether you approve or not, best of fathers, [my Muse] is now engaged on this poem - this little offering - and I do not know what I may give you that can more fittingly repay your gifts to me. In fact, though, even my greatest gifts could never repay yours.)4 Then, after praising his father's negative gifts (his not forcing his son into a commercial or legal career (lines 68-75)), he moves over to the positive ones. At once, lightly leaping over the usual kindnesses of fathers to their sons, he dwells lovingly upon 'greater ones', 'maiora [officia]': Officium chari taceo commune parentis; Me poscunt maiora. Tuo, pater optime, sumptu Cum mihi Romuleae patuit facundia linguae, Et Latii veneres, et quae Iovis ora decebant Grandia magniloquis elata vocabula Graiis, Addere suasisti quos iactat Gallia flores, Et quam degeneri novus Italus ore loquelam Fundit, barbaricos testatus voce tumultus Quaeque Palaestinus loquitur mysteria vates.

(77-85)

(I will not mention the kindnesses which a loving father usually bestows upon his son: there are more considerable kindnesses5 which demand my attention. Best of fathers, when the eloquence of the Roman tongue had been made accessible to me, at your expense, the beauties of Latin and the high-sounding words of the sublime Greeks, words which graced the mighty lips ofJove himself, then you persuaded me to add to my stock those flowers which are the boast of France, and that language which the modern Italian pours from his degenerate mouth (his speech makes him a living proof of the barbarian invasions) and also those mysteries which the prophet of Palestine utters.) In other words, once his son had mastered Latin and Greek ('patuit facundia'), the father urged him to study French, Italian, and Hebrew

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('addere suasisti') and paid for the tutoring. Who would have supposed that the love of languages in Milton needed fatherly persuasion?! Whether or not the words are strategic exaggeration (to win continuance of subsidy) Milton binds together his language acquirements and his filial gratitude, to suggest that his love thereby becomes unusual, ergo heartfelt. In the two passages together there join the ideas of language endowment, poetic vocation and the love a son has for such a father. The poem glows with a sense of occasion, although we do not know what occasion. It enacts the gratitude it describes. Then what about the choice of medium for this occasion? Why should he choose Latin, and hexameters, and Virgil as exemplar? Latin is Milton's first foreign tongue, the tongue of humanist discourse and of commemorative permanence. Hexameters are the highest and gravest Latin metre. They are particularly the medium of Virgil in the Aeneid where he celebrates 'pietas', dutiful love.6 The poem teems with words of relationship, especially for the bonds and gifts between father and son: 'Aptius a nobis quae possint munera donis / Respondere tuis?' ('What may I give you that can more fittingly repay your gifts to me?'). The words I have Stressed are brought together and enjambed by hyperbaton, striking departures from ordinary word-order, to mime the idea of reciprocity. Such observations demonstrate how Latin makes part of the decorum, and equally of the subject. Through Latin, precisely, the poet glimpses a bond between love for a person and the love of languages, together with wider-reaching intimations of the nature of love. Such connections are sought differently, and more explicitly, in the Italian poems. The climax of the canzone is the declaration, 'Questa e lingua di cui si vanta Amore' ('This, Italian, is the language on which Love prides himself'(i5)). Though the idea has ample precedent,7 it has especial force here - the force of rightness of occasion, as he writes in Italian for an Italian lady whose worth includes her skill with languages (rv. 10). The truth and worth of his love are shown in his risking mockery to attempt the 'strange tongue' (in. 7, and Canzone passim). For 'Love has willed the attempt', 'Amor lo volse' (in. 11). That this is said not as a mere conceit but in earnest, is affirmed by the echo of Dante ('Amor lo strinse' at Inferno v. 129); for along with Dante's words Milton assimilates Dante's steady, idealizing tone.8 Sonnet 4 best shows the interlocking of choice of language with ideas about language and about the love-occasion:

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Diodati, e te'l diro con maraviglia, Quel ritroso io, ch'Amor spreggiar solea E de' suoi lacci spesso mi ridea Gia caddi, ov' uom dabben talor s'impiglia. Ne treccie d'oro, ne guancia vermiglia M5 abbaglian si, ma sotto nuova idea Pellegrina bellezza che'l cuor bea, Portamenti alti onesti, e nelle ciglia Quel sereno fulgor d' amabil nero, Parole adorne di lingua piu d'una, E '1 cantar che di mezzo 1' emisfero Traviar ben pud la faticosa Luna, E degli occhi suoi awenta si gran fuoco Che P incerar gli orecchi mi fia poco.9 (Diodati, I'll tell you something which absolutely amazes me: I, the coy creature who used to scorn love, I who made a habit of laughing at his snares, have now fallen into his trap (which sometimes does catch a good man). It is not golden tresses or rosy cheeks which have dazzled me like this, but a foreign beauty, modelled on a new idea of loveliness, which fills my heart with joy: a proud, yet modest bearing; and that calm radiance of lovely blackness in her eyes and lashes; her speech which is graced by more than one language, and her singing which might well draw down the labouring moon from mid-air. And such bright fire flashes from her eyes that it would not be much good for me to seal up my ears.) Much here is purely conventional of course, and modelled on Petrarch. Nevertheless, all hinges on the attraction of what is foreign, alien, different - a 'pellegrina bellezza', a 'foreign beauty'. Milton is extending the range of his admirations, to his own and other people's surprise. But the role of language and of language-choice is crucial. Behind the manifest influence of Petrarch are sensed those of Dante and Plato. Allusion to Dante, whom Milton preferred as a love poet along with Petrarch ('the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura'),10 is instrumental in creating a steady ideal ardour: 'sotto nova idea / Pellegrina bellezza che'l cuor bea! (rv. 6-7), 'modelled on a new idea of loveliness, which fills my heart with beatitude'. 'Idea' is convergent testimony to the hyperbole: both the Platonic absolute of beauty, eidos or idea in Greek, and the sonnet tradition's neoplatonizing of the particular lady as epitome or standard of all beauty. The rhyming of 'idea' with 'bea' sounds out strongly at the point where the sonnet turns from negation to affirmation. What is more, Milton is sharing the new love with his closest friend, Diodati, whose Italian name and understanding

The Italian journey (1638-g) and language choice of Italian launch the sonnet. The meeting of friendship and eros within the Italian hints at the Platonic belief that other loves contribute to perfect love - presumably because in loving persons for ideas seen embodied in them, and in loving an idea which is found in Italian, the speaker finds the persons and the language coalescing into a single life-expanding excitement. Since the lady's accomplishments include being multilingual, and he loves her for that, the love of languages is integral to this love. Italian itself resembles a ground where love can meet, a source upon which they draw. In his Greek version of Psalm 114 further loves meet.11 6T6 TTOCTSES, 6T* dyAaa cpOV 'IOKCO(3OU AiyuTTTiov A lire 5fj|jiov, &nv$kcx, (3appapo9covov, Ar| TOTE JJOOVOV ir|v oaiov ysvos vies 'Io08a. 'Ev 6e 8sds AaoTai \xkya Kpsicov (3C«TIAEU6V.

(When the children of Israel, when the glorious tribes of Jacob left the land of Egypt, hateful, barbarous in speech, then indeed were the sons of Judah the one devout race; and God ruled in great might among the peoples.)

The occasion now being the awed love of God, the tongue chosen has a different relation to the subject. One might expect no relation: what has Old Testament theophany to do with Homer's anthropomorphic polytheism? No doubt Milton chose Homer as a model so as to match elevated subject with elevated metre, but I see more of challenge: the challenge to find out whether two opposing loved grandeurs can enhance one another. At times they can. In thefirstline, the Greek preserves the parallelism which is so typical of the original, but reshapes it to the elegant asymmetry of the hexameter line, which hinges by caesura earlier than mid-line. A mingling of symmetry with asymmetry is gained by the joining of anaphora (on 'hote') with amplification (a three-word unit balancing one of two words): 'Israel hote paides, hot' aglaa phuP Iakobou' ('when the sons of Israel, the glorious tribes ofjacob ...'). The third line squeezes a most Hebraic thought, the exclusive holiness of Israel, into Homer's Greek. Whereupon, the fourth line does the same yet more strikingly. The very Homeric tmesis which divides the prefix 'em'- from its verb-root '-basileuen' mimics sense by syntax, because thanks to Greek's inflectedness and the hyperbaton together 'God' is positioned, literally, 'among the peoples'. 'Among, God, the peoples, reigned'. Milton weds the two loved languages. Nonetheless, the challenge which I have inferred was not so much

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conscious as mysterious to him, since he writes that 'with no deliberate intention certainly, but from I know not what sudden impulse before daybreak, I adapted... this ode of the truly divine poet, almost in bed, to the rule of Greek heroic verse' ('nullo certe animi proposito, sed subito nescio quo impetu ante lucis exortum').12 Now, this being the time of day at which he begins his Nativity Ode, and at which later he habitually composed for Paradise Lost, we should note that the Psalm, like those works, came to him unbidden: can we conclude that it came in answer to some hidden imperative, an imperative to combine Hebraic and Homeric by idealizing each? At all events, the combining was an act of obeying, of unwilled allegiance. BEFORE AND AFTER I 6 3 8

If we now refer the choices so far examined to our opening distinction between occasional and romantic polyglots, we find Milton to be both at once. The choice of tongue suits an occasion and declares an allegiance. The choosing becomes part of the subject. If so, however, why did Milton abandon his polyglot excellence to write in English for the English? At least from the present perspective it seems like voluntary self-diminution. Common-sense explanations have not been lacking. In thefirstplace, his decision has the normal fitness of occasion, because if his best work is to be a national epic for his own countrymen, and for as many as possible of them, he must address them in their mother-tongue. Secondly, it would be natural for him, given the changes wrought in him by extended European travel, to want to renew his sense of roots. Thirdly, he declares that during his visit to Italy he became preoccupied by the political crises back home.13 Yet even these truisms do not wholly suffice. The epic of England did not eventuate - not in the projected form of an Arthur-epic, nor in any epic of national history. Milton's subsequent poetry does not interweave the subject and the chosen tongue by the sense of occasion which we have come to expect. He does not renew that romantic allegiance to the mother-tongue which wefindin the early 'Hail native language...' 14 We expect self-sacrifice of Milton, but hardly self-diminution. Part of the conundrum remains. My own view is this: he did not give up his languages, and did not diminish himself; rather, the interinanimating of his languages increased through abrupt zigzags of development, in the course of the Italian visit

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and in its wake; until his languages came to intersect where they could best intersect, within his English. And this, I believe, is what my inductive method reveals, if it is applied to the crucial, albeit sparse, evidence of Milton's poetic development between 1638 and 1645. IN ITALY AND IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS

A striking, yet indecisive passage occurs in Mansus, written about January 1639 when Milton was leaving Naples to return north. In this familiar passage, weaving in a complimentary linking of his host Manso with his poetic aspirations, he adumbrates a poem on the kings of his native land, and singles out Arthur: O mihi si mea sors talem concedat amicum Phoebaeos decorasse viros qui tarn bene norit, Si quando indigenas revocabo in carmina reges, Arturumque etiam sub terris bella moventem, Aut dicam invictae sociali foedere mensae Magnanimos Heroas, et - O modo spiritus adsit Frangam Saxonicas Britonum sub Marte phalanges! (78-84)15 (O may it be my good luck to find such a friend, who knows so well how to honour Phoebus' followers, if ever I bring back to life in my songs the kings of my native land and Arthur, who set wars raging even under the earth, or tell of the great-hearted heroes of the round table, which their fellowship made invincible, and - if only the inspiration would come - smash the Saxon phalanxes beneath the impact of the British charge.) Milton does not say what language the poem will be in. One could argue it either way; that he writes of Arthur in Latin here, and only in Latin could Manso and his ilk receive it; or that Italians like Manso would well understand that a national epic went best with the national vernacular. We simply cannot decide the question. What is clear, is the manner of the proposal: his eager enthusiasm for the subject of Arthur, the simple British (Celtic) patriotism which leads him to envisage joining Arthur in the Saxon-smashing. I infer he has just possessed the subject, or it has just possessed him. It has not struck him that Arthur may be a myth, nor that an English poet may owe more to the Saxons than to their British predecessors. 16 T h e key passage regarding the choice of English for his British epic is a long passage (lines 125-84) towards the end of Epitaphium Damonis17 which, in its eloquence and informativeness alike, best reveals the manner of his choosing of English.

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The context is quite complex. Milton is writing of his Italian experiences of 1638-9 from the perspective of England in 1640, that is, from the perspective of return. The reminiscences have a mixed value, for even while 'Thyrsis' (Milton) was enjoying Italy, his friend 'Damon' (Diodati, the addressee of Sonnet 4) was dead in England. Accordingly, it is pain to reminisce; yet not entirely so, for Italy was worthwhile, and good to recall; and indeed it has permanently enlarged his being. 'O ego quantus eram...' (129), 'how great I felt then' - and by extension still do, in recalling. Besides, since the dead friend came from Lucca (128), to visit Italy including Lucca was in a way to visit him; it was an act of pietas. So, indeed, is the entire reminiscence, and the poem itself. It is a gift: a conversation with the dead, and a praising of the dead. And thefitnessof Latin is therefore extraordinary. Latin was the language in which Milton had previously written letters to his friend,18 as well as the language in which Milton had composed the poems which won him reputation among the 'shepherd-poets' of Italy (132-8). This is an internal fitness, of Latin to occasion. The external, wider fitness is simply that Latin is the language of commemoration, be it on statues or on graves: it has the needed dignity and tradition, gravitas and permanence. The excellence of the Latin, then, adds worth to what is already the natural gift. More still, however, this most ambitious of Milton's Latin poems is also virtually his last.19 In view of the further fact that this poem announces his next major poem will be in the mother-tongue, not Latin, is Milton in some way laying Latin verse itself- his medium as well as his message - as a votive tribute in Damon's grave? Be that as it may, the sense of occasion in the using of Latin for this farewell is even richer than in our previous examples. To all this in the manner of Milton's choosing of Latin must be added the manner of the reminiscence itself. He says he felt excited and proud as he lay beside the Arno and listened to the 'singing contests' there (132). He made so bold as to compete himself ('Ipse', 133). He did well, moreover, for the Florentine poets (Tastores Thusci', 126 and 134) gave him gifts (134-5) - including poems recording his friendship with Damon (136-8). Still imagining himself back in that past, he had turned in thought to address Diodati in England, who he thought was enjoying an equivalent pastoral life but alas was already dead (142-54). He imagined Damon collecting healing herbs (150-2); and these jolt him back to the fact, that herbs could not heal the healer (153-4). A tumult of feelings is felt in the manner hereabouts - in the twofold 'Ah' (142, 153), or the imprecation upon medicine for failing (153).

The Italian journey (1638-9) and language choice Moved by grief and love together, he nevertheless continues the reminiscing (156).20 The time referred to is complex, because it is excited: two times have been conflated, the happy past and the wretched present. A third time is now introduced, antecedent to the first recollected time. 'Eleven days ago, my pipe was sounding out some grand song: I had just set my lips to a new set of pipes, but they fell apart, broken at the fastenings, and were unable to carry the deep sounds. I hesitate to appear a little puffed up, yet I shall tell the tale. Give place, you forests' (Vos cedite silvae'). His state of mind was (and remains) ambitious. The new, grand subject proves too much for his instruments, in spite or because of their newness. He remains proud of attempting. He must confide it, whether in the time recollected or the time of the memorial poem; he must, even at the risk of hubris. Let pastoral therefore stand aside: that is, the next passage will rise above the typical pastoral register (as do some parts ofLycidas); and the poem which he now describes will as a whole rise thus higher. The excitement is conveyed by the number of the times incorporated, and if these times coalesce, so much the better for the theme of friendship that mere clock-time can be thus transcended. The following paragraph,21 mainly given to summarizing of the British material of the new work, likewise conveys a mingling of concern with the medium and a sense of undergoing rapid (and multiple, hence undifferentiated and unclear) change. 'If I have any time left to live, you, my pipe [= 'fistula', at 169 as at 156], will hang far away on the branch of some old pine tree, utterly forgotten by me; or else, transformed by my [or, from your] native muses, you will whistle a British tune. But after all, one man cannot do everything, or even hope to do everything. I shall have ample reward, and shall think it great glory if, although the outside world does not read my English, all Britain does so. The passage is central to our topic, yet is not exactly transparent. Is he giving up pastoral, or Latin, or both, or what? Does he really know yet? My view is that he does not, and that that is the point. Let us consider the various ambiguities, one by one. Lines 155-60 clearly reject pastoral (the 'fistula' broke, therefore 'cedite silvae'). But from line 169 onwards, he states some alternative, since 'aut' is the conjunction of exclusive alternative (as distinct from VeP): either he will give up his pipe or else he will exchange muses, Roman for British. This latter option would leave him the possibility of a pastoral in English, since an epic in English is not the sole alternative to a pastoral in Latin. Moreover, giving up his pipe might be a rejection of the 'fistula' by synecdoche for all poetry. It is not simply that the rejection of pastoral glides somewhere into the rejection of Latin. The passage

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glides between at least four options. Thus C. S. Jerram took 'fistula5 to mean all poetry whatsoever (and Milton of course did write a prose history of England soon afterwards). But David Masson took 'fistula' to mean Latin poetry (embracing Latin pastoral, but not excluding Latin epic).22 We might conclude that 'fistula5 denotes the one at 156 but some wider class at 169. Yet to localize the shifts of meaning thus upon a glide within one word, albeit a repeated and emphatic one, seems mechanical. My sense of the entire passage is of excited, expansionist self-discovery: the more options, then, the better. Why should a poet know exactly in advance how he would treat material which is susceptible to varying treatment, and which in the event he does treat in more than one language and genre? Instead, the passage (partly because it incorporates three different times and states of thought) throbs with unseparated possibilities. A further reason for thinking so is that the passage depends on Virgil, in a way which may resolve the problem without being mechanical and reductive. Virgil explains that curiously specific 'eleven days ago5. His Eclogue viii. 39 says, 'Alter ab undecimo turn me iam acceperat annus5 ('My eleventh year being completed, the next had just received me5): compare Milton5s 'ab undecima iam lux est altera nocte5 (156). That eclogue, and the one before it, supply Milton with much of the verbal texture hereabouts. For instance, the idea that a poet5s limitations are a special instance of human ones comes from both eclogues (vn. 23 and VIII. 63). Both eclogues are singing contests, therefore are poems about poetry. In the second of them Virgil asks himself whether he will ever rise to higher genres (VIII. 7-13): so, too, does Milton. Milton places a tag from the other eclogue (vn. 27-8) on the title-page of his published first fruits, the Poemata of 1645. That same eclogue provides the allusion which I find decisive, where Corydon enters the singing contest with a 'do-or-die5 statement of exclusive alternatives: Nymphae, noster amor, Libethrides, aut mihi carmen quale meo Codro, concedite (proxima Phoebi versibus ille facit) out, si non possumus omnes, hie arguta sacra pendebitfistulapinu.

(vn. 21-4)

(You nymphs of Libethra, my delight, either grant me a song like the one you granted my Codrus - he makes songs which come closest to those of Phoebus or else, if we cannot all attain such heights, here on the sacred pine tree my clear-sounding pipe shall hang [henceforth].)23

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I have emphasized the words which Milton takes over, not so much to show how many words they are as to show that they are clearer than his. Corydon prays that the Muses will inspire him: if they will not, he vows to give up composing. In Milton, the alternatives are more numerous, and less clear-cut. But the feeling of standing at a cross-roads is transferred. So too is the atmosphere of do-or-die. Damon has died, and his friend voices the thought of himself dying before he has written the poetry which it is his vocation and desire to write: 'O, mihi turn si vita supersit' ('Oh, if I have any time left to live').24 In short, the passage is a Virgilian palimpsest. Latin, especially neo-Latin, adores the effect of palimpsest (signalled and reworked quotation), and hence a poetic meditation upon poetry emulating Virgil works best in Virgilian Latin. But it is palimpsest in subject as much as in verbal correspondence: the subject is poet-singers at their respective cross-roads. The question for Virgil had been how to rise above pastoral, and it was Milton's also at first; but soon, out of sight in the subtext, the question is becoming whether to do it in Virgil's tongue or some other. An answer lurks in the sequel, that resounding march-past of British place-names (never heard in Virgil). Usa, Alauni, Abra, Treantae, Thamesis,

Tamara and Orcades (175-8): Ouse, Alne, Humber, Trent, Thames, Tamar, the Orkneys. That British places are celebrated by the sound and sequence of their versified Latin names, in the moment of turning away from Latin, is a triumphant paradox. To summarize, Milton does not write informatively so much as excitedly. And some regret is intermingled, since he is forfeiting the European audience he has just found and gloried in. Self-discovery and self-assertion remain dominant, as seen in the threefold anaphora on 'ipse' (133,155,162): '/shall write all this', or 'To think of me doing it!' But another element is tension, the conflict between his languages. When for the first time a language choice means loss as well as gain, the poem weighs them. AFTER THE EPITAPHIUM

DAMONIS

Both excitement and uncertainty continued. In 164225 Milton expresses an obligation to his native language and native land together: like Ariosto, he would seek 'the adorning of my native tongue; not to make verbal curiosities the end . . . but to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect.' Zest and zeal are projected. But in the following

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sentences we find him undecided about everything else - the genre and the subject and whether it should be sacred or secular. Such uncertainty seems odd, in view of his two previous proclaimings of a British theme which should climax with Arthur. Likewise he plays down British (as distinct from Saxon) history in the Trinity Manuscript list of themes, made 1640-2. Arthur, in particular, is deafeningly absent. The usual explanation given is that an intensive study of his nation's history upon his return from Italy had exposed the British historiography of Geoffrey of Monmouth and his like as untrue; and if untrue, then unfit to be celebrated or serve for instruction. Roberta Brinkley26 argues that Milton may have found the Arthur story pre-empted, and contaminated, by the Stuarts, and certainly he becomes rather suddenly more interested in the Saxons than in the Britons (the reverse being true at the time of Mansus). At all events, Milton goes on at once to declare that 'England hath had her noble achievements made small by the unskilful handling of monks and mechanics'. Thus we have the ironical situation that he abandoned Latin for Arthur's sake, and then Arthur for the sake of England and English. Where would he look next for his subject? And how secure was his grasp of its medium, too? Even where truth was not in doubt, he faced a dilemma. Should he honour England's history by seeing it under the eye of God, as history is seen in the Old Testament? Or by appropriating the history of Israel to England's destiny? Somewhere in the period of the Trinity Manuscript lists27 he cuts the knot, going beneath both fallen histories to the Fall itself. The manuscript has more entries on Adam than on any other subject, they are longer entries, and each of them is fuller than the one before it. The tide is turning towards 'Adam Unparadiz'd' as his epic subject. In Satan's address to the Sun, that early portion of Paradise Lost, he has found his medium also, has chosen his tongue. How early is that passage? As early as 1642-3, perhaps? Aubrey's Life of Milton dates it to 'about 15 or 16 years before ever his poem [Paradise Lost] was thought of'.28 The figures are not inherently absurd, nor their product unlikely: if we take 1658 as the time when Milton 'thought of his epic because by then he had retired as Secretary of the Foreign Tongues, then 1658 minus 15 on6 equals 1643 or 1642. Edward Phillips says only 'several years' before the poem was begun; but since he wrote that in old age and had talked with Aubrey much earlier, Aubrey's specific numbers may be more nearly right. Certainly Phillips connects them with the opening of a draft tragedy on the subject of Adam, such as figure in the Trinity MS, yet a

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draft later than the four sketches there (none of which begins with Satan and his address). But one hesitates to trust Aubrey on figures, despite the neatness of an inference that Milton searched for a subject and medium together. Assuredly, he had now found his voice and tongue. Though his choice still rests with English, it is an English made personal and multiple, and given a needed tension, by a domiciling of words and allusions and structures of words from his other tongues. I shall explore the 'hybridized5 character of this last of my proof-texts before advancing the hypothesis that its English differs from the style of his English, and his other tongues, of before 1641. O Thou that with surpassing Glory Crown'd! Look'st from thy sole Dominion, like the God Of this New World; at whose sight all the Stars Hide their diminish'd Heads; to thee I call, But with no friendly Voice; and add thy Name, 0 Sun! to tell thee how I hate thy Beams That bring to my remembrance, from what State 1 fell; how Glorious once above thy Sphere; Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down, Warring in Heaven, against Heaven's Glorious King.29 It has long been thought that the address to the Sun takes off from the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Although some scholarship has questioned the idea, it seems probable enough, because Milton knew that play, and to him Prometheus signified a principled, yet ambivalent rebellion.30 Satan, however, rejects the Sun as well as the ruling deity: the first, with rancour, because of the second. So there emerges in subtext a comprehensiveness and (so to speak) idealism in his hatred, but also there emerges the worth of what he contemns. Milton has made a stunning advance from the idealized loves of earlier poems we have examined. And yet the new idiom is related to them, because the tension between valuations of rebellion - Greek-heroic and Hebrew-diabolic - now proceeds within the English language itself. More than that, since the sun was a divine image in the Greek cosmologies, then in Plato and the Neoplatonic tradition through to Ficino, no fewer than four of his foreign cultures cohabit in his new-forged English. 'Sole dominion' is made of two words borrowed from Latin, and hints at a pun on Sol, the Latin for cSun\ In 'their diminished heads' we find the combining of Latin-derived with Anglo-Saxon words which works powerfully for English poets. By artful placing, too, 'diminished'

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becomes both attributive and predicative, as in Latin: heads which have been, and go on being, diminished. The density and emphasis of 'diminished' bring out Satan's obsession with status. Greek and Latin conjoin in the adjective-phrase 'no friendly' voice. As well as being the figure litotes - the negative not of absence but of understated oppositeness - the phrase is a litotes of idiom. Latin inimicus is the negating of amicus, friend, and the Greek aphilos works similarly. ('He who is not with me is against me'.) For good measure, the litotes glances at Hebrew 'Satan': the Opposer, the Accuser, the Adversary, he who exposes human offences at God's court. The word is verb, noun, then a title, then (as he becomes over-zealous at his work, and is poisoned by it) his individuating name.31 It becomes Milton's frequent practice in Paradise Lost thus to etymologize names, for the sake of explanation but further of a witty characterizing, of name and nature together. With the words 'I call' we have reached the main verb of this single-sentence utterance. But instead of moving forward smoothly henceforth, the syntax at once writhes more than ever: 'I call, / But. . . no friendly... and add... to tell... how... That bring... from what... how . . . till. . .' Of course the syntax by its twists and turns enacts the writhing increase of grudge, but we should remember as instigator of that mimesis the many patterns and hyperbatons by which Bembo and Delia Casa gave suspension, hence energy and distinction, to literary Italian.32 Nor does it qualify, but rather reinforces, the point about Milton's style being hybridized to remember further that his Latin authors practised the same sort of syntactical arts: presumably the Italians went back to source, too. After which Milton lets in a ray of New Testament light: 'O Sun . . . I hate thy beams' calls up St John's words, 'Everyone that doeth evil hateth the light', with their context.33 To hate the sun, the source of life on earth, is virtual blasphemy in most cultures: Milton had read it in Euripides, for instance.34 His cultures again corroborate one another as he draws them into his English. To engender such magnificent self-exposure as Satan's in English, then, no single cause sufficed. A prominent contributor, all the same, is the fertilizing interplay of Milton's languages with his native tongue. The forms of interplay fluctuate. We expect contact between his Latin and English. I myself notice the lively joining of Greek and Hebrew in his English, probably because those two languages stand further apart from each other and from English. But in truth, none of the possible conjunctions of his five major languages can be safely ignored. So whether in Italy or upon return, Milton took firmer grasp of

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something fundamental to English: not simply the fact that it had absorbed much from Latin and from other tongues, but that - in syntax as well as words - it could absorb more; in short, that absorption suited it. English itself has grown by being eclectic and assimilative, a cheerful borrower; hospitable to what is different, and thereby rendered creative. Milton's English in the early 1640s grew likewise: in its egotistically sublime way it drew other languages to itself. OBJECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

Three natural objections must be stated and given an answer. First, it is possible to agree that Milton's English of Satan's address is superior in its complexity and force to the foreign-language poems here considered, but also to find that there is far less difference between the English of the address and his English of the poems composed before Italy, for example Lycidas. I grant that Lycidas owes much to the eclogues of Virgil for its ideas and pastoral ambience, and that at times Milton approaches translation in his English.35 He deploys classical names, including the Latinized names of native entities. Less prominent in lycidas, however, is the etymologizing sense of the roots of words borrowed from other languages which is growing in Satan's address ('sole', cno friendly'), and which grows further in Paradise Lost as a whole. In fact, I notice in Lycidas some tendency to use native English words or things just where a Virgilian or classicizing flavour might have been added ('Or taint-worm to the weanling herds', line 46). Doubtless, though, the increase of etymologizing which I perceive is a matter of degree rather than of kind; and since too the question of Milton's Latinism is a vexed question, it is examined more fully later.36 As with diction, the choosing of words, so a second objection might be made regarding syntax, their ordering, namely that Italian influence predates his visit to Italy, and is seen in Lycidas. My reply is, first, that Milton's sonnets in Italian itself are a very important part of this poetic development; then, that the syntax of the English sonnets written after Italy is more Italianate than the syntax of their English predecessors. But, obviously enough, the influence of Italianate syntax will be different, perhaps greater, where it is not played off against rhyme: to my sense, Comus in A Masque does not do through syntax what Satan in his address does. We have still to explain the surge forward to the mature style of the satanic voice, and I propose that the Italian journey and its immediate sequel go some way to explaining it.

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To the third objection, that the present perspective makes Milton's growth too purely linguistic and too conscious, a similarly modest answer is appropriate. It is not my design to make the process of 'domiciling' foreign languages in his English a conscious, or deliberate one. Paradise Lost is not Finnegans Wake (though that comparison would bear some fruit). The choice of a second tongue to compose in does have conscious purpose, because the choice regularly becomes part of the sense of occasion. Yet equally regularly the occasional performance seeks an allegiance which eludes us - and eludes Milton. Whenever, too, he writes in a tongue that is not native to him it admits willy-nilly an English language part of his sensibility, be it the feeling for his father in 'Ad Patrem', or the sense of being an outsider to Italian in the Italian poems. For this very reason, however, the sensibility can make the leap forward (out of sight, so to speak) to Satan's 'multiple' English. For one thing, there is an element of impersonation in speaking any foreign language, some degree of role-playing and self-experimentation; and so to go playing among languages made Satan easier to impersonate, in a general if opaque way. More important, Satan's English is the reverse case of the process (whether of self-suspension or of self-inclusion) involved in composing in the other languages. It is the English with which his other tongues can most readily intersect. To return to our point of departure, finally: more can be learnt from tracing how Milton chose among his languages, than from conjecturing why. To trace how, reveals why we cannot know why; and why he himself may not have known, beyond a limited extent. Into several passages he writes a discussion with himself about the grounds of choice of tongue, and gives a sense that, as he begins to write, the choice of tongue has already been made. How does any poet begin to find a poem's words (as distinct from its subject, though subject and first words may in fact originate together)? Often enough it is from a phrase or rhythm found somewhere within the poet. Milton, then, having the wider resources of competence in his several languages, is a special case of what is very generally intriguing. His language choices obey personal imperatives which remain interestingly obscure. His uncertainty as to why Psalm 114 demanded to be written in Greek before that winter dawn shares something with the fact 'That his Vein never happily flow'd, but from the Autumnal Equinoctial to the Vernal...' Should we speak, not of Milton choosing a language, but rather of a language choosing him?

CHAPTER 4

Milton's arts of language: translating and philology

Besides theflairfor multilingual verse-composing which was displayed in Poems, 1645, Milton cultivated further arts of language. They included Latin prose composition, translating, philology, lexicography, and pedagogy with Latin as its medium. Of these, the first will receive attention in chapter 5. The present chapter will focus on translating and philological scholarship, with a glance at the remainder. His translating centres on rendering verse originals from four languages into English; yet it goes wider, for example when he translates prose, or verse into another language than English. I take translating first now because whenever it approaches autonomous verse-composing it extends the survey of his multilingual verse which has been the subject of chapters 2 and 3. And by closing with an account of his translating from Hebrew we move across to his philology; for whereas Hebrew was not a language in which he composed, it has a vital place in his philology, whether pursued for its own sake or applied to purposes of polemic. By 'philology51 mean, first, the more confined attention to linguistic matters which the word signifies in English. But then also I mean, built on that linguistic foundation, the access through languages to other cultures. This is the wider-than-linguistic scholarship, or Altertumswissenschqft, to which Greek and Latin lead in continental Philologie. It has its equivalent in Old Testament studies as entered through Hebrew, and the whole body of world-history which his classical languages and vernaculars opened up. This chapter will focus on his philology in the narrower sense, mainly textual criticism in fact, while the next will address the wider sense. His other language-arts, while not negligible, seem more routine activities or adequately served by existing scholarship.

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Milton's translating is unusual, full of invention and variety, as reference to his younger contemporary Dryden illustrates. Dryden distinguishes 'metaphrase', close to the original in words and word order, from 'paraphrase', where an author's words are followed less strictly than his sense, and both from 'imitation', freer still, verging on adaptation or recreating.1 Milton practises imitation in his two early Psalm versions, and experiments with metaphrase in his Horace ode version. And this, being 'rendered almost word for word . . . as near as the language will permit', shows him aware of the options and problems.2 More normally in his maturity, however, he favours a mixture of metaphrase with paraphrase, moving perpetually in the course of a version from the one to the other. I would term it 'appropriation', a series of moves from author's words and meaning into possessing that meaning as his own idea. The impact is that of a small epiphany, an apprehending - his then ours - of the point of the particular translating. Something out there, in the cultural past, has come to live down here, in Milton's working mind. We begin with his sole complete prose translation, because in it (besides illustrating his practice) he vents some feelings about translating. The Judgement of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce (1644) shows Milton

shortening his author where Bucer is verbose or moves away from Milton's own interests; amplifying where explanation is needed for the 'mere English' (monolingual) reader; simplifying the diction; and avoiding Latinism of word or construction. In other words, Milton mixes Dryden's options, to achieve his goal of enlisting a favourable advocacy of divorce.3 He is explicit, italicizing his additions (as he would do later in some of his Psalm versions). The impression given is of a clear and confident linguist, appropriating through translation. Yet he does not, this time, rejoice in the process. It irks him: Others may read him [Bucer] in his own phrase on the first to the Corinthians, and ease me who never could delight in long citations, much less in whole traductions; Whether it be natural disposition or education in me, or that my mother bore me a speaker of what God made mine own, and not a translator.4 In short, he felt life had more to offer him than translating, especially at this length, on the subject of divorce. Elsewhere, accordingly, his translating is always briefer, always of verse, and always done into verse. He shows the zest which was lacking in the Bucer version. Thus even his three versions from Italian poets, which do no more in

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their published context than corroborate a polemical point about the Papacy, do it with a glad appropriation.5 Eagerly, he calls up Catholic witness to condemn the Papacy. Milton shifts Dante's lament over the 'Donations' of Constantine to the Papacy from 'dowry' ('dote') to 'rich domains', as the 'cause' not 'mother' ('matre') of evil: compounded by the loss of rhyme and of the maternal image, the change is from lament mingled with anger to plain denunciation. Similarly with Ariosto's allusion to the Donations: 'se pero dir lece' ('if one may be blunt') becomes 'if you the truth will have'. The tone is no longer Ariosto's sly deprecation but a challenge: 'do you want to have the truth?' Milton hammers where Ariosto insinuated. Through modals, Milton annexes. The modal additions perform a fuller appropriating on the title-page of Areopagitica (1644). Euripides' Theseus says liberty prevails in a state when any citizen who wants to advise the city does so; or if he doesn't, stays silent: what is juster than this? The verbs are straightforward indicatives, Theseus being very calm and regal. But Milton's English version rams in modal auxiliaries: 'He who can, and will. . .' and 'Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace' for 'What can ^juster.. .?'6 He is turning 'is' into 'ought', conveying the same enthusiastic urgency as throughout his 'Speech' to Parliament which follows. No mistranslating occurs, since what Theseus as king in a fiction declares to be the case is becoming advocacy, by a living citizen in a national crisis. The modals empower Milton to rise to the occasion. Appropriation animates the translations in another way, which we met in chapter 3; an interlingual, interactive way. Milton's tendency noted in Bucer to eliminate words from the English which would recall the wording of the Latin original, and to prefer Anglo-Saxon derivatives in his versions, is part of the prevalent appropriating. But for this very reason, when he does choose words which look outside the native resources in some way, the impact is of a special effect, an impact of concurrent testimony between languages, between their cultures. One striking instance comes from Horace.7 Horace describes a public man whose private life is squalid as 'introrsum turpem, speciosum pelle decora' ('disgraceful within, despite the fair-seeming skin'). Milton hits harder, starting with a verb and closing with a damning image: everyone close to him 'Sees his foul inside through his whited skin.' 'Whited' connotes concealment and leprosy, from Matthew 23. 27 (where Pharisees resemble 'whited sepulchres'); so that a Christian judgement enters the Roman thought through the English. Hypocrisy becomes more loathsome since Roman and Christian testimonies concur; Christ

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and Horace, meeting in Milton, make a devastating triad of witnesses. In these examples we discern a characteristic 'surge3, the moment when the demands of the original have received enough and Milton surges across to seize the whole at its close for himself, and English. The History of Britain shows a different, more intriguing example of interlingual sparking. The murder of the young king Kenelm is discovered miraculously when a messenger pigeon delivers a message in Early Middle English at the altar of St Peter's in Rome (!!!): 'In clenc cu beche Kenelm cunebearn lith under thorne haudes bereafte' ('In a cattle-meadow the king's child Kenelm lies under a thorn tree bereft of his head'). Milton's source, the Flores Historiarum, adds a translation into Latin hexameters: In clenc sub spina iacet in convalle bovina Vertice privatus, Kenelmus rege creatus. When Milton in turn renders the message, does he straightforwardly render the Latin, or go back to the EME, or mix both, or what? Is this example the sign we have been awaiting, that he did know Anglo-Saxon? He gives the sense as: Low in a mead of kine under a thorn, Of head bereft li'th poor Kenelm king-born.8 Milton removes the weird macaronic effect of including 'clenc' in the Latin. He uses no Latin-based words whatever, nor 'clenc'. He employs word-order, and sound, to retain the pre-Latin phrasing: 'of head bereft' ('haudes bereafed') and 'Kenelm king-born' ('Kenelm cunobearn'). So while he might be following the principle of his Bucer version, to avoid Latinism for the sake of 'mere English' readers, and he might have the the further motive of scorn for the credulity of its monkish chroniclers, the life of the rendering is aural, alliterative. We need not think he knew Old or Early Middle English, but he was captivated here by the music of an older English. A double purpose, of pity for 'poor' Kenelm and scorn for monks, is served by his interlingual palimpsest. To remove any remaining doubt about this intersectivity in translations, recall (from earlier chapters) his rendering of Psalm 114 into Homeric Greek hexameters. An entire poem is born from multilingual imitation, and operates where Homer and David intersect in heroic. A simple instance is the beginning. The Hebrew parallelism of 'When Israel went out of Egypt, the house ofJacob from a people of strange language' is rearranged:

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Israel hote paides, hot' aglaa phuP Iacobou Aiguption lipe demon, apechthea, barbarophonon . . . (When the sons of Israel, when the renowned tribes of Jacob left Egypt, that hateful nation, barbarous of speech . . .) Thereby Milton gets the effect of doubling within the single hexameter line, swelling finely from three words to four, a balancing of unequal metrical units at the caesura. Israel 5 and Jacob 5 enfold the meaning from their positions at the beginning and ending of the Homeric line. The majestic thought of the Exodus combines the strengths of Greek and Hebrew expression. A third tendency which stands out, after appropriation and interactivity, is experimentalism. While it can be felt everywhere in his emulations, it becomes overt in two of them: Horace's ode, Tyrrha 5 (date uncertain) and the Psalms 80-8 (dated very precisely to April 1648). He describes Horace's Odes 1. 5 as being 'Rendered almost word for word without rhyme according to the Latin measure, as near as the language will permit.' 9 Even if 'measure' refers only to the metre, 'language' must mean English, so he must be thinking wider, about what English will - and will not - 'permit'. It certainly permits the Latin words to show through, and on this occasion and for its special needs Milton carries over more Latin words than usual; single words like 'admire' for 'emirabitur', a phrase like 'liquid odours' for 'liquidis . . . odoribus', but even whole clauses: Qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea; Qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem Sperat becomes Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold, Who always vacant always amiable Hopes thee . . . [my emphases] But in fact this third stanza shows the limits all too well. English, forced into the Latin word-order, cannot make clear who is 'credulous' and who is 'amiable' nor what 'vacant' means. What inflection can clarify readily, English fails to: the syntax crumples into nonsense. Horace was a stiff test, of course, because the Latin of his odes is exceptionally compressed - compressed even more than Latin normally is, by metrical exigencies. Three of Milton's stanzas out of four pass the test; and in the other one, Milton found what he had sought, the limits, by exceeding

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them. If this version comes from after 1645 it comes from a time when he was experimenting equally with the hyperbatons of the beginnings of the grand style of Paradise Lost ('O thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd / Look'st. . .') Milton is overtly experimenting again in 'Nine of the psalms done into metre, wherein all but what is in a different character, are the very words of the text, translated from the original'.10 The nine are Psalms 80-8. 'Metre' means Common Metre, the fours and threes of ballads or of Psalms used liturgically by most churches; so were these versions, uniquely among his translations, aimed at public reading and even use? This natural assumption lacks supporting evidence. What we know is that the versions came out - complete with their 'different character' (italics, as in Bucer) and a few notes on the Hebrew - in 1673. And we know they seek to render the Very words' of the original. This they achieve, because the italicized words are never alterations or modifications but expansions made to explain the sense orfillout the metre (or both). Not that the experiment results in beauty: even Milton's fours and threes are doggerel, especially through the distortions of word-order. 'But now it is consumed with fire, / And cut with axes down...' (80.16) (Imagine singing this!) Still, experiments do not seek beauty but discovery. Milton is discovering a way to achieve absolute fidelity to a sacred text, in the literal sense of coverage; after which, to the devout maybe, incorporated exegesis is no detriment tofidelitybut a bonus. All the same, none of his departures from normal English syntax ever again sound so painful and gawky. By flouting its limits and by uniquely privileging the source language, he indeed finds out what English will not endure. Finally, because Milton translated Psalms more than he did other authors or texts, I survey this little group of verses, to bring out its experimental variety. In school exercises (1624) he freely adapted Psalms 114 and 136. In 1634 he rendered Psalm 114 again, into Homeric Greek, this time of his own volition or rather by some mysterious dawn impetus. In 1648 he rendered Psalms 80-8. In 1653 he rendered Psalms 1-8, into a different English for each (and no more fours and threes). Whatever the subjects and moods of these attempts, the recurring factor is variation in the medium and conception of translating - a process, or meditation, which becomes more not less self-conscious. It waxes multilingual at times, but only in 1648 does he explicitly and fully confront the Hebrew. I read that as meaning that he did not so confront it except when he said he did: 1648 is the exception not the norm. The subjects and moods of the Psalms seem to suggest an attitude

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behind each choice.11 This reasoning, however, can be overused. It must mean something that he returned to Psalm 114, 'When Israel came out of Egypt. . .' It must mean he then, even if briefly, shared the joy of the Exodus for Israel, and it may mean he felt such a hope for England. But as for Psalms 80-8, what they spell most clearly to me is experimentation; and all the more so because their subjects and moods are various. The common factor is only the cultic life, and Exodus-hope, of Israel. More still with the 1653 group, experimentation stands out. One might wish to emphasize the personal distress of Psalm 3 there. Yet confidence is present too (Psalm 1). Indeed, perhaps he was meditating the coronation of Messiah in Psalm 2 for the sake of Paradise Lost, Book III? It's anyone's guess. The common factors are: return to the songs of worshipping Israel (songs par excellence according to the Christ of Paradise Regained, iv. 347); and an appropriating of their devotion through one or another of his languages and their mediums. The range of his versions is marked by extremes: from the glorying in free Greek expansion in 114, to an ultimate of metaphrase in the annotated metrical English. The marginal notes to Psalms 80—8 have the special interest of being his only published philology; indeed, if they date from 1673 when he made additions to his collected poems, they are one of the latest of all his acts of scholarship. Like other printed marginalia from the Renaissance they can be located on William Slights's scale of interactions between an author's text and marginalia.12 Slights lists as examples of how margin may relate to text: amplification, annotation, appropriation, correction, emphasis, evaluation, exhortation, explication, justification, organization, parody, pre-emption, rhetorical gloss, simplification and translation (pp. 685-6). Thus clearly the purpose and effect of the interaction vary, modifying the reader's sense of authorial persona. Milton does not play Erasmian extravaganzas through marginalia, and certainly ridicules a theological opponent who overloaded his margins with biblical confirmations.13 But his usage still emerges as personal. For one thing it comes as a late afterthought within his translating, probably as part of the attempt at a more scrupulous fidelity in his psalmody. The Very words of the text' make up the substance of the first eighteen marginalia, being the Hebrew words hefindshardest to render precisely, transliterated according to his Sephardic pronunciation: C!lJehemajun', 'fjagnarimu', and '*Jithjagnatsu gnaP in 83. 2-3, where the thunderous 'gn' represents the guttural ayin.1* But then he alters course. His next note points out that the Hebrew 'bears both' of

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two senses, to explain why his English is giving both. His literal fidelity includes fullness this time (contrast his Horace ode), and marginalia help justify his procedure. The next six marginalia exemplify another of Slights's interactions, explication; for instead of simply annotating (citing) the Hebrew original he gives an English prose version of it. 'fHeb. The burning heat ofthy wrath' (85.3) explicates his verse rendering, 'thy ffiercewrath'; but it shows, too, that he has moved from literal Hebrew idiom to something nearer paraphrase (conveying thought not words). This example comes nearer to appropriation. Similarly, his last two notes explain that he has rendered both possibilities of a Hebrew ambiguity at 88.7; and has made an emendation to help himself understand some difficult Hebrew (88. 15).15 Consequently, while the versions remain predominantly literal, the notes move in the direction in which Milton's verse expansions move, namely explication. The notes latterly show Milton grappling with the complexities of Hebrew for their own or understanding's sake, as a philologist. That extends to the scholarly interaction par excellence, one not listed by Slights but paramount in the handwritten marginalia, namely emendation. Milton's printed marginalia thus, by their own change and impetus, move us forward from translating to scholarship. Even here, in ostensibly serviceable and humble print, his annotations share the experimentation and restlessness, the wish to appropriate, that distinguish his translating. The changes of direction, the inconsistencies, confirm his pride in not being born to be a translator (or philologist). Tensions add energy to his practice.

Whereas for Psalms 80-8 Milton practised philology for the sake of translating, he more often practised it for its own sake - to determine meaning, usually by rescuing it through emending a poorly printed text. I seek to show the spirit, competence and idiosyncrasies of this annotating practice. Though they were written for his own eyes only, it is a fact of the first importance that his Euripides marginalia entered the mainstream of philological scholarship. In view of current theoretic interest in marginalia, as intertextual dialogue, or interplay of personae, I first situate Milton's handwritten marginalia within that now-emergent genre.17 All marginal notes that a reader writes in beside a printed text are dialogic, personal, self-assertive

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and critical, as HeatherJackson claims. That is, by their nature they talk back to the print, are a person-to-person response, in which the reader becomes active, and interprets or re-interprets or criticizes the original or its print version. Most marginalia are economical, thus brusque or laconic, thus self-assertive again, because of space-constraints. Why worry? Annotators write to themselves only, or to the absent author. But Jackson goes too far for my annotator, Milton, when she claims that marginalia are by nature 'self-indulgent'. Not only do most readers deface their books' margins, but serious readers do it more. Such pavings aid precision of thought by being positioned exactly where the text prompts a response. They may accumulate (as with Richard Bentley) to the materials of an edition. Far from implying that the reader's ego outweighs the author's, marginal corrections of a bad printed text seek to remove an extrinsic obstacle to understanding the author, whose claims are in fact prime. This is perhaps why Jackson belittles 'professional' (study-aid) marginalia, as 'suppressing' the annotator's personality. Is this not over-severe, to reason that marginalia must be either selfindulgent or boring? I want to protest that scholarly annotation is neither impersonal nor an ego-trip, but personal in the way that emphasis and zeal for truth (philaletheia is allied to 'philology') are personal traits. In Milton's, at any rate, we see his personality exercised in philological annotation, through the Latin he writes alongside Greek texts. Among the handwritten marginalia the emphasis falls very heavily on Greek and on poets. In total contrast to all his other marginalia he writes numerous, searching, varied notes to his copies of the poets Lycophron, Aratus and Euripides. I therefore proceed from instances drawn out of these three books from his library.18 Lycophron (born c. 320 BG) was famously obscure even in antiquity, being known as ho skoteinos, the 'dark one'. He had some reason to be 'dark': he dramatizes Cassandra's raving, riddling prophecies, doomed to be disbelieved yet true. His obscure diction and allusion suit the character well enough. But there is a whiff of the imitative fallacy too, the mismatching of form to subject: just as characters who are bores must not be boring to read, so obscure tragic prophetesses should not be impenetrable either. Milton, at all events, read the book- wisely only the once, in the 1630s - to test and perfect his understanding of Greek. The reasoning is an a fortiori: Lycophron's sidelong way with meaning, and perpetual neologism, make most other Greek texts seem transparent. The result is a stream of notes, on textual or factual matters or matters of literary allusion. But whereas manuscripts of Lycophron show a

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winding causeway of obscure text surrounded by a sea of puzzled or hopeful commentary, Milton though thorough is brisk. After halfway, he begins to marginalize more thriftily: like any right-minded reader he decides that Lycophron is not absolutely worth the effort, and that the repetitions are decidedly not incremental. This needs saying here, because if the examples chosen seem disproportionate to the worth of the text and its human issues, well, Milton thought so too; but first he read it all, and so entitled himself to cut things short.19 Milton starts commenting as a literary not textual critic; he wishes that the adjective 'karkharos', 'jagged,' were the ampler, Homeric 'karkharodous', 'jagged-toothed', Tor this would be grander' ('hoc enim grandius').20 But he does not alter it, respecting the text where no reasons of sense or metrics or logic compel emendation. Soon enough, however, Milton has to make changes to secure sense or metre or both. An example of both at once is line 224.21 By changing the nonsensical and unmetrical 'homos' to 'houmos' he restores both metre and sense. 'I wish my father [houmospater] had not ignored the oracles of Aesacus, etc' There is great scope for this kind of emendation, since Milton is reading a bad printed text of a purposely obscure poet: Milton often rises to the occasion. At other times, he comments on the content or on the Latin translation which runs underneath his Greek text.22 An interesting note at line 43523 is also Milton's longest. It objects to a translation of Zeus's title 'muleus' ('guardian of mills') into 'Juppiter Pistor', on the grounds that Zeus the 'Baker' is too Roman a concept; it refers to a very particular, faintly comical rescue of Rome by Jupiter, as narrated in Ovid (Fasti vi. 353). Milton wants Lycophron to stay Greek, and to keep a sufficiently Greek decorum in Latin. A translator's appropriating, in this instance, must not flout an author's tone. Aratus (271-213 BC), writing didactically in hexameters on stars and weather-signs, was another Alexandrian but his was a more important text: important in itself as a guide to working life, and as an influence on Virgil's Georgics. Milton's annotations,24 accordingly, show increased interest and warmth. The interest appears in the fact of his annotating the text at least twice, his 1640s hand in some cases revising a 1630s note. The warmth, I come to in a moment. A word of cautious explanation is needed first, regarding the ascription to Milton of marginal notes in Aratus and Euripides. Without claiming much expertise in deciding the date and authenticity of Milton's handwriting in these Greek annotations, I have not yet found

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occasion to doubt the ascriptions and datings of Kelley and Atkins, in their essays on the Aratus and Euripides annotations. For present purposes I have kept to the fullest, therefore least disputatious instances. As a rule of thumb, the difference between Greek and Italian small V in Milton's Latin annotations suffices to distinguish 1630s from 1640s. In a sizable extract it is confirmed by smaller matters, grasped by feel.25 Milton's 'warmth', or even affection for Aratus, appears in the first two notes. On the title-page he adds - in his 1630s hand - Ovid's praise of Aratus as a poet who will endure as long as the sun and moon he wrote about: 'Cum sole et luna semper Aratus erit' ('Aratus will endure for ever, along with the sun and the moon [which he helps us understand]'). Ovid says this at the close of Amores I, dreaming of fame for himself: is Milton having his own dream of fame? Then - in his 1640s hand - he endorses the famous statement that 'we (humans) are all the children of God' ('tou gar genos esmen'); not as might be expected from Paul's reference to this sententia in Acts 17. 28, but from Lucretius — a reputed atheist, yet another didactic poet. sic Lucretius, denique celesti sumus omnes semine oriundi. omnibus ille idem pater est &c. lib. 2. p. 265 (So also says Lucretius. 'Finally, we are all heaven-born: we all have the same father, etc' Book II [of De Rerum Natura], p. 265) Milton is reading with attention, and with empathy. He mentions both poets again, but not Lycophron, in the educational syllabus of the treatise Of Education (1644). The bulk of his Aratus notes, nevertheless, are textual. As so often, early printed texts of ancient authors swarmed with typos, and especially Greek ones because of the intricacies of Greek diacritics and their unfamiliarity to printing-house workers. Consequently, much of the vigilance, issuing in penmanship, of readers like Milton who wanted to be reading the actual words of the author had to be spent on textual criticism. This art has been denigrated as 'glorified proof-reading', and in many cases for Milton it was. But sometimes the printers had preserved a manuscript error, or their own mistakes induced the serendipity of an inspired correction. In the Aratus these are few; yet a couple of Aratus examples will set the scene for Milton's more arduous and productive reading of Euripides. At line 74 his text had left four words out, thus making a hole in the sense and metre: Milton supplies the lack from other editions ('ex aliis

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editionibus supplemus'). Note the editorial 'we': sitting judicially or judiciously above the received text. Perhaps because his own copy was bad he read with other texts around him, collating into his own copy. That was in the 1630s. At line 100, however, hefirst(in the 1630s) changes an unmetrical verb-form from another edition (De Gabiano's); but then (1640s now) alters that editor's strained verb-form to a simpler solution from a better scholar, Stephanus; from 'edeixen' to 'edeixen' to Stephanus' 'eeiden'. So on this occasion he saw a need not only to correct the text but to go on thinking about the problems till he had recovered the pristine sense. This all-round strength and integrity of Milton's scholarship are best viewed in his Euripidean annotations. From the mass of material26 I select two views of Milton at work as a philological scholar. First, I examine which plays he annotated most, and for what reasons we can infer that he did so. Then I group (and illustrate) the main emphases in his annotations. The plays which are most annotated by Milton's undisputed hand, whether 1630s or 1640s, are: Hippolytus (Volume I); Supplices, Helena and Ion (Volume II).27 The Hippolytus contains unusually many of Milton's private attention-markings - * from the 1630s,x from the 1640s.28 As the play's themes include male purity, female lust, misogyny and theodicy, the markings have been linked to Milton's marital vicissitudes. But they show, if anything, that the themes attracted him long before his marriage (1642): they more certainly reflect his idealism and empathy (since Milton did not have to face Hippolytus' problems!) Still, if the incidence does support the idea of a temperamental interest in the Hippolytus, then the similar incidence of notes on the Ion supports the inference of a cognate identification with the trials of a young man self-dedicated to a divinely sanctioned vocation; for in this case we have the intense reliance on Ion in his Latin ode to Rouse. The Helena more certainly lies outside the range of his own life, and its unusually numerous annotations reflect interest and editorial need; empathy with a genre, tragicomedy, which he did not himself practise. The Supplices, different again, centres on a debate about a king's responsibilities to his people and to the laws. He quotes from this play several times in his prose works on government in the 1640s, for example on the title-page ofAreopagitica, and here is where I would see the most direct relation between this scholarship and his English writings.29 The 'most direct' remains not very direct. His annotations still aim chiefly at understanding Euripides' texts, all of them, on their own terms.

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The simple fact is, the demands of establishing text preponderate. Milton's emendations draw on diagnostic, etymological, metrical and dramaturgical skills. Thus his diagnoses extend to the process of transmission of the texts, the sort of errors common in the scribal process before the printing process added new sorts: a line's botched metre is because a word I n versum sequentem ex margine irrepsit' {Ion 1423, 'crept into the following verse from the margin'). He corrects the misprint 'agiatides' because he knows this title of Apollo as protector of streets relates to 'aguiai', 'streets' {Ion 186). Metrical error arouses him to something like irritation, as his comments escalate from 'restoring the integrity' of metre to saying metre 'demands' to be changed ('flagitat', Ion 408) or metre even 'spits out' the offending typo ('respuit', Ion 1360). His grasp of dramaturgy is more extensive than might be expected of one who wrote Samson Agonistes to be read, not performed. He aims for completeness of dramatis personae; he adds speech-entries everywhere they are missed; and he sorts out a huge tangle of muddled speechentries at Supplices 754-8. His supreme gift with regard to emendations is contextual. He has the good textual critic's comprehensive grasp of context, without which the diagnostic and other skills avail little.30 So at Bacchae 218 it is context characters, theme, the whole situation - which invalidates the received reading. For one old man to say to another 'Being old men we have forgotten what pleasures are like [hedeon, literally 'sweet things']' is not absurd, only flat, out of key with the context of Dionysus-worship as having rejuvenating power. Milton alters one letter, and the old man says, 'We have gladly \hedeos\ forgotten that we are old men.' From the tradition of Euripides editing ever since has come loud cheering and ready acceptance. Milton has his place in more than one Valhalla. And that is still only emendation. He attends, as a matter of course, to gaps or problems in the accompanying Latin translation - symptomatizing his determination to understand the text, down to its last minutiae (yes, he cleans up punctuation too, see Iphigenia in Tauris 1040). The thoroughness, absorption and sheer empathy are remarkable. Taken as a whole, these jottings represent the most eloquent of tacit tributes to a great author, by a scholar who thinks differently enough but suspends that sort of judgement for the sake of empathy, using judgement wholly to serve imagination. It is not ridiculous to think of Keats here: reading of 'the suffering of human hearts' Milton attains a version of 'negative capability', uninfluenced by any 'egotistical sublime'. Personal in a different way is the occasional note of commentary. At

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Heracleidae 822 should the text read 'bloody sacrifices' or 'human sacrifices' ('brotoenton' or 'broteion')? His text read 'human': he wants to read 'bloody'. Not beside the text but buried in the editor's endnotes Milton has a long debate with himself on whether Athens, his revered and freedom-loving Athens, practised human sacrifice. 'Only rarely, and then for strong reasons', he concludes. This hardly exculpates Athens, or makes its practice much different from human sacrifice elsewhere. Milton is not so much emending as wrestling with the profound cleavage, between the normal revered rationality of Greece and its moments of glaring cruel irrationality. The moment passes, and he goes on cheering for Greece; but the reflective moment in his study (1640s) may help explain why in Paradise Regained Christ rejects Greece for Israel: the Old Testament abominates human sacrifice, as Milton abominates Moloch worship, and as enlightened Greece - even Athens - did not. OTHER ARTS OF LANGUAGE

Besides translating and annotation, in which arts he excelled, Milton practised the more mundane ones: lexicography, teaching of and through languages, and what would nowadays be called study skills. He practised all of them lifelong and systematically. He compiled a Latin 'Thesaurus', a vocabulary book, amounting as it grew over time and reading to a dictionary. This is mentioned several times by pupils, and used by one of them (Edward Phillips) for his 1693 Dictionarium. It may have been absorbed into still later Latin dictionaries.31 He had kept it from an early date. Likewise, he kept a thesaurus of his Greek reading. If these ever turned up, they would not be enthralling to read; but they would hold great value for Milton studies, as a check on Leo Miller's research into the authorship of state papers, or to test the authorship of the De Doctrina Christiana?2

Of Education includes Milton's languages as part of the ideal curriculum he wrote up as a letter to Hartlib. The languages are valued educationally, not for themselves or even their literature so much as for access to useful thought, be that Varro's on farming or the Bible in its original tongues. The essay conveys Milton's own fluency with languages, not least by implication: witness the airy way in which he suggests the pupil can pick up Italian 'at any odd hour'. That phrase means 'at any time in the regular, working week that is not already occupied' (that is, still regularly, not as in the modern slang, to mean 'casually'); nonetheless, the implication remains that pupils can master this fourth or fifth foreign language without special effort, as a natural

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addition. Natural, indeed, to the language enthusiast! It shows, better than any earnest injunction on the subject would do, how at home Milton felt with languages. And he synthesized and systematized his reading onto paper lifelong — by a method based on Aristotle's topics, into sundry 'indexes', as the Commonplace Book especially demonstrates. This work too holds great interest for the intellectual biographer, since it shows his thought developing. He found arguments in favour of divorce and tyrannicide worth recording there before any need for them came up in his own life. More to the present point, it is written in several of Milton's languages Latin, Greek, French, Italian. To link or summarize such quoted material Milton writes in Latin, English or Italian. I take this to mean he felt more fluent and at ease in those tongues. The reasons are mainly self-evident. English was his mother-tongue, and Latin was the tongue of judicious or scholarly commentary (as in the case of the Lycophron and other annotations). However, the presence of Italian and the absence of French, must draw further enquiry. Is it some dislike of French, or rather a preference for Italian among vernaculars?33 The Commonplace Book itself is a normal not exceptional instance of its type. To keep one was natural to a life in which study was engrossing, yet was meant to be practical too. In otium, when available, the humanist studied to be ready for negotium.34 And even if some humanists in that posture seem pathetic or at any rate doomed to disappointment,35 Milton shared to the full the humanist aspiration to connect the life of studying 'sound authors' (pagan, biblical or humanist) with the whole life of his times. To repeat, these lesser arts were systematic and lifelong for Milton. He kept up his languages, in all sorts of ways. They were ready and organized. It is not just accident that when his Commonplace Book turned up it did so along with three school exercises - a Latin prose theme with Greek inclusion, and sets of Latin verses in different metres. He kept his papers, he kept them in order, and brought many if not most of them before the public in print towards the end of his life. He added some early Latin verses to the second edition of his poems (1673). He published textbooks written back in the 1640s for pupils of grammar and logic. He sought to be a complete humanist. Completeness, a formidable versatility, is what he proved to the European intelligentsia when the awaited opportunity did come. As chapter 5 will show, he attacked Salmasius with all the weapons of a redoutable humanist philology.

CHAPTER 5

Milton's Latin prose

The study of Milton's Latin prose works in their original tongue continues to languish. The three main monuments of his Latin prose are the three Defences of the 1650s. These are as important, and certainly as influential, as his English prose works; yet most Miltonists work on them from translations, translations which leave something to be desired. I dwell on this, to alert readers of those translations to what is being omitted or distorted. The Columbia translations (besides particular faults of rendering or tone) have a tendency to break up Milton's sentences, in a way which unduly differentiates his Latin prose from his equally periodic English prose. The different Columbia translators move different distances towards paraphrase, so that their reader gets different Miltons. As for Yale, the absence of any Latin text seems to me a terrible editorial blunder, preventing the reader of this series (which looks so authoritative) from seeing the words of Milton himself. Even the non-Latinist should be able to see them, because to see them suggests ideas and provides correctives. Naturally, too, the Latin text being absent, Yale's notes pay scant attention to matters of Latin tone or style. Irony, especially, works differently in the Defences from what the translation and commentary present. Furthermore, analysis languishes along with texts and versions. The increased interest in Milton's English prose,1 which has developed linguistic and statistical tools of analysis, must eventually apply them to his Latin prose, this being a corpus of bulk and importance. At present, nonetheless, this has not happened - not even though the lack prevents reliable authentication-tests being done on one crucial Latin text in particular, the De Doctrina Christiana.

In the hope, then, of calling attention to the Latinity of this oeuvre - as distinct from its ideas, or politics, or psychobiography, or whatever currently preoccupies Milton studies — I offer a simple chronological 82

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survey. It moves from a school exercise and a college prolusion, through the notes and letters of two decades, to his published Latin prose. The examples move gradually from private towards more public, until in February 1651 he went from obscurity to European fame in one leap. He did it thanks largely to the qualities of his Latin prose style. He could seize his chance because the Latin composing which I unfold had made him ready. By what method should it be unfolded? I attempt to describe Milton's composing from the inside, showing in examples why he did each the way he did. Discussion works from whatever features of style assume most prominence in the particular instance. Of necessity it works flexibly, since the chief constant of his Latin is its inventive variety; indeed, all that is meant by Latin humanism. I seek, by continuing to use Erving Goffinan's distinction between 'impression' and 'expression', to show what impression he sought to make on each of his audiences. Expression, however, matters equally with impression. His Latin style is equally revealing when directed to no outward audience, but to himself— in his own mind — as a striving with dead masters.

SCHOOL EXERCISE:

MANE CITUS LECTUM FUGE . . .

The little prolusion on the theme 'Early rising is best'2 gives a starting-point, by showing the skills he mastered in Latin composition before he had anything of his own to say. It begins: Tritum est vetustate proverbium. diliculo surgere saluberrimum est nee sane minus verum quam antiquum: etenim si ordine supputare conabor singulas hujus rei utilitates opus ardui laboris obire videbor: surge igitur, surge deses nee semper teneat lectus, nescis quot oblectamenta praebet aurora. Oculos delectare cupis? aspice solem purpureo colore orientem, coelum purum . . .3 The only advance which this makes on saying that early rising is a good thing, is to insist that getting up late is a bad thing. The emphasis therefore falls on the skills with which the meagre topic undergoes amplijicatio.

Consider, for example, the syntactical variation: simple sentence; then double affirmation; then a longer less simple one, which branches first left, then right.4 Or consider the rhetorical urgency injected, first, by repeated imperative ('surge igitur, surge': 'get up, therefore, get up!');5 then by question and answer. Or take the neat and idiomatic diction:

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'supputare conabor', literally to 'prune [a tree] underneath' but used figuratively by Ovid and Seneca to mean 'reckon up5. The persuasion continues into allusion, half a line of Greek from Theocritus, two from Homer. This displays skills of another language, and of apt allusion, and does it in the Roman way of enlisting Greek precedent where possible, for purposes of conviction and elegance alike. The relative lengths show taste, also: Homer, being the more normative author, gets more space. On the debit side, the composition ends some sentences with a rhythm which is that of a line of verse. Classical Latin prose avoided doing this, both in theory and practice, as if to preserve the boundaries between verse and prose. The dactylic clausula in Milton's 'obire videbor', and 'praebet aurora' offends against Roman taste. He is not yet hearing Latin prose with a Roman ear, or perhaps he has not yet read ancient authorities like Quintilian on the subject. In the main, nevertheless, the prolusion is a correct, even fluent, exercise; still an exercise, however, in the limited sense of a set task, in set form, on a trite theme. PROLUSION VI

Contrast a later, Cambridge 'exercise', the Latin speech which leads to the English verses At a Vacation Exercise. This exercising is splendid, being voluntary press-ups. He now chooses what to say, though genre and occasion govern some choices. Having done his part on a debate theme, which admittedly is almost as futile as the virtues of early rising,6 he introduces the pageant in his own way, fascinatingly half in and half out of the persona he will play there. As Ens, Father of the Aristotelean categories, he can choose to modulate between several registers, and tones, and apparently even languages. Thus in the prolusion he runs the gamut from tedium through vulgarity to a sonority of varying degrees of seriousness. Tedium threatens at first, as (228. 3-8) he tells his hearers to laugh by eight synonymous descriptions of laughter. It reads as if he had swallowed a thesaurus; and though it might be funny if acted portentously, the pacing is funereal. Vulgarity has more life, especially when helped by wit, usually puns. Thus he argues (228.13-16) that those who are not joining in the laughter must have indigestion, forcing them to speak with another orifice: 'aenigmata quaedam nolens efiutiat sua non Sphinx sed Sphincter anus', exploiting the homonymity of'anus' = old woman with 'anus' = anus.7

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As to sonority, it is never unalleviated: thus it is saved from bombast by its reductive application, to homely or silly things nearby. He calls two of the College dignitaries 'Vestal Virgins' (232. 12), surely a backhanded compliment. Likening another functionary to Cerberus, he pours a torrent of hellmouth cliches on him (230. 10-14). He overloads cboves' (oxen) with the epic epithet 'insigniter caudatos' ('extraordinarily tailed'). He mixes extremes, too, combining sonority with vulgarity when he claims that eating 'certain Irish birds' causes 'pediculos inguinales' (236. 15). The orotund polysyllables both excuse and emphasize the crudeness, these birds 'give you lice in the balls'. Both extremes of register, then, are guarded by playful irony. Midway, and on the serious side of halfway, he utters a digression very much of his own choosing - about his nickname, the 'Lady' of Christ's. Being dressed up as an aged Father, 'Ens' or Substance, he asks how can a 'Lady' have become a 'Father'? Because, as he lengthily (240. 1-242. 8) explains, he never was a Lady. Granted, he was not a stereotypical male; but does one have to prove one is stupid to prove one's manhood?8 He clinches his rebuttal stylistically as much as substantively: by the strong, one might almost say 'masculine' verb amolior, 'toss away' the insult (242. 6).9 The staple is a fluent urbanity, showing himself conversant with all the kinds of literature. This urbanity, besides being the norm, gives the performance its focus at points of undoubted good taste (images or phrases which anyone would be proud of): 'lepidulos nebulones', 'witty little rascals', said in his character of Ens about his Aristotelian offspring (242.14). This has just the right tone of dry affection, achieved by joining the deprecatory noun with the diminutive (coined?) adjective. Granted, then, that he manages the vulgar better than the elevated, he is playing a voluntary on the organ of the Latin language, and also scripting with zestful invention for a persona. One quality he does not display, however, is conciseness. This is the fault of amplijicatio and the humanist syllabus, I feel, since it likewise slows down his Latin verse. This sluggishness was certainly not the fault of Latin - of all languages! Latin's inflectedness and lack of articles let it say more by less, and without contortion. Where and when did he move away from this dangerously licensed fluency? I suggest it was in Horton, in his voluntary Lehrjahre, when he annotated Greek poems by marginalia in his copies or summarized readings by topic into his Commonplace Book.

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For his marginalia he appropriates the editorial brevity which prevailed before him among humanists, whether acting as editors into print or simply annotating their own copies. Thus in their apparatus criticus verbs of saying or being are omitted, because they are understood from the technical context: in 'sic Canterus', 'so Canter', supply 'dicit', 'says'. Milton follows this idiom so exactly that most of his emendations to Greek texts consist of a single Greek word or a meagre 'fortasse' ('perhaps'), itself shortened to 'f.' in his 1640s notes. Even his longer notes are usually still single sentences, which he keeps concise. Thus at Euripides Helena 1145 he comments, 'planior erit, ni fallor, sensus si pro hote legatur hoti. scil: ad Troiam strages et ad Euboeam naufragium nos exhausit quia tu Pari Helenam abduxisti, aut Helenae spectrum.' 'The meaning will be clearer, unless I am mistaken, if hoti is read in place of hote; understand, "Slaughter at Troy and shipwreck at Euboea have ruined us because [riot 'when'] you, Paris, stole away Helen, or her phantom."' Milton makes his point as succinctly as he can without surrendering to the sort of private abbreviations which lose clarity and accessibility. Although he writes for his own eyes only, he uses the language and register of a public community of scholarship, all those who care about such things. He plays the role of humanist editor, in and through his Latinity. In this little genre, it becomes a matter of personal pride to make one's point in as few words as possible. For the publishing commentator, pride in style continues to matter because in going public one seeks to impress others (or at any rate not alienate them by bad or flabby Latin). Further considerations are those of space (to say it shortly) and beauty (not allowing the page of the classic author to become usurped by editorial ancillarities). None of this concerned Milton in his private studies. He did it just the same. It was a point of honour.

FAMILIAR LETTERS TO 1647

Milton's 'Letters to Friends' (Epistolarium Familiarium Liber) was a very late publication, of May 1674. Its title encouraged comparison with the chief ancient exemplar, Cicero's Epistulae ad Familiares. We should therefore first ask, how far the selected letters are acts of Milton before 1647 and not rather the self-editings of the old man? And what is Milton's own, rather than Cicero's? On the first point, two letters which survive in

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handwritten form from 1639 and 1647 show that only few and minor changes were made editorially. For example, in the letter to Holstenius he toned down a few stylistic audacities and youthful jeux d'esprit.10 As to the second point, I focus on whatever Milton saw fit to make most salient, whether by repetition or placing or quality, because this will point to his chosen persona on each epistolary occasion. Ironically enough, Milton in many of his letters does not follow Cicero into brevity or density. Cicero, so orotund in his public speeches, sought an idiomatic brevity in letters; yet not so Milton, not at first. Amplitude continues in the two to Charles Diodati; not so much as neo-Latin copia or amplification, however, but in a slowness to emerge into specifics from the ponderous opening civilities. But he may have a reason. Both letters are written out of turn, begging Diodati to reply to a previous one sent him. Accordingly, though they maintain a teasing tone as between old friends, some embarrassment shows too — in tortuousflightsof fancy. He should not worry about balancing the numbers of letters, because 'Your probity writes for me in your stead, and inscribes letters on my inmost consciousness', 'scribit vicem tuam apud me tua probitas, verasque literas intimis sensibus meis exarat.' (24. 13-14) He has a neat idiom in 'scribit vicem' (perhaps 'writes out your role' = speaking part in a play), and again in 'exarat' (writes as on a wax tablet, so helping to Romanize the correspondence and the friendship). Yet the conceit remains frigid: does it evince anxiety? Milton was lonely in Hortoh, depended on letters, received not enough, and his own letters show it. Full and formal for quite different reasons, is Milton's letter written in Florence to Benedetto Bonmattei (1638). Here, he is repeating in written form, what he has said to Bonmattei in conversations (36. 18-22), in order to press the point of an earnest request on an issue of importance to him. That issue is the well-being of Italian (or Tuscan, rather), and how best can foreigners understand it, so as to love it more deeply; Milton urges Bonmattei to add to his book on Tuscan something on pronunciation and recommended authors for the benefit of stranieri, non-Italians. The formality and amplitude now assist the cause. So does the intelligent praise, of Bonmattei and his language. Beginning 'Quod novas patriae linguae Institutiones adornas (Benedicte Bonmathaee) jam jam operi fastigium impositurus . . .' n Milton honours the work which honours that native tongue ('adornas . . . patriae' both imply absolutes). He hints at blessing in the Latinized Christian name of the recipient ('blessed be the man who loves his native language so worthily'). He quickens into urgency and drama with the double 'jam', completion of

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the task being 'any day now'. In a vivid, apt metaphor Bonmattei is about to complete the 'fastigium' (roof or roof-ornament, the /
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lengthy clauses, 'tametsi . . . tamen', where the lead-words echo to guarantee the signposting of the syntax. Is Milton afraid Holstenius won't understand? Or is he anxiously clinging to the shape of his own opening period, like a life-raft? I suggest, rather, that what he wants to signal is not meaning but his control of this Ciceronian periodicity. The signal is not expression but impression: the evidence of being a competent young humanist. Similarly, further on in the sentence we have the carefully idiomatic bunching of pronouns fea quae mihi abs te3). It was the regular practice of Latin, and of Milton in Italian also, to congregate pronouns like this. But here we sense why: to gather them up by word order and by penultimate placing underlines that they make up a relationship. 'I am now related to you by them, "ea", the tokens of your goodwill to me'. The immediate purpose is to claim (humanist) kinship. The larger purpose is to show appreciation of the Librarian's kindness in showing him round the treasures of his great library. And since this entails telling Holstenius many things he already knows, the tenor of the message is not to convey information but to remind the man of their contact, and to convince him of Milton's own humanist credentials. The conviction must come, and can only come, from style. The medium — an epistolary Latin prose, of higher register than normal for a letter - is the message. Theme does also vindicate the obsequious opening, because Holstenius was a great scholar, editor of Greek texts galore, and may be returning hospitalities offered to him in the past by Oxford. The theme is simultaneously humanist scholarship, and the admirably reciprocal acts of goodwill pertaining to it. Yet still one may find Milton's deference excessive, excessive where it matters, in the style. For half a page he avoids the first person singular though talking about himself: he is overawed, perhaps, not a usual posture for us to find him in. We can contrast the letter to his Italian friend, Carlo Dati, of 1647. Hearing at long last from him, Milton writes him his longest, most fervent letter. The tone says this, at once: Terlatis inopinato Literis ad me tuis, mi Carole, quanta, & quam nova sim voluptate perfusus . ..' (my emphasis).14 The affectionate address is unprecedented- he does not address even Charles Diodati like this - and the hyperbole of the following phrase impinges as that of surprised joy. 'Quanta', 'quam nova', Voluptate', all are strong or exclamatory words, and as a collocation are unprecedented in these letters. Over against joy is soon set 'dolor', distress, at not receiving three previous letters. He pours out other strong feelings: he

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recollects the pain of leaving Florence in 1639. (And this takes the tone beyond formality into sincerity, since who can't share that pang?) He has sent one poem, and will now send his collected Poems, notwithstanding their offensive tone concerning Dati's religion: he apologizes for that. Finally, he talks optimistically about more frequent exchanges in future easy, there are merchants' messengers running to and fro between England and Italy every week! 'Tabellarii singulis hebdomadi ultro citroque cursitant'. The eager 'cursitant' is delightful: a frequentative form, like a hithpael in Hebrew, it means 'run about the whole time'. Milton has by now forgotten that the correspondence has hitherto been difficult, not easy at all. But the amnesia itself communicates the sheer delight of resuming the friendship. It does so not least by apparent artlessness, the youthful hyperbole of a middle-aged writer recalling his happiest young days. But equally we should applaud the intelligent way he skates on thin ice. He has spoken 'asperius' about the Roman Pope; but the comparative adverb may mean either 'rather harshly' or 'too harshly' - let Dati take his pick. To call the Pope 'Roman' reminds Dati of grudges felt from Florence towards a bullying Papacy; and the previous incumbent, Urban VIII, had been a Florentine, so doubtless of finer character . . . And next let the greatest of Florentines, Dante, be summoned in aid: Nunc abs te peto, ut quam veniam, non dico Aligerio, & Petrarchae vestro eadem in causa, sed meae, ut scis, olim apud vos loquendi libertati, singulari cum humanitate, dare consuevistis, eandem impetres (nam de te mihi persuasum est) ab caeteris amicis, quoties de vestrisritibusnostro more loquendum erit. (Now I beg of you that the indulgence you were wont to give, I say not to your own Dante and Petrarch in the same case, but with singular politeness to my own former freedom of speech, as you know, among you, the same you, Dati, will obtain (for of yourself I am sure) from my other friends whenever I may be speaking of your religion in our peculiar way.)15 Milton aligns his critique with that of two shared culture-heroes, in a sly parenthetical figure (mentioning what he will not mention). He appeals to former tolerance, to continuing humanitas - the word combines good nature, humanity, cultivation of shared humanism. The offending satire (very visible in the gunpowder plot poems) is merely 'our [English] way of referring to your [Italian or Catholic] rites'. Knowing that Milton never had a good word to say about Catholic spirituality or liturgy, one may still find this apology insincere. But indeed many

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Catholic thinkers have detested Vatican bureaucracy and autocracy, with at least Miltonic ferocity. All in all, then, these swirls of less than regulated emotion thoroughly suit what is a fascinating, unexpected, unguarded letter.16 Art helps create the warm tone, and the fervent persona; but it is not controlling them to the usual degree. So much the better, then, for the speech-act as a whole. It is better, likewise, for the 1674 collection, as the presentation of a developing self, developing itself and unfolding itself to the reader through varying personae. To repeat, Latin letters - be they Pliny's or Milton's - were published to display the self in a stylish way, to prove the self to be stylish. Other aspects of display find their place in the impression, and the same goes for expression; yet the style is in high relief, and was expected to be. Stylish Latin was central to impression and expression. MILTON'S FIRST PUBLISHED LATIN PROSE (1640 AND 1645)

Though Milton composed no more than two paragraphs of Latin prose for publication in the 1640s, they are his first to reach print. One is the 'Argumentum' explaining the occasion and pastoral allegory of the Epitaphium Damonis, privately printed by Milton in about 1641 as his epitaph to Charles Diodati. The other introduces, and mitigates, the commendations from Italian friends which herald the Latin half of his bilingual Poems, 1645, The former gives a rare specimen of impersonal, or self-effacing prose: it describes then praises another person. The latter is the opposite, self-deprecatory while quoting the praise of himself by others. The Argumentum says who 'Damon' is, or was, whilst not saying that Milton was 'Thyrsis': Thyrsis et Damon ejusdem viciniae Pastores, eadem studia sequuti a pueritia amici erant, ut qui plurimum. Thyrsis animi causa profectus peregre de obitu Damonis nuncium accepit. Domum postea reversus, et rem ita esse comperto, se, suamque solitudinem hoc carmine deplorat. Damonis autem sub persona hie intelligitur Carolus Deodatus ex urbe Hetruriae Luca paterno genere oriundus, caetera Anglus; ingenio, doctrina, clarissimisque caeteris virtutibus, dum viveret, juvenis egregius. (Thyrsis and Damon, shepherds of the same neighbourhood, had pursued the same interests from childhood, and had been very close friends. Thyrsis, abroad for the improvement of his mind, received the news of Damon's death. After he had returned home and ascertained that it was true, he bewailed himself and his

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loneliness in this poem. 'Damon' here represents Charles Diodati, whose origin through his father's family was in the Tuscan city of Lucca, but who was in every other respect English. While he lived he was a youth distinguished as a man of genius, learning, and other honourable virtues.)17 T h e emotions here are only implied, but understatement emphasizes: the unelaborated 'friends from boyhood', friends 'ut qui plurimum' (to the utmost); and Thyrsis' vain hope that the report of death was false makes it worse when upon returning home he 'found the fact to be indeed so'. From here, he moves on to description then praise of the dead. (Note in passing that he uses 'persona' in the classically correct sense, of a 'role' or 'figment': Milton will castigate Salmasius for using it in the much later sense of simply 'person'.) In 1645, choosing to include the written encomiums of his Italian friends (including Dati), Milton had to perform a balancing act. Since they all praise his abilities, and some to an extreme which might offend or dissuade readers, he guards himself by guiding the reader into the right spirit or posture of reception. He does it with elegance and wit: Haec quae sequuntur de Authore testimonia, tametsi ipse intellegebat non tarn de se quam supra se esse dicta, eo quod praeclaro ingenio viri, nee non amici ita fere solent laudare, ut omnia suis potius virtutibus, quam veritati congruentia nimis cupide affingant, noluit tamen horum egregiam in se voluntatem non esse notam; Cum alii praesertim ut id faceret magnopere suaderent. Dum enim nimiae laudis invidiam totis ab se viribus amolitur, sibique quod plus aequo est non attributum esse mavult, judicium interim hominum cordatorum atque illustrium quin summo sibi honori ducat, negare non potest. (The author knows that the tributes concerning himself which follow are not so much words of praise as overpraise,18 because men of remarkable talent who are also friends are wont, for the most part, to eulogize and fashion all things with excessive warmth according to their own excellence rather than be consistent with truth. However, the author was not willing that their good wishes for him not be known, especially since others have earnestly urged that he make them known. For while he seeks with all his strength to ward offthe odium of excessive praise, and prefers that he should not have attributed to him more than is fair, nevertheless, he cannot deny that he considers these judgements of wise and distinguished men a supreme honour.) It is the difficult yet clear and strenuous syntax which first commands attention, so that in experiencing its sinew we concede distinction of mind, so that in turn praise seems fitting. The praise may be excessive, he says, but that only goes to show what good friends are speaking it: he will cite them for their own honour more than his — a generous, if precarious

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position is being sought. Also precarious are the double negatives at the close of both sentences, yet of course by being double negatives ('cannot deny') they avoid a crude or bumptious affirmative. Besides, this author 'thrusts away' or heaves aside all envy, using again that strong verb amolior which stood out in his prolusion. A personal, strong voice is felt in this verb, in the thought, the firm contempt for envy and malice.19 The voice is felt most of all in the muscular periodic sentence. Here, to use Thomas Corns's distinctions20 again, of 'left-' and 'right-branching' sentences from 'embedded' ones, whereby subordinate clauses precede, follow or bisect the main clause: the whole thing is really one single thought, one complex period whose first sentence is embedded then right-branching, whereupon its second sentence expands and explains, hinging on 'enim', with a balanced left-branching. The persona emerges as no shrinking violet, but a cross between Erasmus and Houdini; a humanist well-befriended by fellow-humanists on the basis of accomplishment. On the other hand, when occasion requires, as in 1640, he can efface himself; choosing the persona of praiser, eye on the object of praise. Decorum rules, and elegantly. THE FIRST DEFENCE (PRIMA DEFENSIO),

165I21

By now Milton could choose and project a persona through his Latin prose. So when it came time to adopt that of humanist controversialist, against a more famous and ostensibly formidable opponent, he was ready. The sequence of events is well known, but notice its swiftness. The King had been tried and executed by Parliament (January 1649). Milton had of his own volition defended those actions in the Tenure of Kings (February 1649). Employment by Parliament followed - the Secretaryship for the Foreign Tongues (March) and the answering of Eihon Basilikeby Eikonoklastes (ordered March, completed October). In January 1650 the Council of State ordered Milton, by now its chief mouthpiececum-propagandist, to answer the Defensio Regia, which had been commissioned from the French humanist scholar Salmasius by Charles II, and had reached England in May 1649. Now Milton was to defend the English Revolution, the cause of religion, and his native country, to the whole of Europe. He would do it in Latin, the lingua franca of politics and thought. Being unknown in Europe, he was David to the Goliath of Salmasius (an old and famous philological warrior). Milton would show

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what he could do, not only with reasoning but with Latin. Such was the importance of Latin as medium that, to many European readers, especially the more uncommitted ones eyeing someone else's quarrels, good Latin could help if not win the argument. Milton the Latinist girded up his loins, as never before. Consider the exordium of the Prima Defensio. The opening sentence, which at 113 words long is too large to quote, comprises syntactically a left- then right-brancher, both with subordinate clauses inside one another, followed by a lengthy final apposition which itself branches into further dependent clauses. Logically, it hinges on an a fortiori: if even an ordinary subject merits a proportional exordium, what must this defence deserve, being 'on well-nigh the greatest of all subjects'? Ethically, it glances at Aristotle's Ethics, the desirable mean state, by neither omitting nor overdoing introduction. Allusively, it adduces Tacitus, most scathingly dense of ancient authors: let me not be as 'empty of matter' ('vacuus rerum', line 2) as my opponent Salmasius. And when the sentence at length concludes, it does so on a weighty clausula, 'ipse nihilo minus judicer'.22 The word 'judicer', CI may be judged', invites the audience to do just that; judge the performance now set in motion, but do so in the all-round humanist way, style and matter and their interaction. The period resounds, it employs numerous humanist weapons adeptly, it displays complexity and variety, density and energy, it ends mightily: what should he then fear from this 'judgement'? No single feature of style has salience now, much rather the impression given is of versatile strength, strength through being a very compleat humanist. Several more periods roll forth, and each ends with a sonorous clausula that amounts to onomatopoeia. Next comes 'securi percussam', Charles I 'smitten with axe' in the Roman phrase for legal execution.23 The third period closes on 'facile defendam', the freer running short syllables embodying the idea of easily refuting a futile opponent. The fourth sentence clinches this sense of confident, many-weaponed ease: it is short (20 words), it is balanced (the claims of the people and those of God), and God gets the last word ('ubique testantur Deum'. The speaker has the biggest artillery of all, it appears, the clausula giving mimetic finality to the Deity (cretic, then iamb: - - - 1 - - - - ) . And still Milton can go one better. To demonstrate God's backing he now cites Virgil and the Bible. 'Superbos et effraenatos reges, supra humanum modum sese efferentes, solet [Deus] deturbare' (VII. 4~6)24 must evoke the prophecy to Virgil's Aeneas that Rome's mission is to 'debellare superbos', 'overcome the proud'. And it evokes even more the

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words of the Magnificat (Luke 1. 51-2): 'Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui / Deposuit potentes de sede' ('He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats.5) Convergence of independent testimony, authoritative to humanist and Christian respectively, must carry conviction. Note the qualifying phrase, too, 'supra humanum modum', in which speaks the Christian humanist, about human limits. Six sentences into the speech, Milton has employed a wide array of humanist weapons. He has conveyed his humorous contempt for an ill-informed and rash oppponent. He has done all this without committing hubris either, because he is recognizing first principles, greater glories. The unknown David, fighting the humanist with the giant reputation, carries on with equal verve. Mention of God suggests an aligning of revolutionary England with the image to end all images: England as Israel on Exodus, we 'followed God as our leader' ('ilium Ducem secuti', VII. 6. 4). For good measure, we are 'venerating the divine footsteps, printed far and wide' ('impressa passim divina vestigia venerantes'). There is an elegant phonological patterning to this, using s and v. And though the thought is not a Roman one it is a very Protestant one. Protestants, as well as humanists, are the constituency to be persuaded, and this both by force of argument and rhetoric and by pleasing. Not only is Milton having the biggest gladiatorial fight of his life: he is enjoying it. On the next page he is more obviously mingling the useful with the pleasurable, in a fusillade of small but cumulative felicities, all dear to the humanist palate: (a) apt quotation, (b) the mot juste, (c) precision of compound verbs (a favourite instance of (b), this), and (d) final demolition by massive hendiadys. I take these in turn, (a) The phrase 'verborum lenociniis' (Verbal pimpings', vn. 8. 12) to describe the Eikon Basilike is drawn from Minucius Felix: he, significantly enough, was a third century Christian apologist with a flair for ironic debating on confessional matters, (b) 'Populo se venditantem' (Charles I in Eikon Basilike was 'selling himself to the people', ibid.) hits home because of the exactness of the verb: the frequentative/desiderative suffix on 'vendit-' suggests eagerness to be bought, as it were prostitutiveness.25 (c) Milton characterizes himself, replying, as a vigorous defender by the string of strong verbs, whose precision stems from the right choice of prepositional prefix fraiargui atque summowi, refellam atque &cutiam': 'throw the proofs back, thrust them aside, knock the lies in all directions', 'dis-', that is to smithereens), (d) At the climax of the same sentence, not only these strong

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verbs are paired, but adverbs and nouns. I mark the joins of the four pairs to show Milton's vehement fourfold hendiadys: 'redargui et summovi, tarn . . . feliciter tamque vere, petulantiam et mendacia, refellam atque discutiam'. Note incidentally that he varies the conjunctions by synonyms, lest these obtrude. Note more essentially the sheer weight of the ending of this period (another very long one): 'declamatoris huius exotici petulantiam et mendacia refellam atque discutiam', 'I refute and demolish this interfering-foreign rhetorician's impudent lies.' Since 'exotici' has two meanings, 'foreign' and 'meddling', just about everything here goes in twos. Milton hits out with a stylistic two-handed engine. To repeat, he is having fun. He wants it to be fun for the humanist reader, because what else could sustain even that reader through hundreds of pages of demolition-job? And so he intensifies the insulting fun in the next three pages (8-14). He does it by starting off a series of inventive insults. These intersperse the whole of the rest of the refutation, like a cross between running gags and comic subplots. First he calls Salmasius a 'busybody', 'ardelio'. Apt word, fair comment; for the waspish satirist Martial used it, and after all why is a foreigner joining in an English dispute? (Answer in a moment, 'for money'.) Then Salmasius is summed up in yet another hendiadys: all that Salmasius brings to this argument, on life-and-death matters, is 'arrogantiam et Grammaticam', his presumption and his grammar, which are made to denigrate each other. Soon his 'professoriae linguae' ('expert's tongue') is mentioned (10. 18). 'Professoria' can mean either 'expert' or 'typical of a teacher of rhetoric', but as it is used about Seneca by Tacitus (him again) we know that Milton is emphasizing the derogatory sense while playing on the other.26 Humanist readers of Tacitus, the mordant exposer of phonies, surely enjoyed this hit. These were all quick thrusts, almost asides. But soon, warming to his work of dismissing the opponent by derogatory yet apt caricature images, Milton slows the pace. He depicts Salmasius in two little scenes, one more or less true, one imagined with the help of Roman comedians. First, he describes vividly how Charles IFs chaplain brought the coins of payment to Salmasius at his house - in a 'purse with beads on it'. Milton neatly conjoins the word 'sacred', 'Sacellanus' ('custodian of the shrine or holy things') with the vulgar word 'crumena' ('purse', a word most at home in the satirist Juvenal and the comedian Plautus). Now follows a deliciously absurd caricature of Salmasius pretending to embrace the man of God, but actually embracing the money! We need not feel Milton

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was wasting his creative talents on this prose, because his fictional, image-making powers are well engaged. At once these powers blossom. Launched perhaps by 'crumena' diction as virtual allusion - Milton imagines a whole scene from a play, starring Salmasius: 'here comes the man himself; the door creaks; enter the actor' - to start quoting from Terence, the Eunuch. It would be that play: Salmasius is going to be seen as a eunuch. Thus the humanist reader, who loved Plautus and Terence and for whom those writers constituted the living ideal of comedy, is laughing as if at a hitherto unknown scene from Roman comedy. It is at this precise moment that Milton begins quoting from Salmasius' treatise, before the laughter and the analogy can subside. Jokes continue in a varying, abounding stream: a fantasia about ears, such as the long (asses') ears of grammarians (14. 15-23); exposure of a non-regulation usage of the word persona (— 'role, mask', not 'person' in classical Latin), making the pundit out to be a barbarian; describing his speaking by the verb ampullari (deriving from 'ampulla', a bulbous wine-jar, so here comes some more diverting image-making); punning on Salmasius' name and that of Salmacis, a very choice and Ovidian metamorphosis now because Salmacis was an insatiable nymph who was united with Hermaphroditus into a bisexual entity; and so on. The point is not that such insulting is distasteful or childish. It is simply the street-fighting aspect of any political acrimony: it had to be funny and effective; and it was. (Those on the receiving end of Parliamentary taunting feel affronted, but bystanders can enjoy it in a spirit more sportive than anything.) To make humanists laugh like this, to make them laugh equally from pleasures of recognition and aptness, was an integral part of the (Parliament- and God-given) task. Like most seventeenth-century satire, Milton's satire attacks. He mocks, ridicules, lampoons, and convicts his opponent whilst entertaining humanist Europe as diversely as he may. Like Dryden (who learnt from Milton and used him) Milton is waging 'immortal war with wit'; a war of wit, by wit, and about wit. The war is fundamentally serious even in the knockabout. CONCLUSION

And it worked. How humanists reacted to these aspects of the Prima Defensio is not directly recorded. The demand for a sequel suggests it was a triumph; and on the sequel and its style, there does exist apt comment.

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Consider the words of Elie Bouhereau: 'II est partout si brillant et il dit des injures de si bonne grace que quelque peu malin que tu sois, tu ne laisseras pas de t'y divertir' ('He is everywhere so brilliant and he says insults with so beautiful grace that, however little malicious you may be, you won't stop being diverted with it'.)27 This Bouhereau may have been Protestant, which would make him more readily amused, and he wrote in 1672; but the comment is apt and true, indeed the approach is my own. Milton played his part, as humanist wit-satirist-orator-logician, not to mention prophet, to the fullest. He played it very well. It was the acme of his whole life's and study's development to date. He played — in a spirit of enjoyment of totally serious play — all the parts of the humanist, before the humanists of Europe, regarding a great issue, with a fervour that included the patriotic but went wider, to first principles of a more than patriotic scope. It is really no wonder that he postponed the writing of Paradise Lost, nor even that he defied blindness and illness to write two more such Defences.

We can go further. The feeling, often voiced in books on Milton, that he ought to have stuck to his poetry, and maintained a dignified silence on nasty politics, is a ridiculous anachronism. I would like to hear his own (Latin) comment on it. The newer view, that we should heed his Defences because they had political importance and interest, does more justice to them, yet still to the context rather than to the texts themselves. He was performing, in his fattest role to date, to his largest and most cosmopolitan audience (far, far larger and more diverse than his audience in Paradise Lost), his most congenial part, to great and pleasurable effect. Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci (The writer who both profits and delights the audience deservedly wins all the prizes.) The Horatian tag is incessantly quoted by renaissance humanists, usually as critics or poets. Yet it applies with equal force here, to Milton's prose polemic in the crisis of 1651. The whole development of his Latin prose writing now reaches its culmination.

CONCLUSION TO PART ONE

Multilingualism in Milton's Latin prose

The First Defence not only became the climax and practical justification of Milton's writing of Latin prose: it provided splendid scope for his whole multilingualism. To close part one of the enquiry, and before part two shows the impact of multilingualism on the three major English poems, I stress further how fundamental his languages were to the scope and force of the Defence, with some reference to other prose genres.

PHILOLOGY AND COMPOSITION

Against Salmasius, Milton's philology emerged from his study into the European cockpit; from theory to unforeseen practice, from private to very public. He corrects Salmasius on all sorts of language-arts, in all three classical tongues: usage, translation, interpretation, even composition. For example, drawing on his protracted Greek studies, he contests the meaning of passages from Aeschylus and Euripides.1 Again, drawing on his Hebrew studies, he tackles Salmasius on the meaning of 'mishpat', because it bears on the rights and duties of kings.2 Or again, he re-composes a poem of Martial, tofitthe new occasion. It is in scazontes, the 'limping' metre: the line is iambic till the last foot, which by switching to trochee makes the line as a whole 'limp', to an effect of comical bathos.3 The impact of such varied applications of language-arts is naturally to convince the humanist audience, that the writer possesses multiple humanist credentials. That aids persuasion. But it confirms, equally, Milton's attitude to himself. As in Poems, 1645 he is both impressing and expressing. He gives himself intellectual fun. Even if the Defence as a whole was drudgery, the elements of multilingual play could relieve it. He could perform again, on a spectacularly wide stage now, those language-arts which he had seemed to set aside. 99

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At least three principles govern Milton's recourse through his languages to multicultural proof texts. These are: his going back to roots or origins; his comprehensiveness; and his selectivity. The going back to originals is an important part of the proof. It coincides with Milton's whole commitment to languages. Going back to originals in their own tongues is going back to the roots of knowledge. This is why etymology (digging for root senses) or textual emendation (recovering authorial sense), and all philology in the broad sense, are hardly to be separated from his going back to the origins of one human problem after another - kingship, covenant, social contract, law. The language-arts not only image the thinking - they aid it, they are continuous with it. The comprehensiveness of Milton's learning shows best in his sense of history. In the First Defence he has to explain all history, because in history both kingship and covenant originated. He sweeps through the history narrated by the Old and New Testaments; then on into ecclesiastical history; then takes his dragnet to pagan history; and so to British (Celtic) - all the history he had studied during the 1630s, and the 1640s, when he also wrote history. The Commonplace Book amply demonstrates how varied was the history he read, and how systematically he moralized its meanings. Much of it was drawn upon in 1651. Yet his selectivity in the Defence and elsewhere tells us even more. For instance, he dwells on Roman history to show that supreme magistrates are not above the law. To make this central point against Salmasius and Charles I, Milton instances the expulsions of Mezentius and Tarquin, and the deaths of Caesar and Caligula, Nero and Domitian. To do this he uses the words of Roman authors upon them (Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny).4 Selectivity works with comprehensiveness. The choices are apt. The coverage (from the foundations of Rome through to the first two dynasties of the Emperors) is complete; for this covers all the greatness of Rome, from its origins to its status as world power at its greatest extent. Through knowledge of those authors in their original, he as it were gets an 'ought' from an 'is':5 Rome taught a duty, to get rid of tyrants. THE CONVERGENCE OF TESTIMONY

Moral themes emerge, not simply from history, but from Milton's seizure of points where his languages show him historical convergence of

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testimony among their cultures. Most strikingly, since in terms of interaction or even dialectic Rome and Israel learnt rather little from one another, he seizes on the essentials of his view of history from crises of both. They show him how salvation and failure came about. And since one and all in Milton's day believed history was instructive (because recurrent), historiography led straight to choice now. That choice embraced the moral, political and spiritual, without separation or differentiation. The simplest illustration has just been given: the recurrent Roman need to rescue the state (respublica, = that state of social living which is 'public', has come down to and belongs to all citizens). Not to act, for the Roman, is failure and betrayal Exactly the same passion and absolutism runs through all biblical history. Milton found it further on in Gildas, the Celtic historian of Celtic collapse. He found it in Sallust, his preferred classical historian.6 He found it in Cicero, who not only held that as consul he had saved Rome from Catilina,7 but tried to do it again against the Triumvir Antony, and died as a consequence.8 And if knowing the past and its patterns qualifies Milton as historian to advise for the future, the moral bases qualify him to speak on politics past, present and future - as a prophet. Very often he affects the tones of a Jeremiah as well as a Cicero. It is a heady, powerful combination. He opens the Defence like the prophet, claiming that England has survived Charles's tyranny by 'following' the cLord and his clear way, the divine footsteps imprinted everywhere'.9 He closes the Defence by an astonishing reliance on Cicero. THE ENDING

It is Cicero who breathes the fire into the first, 1651, ending to the work. Milton emulates Cicero's impassioned appeals (the Philippics, of 44-43 BC) to the Romans, urging them not to throw away what Brutus and Cassius had won for Roman (well, Senatorial) liberty. Especially, let them not throw it away in appeasement or credulity with regard to the Triumvir, Mark Antony. The same fire is in Milton's belly in his final appeal. Yet on reflection, how very odd the ending is. The Defence is in Latin for consumption by the uncommitted humanists and others of Europe; yet Milton closes it by direct appeal to his fellow-countrymen. Do not now, 'O Cives' (fellow-citizens), subside into faction or greed or faintheartedness (VII. 551-2). Suddenly the European audience find themselves listening in, on an internally directed debate.

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The reasons, I suggest, are these, (a) The continental audience receive a hint to stay out of this English quarrel; which suits the Commonwealth cause nicely, especially in 1651 (just before the Protectorate), (b) More important, Cicero can be heard all the more resoundingly. The late turning of the utterance is towards a new philippic, making more overt what had long been implicit, (c) Cicero, the Roman, suits this perfervid appeal. Romans were a practical, secular, pragmatic people. But therefore they felt towards Rome as towards their mother; with pietas, religiously. So Milton makes his appeal, which is simultaneously biblical and prophetic, an appeal to the sacredness of things Roman; to the Roman, and therefore to the practising humanist. Style supports stance. Milton ends with a cataclysmic peroration (ninety-nine words long), itself culminating with an authentic massive Ciceronian clausula: . . . vosque multo iratiorem brevi tempore experturi estis Deum, quam aut infensum inimici vestri, aut vos benignum et faventem, prae caeteris omnibus terrarum orbis gentibus hodiernis, experti estis.10 (And in a little time ye willfindGod far more wrathful against you than either your adversaries have found him embittered, or ye have found him aforetime gracious and favourable beyond all other nations at this time on earth.) The sense pivots on the contrast of future and past in verbs: 'experturi estisV'experti estis'. The echoed 'estis' ensures recollection, hence control. The double comparison, God 'embittered' against adversaries but gracious towards 'ye', keeps up the need for complex attention to the end. The reward of staying tuned is the crashing clausulaic pattern: spondaic, resolving, then more than ever massively spondaic; 1 _

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Cicero would have approved. Humanists did approve. 'I find him so brilliant and so agreeable everywhere that I should prefer to read entire volumes of his rather than a single page by his adversary, who seemed to me everywhere very pedantic and not at all witty', said Elie Bouhereau.12 He thought that even opponents would laugh with Milton. That was the governing aim, which Milton's languages - and only they - could achieve.13

PART TWO

Multilingualism and the major English poems

It is scarcely possible to interpret coherently the rhetoric of European literatures, the key notions of sublimity, of satire, of laughter which they embody and articulate without a just awareness of the Latin 'implication', of the unbroken, often almost subconscious negotiations of intimacy or of distance between the author in the vulgate and the Latin mould. (George Steiner)1 Now we apply the methods and perspective of part one to Milton's major English poems. Thus in so far as his languages interact within the grand style they may solve, or ease, or redefine the problems which that style poses nowadays. Again, once we recognize how his languages helped him as best access to best minds we are well placed to appraise influences on Milton — where 'influence' means not merely the pervasive presence of notable exemplars within the grand style, but precise voices or 'signatures'2 of those whom Milton emulates. For one thing, the key contributors in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes tarn out

all to be from foreign languages, authors whom Milton had read in those languages. (Even the Bible; not least the Bible.) Secondly, moreover, Harold Bloom3 need not have exempted Milton from the 'anxiety of influence'. Something strenuous, and persistent, and at times contentious enters into his emulation with Virgil and Latin. Ambivalent elements of his composing are understood better when set alongside his multilingual exemplar, Dante.

CHAPTER 6

Latin and Milton's other languages in the style of Paradise Lost

'Latinism' within the grand style is the felt presence of Latin diction and usage within the English, interacting with it. Most readers of Paradise Lost felt it, and liked or loathed the poem accordingly, until Alastair Fowler expunged many supposed instances; and concluded that the poem is the 'most colloquial secondary epic ever written'.1 Thomas Corns's recent study has continued the tendency to expunge, along with the polemical tone. The present study, on the other hand, is committed to the view that Latin — and Milton's other tongues — are an important interlingual intertext for Milton's poems. I hear more such interactions than the current orthodoxy allows. Moreover, the precedent of Dante, relevant as usual, persuades me that an epic may be colloquial and interlingual in the sense I intend: as Tuscan and Latin for Dante, so a more English hybridizing for Milton. Accordingly, I shall summarize the debate hitherto, then propose different terms of reference, to focus attention on the most profitable, least contentious interactions. Though their proportion is indeed smaller than used to be claimed, their placing, clustering and local impact enrich the text in important ways. So of course do the contributions in diction and usage from Milton's other languages, albeit by less frequent interactions. THE DEBATE HITHERTO, AND THE DEFINITION OF LATINISM

We can accept, to start with, that Eighteenth-century critics and editors left to a credulous posterity a considerable legacy of comment and annotation which attributed to Milton a penchant for using Latin words in senses which are redolent of their classical signification rather than their current English meaning (Corns, p. 95). Broadly, Corns is right that 'What has disappeared are those cases where 105

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Milton uses words of Latin origin in senses which were contemporaneously current3 in English. Resorting to the Oxford English Dictionary confirms that 'where the editors' knowledge of Latin surpasses their knowledge of seventeenth-century English they have simply duped themselves'.2 I am less certain that 'Such supposed "Latinisms" have traditionally been invoked to substantiate claims for Milton's unEnglishness and to support an adverse assessment of his achievement.' How many English readers have ever wanted an 'unEnglish' Milton, and how much has that ever mattered? It is all too clear that the campaign by F. R. Leavis to dethrone Milton by these and other means is itself insular; which Milton's style is not. It is equally clear that the resistance to Leavis from Fowler has tilted the balance the other way. It is very clear indeed that Fowler's commentary discovers new Latinisms as busily as it disallows old ones. What is lacking in Fowler, and still in Corns, is any weighty rebuttal of the view of (for example) Christopher Ricks3 that Latinism enables puns and echoism to make the grand style denser, so commanding a more complex attention and thus persuading more completely. Yet once more, therefore, I shall ask, what is - and what is not - a Latinism? Here Fowler did a notable yet insufficient service by distinguishing four 'bands' of Latinism: There is a spectrum of possible Latinity of diction in which four bands may be distinguished; i. The Latin usage is the primary sense or chain of discourse; and is completely new in English... Milton very rarely innovates so extremely... 2. The Latin usage is the primary sense; and occurs in English only or mostly in poetic contexts... Paradise Losthas few Latinisms of this kind. 3. The Latin usage is a secondary sense only. The primary sense is an ordinary English usage, but a Latin usage is present in addition, as an allusion or ambiguity . . . There are many 'Latinisms' of this type; but they could never be said to weaken the native sinews of anyone's style. Such effects enrich and deepen. 4. The primary sense is an ordinary English usage, occurring in prose contexts, which happens also to be a Latin usage. This, if it were to be considered Latinism at all, would be Latinism at its faintest and least objectionable. Examples of this type naturally occur throughout Paradise Lost in great numbers, (pp. 432—3) That is all well said; so well, though, that it provokes a swarm of further questions. Why stop at four 'bands'? Is there any sense in which the four stand equal? Is it not a lopsided classification, having two bands tiny and the other two huge? Would we not rather expect a continuum, or bell curve? Can we accept so simple a sundering of'poetical' from 'ordinary' usage, or 'primary' from 'secondary' senses? What if most of the cases

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worth considering are 'borderline'? What if they bunch within the third band, for the simple reason that only by being of that sort will they reach the ideal readership, those who care about the theme and about epic? Why suppose that Milton did not hear what was heard by his contemporaries, also Latin-educated but less so than he? Who precisely is hearing or not hearing the interactions? Such questions deserve a more open address than both Leavis and his opponents have given. The polemical tone is felt unduly: 'native sinews', 'least objectionable' - who is still objecting? It should be salutary, this late in the day, to consider instances rather than declare principles; to explore interlingualism in a few of Milton's myriad particular combinations of Latin usage or diction with English. No one conclusion or position will emerge triumphant, except that we find an experimentalism of bilingual engagement, Milton using his entire intellectual - which means, multilingual - armoury in his best poem. The ensuing discussion will attempt a more inductive analysis, building on Fowler but arriving through induction at more numerous, overlapping categories than his. PARALLEL CASES: SPENSER AND MILTON

To recover a context of understanding, one more apposite than that of eighteenth-century editors or twentieth-century critical warfare, let us glance at parallel cases: the Latinism of Spenser in the Faerie Queene, as Milton's only English epic exemplar; and coinage in Milton's other languages, to see how he neologized outside English verse. Sir Guyon, Spenser's champion in his legend 'Of Temperaunce', is on quest to destroy the Bower of Bliss. He comes his nearest to failing in the quest when he is almost deflected by 'Two naked Damzelles' in a fountain.4 What slackens the hero's stride is their alternate concealing and revealing of their bodies: '[they] th'amarous sweet spoiles to greedy eyes revele' (64. 9). 'Amarous' is one of several 1590s spellings of 'amorous', = 'lovely, arousing desire'. That is clear. But Blount's 1656 Gbssographia.. .[of] hard words.. .as are now used gives 'amarous' = 'bitter,

sharp, froward . . .', all of which go back to Latin 'amarus', bitter. The sweetness of the 'spoiles' will leave a bitter aftertaste, then. Now, here is just the sort of double entendre by which Spenser keeps up a moral vigilance in the alert reader alongside the seductive onomatopoeias of his description of the Bower. I find it more natural to suppose that his readers were to hear 'amarus' within 'amarous' = amorous, than that 'amarous' = bitter was current in 1590 with no sense of its Latin. It is

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more economical, as part of a transaction between a Latin-educated poet and his readers. To insist we argue backwards from Blount in terms of a sufficient currency for 'amarous' = bitter seems unduly circuitous. But if so, how many of Fowler's band 3 examples, and even of his band 4, similarly read best as transactions in Latinism between poet and readers experienced in Latin, and especially in its poetry? Spenser being Milton's chief English exemplar, it is a question worth asking. A second suggestive context is Milton's coinage in his other languages. In his Latin verses he makes up rather few words, and when he does it he forms them on principles implied by existing wordstock. Thus his verb surdeo, 'I am deaf, resembles pre-existent 'denominative' verbs (called 'statives' in Hebrew), such as albeo, calveo, or claudeo ('I am white/bald/lame'). 5 Mostly, though, his coinages are adjectives, since Latin verse liked (and metrical exigency might require) amplification, of which epithets gave the readiest supply. Examples include 'coelifuga' ('heaven-fleeing', said of Christ), and 'stellipar' ('star-begetting', said of the sky at the Nativity).6 Since the parts are common words, and kindred compounds existed, the new word is more like grafting than coining. It uses ordinary things and established law to create. Actually, coinage does not flaunt itself after the early In Quintum Novembris, The somewhat special needs of this satire in epic hexameters on Satan's failure to blow up King James on 5 November make coinage more rife than elsewhere, usually as bombastic polysyllables to inflate then expose the wicked Papacy. Examples include 'tricoronifer' ('triplecrown-wearer'), said of the Pope. Otherwise, Milton's Latin moves away from coinage. His most striking effects are found in the new usage of received words, as in 'fractaeque agitata crepuscula silvae',7 in which Latin had not conceived of an 'agitated twilight', light on the move, till Milton. For his Italian, having less confidence, he used only a pre-existent poetic wordstock; but here we noticed successes, as well as failures, among his novel uses of existing words. Dantean compound verbs with in- as prefix can signify both process and joining, to embody a new state in its moment of formation. Tasso in the Discorsi had discussed and recommended this practice, and Milton heeded Tasso. The enthusiastic following of this pattern in the Italian poems modulates into English coinages for Paradise Lost; such as 'imparadised', 'imbrowned' and 'imbrute'. And even if somebody were to turn up these words in a plainer context in English from before 1667, it remains more likely - even aside from the perspective of the present study - that he was infusing his

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English with a Dantean spirit in these rare Italianisms; crare' in both senses. Consequently, whilst conceding that no strong inference can be made from innovative diction and usage in his second languages to his practice in Paradise Lost, we can at any rate combine the cases of Spenser in English and of Milton himself outside it to frame expectations as follows. Boldness will be spasmodic, perhaps clustered. Coinages will conform to the language's implicit rules. New uses of existing diction (band 3) will far exceed outright coinages. Yet the boundaries between bands 2 and 3 will be hard to draw (as will those between 3 and 4). Accordingly, as a matter of method now, we should not set limits or insist on categories in advance of meeting Milton's imagination within particular utterances. And we should be looking for interaction, not so much at the cellular level of the word as in phrases, lines or clauses. For then we see the multilingual interaction in the context where it seemed good to Milton that it should interact. THE TROUBLE WITH BOUNDARIES

The trouble with boundaries, and for that matter the importance of borderline cases and the resultant need for pragmatic delicacy, can all be seen in the marvellous words describing how Adam waits for Eve after she has fallen: Great joy he promis'd to his thoughts, and new Solace in her return, so long delay'd; Yet oft his heart, divine of something ill, Misgave him; hee the falt'ring measure felt; And forth to meet her went . . . (ix. 845-9, m y emphasis)8

In the first place, 'divine + of inhabits the borderline between diction and syntax. Secondly, the OED tells us that the usage, meaning 'prophetic of, is rare in English and first occurs here. Thirdly, if being unsure whether Milton coins it from Latin we consult the Latin dictionary, we find the usage common in Latin, and exemplified by two notable occurrences - both with the same 'objective' genitive, directed at future evil - in Horace. Fourthly, we then notice that not only is Horace in general a favourite author of Milton's,9 but has been echoed as the climax of Eve's preceding speech (ix. 832-3, her twisted version of 'tecum vivere amem, tecum obeam libens'.)10 Thus the phrase gains

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impact by its Latin connection. And lastly, that is even more the case if we admit other senses of'divine': the diviner part of Adam 'divines' the nearness of danger. And we should admit this nuance derived from philology: the newness of the English idiom alerts us to multiple, ironic meaning. What I have termed pragmatic delicacy seems, accordingly, more useful than an insistence that 'divine of be either solely a Latinism or else not. For those who read Horace, it probably is; for those who do not, the context steers the sense; but Milton himself did read Horace. A final conclusion from this example is that no general conclusion, and no method, should be drawn from it. Any Latinism may be particular, unique, local, invented for its occasion - though equally it may have a parallel elsewhere, or indeed many. LATINISM IN SYNTAX

I take next three examples of probable Latinism of syntax. For once, it seems, syntax may illuminate more simply than diction does — perhaps because it looks beyond the lexicographical monad, the word, towards clauses or sentences, which Milton makes so long that they give strong contextual guidance into meaning, complex and multiple yet lucid. Be that as it may, the three examples offer us two pervasive usages, and another that is unique (so illustrating that a Latinism may be unique, and occasional, or not). And of those two, one is more surely Latinate than the other. (a) Absolute constructions point to our issue at its most intractable. How did Milton, or his contemporary readers, react to the likes of this: God says that by the help of his rebel angels, 'This inaccessible high strength, the seat / Of Deity supreme, us dispossess^ I He [Satan] trusted to have seized' (vn. 141-3, my emphases)? Readers of Latin soon become familiar with the ablative absolute, as readers of Greek do with its genitive cousin. Yet absolute constructions, whether or not taken from ancient languages, are plentiful in Middle English. So the question arises whether in Milton they are felt as Latinate or native, or indeed both. I submit that it is an open question which way Milton himself would vote if he had ever had to; but that for his readers it depends whether they have read the absolute construction most in English or another language. For Milton's first readers this seems to me very much an open question. That is, they would meet the absolute usage early on in their Latin reading (in Caesar's Gallic Wars, for

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instance), very possibly before they met its English counterpart in their English reading, if Latin doings edged out English ones in their local syllabus. It was not only in Latin verse composition that Latin took educational priority: after all, it was the medium as well as subject of a grammar school syllabus. So much in general. The particular utterance, however, is so inverted in its word order that the absolute construction is to be subsumed under that quality, to give us Milton's Father at his most condensed and difficult. Those who hear no Latin will find it only condensed and difficult. Those who hear Latin will hear Roman models who cultivate difficulty: Sallust, Lucan, Augustine. To side with the latter group seems to me not absurd, though certainly optional: the gain in complexity of understanding is offset, yet not overwhelmed, by loss of immediacy. Either way, we must ask why God is made to talk like this. Perhaps such density is a shorthand, the occupational hazard of theological mind.11 (b) A second pervasive type of locution strikes me as more decisively Latinate. This is the use of a predicative past participle to avoid abstract nouns, which Latin disliked: thus 'navis capta', literally 'the ship captured', is idiomatic for 'the capture of the ship'. The idiom is familiar in the Roman dating formula 'Ab urbe condita' (AUG), 'from the founding of the city' though literally 'from the city founded'. It was enshrined in the epic tradition, too, by Milton's time: 'Gerusalemme Liberata' means 'the freeing of Jerusalem'. So Milton's own title means 'the losing of Paradise,' not 'the lost Paradise'; thus declaring itself in a Roman tradition by its grammar, and in an epic one by the parallel with Tasso. Other instances include 'since created man' (i. 573), or 'Adam Unparadiz'd' from the Trinity Manuscript.12 (c) Nonetheless, many Latinisms of syntax do not become a class, but remain a once-only local effect. When Belial during the Great Consult advocates inaction, Milton gives him an English equivalent of Latin's 'licet' + subjunctive for a concessive clause: 'Who knows, / Let this be good, Whether our angry foe / Can give it?' (11. 151—3). The reader (thanks to the punctuation, which is original) is not baffled because there is nothing else 'Let' can mean but 'even supposing'. Any momentary obscurity suits the speaker's purpose: to slither, through lengthy talk of action, into convenient sloth. The weird quick idiom helps to characterize him. Whether or not the reader actually hears any 'licet' in this prominent 'Let', that is the missing link. Similarly at vin. 577-8 with the quite different effect of the play on 'see/seen' (the figure traductio): 'with honour thou may'st love / Thy

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mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise'. This makes little sense in terms of unfallen Eden, where there is no one but Eve for Adam to be seen by. The point lies rather in the different sense carried by the passive of 'see' in Latin video: videor (like German aussehen) meaning 'I seem, I appear' is a commoner sense than 'I am seen'. That sharpens the sense of Raphael's veiled rebuke, into 'Eve is the one who observes you when you appear most foolish' - and so, let your desire of her itself keep you rational, save you from passionate subservience. The usage may be abrupt and elliptical. It is certainly unusual. But it suits the situation, enabling the archangel to make a quick, indeed critical hint, with a leverage which Adam ('half abashed') feels. Even unfallen man winces, to think how he looks to his wife when at his worst. Latinism, the Latin idiom underneath the plain-seeming monosyllables, keeps the critique subtle and rational: you have to be quick yourself to 'see' it for what it is, a searching critique. THE INADEQUACY OF CURRENT CLASSIFICATIONS

'Latinism' often seems like a loose assemblage of distinct particular effects within the style; resisting ascription to this or that band. Here is another instance which hangs — in a fashion all its own — between syntax and diction, between Latinism and allusion, between English and Latin. The Father has told the loyal angels that he will repair any depopulation of heaven by a new creation, mankind, who after trial will enter heaven, with earth and heaven becoming one another. He goes on, 'Meanwhile inhabit lax, ye Powers of Heav'n . . . ' (vn. 162). The phrase is odd, first, syntactically: 'inhabit' is not recorded intransitively by the OED after 1588. An intransitive usage occurs in Latin, but governing a dative rather than absolutely. 'Lax', on the other hand, in the sense of'so as to have ample room' is firmly declared a Latinism by the OED (under 'laxity' as well as under 'lax'). My own guess is that it was wanted thus for conciseness, and for the assonant slack a pairing; and hence comes the Latinate syntax, made out of hybrid diction, one obsolete anglicism and one clear Latinism. Again, if we ponder the phrase rather than its parts, we are told by one editor that 'the phrase is a Latinism, and imitates "Habitare laxe et magnifice voluit"' (Cicero, De domo sua xliv. 115)'.13 Fowler, who says the phrase 'imitates' Cicero but does not speak of a Latinism, may perceive a case where Latinism verges on allusion, or becomes it. Yet even the allusion is odd: what have Cicero's theme and scathing tone to do with the Father's? The relationship of tenor to vehicle in the allusion is either lax or distracting.

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I find something prefabricated about the phrase at large, as if language and thought were for once being subordinated to requirements of sound; or to a leaden play of mind, be it God's or Milton's.14 At the end of analysis, it remains true that a commonplace idea is taken from a mundane source: something remains to be explained here, and even if we invoke an erratic working of the hooks and eyes of imagination, it still seems a pedantic doodling. The value of such analysis is only heuristic: we have diagnosed one of the poem's 'flats', as Dryden or Addison called them. Quite opposite value accrues from a passage with a similar blurring of terminological boundaries, where the new-created swan with Arched neck Between her white wings mantling proudly, Rows Her state with Oary feet . . . (vn. 438-40) The cognate or internal accusative is found in Latin and English alike: dicta dicere = to say witty sayings; and 'fight the good fight'. So why detect any Latinism? Yet since the phrase feels odd, one might as well say, why not feel the oddity as partly Latinism? Next, indeed, we meet a further Latinism. For after the charm of Anglo-Saxon in 'oary feet' (humanizing the swan) we may recall that Latin remigium = rowing is regular poetic usage in Latin for the movement of legs in swimming or wings in flying (OxLD. b.), as in Virgil's 'remigium alarum', the 'oarage of wings'. The phrasing as a whole, then, almost even-handedly balances the native English with the learned Latin - for an effect, finally and upon reflection, of sublime emotional onomatopoeia. The swan rows across the linebreak. The onomatopoeia lies in the smooth and stately enjambement. The emotion is ofjoy in this beauty from the new creation. It is seen as if new-created because defamiliarized by diction and allusion and syntax, all swimming into and out of each other. The impact is sublime because the words are full-blooded new creation. To its poise as an act of thought the Latinisms are essential: they balance the English. The reader may have noted that most instances so far have come from Books VI-VII, Raphael's instruction of Adam. Is this accidental, or a significant clustering? Do heaven-dwellers use more Latinism than Adam and Eve? Is its presence a mark of their possessing greater insight or experience than Adam, listening? It will be suggested later that the incidence of Latinisms does increase in the middle books, as not only archangelic instruction for Adam and defamiliarizing charm for the reader, but as part of a technical-philosophical-theological tone of these books, itself part of a larger style of multilingual thought. Did it always

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matter to Milton as thinker whether an idea came to him in English words or Latin ones, since his two most-used languages had long ago interpenetrated as far as concerned his thought - about the Bible especially? He is a compound, not coordinate, bilingual. To conclude this section, 'minims of nature' (vn. 482) is a charming instance of his integrated bilingualism. I risk crushing the charm by analysis, because the instance shows the many-sidedness, energy and thrift. 'Minims of nature' alludes to Proverbs 30. 24, 'Quatuor sunt minima terrae'. ('There be four things which are little upon the earth', as the Kingjames Version has it). The phrase connotes wisdom, as the verse ends by claiming minims - such as the ants - are 'sapientiora sapientibus', wiser than the wise). And it appropriates that wisdom by echoing the Bible in an English, personal assimilation. Such tiny touches add up to the poem's continuing power to please, even in a less than dramatic place, and equally its power to convince, because the small effects like the minims themselves point to the larger wisdom, of the 'doctus poeta,' the 'learned' poet. COMPOUND EPITHETS

By doctus in this context I mean something between the special and general senses. The special sense in Latin was somewhat pejorative, being the epithet of the 'neoterics' or 'new/young/modernizing' poets who, after the more rugged versifying of Lucretius, sought to be correct, stylish, well-informed by doing for Latin what Callimachus and other Alexandrians had done for Greek. Virgil began like this, but moved steadily away from what he came to see as narrow and pedantic. The general sense of 'doctus poeta' is broadly that poets were thought to be wise, and to impart wisdom. Between the two senses lies the truth that (as one sees from, say, star- or other lore in ancient poets and their humanist emulators) the poet was expected to offer apt, correct knowledge, on all points that came up. This is why one can make diagrams or time-charts of the night sky in Dante, Chaucer, or Milton. Milton had expressed his aspiration in 1642, thus: 'to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect' (italics mine).15 It comes naturally to a poet who is 'doctus' in this sense to coin epithets which sum up a discourse of learning or thought. Such epithets sum up almost as a technical term does, definingly and nomenclatively. (Nobody but a theologian would coin and use words like 'salvific' or 'soteriology'.)

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It is in this vein that Milton coins 'omnific', in 'Silence, ye troubl'd waves, and thou Deep, peace, / Said then th' Omnific Word' (vn. 216-17). Corns comments16 that 'omnific' merely completes a set of similar divine attributes ('omniscient, 'omnipotent5 . . .) which occur frequently in Milton's writing and in contemporary theological English. Precisely: it sums up a set of commonplaces about God in the Bible and theology. Hardly more startling in formation and novelty is another £-fic' coinage, Death's mace 'petrific' (x. 294), because 'petrify' and 'petrification' were well established. We should not be amazed that Milton could make up such a word, if he did: to do so is not much more than literacy. Rather more personal flavour occurs in the playful 'wondrous Art / Pontifical' (x. 313-14), punning on bridge-bulding/Pope as 'Pontiff (pontijex — priest).17 Milton enjoys his smack at the Papacy, as bridgemaking but deathly, so much so that he repeats it. It reminds me that the biggest of any clusters of Latin verse coinage comes in the heavy-handed satire of'In Quintum Novembris'. The presence of Latinism does not entail subtlety, being only as subtle as the thought which produces it. But therefore the most cogent of the three '-fie' coinages is 'omnific' after all, for the reason given above, that it sums up the most thinking, and for the wider reason that in its phrase it comes to life. The 'all-making' agent is 'the Word'. It remains a paradox (even after allowing for the prevalence in common life of what lawyers and philosophers have called 'performative' utterances) that a voice can make by its sounding; can 'make' all things. The idea is of course ajewish and Christian orthodoxy, proclaimed at the opening of Genesis ('God said . .. and it was so'), and reiterated at the opening of John's gospel ('In the beginning was the Word [logos]9). The orthodoxy is more startling in Greek, where 'word' and 'deed' routinely oppose one another: Hebrew dabar extends wider than 'saying', and the routine opposition is absent. Milton's ostensibly dry or technical coinage is thus foregrounding the crucial fusion, by moving the reader from 'said' to 'Word' by way of 'omnific'. 'Omnific' joins word to Word. 'Omnific' alerts us to Milton's credibility as 'doctus poeta'. He is at home in languages, worlds of words; he coins correctly and aptly. He is at home among ideas, barely distinguishing in the act of thought between ideas and the language they come to him in, to make a new composite attribution to God. He is at home with deeds, to bridge where appropriate the gulf between words and action. It is all thanks to his

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multilingualism, giving access to the varying languages which clothe the ideas about divine action, and combining them in his poem's texture. PARTICIPIALS OF PROCESS

Elsewhere Miltonfindswords which embody ideas about action in away which mimes or foregrounds its processes. He does it prominently in his Latinate passive participles. These are adjectives and verbs simultaneously, the former aspect expressing state or product, the latter expressing process or becoming.18 Instances include 'abrupt' (n. 1049), 'absolute' (VIII. 420), 'adust' (xn. 635), 'circumfused' (vi. 778), 'convolved' (vi. 328), 'deified' (= absorbed in, or is it into, the divine nature: vm. 431), 'denounced' (x. 210), 'devote' (in. 208, ix. 901) with 'devoted' (v. 890), 'extinct' (1.141), 'gemmed' (vn. 325), 'instinct' (xi. 562), 'interrupt' (in. 84), 'intervolved' (v. 623), 'levied' (11.905), 'obdurate' (xn. 205) with 'obdured' (vi. 785), 'obtuse' (xi. 541) . . . Moreover, Milton wields the Latinate active participle with equal force ('congratulant', 'serpent'), or adjectives deriving from Latin verbs by other routes ('irriguous', 'obsequious'). The question to be asked is, naturally, why suppose the Latin root of all such words is operative in them if the word has the same force in the English of 1667; and especially so where the Latin root was no longer of force in that English. My answer comprises not only (a) the expected lexicographical checking but more especially (b) hearing the word in its phrase, and even more (c) in its line, and (d) noting whatever features of syntax or metre or rhythm foreground it. It is the predicative placing of such adjectives which beckons us to a more complex and phrasal scrutiny. Milton as it were holds up the word for inspection, twirls it like a faceted ball, for us to pay it a multiple - including multilingual attention. By contrast, a purely lexicographical approach rushes to judgement, assertive or dismissive, but uninteresting either way. It is too much of a pigeonholing, not global or contextual enough. Words in a poem are not monads. Most of all, some of their crucial element, pleasure, is drained away by such monadism. The loss is most clearly seen in those passive participles. Take Eve, 'lost, / Defac't, deflow'r'd, and now to Death devote' (ix. 901). The sense 'cursed, consigned to destruction' is Elizabethan. But Latin devoveo meant a Roman's voluntary giving of himself (and his army) to the infernal gods for the sake of Rome's survival, a voluntary (or in the army's case unwilled) suicide. And if perchance they survived they had no status in life, having been vowed ritually into a state of non-life. What

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with the deafening alliteration, and iteration of idea, I am loth to deny Milton recall of this Latin nexus of sharply relevant ideas - sacrifice, vow, suicide, self-denial, complicity in the deaths of others, one life and death bound up in another's; a whole condition of forfeited life. It seems false economy to deny them entry, at any rate at the edges of the explosive field of meaning. Or take a clearer Latinism, 'convolved' (vi. 328): 'then Satan first knew pain, / And writh'd him to and fro convolv'd; so sore / The griding sword . . .' It means 'contorted, twisted'. The OED gives it as obsolete, with this passage as first recorded use. What clinched for me the idea that it is Latinism, and activates the fullest force of the verb convolvo, was finding that in Latin it means (a) 'whirl' (b) 'sweep to destruction' (c) 'writhe' (of snakes) (d) 'enfold': the spread of senses is simply fuller and more dynamic, more haunted, if we hear the Latin as equal or primary. Satan twists his body in pain, he hugs it on the way to his ruin like a snake. Certainly the verbal force of '-volved' is felt on the tongue, its onomatopoeia. A kindred 'rolling' meaning accompanies Milton's other words from this root.19 Thus at vi. 623 the 'mazy' movement of the stars, most regular when seeming most irregular, is an 'intervolved' movement: the in-and-out of a cosmic 'dance' (620). This is the first occurrence of 'intervolve' in English, yet the word is not in classical Latin: is it then personal to Milton's vision of words and things? Whether or no, the contrast is radical, between Satan's state of convolution in on himself, and that of the universe engaged in the ennobling interchange of dance. THE BREADTH OF MILTON'S LATIN AND RESULTING LATINISMS

Next, I turn away for a moment from Latin elements within the epic style, to consider their sources. It is easy to forget how much of Milton's education, but also of his self-education and continuing intellectual life, came to him via Latin. The pages of the Commonplace Book, or a list of authors cited, make this manifest. He had read much of that 'well-nigh forgotten intellectual Latinate culture that was widespread in Elizabethan and Jacobean England and affected every area of intellectual life'.20 He may even have read more of it than of its coeval Englishlanguage culture. Certainly he had read deeply and widely in continental Latin culture — in historiography, for example, for otherwise he would have had scant sense of world history. Just because we, now, value the links of English back to Chaucer and Beowulf, there is danger that

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through interest in the later achievements of an English culture we may neglect the greater importance to Milton - and his readers - of Latin culture, and its Italian offspring. Consequently, we should be surprised if Latin did not make an impact on his English high style. And the Latin which is meant is not simply the agreed best of Roman Latin, but another 1600 years of Latin thought, from all the countries of Europe. If only to avoid this further distortion, then, I exemplify the breadth of his Latin sources which appear in his epic as Latinism, be it of diction or syntax or allusion, or combinations of these. A simple instance is the phrasing 'delicious Paradise' at iv. 132. In the Church Fathers the original phrase was 'deliciarumparadisum', literally 'the paradise [or garden] of delights5.21 Milton takes over the Latin thought, but - or is it therefore? - changes its grammar to defamiliarize it, and to make it more his own. Latinism of thought, rather than of diction or syntax, still demonstrates his allegiance to Latin; a Latin later and other than the Latin of Roman literature. The Latinity of the Bible, his Bible, can work in the opposite way, as neither thought nor words but purely sound. It does so whenever he spells a biblical name by neither its English nor its original Hebrew spelling, but by a Latin one: Siloa, Sion, Msroc, Basan. I cannot be as sure as Fowler that he is following the Vulgate - there were many Vulgates, and Latin versions other than Vulgate - but I am sure he preferred Latin sounds in some instances. Latin and euphony often coincided. Nowhere in his epic does he favour transliterated Hebrew. These two facts alone show the importance of an aural Latinism in his English.22 A final example of contribution from later Latin shows how Latin is inseparable from Milton's thought-forms. At vi. 669-77 all Heav'n Had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread, Had not th5 Almighty Father where he sits Shrin'd in his Sanctuary of Heav'n secure, Consulting on the sum of things, foreseen

This tumult, and permitted all, advis'd . . . Lucretius and Ovid are adduced by editors, as each has part of Milton's phrase. But the truth is, Milton had already combined their phrases, to the exact sense of the present passage, in his own early Latin poem: cAt Pater omnipotens fundatis fortius astrius / Consuluit rerum summae...' [Naturam nonpatisenium, 35).23 Milton is his own source. Is it by thrift, or by

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unconscious recall? By simple grasp, I suggest: having got hold of the idea, with the help of Lucretius and Ovid, he did not let it go.24 DIVERSITY, AUTHORITY,

GRAVITAS

Though we may distinguish a Latinism of thought, of diction, of sound, of syntax and of allusion, in practice we meet these in varying combinations, whether fused or collocated. The combinations, by being such, show Latinism to be second nature to Milton. Latinism may not be deliberate, therefore, but present nonetheless because deeply appropriated. As thought, Latinisms enable him to relate his theme to a wider than Christian orJudaic witness, and hence more convincingly because where pagan Latin witness supports a Christian view it is so to speak disinterested. Contributing to style, whether diction or allusion or other, Latinisms convince the senses, enriching the texture to an effect of weight. Latinisms conduce to a continual varying gravitas. The diversity of this gravitas, this authority, is increased by a further sort of combination. Latin was the channel for other tongues to flow into Milton's mind, and out again as texture. Here is one example from Hebrew: God made The Firmament, expanse of liquid, pure, Transparent, Elemental Air, diffus'd In circuit to the uttermost convex Of this great Round . . .

(vn. 263-70)

Once again the passage is from the middle books, where Milton is at his most explanatory-learned. Moreover, loan-words of Latin origin here make up half the total. While not all retain a sense of Latin root, those which do not are making a background to those which are foregrounded because they do. The world-picture is explaining the Hebrew one of Genesis, but is eclectic too. Thus the 'firmament' is penetrable, made of air, not as in Hebrew hard like a beaten-metal plate. Yet this rather adjectival cair' still does what the Hebrew metaphor does more bluntly, it is a 'Partition firm and sure'. We do not ask how: Milton's air is unpicturable, all concept. What concept, then? The key word is 'expanse', following and explaining the too familiar 'firmament'. Hebrew raqi'a meant a beaten-metal plate, the vault of heaven understood as a solid dome, enclosing the earth like a cosmic dish-cover. The King James version put distance between its 'firmament' and the dish-cover,

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by glossing 'Heb. expansion'. This detaches the idea of'spread out' from the shape of the dividing element. Milton, here, is orthodox, using the current cosmological term, a Latin one because science was international. The whole area was controversial (as well it might be) but Milton's choice, even as eclectically and vaguely elaborated here, sides with contemporary Latin science against any probing of the Hebrew metaphor. His gloss rambles round, in the end, to a glimpse of the dome, at 'the uttermost .convex / Of this great round' - still unpicturable, but at least we get back the Hebraic curvature of the presumed boundaries of space, curving away as in Genesis to the eye of God. This is a complicated, problematic instance of something very general in the explanatory parts of the poem, namely that it reflects by Latinisms how Latin was the main European medium of theology and exegesis and science, and of the interchanges of these. Simpler instances include almost every allusion to a Greek myth - Pandora, say, or Demeter and Proserpine - because these were taken over holus-bolus by Roman culture. They come on to Milton's English, accordingly, Romanized- in the spellings of names, for example ('Jove', 'Proserpine', 'Jesus'), and more thematically as moralized by Rome (notably by Ovid in recounting the metamorphoses of or by gods). A further permutation of this Latin influence is the rhetorical impact of Latin on Milton through the Romanizing of Italian poets, seen in word order,figures,coinages, sense of linguistic origins and much else. Latin, therefore, enters into most things which Milton does. And to come back to our original crux, Latinism may be at work when not thrust forward. The differences between instances, in fact their frequent uniqueness, may matter more to the present state of debate than the similarities. Plato would have closed with a myth, but I will make do with a crude extended simile. As when a chef using garlic or curry powder, blends those flagrant ingredients with care and patience over time into a dish which has multiple ingredients yet becomes one single though multifarious delight - so that the gratified diners exclaim about the taste, and argue whether it has garlic or curry powder or neither in it: so should the delighted reader of Milton's grand style applaud the multiplicity of its language ingredients, and struggle in vain to identify the proportioning let alone sequence of the blending - yet not deny there is blending. Perhaps, too, as no two curries (unless they come out of a packet) are identical, neither are any two instances of Latinism.

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GRAECISMS

Latin was a conduit for other languages and their cultures to become prominent in the texture from time to time. They could, however, contribute directly: Milton, like English, was a cheerful borrower. Examples are given next of direct borrowing from Greek and other tongues, in respect of both diction and syntax. This is done, however, to stress the mwMingual, because his resort to these tongues is briefer and more subdued to interlingual effect than was the case with his Latin. It remains important not to gloss the small markers of these languages in isolation from their surrounding phrase, line and clause. Greek idioms are especially intriguing. They had intrigued the Romans also, and what looks Greek in the poem may equally be continuing Latin's admiring reception of Greek high culture. For instance, 'Hear'st thou' (in. 7) is odd in English to mean 'Are you known as . . .?' But does it arrive from Greek akoueis direct, or through Latin's imitative audis? My vote is for both, because the idiom marks the join between a more Latinate and a more Greek wording of his apostrophe to the 'holy Light' of m. 3; from the Latinate 'Bright effluence of bright essence increate3 to 'pure ethereal stream'.

There are still some idioms which Latin could not take over. One is where Eve 'Knew not eating death' (ix. 792): Latin participles will not work this way. Greek differs from Latin in a number of constructions with verbs of cognition, which may mean Graecism at v. 860: 'Know none before us' (gaining a Satanic superacute brevity, for 'Know [that] none [existed] before us'). It may also explain x. 540-1: 'for what they saw, / They felt themselves now changing', which is not the English idiom which 541 could be by itself, but means 'because they felt themselves to be even now changing into what they beheld [i.e. serpents]'). The double ellipses ('to be,' 'into') push the utterance into multilingualism by condensation. Such idioms are useful to the swift, long-striding compression of this epic style. Though not 'native', they do have 'sinew'. Another such is 'unanswered lest thou boast' (vi. 163): this can only mean 'Lest you boast yourself to be unanswered', and we mentally supply a pronoun and infinitive, a la grecque. This holds, even if Roman authors had domiciled such Greek idioms in Latin. Greekish again are phrases which leave out words to create point, by rapid, almost tacit antitheses: 'them aware themselves' (vi. 547), 'fearless unfeared' (ix. 187), 'all places else . . . Nor knowing us nor known' (xi. 305, 307). It is striking how often these candidates for participation in

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Greek idiom involve knowing, and struggles between cognitive agents about cognition. The Greeks invented epistemology, and a concrete vocabulary to discuss it. Milton remembers them, and by his ellipses moves English towards them.25 Many of the more certain Graecisms of diction are simply Homeric allusion: 'broad herds' (vn. 462); 'sceptred heralds' (xi. 660). 'Ocean stream' (1. 202), 'rhoos okeanoio' = floods of ocean, is both allusion and idiom. Lively consequential queries arise. We may wonder if the Homeric 'ridges of grim war' (vi. 236) should read 'bridges' with Bentley, because Homer actually said 'gephurai polemoio' ('bridges of war'), whatever those were.26 And at vi. 355, 'where the might of Gabriel fought', do we have a mere Homeric (metrically conditioned) periphrasis for 'where mighty Gabriel fought'? Or a Hebraism as well, since 'might' is part of his name's meaning ('Strength of God')? But since Homerical touches can be expected in a secondary epic, it is time to point out the sheer breadth of Milton's Greek texture of allusion. This was as great as for his Latin, because Greek literature in the classical period was much more voluminous than classical Latin, though Latin caught up later. From other poets to the Bible (Septuagint and New Testament), to geographers, to cosmographers to mythographers to philosophers . . . From out of all this wealth of allusion I make some simple points on how Milton puts this knowledge to use for local effect: by euphony; by caique; by puns; and by conjunction of provenances. By euphony is meant Greek's vocal music, which is not like Latin's. This may come in groups of sounds as much as of meanings: he dwells on 'hyaline' (VII. 619) and 'hyacinthine' (iv. 301). Here, the euphony is melodious. Elsewhere he likes rather the precision and bite of Greek sounds (hearing some onomatopoeia?). One example is 'Asphaltic Pool' (1. 451, 'Asphaltick' in the MS). Others are 'amarant' (in. 352-3) and 'marasmus' (xi. 487) because he likes their sound in context. Indeed, 'marasmus' was a 1674 addition, really quite needless for meaning amidst an already sufficient catalogue of gerontological miseries. In both passages the root meaning (from maraino, to waste or decay) is also glossed nearby, as if euphony might become briefly an end in itself. By caique is meant that instead of availing himself of Greek sound, or Greek sense with sound, Milton transfers sense without sound. Examples are clearer with syntax, but the practice is clear enough in 'this habitable' (viii. 157): though it is an instance of Milton's frequent changing of adjective into noun, Latinism as much as Graecism, it also

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renders he oikoumene (with ge> earth, understood). This is the regular Greek expression for the Greek, or civilized, or inhabited, world learnt early on in studying Greek, as a participle become autonomously substantive. By Greek puns is meant the characteristic sidelong etymologizing. After the rare mot juste, drawn from Milton's languages, comes an English rendering of it, to explain then extend the effect. The 'abyss' is 'un-bottomed' (n. 405). To exemplify conjunction of provenances, we can take 'gliding meteorous' (xn. 629). Note the placing of the accent, meteorous, which is the Greek placing, not that of English except here. In fact, it is not just Greek, but Homeric Greek.27 The phrase beautifully conjoins a blunt and plain-style Germanic word with this Greek word, one of great dialectal and diachronic variation, in its most archaic sound - anapaestically suiting the movement of mist and of angels, come to expel Adam and Eve. When the elephant, to make them mirth, 'wreath'd / His Lithe proboscis' (iv. 347), is the reader to register a Greek tang in 'proboscis'? More than in 'elephant' itself? Certainly less so than with 'meteorous', since here as everywhere we have a continuum or bell-curve; but I would still say, yes. The reason is the foregrounding of 'proboscis'. Caesura, word-length, vowel-progression, but most of all the conjunction of a scientific and classical name with plain Anglo-Saxon, giving Greek again the last word - the combination of these choices holds up to linguistic as well as other forms of inspection the word, in its onomatopoeic playfulness. Milton shows he has more than most to play with. HEBRAISMS

The last of Milton's classical (dead, but sacred) languages has a standing similar to Greek in the style, but different in proportioning. Hebrew names, and the whole Bible, make this tongue seminal; yet its message like its sounds have passed through much translation (Greek, Latin, English) and Latin interpretation en route. Hebraisms, of diction or syntax, are few. For this, we should not impugn Milton's Hebrew studies. He worked hard enough at these. So it seems that the need did not arise for epic. He liked to be read to from the Hebrew every morning (his version of press-ups or cornflakes); yet the sound of Hebrew is seldom heard. Why?

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Three explanations suggest themselves. First, whereas Latin and Greek were within reach for numerous readers, not even in the seventeenth century did Hebrew rank so popular. Next, the sound and syntax and vocabulary of Hebrew were too alien from Milton's other languages, which (including English) lay all within the Indo-European group and hence shared many and common roots. Lastly, the simplest explanation would be that the Hebrew Bible was best mediated to a reader through its translated forms, the Greek and Latin ones as well as English.28 There remain occasions where Milton does seize on Hebrew, for a special effect, or lets the English glance at Hebraisms familiar from English Bibles. Such occasions include these, (a) Idioms: 'tree of prohibition' (ix. 644) or 'sole daughter of his voice' (ix. 653).29 (b) Caiques: 'God's holy rest' rendering 'Sabbath/shabbaf (vn. 91), or 'the Mountain of the Congregation called' (v. 766).30 (c) Rhythmic wordplay: 'hard be hardened, blind be blinded more' (in. 200).31 (d) Naming: angels' names, hypostatizing qualities of God as substances.32 At vi. 29, Abdiel is addressed eponymously as 'Servant of God', (e) Entitling: 'I am who fill' (vn. 168) plays on the Hebrew divine name YHWH as a modification of the Hebrew verb 'to be', and carries on into an invented attributive phrase, (f) Spelling/pronunciation: 'Asmadai/Asmodeus' (vi. 365/rv. 168), or 'Joshua whom the Gentiles Jesus call' (xn. 310). (g) The unsolved conundrum, what was Satan's name in heaven, now forgotten or erased.33 A density of brevity is experienced in all of these locutions. Yet they are rare. Biblical phrasing is much more frequent and emphatic in echoes of the English Bible (especially at the start of Book X, where Adam and Eve receive judgement). Specifically Hebrew idioms and other nuances are kept for an occasional flourish or piece of wit; and especially for appearances of deity, theophanies which stay close to the Bible's presentation. We have noted 'I am who fill / Infinitude' (vn. 168-9). This moves from a gospel image ('My overshadowing spirit') through a Hebraic pun (Yahweh/Hayah, name of god/verb 'to be') to an abstraction of Milton's own. God 'fills' (Heb, male) the waters with fish and the air with birds, and fills people with their characters:34 Milton generalizes this, using a biblical word to appropriate its implication, and build it into his act as interpreter and relater of biblical wisdom. The doublet first familiarizes, then at once defamiliarizes. The act of appropriation resembles the 'surge' within Milton's verse translation, discussed earlier; only, now it is

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found rammed into a pair of words, demanding a fuller and quicker attention, for these words of his own. At times the appropriating is not so much a 'making one's own' as a revising. The theophany at which Abdiel is commended accumulates an image of God in power, judging. Greek accoutrements of godhead, from Homer and Hesiod, prepare the way. At the climax, however, Hebraism dominates: from the unseen 'seat supreme' (vi. 27) the voice is heard. Clouds, as often, hide the deity in majesty. Only they are not the thick, dark cloud typical of Exodus theophany. It is a 'Golden Cloud' (upper case being used for both in 1667), more typical of Christian depictions of God in majesty; a giant halo, or the all-gold background of (say) Fra Angelico's paintings. Such effects are rare, yet climactic where they occur. To anticipate, we have it again in Paradise Regained at 'Holiest of Holies': whereas 'Holy of Holies' is Hebraic superlative, for 'the most holy', God is holier even than his most holy place, Sion (iv. 349). Milton moves past the familiar absolute, pointedly capping it. At the climax of Samson, God is 'our living Dread' (1673, semichorus speaking). The familiar epithet of God is followed by an unfamiliar personification by attribute: God as 'Dread' appears in a special idiom, linked with 'Isaac', ancestrally. Milton keeps the ancestral claim but merges it with the more usual title, 'living'. Three words, three aspects of God, merged in the coinage. Such interlingual effects amount to an apprehending and interpreting of the received worship-tradition, through Milton's languages, here especially Hebrew but not solely Hebrew. ITALIAN AND OTHER LANGUAGES

The primacy of Italian among modern languages is axiomatic, being the only one in which he composed, and by whose literature he judged. The primacy is confirmed by the ways in which his epic draws in Italian diction, syntax and allusion. These include coinages, new to English but learnt among Italian authors especially Dante: 'adorn' (as adjective, adorno — adornato, vm. 576), 'fugue' (= flight, xi. 563) and perhaps 'umbrageous' (= 'shady', iv. 257) and 'outrageous' (= 'excessive', 11. 435, vi. 587, etc.); the Dantean inceptive compound verbs 'Imbrown'd' (iv. 246, Purgatorio iv. 21) and 'Imparadis't' (iv. 506, Paradiso XXVIII. 3). They include conceits, too: the cold hell; the Paradise of Fools; the Dantean pain of recalling lost happiness, or closeness of absolute opposites in desire, the paradise and hell of desire.35

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It will bear repeating, nonetheless, that the single greatest boost to the growth of the epic voice came to Milton from those Italian poets, Delia Casa especially, who gave their language a Latin dignity by modelling their word-order and its figures upon that of Latin. And they did it the more strikingly because they had to do it without much inflection to steer the sense: Milton's own position with English was harder still because English was still less inflected.36 French seldom figures in the poem, to judge by editions and commentaries: whether from lack of interest or from active avoidance, who knows.37 My guess is that Italian monopolized his attention as far as culture went, even though naturally Italianate words ('umbrageous5, 'outrageous') in his English might have derived through French as well or even instead. Undoubted French terms like 'puny' (puisne) would have come to him from within English. So also would examples of the older forms of English. At any rate, he had an ear for its sounds and rhythms, which continued into his own English. That would account for iv. 642 and 651, the 'charm' of birds (OE chirm): 'charm' meant 'song'.38 At 11. 827, 'this uncouth errand', Satan picks up the narrator's word for his space-ride (407), but in doing so activates almost every one of the OED's array - 'unknown', 'strange', 'wild', 'disgusting', 'shocking.' Since some of these were obsolescent by 1667, we might again be glimpsing Milton in a lexicographical moment. It may rather be a Spenserian one, however, for not only is 'uncouth' a favourite in the Faerie Queene, but Spenser is his obvious predecessor for epic and Anglo-Saxonizing simultaneously, the latter as means to the former. At n. 600 'to starve in ice' uses an obsolete or at least obsolescent sense, to die (OE steorfan, OHG sterban, mod. G sterben). Spenser had used it (FQu. vi. 34. 3), which could mean it was an archaism revived in 1590. Now this concurrence, for once, with Spenser emphasizes how normally Milton avoided that poet's archaizing road to epical diction. Milton was not deaf to the music of Old English, it seems, but keeps it as a sub-song to a song more modern and European-multilingual than Spenser's. What is main in Spenser becomes subsidiary here. The converse also holds. Milton relies proportionally more on Latinism than Spenser does. In view of the fact that early Milton was markedly Spenserian, I infer that he turned away from Spenser as a guide for diction, obeying some negative impulsion, alongside the positive one towards Italianizing. The balance is made up from Milton's other tongues, especially Italian and Greek, where once again Spenser

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was a forerunner but an ungainly one. Spenser, like the dramatists, practised multilingualism in the safer area of names, and in a crude and not entirely accurate form; the unwanted h of 'Braggadocchio' or 'Pyrochles'. Had Milton read and heeded Ben Jonson's strictures on Spenser, as writing his epic in a sort of non-language? At all events he went in a more deeply multilingual direction.

FUSIONS AND COLLOCATIONS

Fusions of Milton's languages within an English phrase present us with a long continuum. At one end, the fusion has happened already, in others' langue rather than Milton's parole (though not necessarily only in English, since for example Latin has much Greek in it). At the other end, Milton has sought a point of junction for special effect, something heard which is hard to tease out without spoiling it. Collocations of derivation-worlds in a phrase pose a distinct problem. They are so usual in good English writing, so powerful in Shakespeare for example, ('the multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red') that it is a delicate thing to grasp just what is multilingual in a specimen from Milton. Fusions regularly occur when Latin has used a Greek word or idiom, and Milton's English borrows from both languages at once. As mentioned above, 'hear'st thou' = audis = akoueis = 'are you known as' (m. 7). A richer case is ix. 795, 'precious of all trees', a superlative which trails clouds of epic glory from both Homer and Virgil - Homer therefore Virgil. But considering what tree this is, there may well be rather the Hebrew superlative, which is not a specialized epic option but Hebrew's main way of expressing the superlative.39 And what is true of a word or an idiom is true for major elements of thought: the divine scales, in which consequences are weighed, belong equally to Homer and to Isaiah (iv. 994—1004). This fusion is of course ubiquitous, in that Homeric epic is being composed on a Hebraic theme throughout; but such moments as the scales enforce contemplation of the fusion. Hebrew is made to be Greek, or Greek Hebrew, as part of the especial tone of Book IV, and of the unique boldness of the whole epic. Harder to probe is a phrase like in. 564, where Satan 'Down right into the world's first region throws / His flight precipitant, and winds with ease / Through the pure marble air his oblique way . . .' Marble being especially solid, as an attribute of air it gains a paradox, which might be oxymoron but for the preparatory effect of'pure'. Even so, OED gives as

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alternative only the sense 'coloured like marble' (veined, mottled, still opposite to 'pure'). Latin, however, gives a figurative range, from 'white' to 'smooth' to 'bright' (so Virgil has a marble sea, aequor). The choice begins to seem a variant on air that is liquidus, 'clear'. It is Greek which has the single most explanatory usage, marmareos, 'sparkling'. Nonetheless, I find I lose the original sharp impression and paradox by wandering in these byways: Milton surely meant bright/white, going back to no single contributing tongue. We cast this one away, then, as insulated - by word order — from too rigorous inspection. It lacks the foregrounding of, for instance, 'precipitant' before it, made so actively participial by predicative placing that the Latinism is felt. We must see Satan'sflightas Jehu-headlong, fast and rash. We should think, then, of a continuum, from fusion subdued and pre-existent in the langue, to coinage or rarity saying a thing strongly through a latent multiplicity which is a joy to tease out, to more overtly meaningful double entendre. A good instance occurs at vi. 884, 'jubilee'. To meet him all his Saints, who silent stood Eye-witnesses of his Almighty Acts, With Jubilee advanc'd; and as they went, Shaded with branching Palm, each order bright, Sung Triumph, and him sung Victorious King . . . This word meant either specific rituals of atonement or else general rejoicing; from Hebrew yobel (the amnesty, every fiftieth year, proclaimed by the ram's horn, yobel) and from Latin jubilare ('rejoice') respectively. But though langue has already fused the meanings, Milton makes us notice both, to catch the progression and fusion of his thought. We are moved, from Judaic jubilee through messianic 'palm' to a Roman triumph: 'sung triumph' alludes to Roman victors shouting 'Io triumphe' on entering the Capitol; and Christ 'rode / Triumphant through mid heaven' (888-9). I* *s a messianic anthropomorphism; victory is made gratifyingly palpable; the effect is made through echoes set up by multilingualism.40 Collocations have been treated in a previous chapter. They abound. In 'thwart obliquities' (vm. 132), for instance, we get the same rhythm and similar impact to Lear's 'thick rotundity'. Milton has no lien on the procedure and its potential. Yet still the joy of the contrast, bluntness with grandeur, is audibly being rediscovered, as the differance between linguistic provenances. More distinctively Miltonic, however, is the collocation of native with

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Latinate adjectives, placed in Italianate sequencing. In 'the sacred fruit forbidden', for example, 'sacred' first carries the meaning 'holy', from sacratus but then secondly means 'declared tabu' by 'forbidden' - both purity and danger - in which the sequel is helped to dominate by the joining affect of alliteration. In other words, where Fowler spoke of the 'primary' and 'secondary' chains of meaning, we might conceive rather of bifold meaning, sequential within a split second; a meaning which the reader's eye, voice and ear meetfirst,instantly afterwards modified by the meaning thrown back onto that first meaning by the revising impact of subsequent words, all held firm by the well-defined boundaries of the Italianate unit. And bearing in mind that the adjective-noun-adjective grouping is only the simplest version of such units, I would conclude that Milton not only has a most enjoyable time, playing among his multilingual resources, but that they add up to a major dynamic of the grand style, at the cellular level, which then becomes the moment-to-moment pleasure of the reader's strenuous attention. CONCLUSIONS

If nothing else has emerged from these detailed analyses of multilingual interactions in the style of Paradise Lost, at least the emphasis has been placed where it should be, on the detail itself, the particularity of the interchanges between each phrase examined and its surroundings. So many examples are composed ad hoc, uniquely, as a miming of the flow and change of thought itself at that moment of the long poem. For too long Milton's Latinism has been reviled or upheld - or denied - as if it were a single or uniform phenomenon. It cannot be that. For one thing, Latin is not the only language to contribute. But further, Latinism (or Graecism, and so on) is not a clear or single concept. It is not to be divided into rigid bands, certainly not Fowler's lopsided four. At times its congeries of local effects shapes as a continuum, a graph. But the pattern of incidence along it then defeats graphing. As soon as we have thought we can draw boundaries, we find them blurred or defied. Consequently, as with individual features of style, proposed Latinisms are better taken along with the allusion they also make; or with the figures - especially onomatopoeia - which they help to bring to life. The approach through Latinism has much to offer: not through lumping or splitting, nor in carrying on the sterile debate between 'native sinew' and alien poshness, but more simply, as a heuristic device.

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Latinisms are phrases which stand out. How, then, do they stand out? That has to do with the wordstock of English and of Milton and their interchanges. It is foregrounding which leads the reader to the multilingual aspect, and onwards into whole acts of thought. Whether as style, or by giving Milton access to the springs of his thought, it is these acts of thought which his languages empower.

CHAPTER 7

Milton's languages and the voices of Paradise Lost

Chapter 6 sought to show that Milton's languages contributed to the texture of the grand style. Analysis of the poem itself had to come second, in the organization and direction, to the more methodological enquiry. Next, reversing the emphasis, I shall survey the poem's many Voices', to explore how the languages enhance them. First, what is meant by Voices'? The term is invitingly flexible yet resistant to adequate definition, and not least because so many critics or theoreticians have written on it. Although their work has benefit as a heuristic device, its fluidity leads me to replace it by a model inferred from Milton himself. I summarize the long debate, selecting from it points of heuristic value, before explaining my main model. THEORIES OF VOICE AND VOICING

Aristotle distinguished in Homer between mimesis by a narrator and by speeches of characters.1 Aristotle's distinction holds good, though an epic narrator may at times speak like a character, with passion or by intervention, and though characters often narrate. All reading experience tells us that characters speak with voices differing from one another. Major characters differ within their speech according to situation; they vary, change, develop, or become more wholly what they always were. Further, when Blake urged that Milton was of the devil's party he was perceiving that Paradise Lost in particular has both orthodox and heterodox voices. It may speak against itself, may contradict its declared allegiance. A similarly valuable tension has been understood as between 'majority' and 'minority' voices for Shakespeare, as the 'dialogic' imagination at work by Bakhtin, or as the 'rhetoric of irony' by Wayne Booth. Bakhtin had Dostoyevsky in mind, a writer in whom the rival voices stretch fiction to a distraught relativism. However, this insight

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suits Dostoyevsky far more than it suits Milton, to the point where Bakhtin's current popularity may do some disservice to understanding Milton. I have found more relevant the temperate and independent thought of R. O. A. M. Lyne, writing about voices in the Aeneid.2 It is the 'further voices' that play off human losses against the imperial theme, so that for instance the ending speaks - literally and metaphorically - with the voice of Turnus; and the tension there for us to absorb from Virgil was there for Milton also (as in his own ending). At the same time, it would be fallacious to hypostatize a category of'further voices', as if'furtherness' had any constant essence. Dido and Turnus share nothing but negatives. Indeed, 'further' voices are perhaps the necessary vitality of a good narrator, altering the perspective of the narrative, line by line or even word by word. Milton learnt much here from Virgil: he developed it way beyond Virgil. In the end, the theorizing of voice may become centrifugal, arid, or overcomplicated. Thus I have not found Gerard Genette in Figures as illuminating as I had hoped. He blurs for me what Aristotle had clarified, and buries his points under neologistic technical terms ('autodiegetic' and the like). The application of his thought to epic, to Homer, by Irene J . F. de Jong in Narrators and Focalizers. The Presentation ofthe Story in the Iliad

(Amsterdam: B. R. Grliner, 1987) similarly impedes reflection, by its hideous jargon ('focalizer', focalization', 'focalizee' and so on). The hoped-for freshness runs to waste into glossary and diagrams. Whatever else 'voice' may mean, the discussion of it should keep contact with how voices speak. It should stay aware that voices are to be heard; that, indeed, Milton composed out loud; and that, for their greater pleasure, readers read him aloud. Milton keeps faith, by conviction and habit and the misfortune of blindness alike, with epic's original orality. Accordingly, whilst availing myself of insights from the critical debate for particular occasions, I offer as my main vocabulary of analysis the following, modelled on Milton's own awareness of his voicing. MILTON'S MODEL

How does Milton use the word voice in his poem, along with voices and vocal, and also word, words, language, tongue and so on?3 The axioms are: (a) that the poem is so unified that all major words lead us to its centre; (b) that these are major words, indeed a major semantic group; (c) that in

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any case the words selected belong naturally to the present discussion of voicing; (d) that voicing, for an epic bard, leads us to the poem's self-awareness; and (e) that Paradise Lost, even among secondary epics, is exceptionally self-aware. The theoretical underpinning of this model is Leo Spitzer's 'philological circle', with its often-vindicated axiom that when reading a text to understand it - on its own terms - we move in a circle between detail and whole, interpreting the one by the other till (in an adequate reading) we have got them all in without loss of coherence.4 With that aspiration, then, let us 'Hear the voice of the Bard'. We will hear some of it by addressing such features as the frequency and clustering of words about voicing. And we shall thereby gain an apt context for examining how the bard's languages enter his voices; especially, yet not solely, his chosen epic voice. Which parts of the poem use the key words most? Books VII, IX and X contain the most occurrences of voice, voices and vocal; respectively, seven, six and nine.5 In Book VII the passages comprise: Milton's own voice talking about itself in the invocation which launches the poem's second half; God's voice, the Word creating by using voice for speech-act (the mother of all performative utterances!); and creatures' voices responding in praise. 'Voice' here takes us straight to the centres of a straightforward narrative. But in Book IX, a book of conflict and conflicting voices, 'voice' belongs by turns to: Adam and Eve, disagreeing; the serpent's preternatural 'vocal' organ; and God's voice, in the sense of commandment, diminishingly present as the Book proceeds. In Book X, the conflict remains, now painfully clarified as the clash in Adam of his listening to the voice of God or to that of Eve. 'Listening to' a voice means, not simply hearing it but heeding it, all the way up to obeying it, or disobeying it. Eureka! Is Milton reviving the etymology of these key words for response to voice, since in Latin and Greek6 the words for obedience and disobedience are compounds of the verb 'to hear': oboedire (ob + audire), hupakouein (hupo + akoueiri)? If so, etymology de-

familiarizes what the Bible also emphasizes: 'If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God . . .'7 Next, we survey the entire incidence. Voice, voices and vocal are summarized for each Book in turn. In Book I it is mainly Satan's voice and words, in contexts of obedience and fear (274,337). Book II is similar, but now we also notice 'voice' as vote or advocacy m, debate (188). In Book III the 'voice' becomes God's, ordaining and creating; to which creation's voices respond in praise. Book IV has a greater dynamic: Milton wishes for a 'warning voice'; Satan sees his own speech-act as 'no

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friendly voice5; newly-created Eve hears God's voice and it leads her to Adam; she and Adam lift their voices in praise. Book V emphasizes the Satanic dream-voice, and another new voice is that of an army. Book VI, although or because it tells of the War in Heaven, upholds the voice of God, authoritative in theophany by voice (27, 56, 782). Book VII has been mentioned, but we may note that Voice' brings in Orpheus (self-image of Milton as 'singer') and Raphael (for Adam's unfallen communion in speech). Book VIII offers us God's voice, in a line added in the 1674 edition (436), and repeats that unfallen Eve was led by God's voice. As Books IX and X have been mentioned, I will add only that the judging of Adam and Eve relies (as in the Book of Genesis but more so) upon a bandying of the word voice: whose Voice' is to be sought, fled, believed, obeyed? In Book XI God's voice is lost to Adam, sadly reminiscing (321). And in Book XII that voice is now 'dreadful' (235) not but what 'man's voice commanding' may make the 'Sun in Gibeon stand' (265). We can also relate the incidence of voice and its cognates to that of word and words, which though more frequent is simpler. Baldly put, word (singular) tends to mean the word of God (as injunction or as made flesh in the Son), whereas 'words' (plural) means the speech just ended, or speeches, or the power of speech.8 All this evidence together would enable a summary of the progress of the theme, in each Book and in the whole. More to the present purpose, it enables me to define and arrange a set of ideas about voicing, and so to illustrate how Milton's languages enter into each sort of voice. I define six categories, and arrange them in a pragmatic (not narrative) order. The six comprise: (a) the poet's voice, joining with the Muse's to represent the poem's inspiration as theme, and its reflection upon itself; (b) Satan's voice, taken early because it dominates the beginning and fades out by the end; (c) voices of heaven, meaning not only the ex cathedra deliverances of God but deity mediated by whatever other means whether seen in derived glory, or reflected as praise of worth, or immanently in the Book of Nature, or revealed in the Bible as God's other 'book'; (d) creaturely voices; (e) the voices of Adam and of Eve, not only creaturely but voices of change; and (f) the voice of the Serpent. VOICING BY POET AND MUSE

The poet does not discuss his own voice directly in the opening invocation, but something is implied in his second main verb, 'I thence /

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Invoke thy aid...' (1.12-13). More clearly than Virgil or Homer, he names the speech-act he is performing; what we routinely term the 'epic invocation' recognizes itself as such. The verb 'invoke' may not include Latinism since it is common enough; yet the root idea of Voicing-into' does impinge, because the poet's voice is 'calling' the Spirit 'into' the speech-situation, the opening speech-act. The emphatic positioning of the verb at the line-beginning encourages the possibility of Latinism. And Latinism indeed weighs in when, soon, the purpose of the invoking is declared, at the close of the paragraph; 'That. . . / I may assert eternal providence'. 'Assert' means 'uphold', 'vindicate': the OEDh sense 11. 4 (first recorded 1649) 1S pertinent, and so is in. 7 'to affirm the existence of. But Latin offers further to 'claim as a god', 'deify' (OxLD 4. a) - the most forceful relevant sense of all. Nearby comes the resplendent composite caique: with mighty wings outspread Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss . . . 'Sat'st brooding' is a single idea, that of hatching. Whereas the spirit of God 'moved on' the waters in the AV, and in the Hebrew 'merachepheth' was 'hovering tremulously', the patristic 'incubabat' ('was incubating') comes nearer. But Milton improves on this, too, as caique pushes the Hebrew towards an icon of power.9 Hatching birds do not keep their wings spread out. But 'dovelike', heralding the verb, has already brought in the New Testament image, the dove/Spirit descending on Christ at his baptism. By glancing at the language-origins of his words, then combining them, Milton makes a more packed, conclusive affirmation about Creation. Or take two nearby words, 'vast' and 'abyss'. 'Vast', as often, connotes Latin vastus, waste as well as huge, while 'abyss' from Greek a-bussos ('without bottom') renders the Hebrew 'deep' with the same connotation of the measureless unformed as in 'vast'. The awe of such hugeness mastered in the act of creation helps the rise to 'assert' providence two lines later. The multilingual voicing of the theophany prepares and vindicates the vindication. In each of the other three invocations (III, VII, IX) Milton describes the Muse's voice and his own. In each, he draws in his languages. But a more startling, revealing self-voicing comes when he passionately desiderates a 'warning voice', to alert humankind to the invading Satan (rv. 1-12):

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O for that warning voice . . . This leads on to an analytical voice, which probes Satan's hellish state of mind, whereupon Satan diagnoses his as cno friendly voice'. That address to the Sun we have examined in an earlier chapter, and shown to be replete with multilingual effects: so, too, is the whole dynamic opening to Book IV. I shall illustrate briefly. He refers to Revelation as 'Apocalypse'; the less English, more commanding name, which is Greek but also Latin.10 He renders the actual verse from John by a wording of his own; not the AV's 'Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea' (12. 12), but cWoe to the inhabitant on Earth' (rv. 5). The sea is left out, as not relevant to context; the definite article also, for density (compatible, at least, with Latinism since Latin has no article); 'inhabitants' is the less frequent, but more participial form of the word; and sure enough, the verb-force carries over into the preposition, dwellers 'on' the earth, as if dwelling were an action (as, hebraically, it is). Lastly, at mention of 'Satan' (10) Milton at once glosses the name as, etymologically, a role, in fact two of several: 'tempter' then 'accuser'. In a moment (36), Satan himself etymologizes, as speaking to the Sun with 'no friendly voice': the litotes used about his own 'voice' spells awareness of language and self, the language of the self.11 The pairing of the two strongest voices, Satan's and the poet's, is made at this crisis of the poem; it calls attention to the dialectic set going between them. Next, I consider Satan's voice.

SATAN S VOICE

That voice is many things (which is why I consider the serpent voice separately) but always self-preoccupied. I mean this not so much as egocentric, more as self-referential; aware of its existence as a voice. This awareness is our focus now. Furthermore, we note the unusual range of Satan's interlocutors, those to whom he wields his voices. They comprise: angels, Sin, Death, Chaos, various unfallen angels and Eve. He does not talk with Adam, the Son or the Father.12 And in soliloquy, by means of apostrophe or personification he always addresses someone or something else (Sun, Earth, his own 'Thoughts') to think himself out once again. In the first group of his speeches, though communicating with others, he is self-referential because the speech-acts hinge on status, self-worth, self-esteem. In the second group, though expressing, he links and

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measures himself to outside things. In the present connection, however, his opening speech attracts particular notice because it is the only one delivered to another person yet expressively, without ulterior purpose. It is also one of his most multilingual. It shows passion beyond control: If thou beest hee; but O how fall'n! how chang'd From him, who in the happy Realms of light Cloth'd with transcendent brightness didst outshine Myriads though bright . . .

(1. 84-7)

Because Satan cannot securely recognize his oldest friend, he swings between second and third person address ('thou', che', 'him', 'didst'): through this telling rhetorical ploy Milton confirms the changed appearance which is all Satan can focus. Soon, he applies it to himself: c N o r . . . / do I repent or change / Though chang'd in outward lustre; that fixt mind / And high disdain...' (96-8). The change resembles that between the glorious living Hector and the dead spirit seen by Aeneas at the sack of Troy: ei mihi, qualis erat, quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore qui redit exuvias indutus Achilli13 (Aeneid 11. 274-5) Milton is repeating the pivotal pronouns ('mihi'/'illo'), and the stronger syntactical stutter mimes a greater amazement. 'Qualis' and 'quantum' aid the shocked recognition of changed countenance, meaning changed selfhood (Hector dead not living is like, but less than, angels in the loss of bliss). 'And so, without any more direct description Milton makes us feel the atmosphere of anguish, and foreboding, and defeat'.14 This voice is a 'further voice', maybe the first of the poem. It expresses the moment of waking up to irreversible loss; loss of face, loss of a part of the self. The name for this in literature and life is 'tragic'. If we are awake ourselves, we experience pity and fear. Straight after the epic narrator had zestfully plunged Satan and cohorts from high to the lowest, with implied spectator or even victor viewpoint, the reader is wrenched into pity. But then scorn is felt, then fear, as Satan becomes self-pitying then obdurate. These are violent surprises for the reader. We are rushed along by change, and sheer range, of voices. They are the voices of a dialogic imagination. They resemble the shifts in speech-acts, or internal genres, found in Dostoyevsky by Bakhtin. Except that, because the medium is poetry and so more condensed, the shifts come quicker. Allusion may come by diction or syntax or naming —

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here it is by the first two, with the third aptly incognito - but however it comes, it exploits the languages of the relevant human experience, to engage the reader in a plural, complex way. This way is often tragic, and (so to speak) unofficial. Aeneas was founding Rome (Good Thing), and the Father is punishing Satan (Serves Him Right); but further - thanks to the texturing by languages - that is not the whole of the matter, nor the end of it. Nor is it even the end of the texturing, since alongside Virgil we have Isaiah: 'How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer' (14.12). This has the topos, 'How are the mighty fallen', David lamenting Saul andJonathan, but adds a judging sarcasm. Similar misgiving is created by the following phrases, scampering round the ring of languages to pile up self-glorifying images (brightness and royalty, in 'realms', 'transcendent brightness', and 'myriads'). These suggestions are mainly etymological, but soon when we hear of Satan's 'fixed mind' and 'high disdain', the texture is lit up by the calquing summary of Dante's Capaneus. 'High disdain' is, as Fowler notes, the proud man's 'alto sdegno', the valuing of self by scorning others. The fixed mind, as Virgil tells Capaneus, is his greatest punishment.15 So the new emotions, pity and compunction, which Satan has felt will not grow into anything. The longer Satan's sentences continue, and the whole speech, the more - as with Capaneus self-expression is exposed as fixity, having all the ambivalence of the phrase 'fixed mind'. VOICES OF HEAVEN: THE FATHER'S AND OTHERS'

God speaks in the poem with many voices. One such voice is of course where the Father appears in a judicial majesty combined out of the Old Testament and Homer (Book III). Zeus pushes back onto mortals' wickedness the blame for their suffering;16 so does the Father. Rather simply, Latinism aids his sarcasm, Psalm 8 his satirical scorn.17 But Milton has a far wider repertoire of deity, presented from many standpoints through many Bible genres to gain a convergent conviction, and making correspondingly diverse use of his languages. I illustrate some now. His Hebraism itself manifests huge variety. He starts Book III with the Johannine image-theme of light, fusing Greek and Hebrew. Elsewhere (vn. 9) he seeks a holy wisdom which joins the Wisdom literature with the Greek Urania and the patristic Holy Wisdom.18 Coming nearer to the image of voice, Eve calls God's veto on eating of the Tree the 'sole

Milton3s languages and the voices of Paradise Lost daughter of his voice' (ix. 653). Is this like the four 'daughters' of God, Justice and Mercy and so on? or does it rather mean 'epitome' (as in 'Belial' meaning 'son of inquity')?19 Whereas that idiom was personification, further usages move beyond personifying God's voice, towards and then all the way up to equating God with God's voice. At x. 97-8 'the voice of God they heard / Now walking in the garden' makes it seem for a moment that the voice is 'walking'. The same ambiguity is in the AV; but not in Latin (because of genitive inflection, 'vox ambulant^'); yet it works again in Hebrew - as if God is the voice (as well God might be from the human point of view since by it he speaks to humans).20 In biblical theophany God is heard, rather than seen. Finally, the full Hebraic cultic sense of deity as voice is found at vi. 25-8: On to the sacred hill They led him [Abdiel] high applauded, and present Before the seat supreme; from whence a voice From midst a Golden Cloud thus mild was heard. Servant of God, well done . . . Theophany is by voice. God is unseen, just as when sitting unseen on the Mercy Seat in the Holy of Holies in the Temple. Abdiel after his aristeia (Homeric episode of special prowess) has his Hebrew name at last explained: out of the cloud of the presence (Shekinah) God declares that 'Abdiel' has lived up to his name, 'Servant of God'. Milton here shapes his most completely Hebraic theophany. Yet it is not solely Hebraic. Abdiel gets a gospel, Greek accolade as well - the Homeric one in his aristeia, and a gospel one because he is the 'good and faithful servant' who has 'fought the better fight'.21 Similarly the Theogony of Hesiod shaped the numinous place of time just before, that 'Cave / Within the Mount of God, fast by his Throne, / where light and darkness in perpetual round / Lodge and dislodge by turns . . .'22 Though Milton at times insists that pagan gods are lesser or futile, at times like the present one he takes a syncretic option. Here he is manifestly drawn towards the Greek/Hebrew one. The fusion of Greek with Hebrew, just seen and frequent in the poem, achieves a strong sense of deity, half-revealed as glory. John Rumrich has argued that God's glory is kabod, infinitely weighty.23 It is also Hebrew shekinah, presence, imaged (as in the opening of Book VI, above) as a 'golden cloud', in fact as light (for example in the Light imagery of the

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opening of Book III). Greek doxa and Latin gloria equally image transcendence as light. (A 'glory' still means both 'halo' and 'anthelion', OED 9.) The fusions become even richer when God is sensed indirectly, by immanence. Milton draws on his "book of knowledge fair' to voice God immanent in Eden. Convergent witness from languages and their cultures abounds here: In shadier Bower More sacred and sequester'd, though but feign'd, Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor Nymph, Nor Faunus haunted. Here in close recess With Flowers, Garlands, and sweet-smelling Herbs Espoused Eve deckt first her Nuptial Bed, And heav'nly Choirs the Hymenaean sung, What day the genial Angel to our Sire Brought her in naked beauty more adorn'd, More lovely than Pandora, whom the Gods Endow'd with all their gifts, and O too like In sad event, when to the unwiser Son Ofjaphet brought by Hermes, she ensnar'd Mankind with her fair looks, to be aveng'd On him who had stole Jove's authentic fire.

(iv. 705-19)

'Sacred and sequester'd' (706) is an orderly hendiadys of Latinisms, befitting the deities then named. 'Espous'd', 'nuptial', 'heavenly' and 'hymenaean' originate in (respectively) Latin entering English through French, Latin entering direct, mainline Anglo-Saxon, and Greek via Latin. Such derivations are not merely retrievable by philology: their root-senses are activated by context (the excitement of viewing beatitude), and by their own co-presence and interaction. They are so arranged as to converge and corroborate; for example, by the alliteration of 'Espoused Eve' (fronting its line), or the ascending series of adjectives 'espoused-nuptial-heavenly-hymenaean-geniaP. 'Genial angel' unites the Roman worship of generation with the Greco-Christian angelos. The confluent languages guide us into agreeing that this human union is blessed because all available heavens contribute.24

CREATURES

VOICES

It hardly needs adding that a further indirect witness to deity comes from what angels and humans say in praise of God. Whether transcendent or

Milton's languages and the voices o/Taradise Lost immanent or revealed, languages help them praise. But also, being creatures, and endowed with choice, they use languages which may draw in their own history, replete with the contrast deriving from other choice. Such contrast only sharpens the sense of beatitude by adducing clouds of loss, serving a poem whose theme is loss. I illustrate each point briefly, reserving examples from the speaking of Adam and Eve themselves to the next section as Voices of Innocence and Experience' (both at once, with shifting proportion of contrast). When Messiah returns from the war in heaven, To meet him all his Saints, who silent stood Eye-witnesses of his Almighty Acts, With Jubilee advanc'd; and as they went, Shaded with branching Palm, each order bright, Sung Triumph . . .

(vi. 882-6)

'Jubilee' connects the Hebrew amnesty rite (fromyobet) and Latinjubilare, rejoice. 'Triumph' is Roman ritual. 'Almighty acts', 'saints' and 'palms' span all history; everything from Creation and Exodus through Palm Sunday to the Apocalypse.25 Such creaturely voicing admits change because good will come from evil. The passage describing the Bower of Eve will again make the point. In Greek 'Pandora' means 'having all the gods' gifts', but she lost them. Milton describing this pagan act of special creation dwells on the loss ('O too like / In sad event'). Next, Greek is blended into Hebrew when Pandora's father-in-law Iapetus becomes 'Japhet', Noah's son: perhaps this is done to hint that fall within marriage recurred soon after the Flood, but certainly Milton collocates the HebrewJaphet with the Greek 'Hermes' (717). So then the contest of Prometheus with Jove (718-19) links marriage with the warfare of mankind with gods. The clausula, 'stole Jove's authentic fire', contains a linguistic hint: Greek authentia means 'original authority'; and this has become subject to theft. Immanence as blessing modulates in the passage towards awareness of Covenant breached. ADAM AND EVE - VOICES OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE

How can humans sound innocent? And if they can, how can they voice change? This dilemma of voicing is the dilemma of the story itself. The Book of Genesis gives Milton no clue whatever. The thing just happens: the mischievous serpent is just a serpent, and serpents just happen to be

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mischievous. His languages, however, give Milton much of the dilemma's resolution. T o put it baldly, because his languages have a huge past of lived experience they embed, willy-nilly, ironies of the human future when Adam and Eve are given them to speak with (and all the more so when others speak about them, as incessantly takes place in the poem). Eve has a special place in this process: she leads Adam linguistically too. For example, when (as everyone notes) she is given Ovid's words about Narcissus' self-love I started back, It started back, but pleas'd I soon return'd, Pleas'd it return'd as soon . . .

(iv. 462~4)26

the impact is not necessarily a moralizing one ('Ah! She is vain, there is self-love in Eden this early'); but there is sophistication in Eden, in the clever syntactical mimesis, and there is the smell of Ovidian metamorphosis, the change of potency into permanence. She is insistently linked with change anyway, as the future mother of all mankind; but what sort of change will that be, the poem keeps asking. Less ambivalently, Eve undergoes 'trouble' (v. 34) before Adam does, and 'trouble' is change. It is ironic that she even has words for trouble, like 'offence' and 'irksome', in the dream-narrative. And the dream alters her vocabulary as she recounts it, as if Satan were again violating her mind by imposing his idiom. First he insinuates his 'gentle voice' (v. 37). From simple diction she moves to the more august 'interdicted knowledge' (Adam-talk?). But soon she sees the dream-figure, 'like one of those from Heav'n / By us oft seen' - she does not know the word 'angel'. Yet irony replaces naivety when she says his 'dewy locks distill'd / Ambrosia'. Dew, she knows; but not ambrosia (v. 56-7). It comes from Virgil, where Venus leaves her son Aeneas: Ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem Spiravere . . .

(1. 403-4)27

T h e application is ironic, as what is blessing to Aeneas becomes a theophany of corruption. T h e sleazier we feel it to be, the more Eve's consciousness is contaminated by the dream: to have one's dreams controlled by another person's designs is nearly the ultimate in subjection. As for Adam, in his talk with Raphael about Eve he declares that delight 'works in the mind no change, / Nor vehement desire' (vin.

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525-6) - or no delight except that which he takes in Eve, 'weak / Against the charm of Beauty's powerful glance5 (533-4). In the Argument to Book IX, read shortly afterwards, 'Adam at first amazed, but perceiving her lost, resolves through vehemence of love to perish with her . . .' 'Vehemence' guides us to the authorial comment: Adam is never vehe-mens or ve-mens/vae-mens, 'out of his mind, except with regard to Eve.28 Which suffices for ruin. He talks of his fallen state as if by hyperbole: Raphael's response arouses a premonitory shudder. Even nearer to the brink Adam voices innocence looking down the precipice into experience, when he perceives that Eve is Defac't, deflowYd, and now to Death devote

(ix. 901)

Though the line has been discussed before, it bears repeating and extending, to register the heightened awareness, Adam's uncanny recognition of what he could hardly, as innocent, recognize. It draws on almost all Milton's language-resources. It has Spenserian alliterative thunder. It insists on the romance languages' prefix of fall and loss, 'de-' = 'down', 'downfall', 'loss'. The roots which follow the prefix are a series in crescendo: 'face' lost, 'flower' lost, 'vote' (vow, word, voice) lost. 'Devote' (past, passive participle) shows Eve has been taken over by something, some other agency - Satan and/or the moral law. 'Devote' in Latin means 'given over to death', and voluntarily too. Addfinallythat Virgil had used the word at a climax: Dido, given over to unlawful love, is declared by the narrator to be 'pesti devota futurae' (1.172), 'doomed to a plague to come'.29 Adam could have said this, too. But the astounding thing is that, in Milton's version, Adam not the narrator perceives the meaning. Of course he must: the insight itself tips him off the edge. But the depth and breadth of the line's implication are not simply multilingual, they are piercing because it is not the wise narrator but the unwise Adam who speaks here. Here is the very voice of innocence passing over into bitter experience. Languages, then, help voices of innocence express experience, and not least by ironies from etymology. But does the reverse hold too? Can words of experience regain their original innocence of guilt? Can Adam's 'liquid Lapse of murmuring Streams' (vin. 263) be simply Latinism, 'gliding flow'? I think not. The word's other occurrence (xn. 83) is 'thy original lapse', said to Adam again; and the word is too frequent in the sense of 'fall' or 'fault' to be ring-fenced here. What we register is, the purity and the fence; the first more, and all the more because of the second. It is not as dreadfully true

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as the reader finds it, just as Vehemence' makes Adam's words ring truer than he yet knows. A similar question arises with the brooks of Eden which 'with mazy error under pendant shades / Ran Nectar' (iv. 239-40). 'The evil meaning is consciously and ominously excluded. Rather than the meaning being simply "wandering" [and "shadows"], it is "wandering (not error)" [and "shadows not death"].' 30 One and all, such precisions of irony depend on language-knowledge, and are the precision which gives each line such weight and authority. His languages help Milton say multum in parvo.

THE VOICE OF THE SERPENT

Because it is unprecedented for a snake to speak, Book IX naturally yields plenty of occurrences of voice and vocal around that surprise. A kind of a fortiori is involved: a snake speaking is unheard of; here is a snake speaking; so either it cannot really be a snake or else it is a snake with a vital truth to tell. Eve falls for the second alternative, being the only one the snake offers her. Since the logic is false, how does it succeed? Does its success owe anything to Milton's languages? It does not work through any erudite or high-flown diction, at any rate. Eve must seem to understand (and not seem stupidly taken in by big words). But syntax and figures work hard, as do ellipses - 'Not just, not God' (701). Clever tricks use simple words, in order that she will seem to follow and assent - 'a Goddess among Gods' (the one unique being in Heaven!, 547). Circular patterns drive home the ideas which will best c o r r u p t - 'Wonder not, sovereign mistress, if perhaps / Thou canst, who art sole wonder . . .' (532-3). T h e languages are seldom wielded, as this must seem a plain style (making the better argument appear the worse, like Belial the Sophist, 11. 113-14). Do we hear as Latinism the play of active against passive voice in 'who sees thee? . . . Who shouldst be seen / A goddess'? We might, since Raphael used this figure to rebuke Adam recently (vni. 578), and it admits the ironic pun ('seem' a goddess, yet not be one - the other force oivideof). Similarly, allusion may be helping the flattery: 'Thee all things living gaze on, all things thine / By gift', where the word order and adoring repetition of the intimate pronoun recall Lucretius' 'prayer' to Venus. A surer allusion resides in Satan's final rhetorical question: Or is it envy, and can envy dwell In heavenly breasts?

(729~3°)

Milton's languages and the voices of Paradise Lost This is Virgil's question about Juno, to which Milton is returning us.31 It is heavily ironic here, for envy indeed dwells within this spirit's breast. The pot is calling the kettle black, and letting Eve think she thinks it: she knows nothing about blackness, yet she is about to find out. In the main, however, Milton chooses a pseudo-plainness for the serpent voice. It must be for contrast's sake that the epic voice, to introduce the serpent's voice, employs so much higher a style. First, we hear of 'tract oblique' (510), then an epic simile ('As when a Ship . . .', 513), then the ominous allusion to 'Circean call' (522), and so to the climactic Italianate locution 'Serpent Tongue / Organic' (529-30). And similarly before Satan's conclusive speech, under the Tree. PARADOXES OF VOICING

Multilingual voicing assists ironizing. It helps set innocence off from experience. Contrast helps meaning; in fact, contrast- the system of the differences — is central to meaning. Complexity is not, however, sinister. It does not hide, it uncovers, it gathers and connects meaning. Hence angels, teaching, use more not less of Milton's Latinism. And the epic voice uses more not less of it than the tempter does. Decorum governs and explains the paradoxes. Milton wins authority, gravitas, dignity and weight from his textural tact. Whatever else voice may mean, the discussion of it should keep contact with how voices speak. It should stay aware that voices are to be heard, that Milton composed out loud, and that readers read him aloud. I contend that Milton's own conceptions of voice do remain aware of what voices are for, namely for people to express and communicate, and be heard. All voicing, and not least that of the narrating voice, is transaction; part of responsive, responsible living. Hence, the voice of Satan is arresting in an immediate way. The official voice of the Father, on the other hand, is bluntly affronting; but Milton proclaims God by a host of other voices. His own epic voice is a major one among them. In fact, that voice is not only the most often heard, it is the most varied, most learned, most multilingual, and even most orally satisfying. It had to be; and it is.

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CHAPTER 8

Multilingualism and epic

Such being the manifestations of multilingualism within Paradise Lost, it is time to ask whether Milton is normal or unusual or unique in enlisting it for epic. The question is really several questions. Is epic more multilingual than other genres or discourses? How does Milton relate to his epic exemplars in this respect? Is his epic style any more multilingual than language is, or than English is? Is his undoubted distinctiveness of style simply a variant of something done by all secondary epic? My view is as follows, (a) Milton's epic style is multilingual in a way and to an extent he had not used in earlier poems, (b) He learns from predecessors in secondary epic, and from some more than others. And (c) while his multilingualism works with the grain of English itself, it is a new departure, fulfilling the nature of langue and of epic parole together. In all three respects his achievement is sanctioned by precedessors, emulative of them, and distinctive if not triumphant. To show this I first summarize relevant contexts, which explain his traditionalism and emulation, but not his distinction. That distinction emerges better from comparison with two predecessors, Virgil and Dante. LANGUAGE, HUMANISM, TRANSLATION

Most languages are multilingual in the sense in which Paradise Lost is. They borrow words, also phrases and syntax along with names and allusions, from communities and cultures which come into contact with them. Yet languages vary greatly in their kind and degree of borrowing. Some languages import ideas complete with names for them. The extreme case happens when every third word seems a recent import, and the parole resembles a pidgin. Other languages borrow the thing but not the word for it, their speech community having developed a disposition to caique (Russian, French). The extreme case happens when a language develops a resistance to loan-words, ideologically, as if they were 146

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unclean. Some languages have a syntax so strong as to resist all modification from new surroundings and alternative method (German word-order). English over the centuries has proved absorbent without becoming subjugated: maybe this has something to do with its candidacy for being the world's language. At all events most English poetry, not only Milton's nor epic's, is multilingual in the absorbing of words, phrases, usages and the rest. However, whereas all languages do it, and English more than many, language-users vary enormously in what they do on the basis of this absorbency. Most are unaware. Thus academic and scientific writing nowadays abounds in Latin- and Greek-based polysyllabics, but in the name of impersonality or objectivity, not from any awareness of roots or resultant ironies. Today's humanists may be more aware. In Milton's time, they certainly were. Poets were occupationally so. Nonetheless, poets till Milton did not demand attention to this feature. There are no good inkhorn poets. Spenser's medievalism did not last. But Milton's epic style - for better and worse - did. One good reason why it did, is that he had thought hard about the Questione delta Lingua. His Latin, including verse, was so good that it might have been his chosen tongue, for an international audience. When, like his Italian exemplars, he chose the mother-tongue, so as to speak to a smaller but more unified speech-community, he used Latin to extend that speech, in fact to help him teach and preach in it. He did it in two ways, corresponding to his own lifelong interest in translation: by putting a Latin (or other) thought into English words (like paraphrasing, or caique), or by coining or reviving Latinate meanings in English (like metaphrase, or Latinism). Yet both practices aspire to the status ofjidus interpres. In his long poem, he does both, kaleidoscopically varying and mingling the balance. He is continuing and applying the language-arts at which he had long excelled. Another strong reason why Milton's multilingualism requires attention is that his blank verse medium powerfully foregrounds his multilingual effects. It does so, not more but yet no less, than it does with the other features of that medium (puns, for example, or collocations of names). Such foregrounding draws attention to the multiplicity of apposite meaning, and resultant lively emotion, in whatever is foregrounded. We should enjoy those effects as served by the lively interest in other languages, their etymologies and literatures. I say 'should', because his earliest readers certainly did: the enjoyment remains a heuristic device of great power and flexibility.

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As a student of the Bible, too, Milton was a linguist. If there had been no other prompting to enhance and use his languages it would have been imperative for such as he to work up Hebrew, Greek and Latin in order to understand - in a Protestant, individualistic, Bible-centred way - the Jewish and Christian sacred writings, ab origine. Accordingly they find a role in Paradise Lost. They find it not simply as correctness of allusion or diction, but with a vaguer control, for instance of euphony in names, and an experimenting with special effect. All the same, this centrality of the Bible brought him its own version of the Questione. For liturgical purposes, the language-choice is tricky enough: should worship be in the language spoken by the founders and recorders of a religion, or in the tongue of each worshipping community? The former option keeps up authenticity and awe, at the expense of incomprehension and an entrenched role for priestcraft or hermeneutics. The latter attempts full comprehension and accessibility, at the expense of the failures endemic in translation itself and in language (whose nature is change). Historically, mixtures have been favoured, though they are harder still to be theoretically satisfying since they could always have been a greater or lesser or different mixture than as encountered in religious communities or traditions. The problem was as old as the Septuagint, however, and some have always thought the best answer was either pragmatic (do whatever works) or pluralist (the more translations and mixtures the better). The early Christian answer was to use the koine, the Greek of widest circulation; and then, after the new religion's centre became Rome, to use Latin for the same reason. But within the koine certain words of Christ are kept in their Hebrew or Aramaic.1 Later the Latin of the Mass keeps some few phrases of Greek,2 along with embedded Aramaic or Hebrew.3 So ritual, too, has behaved pragmatically: the mixture, with the most sacred utterances embedded in the vernacular, is kept because it works. Nonetheless, the Reformers had to think it all out again. Latin, assuredly, must go, qua inaccessible to the ordinary Christian, and tainted by association with the Papacy. Yet the King James Version keeps the Aramaic and other fossils. Milton keeps the more universal ones ('Amen5, 'Hallelujah', 'Osanna'), on the Protestant principle of intelligibility. By keeping 'Hallelujah' and 'Osanna' one has more ways to praise God. Indeed a residual conservatism, or conservationism, is as perceptible in English Bible translations as it had been in the New Testament

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Greek. (Hence that mysterious 'Selah' that in old Bibles peppers the Psalms incomprehensibly: not although but because its meaning is lost it is to be retained.) As for Milton, then, he had committed himself to Protestant as well as humanist and patriotic purposes by composing his Adam-epic in English. Yet because the Bible was so important, and because that fact had occasioned a long tradition of philological scholarship in exegesis, he could in practice — in thousands of local details — avail himself of the long, lived language-history of the faith. This helped, not hindered, accessibility. It enabled him to address the many learned amongst his coreligionists. A poet who is doctus gains in attention from the learned and the devout. He took his chances. All the same, the chief thrust of biblical into his epic is in the form of native expression. In one reared on Latin composition, and so excelling at it, there is an element of conscious sacrifice about this; for neo-Latin is inherently intertextual, more so than any other Latin, and than most other languages. We find him glad to make that sacrifice; yet willing also (where appropriate, and safeguarded by adjacent synonym or etymological gloss4) to enrich his texture and the reader's pleasure by giving the more exact and learned name or word as well. EPIC AND LANGUAGES

European epic was multilingual from very early on, by dint of Homer's form of Greek and of his early supremacy. Three reasons stand out. First, the texts of Homer preserved older forms of Greek, as part of his epic axiom of praising the former glories, to his own lesser world. Such forms included: words with the extinct consonant digamma; paratactic syntax; ancient words, hardly Greek at all, ending in -nthos. Secondly, because Homer's epics were virtually sacred texts to the Greeks (who agreed on little enough else) the successor epics drew almost perforce on his diction, scansion, dialect, syntax and epic features. Even while epic remained Greek it was an intertextual, indeed interlingual Greek, and increasingly so. Words which were ancient in Homer continue, ever more ancient and obscure, in the Hellenistic and Alexandrian epics. And Homeric lexis mutates in the hands of the Epigoni. Thus Apollonius Rhodius invents weird back-formations, made up from Homeric words whose meaning or form have ceased to be understood. Thirdly, moreover, what is thus customary and indeed sanctioned in

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later Greek will necessarily be magnified in the Roman reception of Greek epic. But equally, what held in Greece then Rome for the highest genre need not hold for other poetic genres, or for discourse other than poetry. The ancient pre-eminence of epic ensured that some sort of multilingualism, and a heightened and heightening intertextuality, remained a source of epic formula. Multilingualism was formulaic and normative for epic, almost alone among the genres. Literary as opposed to oral epic began long before the Roman epic. Still, secondary epic is rightly identified with Virgil. His practice became virtual law for secondary epic after him. Certainly that was the case for Milton, who looked up to Virgil as the source of his title-page self-signatures, and back to Virgil for the actual practice of epic. For Virgil was the one who first saw and solved the Questione as regards epic. He began as a 'neoteric', or cultivator of 'exact' late Greek imitation, a Roman Callimachus; but he grew away from that conception of homeric. Again, he inherited a more native tradition from Ennius, both subject and language and decorum; yet he modified that too. In his maturity he matched admiration for Ennius with contemplation of Homer, so as to unite the two aspirations in his Aeneid, very much as Milton in his turn would unite the classical and biblical. VIRGIL S EXAMPLE

Epic had been intertextual, accumulative and bilingual before Virgil, alike in Greek and Latin — in the Homeric embroidery of Apollonius Rhodius, or the translation of a Homer passage for his own purposes by Ennius. The new thing that Virgil does is to owe everything essential to Homer yet to subdue it to the needs of his own nation and tongue. His intention to emulate and alter Homer is declared at once, by the structure and the opening of the Aeneid. Structurally, its twelve Books declare the intention. Whereas the Iliad and the Odyssey have twenty-four Books apiece because that was the number of letters in the Greek alphabet at a time when long after their oral composition the two Homeric epics were written down and edited, Virgil's twelve has nothing to do with alphabet, and everything to do with the base of twelve established and hallowed by the two Homeric exemplars. Just so, Milton's eventual twelve Books link him to Virgil.5 Virgil's opening, too, declares the intention: 'Arma virumque cano qui. ..' ('Arms I sing, and the man who ...') As Derek Williams puts it:

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Thefirstword, indicating war as the subject matter of the poem, challenges a comparison with Homer's Iliad; the second challenges comparison with the Odyssey, of which the opening words are 'andra moi ennepe Mousa ...' ('Sing, Muse, of the man who . . ,')6 Indeed, Williams goes on, Throughout the Aeneid Virgil sets his Roman theme in tension with the heroic world of Homer; Aeneas has to leave the one world and enter the other, [my emphasis] Just so, in Milton's opening we hear of'Man's' first disobedience and the rescuing greater 'man': these link it back to Virgil and beyond to Homer. But Virgil pays his dues to Roman epic also, to Ennius5 Annales (composed after 189 BC). At Aeneid WI. 845, in the underworld the spirit of Anchises shows his son Aeneas the hero Quintus Fabius Maximus 'Cunctator', so nicknamed because he saved Rome after Hannibal's victories by his delaying tactics (cunctationes). 'Tu maximus ille es, / Unus qui nobis cunctando restituis rem' ('You are that greatest Fabius, / That one man who restored our state by delaying'). Virgil has adapted this judgement from Ennius, who had said 'Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem' ('One man restored our state by delaying'.) Virgil is paying tribute to the earlier poet and the saviour-hero alike. However, the allusion is all the more unmistakable and deft in that it suspends Virgil's own metrical preferences, to dwell on the rougher older rhythm: 'restituis rem' is unlike Virgil's practice of ending the line with a word of either two or three syllables. While the line honours this Fabius, its sound and pause honour Ennius. Just so, Milton's rescuing 'unus homo'7 reappears in his opening sentence, 'Till one greater man / Restore us'. What is more, he reappears in order to 'regain' the 'blessed seat' - Aeneas in context had been shown, precisely, the souls of Elysium in their 'sedes beatae' ('blessed seats'). As Virgil had honoured Ennius, by a small thought and a tiny stylistic signature, so Milton honoured them both, whilst praising a more than Roman saviour. Virgil, then, has set himself to combine Homer with Ennius, and to overgo both. To take a further instance, where Ennius had translated a simile from Homer, Virgil makes the wording on the whole less dependent, whilst however restoring the key adjective 'kudioon' (Iliad vi. 509, 'exulting') as the weighty 'luxurians' (xi. 497, the escaped horse is 'exulting in his pride and strength').8 Virgil restores the imagined emotion: the joy of freedom, the joy of strength. Just so, though his theme

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does not admit much battle-joy, Milton makes sure as a principle that his epic similes achieve an energetic bonding of tenor and vehicle, in which strong, complex emotion is communicated. Satan is like a sleeping sea-beast to whom the lost sailor anchors because the anchorage holds fear, Satan's steps on the burning marl bring him pain. Finally, whereas these examples (though thematic enough) are on a small scale, working as local effect, Virgil sometimes makes Homer the mainstay of an extended or pervasive effect. An example of extended effect is the aristeia of Mezentius (x. 689-768). Of this, Williams writes: The passage is made particularly Homeric by the frequency of similes... Three are very largely based on Homeric originals. Virgil is closer to Homer than almost anywhere else in the poem; this is deliberately done to portray the archaic nature of Mezentius5 qualities as compared with those of Aeneas.(II. p. 366) [my emphases] The intelligent and thematic use of a predecessor as a placing device resembles Milton's lavishing of heroic on Satan: the lavishing implies critique. As for pervasive effect, having instanced the exordium earlier I will here use the ending, the resolution of the agon, when Jupiter at last overrules Juno, and Turnus must fight Aeneas alone and unaided. To quote Williams again, 'The similarity of the narrative itself with Homer . . . is extremely marked, as Virgil re-enacts the famous and familiar scenes of Iliad 22 (the pursuit of Hector by Achilles) . . .' The thematic effect is 'to add a new chapter to the Homeric story; this time the Trojan is the pursuer and will be the victor'.9 The moment is heightened by simile, Aeneas as a mountain - Athos, Eryx, or Father Apenninus himself. A tiny detail here shows what care Virgil is taking. Mount 'Athos' scans iamb, x / ('quantus Athos aut quantus Eryx . . .', xn. 701).10 Virgil had given the name a short 0 in an earlier poem; but in Greek it has long 0, as here. The point is not merely that Virgil has corrected himself on a tiny detail of Greek language, but how and why. He wanted, at this high point of the story, to be heard in a more than Latin way, a Latin-am/-Greek way. Sound and metre and rhythm help him do it, a Roman poet hearing in a Greek way for a special impact. Just so, Milton cultivated accuracy, and changed error or unclarities, even at a cellular level where no one else would have noticed. He is on his mettle, because Virgil was: he too is a doctus poeta, finding self-respect to be threatened by error, and by the same token restored by

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care for linguistic detail. Instances include the changes to i66y in 1674, which include the similarly infinitesimal. Small or large, these intertextual touches betoken the poet who is learned qua self-aware - aware of the self through awareness of roots. DANTE S MULTILINGUALISM

First of all, we need to ask whether Dante's poem belongs at all in discussion of epic. After all, it is a dream-vision poem, consciously seeking a sermo humilis rather than a grand style. But I admire the Divine Comedy as a poem excelling poems after Virgil which are more technically epic: it excels in epic sublimity because it makes us read through the plain style to the transcendence of the thought. To that end Dante uses with splendour, as local effect, almost all of epic's best distinguishing characteristics (invocation, catalogue, speeches, similes, prophecy and so on). More to the present issue, the style of thisfirstgreat vernacular non-oral poem is incessantly multilingual, in a way which illuminates at every point how he is standing on the shoulders of the giant Virgil. These considerations suffice to make Dante a key figure in my case that Milton learnt most from Dante among preceding multilinguals. As Dante to Virgil, so Milton to Dante. Dante's attitude to languages and the practice of them is much more complex than Virgil's. He is multi- not bi-lingual. He is multilingual by temperament and situation alike. Of course he wrote a whole work on the language question and its depths, De Vulgari Eloquentia. Here, however, I focus on his practice in the Divina Commedia itself. At once we encounter his fascination with language. The poem itself is entitled a 'Commedia', with accent proparoxytone; yet in the text he uses comedia (and tragedia), with the medieval accent. The less of tangible reason we can find for this, the more we perceive his interest in word-behaviour for its own sake. Dante abounds (as in that small instance) in awareness of languages and delight in them, but most often he is also exploiting them for special effects of character or irony or theme. He does it for special effect; so not all the time; but when a chance comes. I use seven examples to illustrate his delight in the differences and changes in languages, then two more to show his equal delight in their continuity. I conclude each instance with connections to Milton's practice. (a) The word for 'yes' was used as a test and marker of language variation among the romance tongues. So 'Langued^' is the region

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where they say oc for 'yes', as opposed to si, oil and so on.11 Dante identifies the Bolognese in hell as saying sipa for 'yes' (Inf. xvm. 61). Elsewhere he notes how Italians preserved the Latin ita for 'yes' [Inf. xxi. 42), even though their usual trademark was 'si' (XXXVIII. 80). He is using these synonyms as national or regional identifiers. Yet although many of his instances work simply enough in that role, others develop past the simple to the curious and word-fancying, in fact to the linguistic: language-variation becomes synecdoche for communal identity. Dante writes from amidst language-change, and is aware of it at first hand: Milton's knowledge of vernaculars is more bookish. (b) Dante alludes to matters of register also, defining childhood as when 'pappo' and 'dindi' are said for pane (bread) and danari (money) respectively (Purg. xi. 105). The babyish reduplicatives stand out charmingly but also tellingly from the austere discourse of Oderisi surrounding. One must put away childish things, the swift lexis is ordaining. As for Milton, his linguistic range includes the colloquial, but not these even more informal registers, whether in English or not. (c) In the same canto (Purg. xi. 81) Dante refers (in Italian) to the French term for Oderisi's art of miniature-painting, miniare in Italian, as 'illumination'. Dante's alluminar is enluminer in French (cf. English 'limning'), his al- 'reflecting a typical mispronunciation of the nasal sound' of the French.12 Dante is being learned here, without being phonetically accurate. I can see no great point in the whole allusion to how people term the art elsewhere. Dante either needed the rhyme 'fisi'/'Oderisi'/'Parisi', or enjoyed the multilingual flourish. I suspect the last. Similar playfulness about language vivifies Milton's language compositions. Nor is it wholly abandoned in the high seriousness of epic, whose puns and ironies are his multilingual play - the strenuous play of contest with Dante. (d) Puns occur in Dante too, whether forceful or ironic in effect. Thus 'dai denti morsi de la morte' (Purg. vn. 32), 'bitten by the teeth of death', uses hyperbaton to collocate 'morsi' with 'morte'. It is a pun but not an etymological one. Rather than being playful here, Dante is endorsing the Vulgate Latin of Hosea 13. 14: 'O death, I will be thy death', ('O mors, morsus tuus ero'). Is there a countersuggestion of hope (the biter bit) on the part of Dante within Virgil's hopeless contextual statement that he is in limbo with the infant dead? And is this yet another tributary stream to the multiple pun that Eve 'knew not eating death'? Or a phonological onomatopoeia, Milton remarking like Dante that words for 'eat and 'death' resembling one another in working off the lips and teeth?

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(e) Latinism comes easily to Dante's Tuscan, it goes without saying. Thus he can make a prominent symbolism of the seven Ps traced on Dante's forehead {Purg. rx. 112) without any need to explain that T ' stands for Peccata, sins. Latinism in fact occurs in matters so small as to suggest this is the ordinary, instinctive way of Dante's dialogue with Virgil - character with character, as writer with writer: consider 'luogo e' (= locus esf), Inf. xxxiv. 127, or the hybrid phrase 'ab antico' {Inf. xv. 64). 'Vosco' {Purg. xi. 60) must be vobiscum. And so on. Milton does not use Latinism in these ways, for it is not possible to English, and may be uncongenial as too medieval or macaronic. (f) More often, however, Latinism brings gravitas, of a sort and by a way which may even have reached Milton from Virgil through Dante. Possible instances include Milton's predilection in Book I, plunging his poem like Dante's into hell and medias res, for 'horror' and 'horrid'. Dante liked the word, and found it in Virgil's description of the 'hell' of burning Troy {Aeneid n. 559). Nearby we have the verb ruinare, and rovinava: compare Milton's intransitive 'ruining' (vi. 868). Dante too stresses the 'livid' flames of hellfire.13 (g) More centrally, Dante does something Milton never does: he employs his other tongues directly in his poem. He writes in provengal for a proven£al soul (Arnaut Daniel, Purg. xxvi. 140-7).14 He creates a gibberish for Pluto, with childish echo-patterns {Inf. vn. 1). He creates another - a babel-deriving nonsense - for Nimrod {Inf. xxxi. 67). And he embeds all sorts of Latin. The Latin is never Virgil's, though: it is always a biblical, or liturgical, or theological Latin, which meant in his day a living Latin. The effect can be solemn (as when the beatitudes are cited in apposite cantos of Purgatory). Or it can be deflating ('Vexilla regis prodeunt infemi, Inf. xxxiv. 1: 'forward go the standards of the king of Hell', where the added final word wrenches the hymn-line into bathos). O r technical (the quia of the scholastics, Purg. in. 37). But sometimes the Latinism is one of calquing or appropriating; the souls who work through an expanded praying of the Our Father, do so in Italian {Purg. xi) - to make it their own, perhaps, appropriating it (like Milton as translator). T o sum up provisionally, Dante's poem is macaronic and hybrid at times, whereas Milton's never goes that far. Is this the difference between Catholic and Protestant, or between English and Italian, or solely between Dante and Milton? At any rate the difference invites us to look at causes, in liturgy, in placing, in spirituality. The Catholic view of the Latin of liturgy marks a dimension of that language which Milton lacked or denied himself. Dante (1265-1312) stood closer in place and time to the

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formation of the Romance languages, the myriad changes which turned Latin into vernaculars. Spiritually speaking, by his languages he offers to God a representative rather than individualist synthesis of praising. While both are poets of exile, Dante is more of a belonger and less of a loner. (h) After this diversity of language-behaviour is recognized in Dante's poem, we must recognize its nature as equally centripetal. It has startling continuity with, and through, Latin. He implies this in several places. He proclaims it when Sordello hails Virgil at Purg. vn. 16-17. 'O gloria di Latin', disse, 'per cui mostro cid che potea la lingua nostra . . .' ('O glory of the Latins' said he, 'through whom / our tongue showed forth its power'). Virgil demonstrated what 'Latin' could do, and is its 'glory' - straightforward enough compliment, so far. But he is the glory of 'lingua nostra \ Latin is our language, our language(s) are Latin. Sordello was Italian and wrote in provengal (as did other older Italian poets). Brunetto Latini, Dante's teacher, wrote in French. Hence Dante's own proven^al in the poem. And not only are all romance tongues Latin equally, but Dante seems to have believed that 'the Italian dialects dated from antiquity and had always existed simultaneously with Latin'15; so that Sordello and Virgil, being Mantuans, can talk Mantuan to each other, and never mind that some 1300 years of language change have intervened! This insouciance conflicts with the preceding awareness of language-change, but Dante wants to make a witty local effect; so he does that. Nothing like this attracts Milton. However, just as Dante plays fast and loose with diachronicity upon occasion, so Milton avails himself of the whole body of literary Latin word-formation (or that of Greek or Hebrew) for his own occasions. The sense that his own idiom is in unbroken continuity, in fact living contact, with that of Latin's best poet helps to empower Dante to speak comprehensively about his own world, and magisterially for his own time. So much so, indeed, that Oderisi hints Dante may become the new 'gloria de la lingua' (Purg. xi. 98), making Tuscan the new koine for Italy. Other regions would of course contest this; but Milton believed it, witness his letter to Buonmattei. Milton never even hinted at such zeal to be the glory of English, since his tongue - though unknown abroad - was an established and national

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not regional idiom, with a considerable and normative literature achieved before him. He is both more, and less, modest as a voice about himself within his poem. He talks about himself far less, but since Dante so centralizes and confesses himself he can also rise higher, to express aspiration for himself and his language-community. Milton, on the other hand, moved away from patriotic themes, to universalize the Fall. Does not the felt presence of his multilingualism have something to do with this universalizing? That is, far from alienating native readers he is drawing them into a wider community of culture through language, where 'culture5 means 'experience lived and expressed and passed forward'? If so, Dante's position as a multilingual in his age and place had many powerful advantages that were not Milton's in his age and place. In particular, Dante's relation to Latin was more natural, strong and varied than Milton's could be. Conversely, Milton's mastery of languages and their literatures was more scholarly than Dante's could be, lagging behind Milton in Greek and Hebrew. But most of all, the key difference is a distance. Latin was closer to Dante because it was alive in his age and country in ways it was not in Milton's, and it lived especially for Dante in his spiritual centring (Bible and worship). Milton writes in a mothertongue which has its taproot outside Latin and its offspring, so that to lay them - or further sacred tongues in their classical (dead-language) form under contribution for his epic is to bring them a different distance, for a different impact. There is a less established feeling-tone, a more conscious intelligence. Finally, nonetheless, we should keep in clear view the tendency for Dante to work multilingually, as part of his appropriating of Virgil and Latin and epic method. As Virgil stood to Homer and Ennius, so Dante stands to Virgil and all that had happened after him (yet not Homer, not having Greek). Just so but even more so, Milton stands to Homer and Greek, Virgil and Latin, and adds Dante and Italian; to which again add lesser exemplars, and the whole biblical tradition known in its own languages and the languages of its translations to boot. Milton's emulating of Dante will be a mighty, and equal contest. MILTON'S ENGLISH MULTILINGUALISM IN THESE CONTEXTS

I have already made a number of connections, whether of continuity or departure, between Milton's languages-practice and that of his two key predecessors. Now, using those connections along with fresh evidence

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from Paradise Lost, I shall draw conclusions which show the diversity of his epic multilingualism. That diversity outstrips Virgil's, whereas compared with Dante we perceive equality within difference. Four points deserve emphasis, (a) Virgil's use of Greek and Homer for verbal texture alerts us to the same or related habits in Milton, namely in his use of Virgil and Latin (and Homer and Greek), (b) Dante's Latinism alerts us to the different Latinism in Milton; 'different' in respect of frequency, angle and profile, (c) It is different especially in the range of his language-influences, Milton being a language polymath: this opportunity, taken most diversely for a myriad local effects, is Milton's newest departure from precedent, (d) The local awareness of languages is a form of allusion, which Milton extends and makes his own: readers recognize it essentially as they do allusion of other sorts - less by intuitive or quantifiable means, than through their sense of context and foregrounding, combined. Here especially Dante is emulated and equalled. Now I expand each point. (a) Virgil's use of Greek and Homer for verbal texture, so far back in time yet integral to his setting of norms for secondary epic, alerts us to the kindred habit in Milton's use of Virgil and Latin (and Homer and Greek). Naturally, the effect and method will not be identical. No two pairs of languages stand in identical relation to one another. This applies equally for parole and langue; above all when the parole is speech at its most distinctive, in great epic. Granted all this, we cannot expect Milton's different metre and syntax, with English's different history of absorption of words and names, to correspond closely to Virgil's: we must seek for the same kind of debt, mutatis mutandis. Nonetheless, what Virgil does to Homer alerts me to its counterpart in Milton. The best particular example is still the opening, adduced already but now seen more fully. Announcing his subject and claiming both originality and status for it, Milton follows and adapts Virgil's exordium. Just as Virum' had sufficed to link the Aeneidwith the Odyssey, and 'Troiae' to announce the changed focus, so does Milton's patterning of'Man's / man' declare a more comprehensive humanity as theme. Virgil shapes the detail too: the emphasized words in 'Till one greater man I Restore us, and regain the blessed seat' return us definingly to Virgil, and to Ennius through Virgil. Christ is 'greater' than Adam, internally, but 'greater' too than Aeneas or Fabius Maximus within the allusion. 'Blessed seat', finally, is Virgil's phrase for the Elysian Fields where Aeneas is meeting the happier souls, like Fabius (vr. 639). The method throughout is Virgil's, extended to a greater complexity by Virgil's method.

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The best general example is Milton's admiration for the Virgilian verse-paragraph (expressed in the 'Note on the Verse', 1669). He composes similarly, to gain Virgil's 'sense variously drawn out from one verse into another', that is, enjambment. This gains especialgravitas from the first word of the line following. As Virgil's bolted horse (xi. 495-7) aut adsuetus aquae perfundi flumine noto emicat, ['bursts out', at start of new line] and again . . . arrectisque fremit cervicibus alte luxurians [the feeling, foregrounded by weight and positioning] so with Milton's 'thus they relate / erring' (1.746-7).16 It is an impact which betokens control, of response as well as utterance. From such as this derives the unusual command we sense, the unanswerable authority of the poet within his poem. Tiny changes, trivial in themselves, may yet say the most. When Virgil alters the scansion of'Athos', or Milton the spelling for sound of biblical place-names, it is precisely because no one but the author would bother, or know how to judge of such minutiae, that they are a sure sign of that author's internal constraint. Should we term it conscience, fidelity, independence? I prefer to call it an unformulated language-sense, of the same kind as a native-speaker's sense of what is and what is not idiomatic - unstatable, irreducible, but still controlling the utterance. (b) Dante's inventing of non-languages, and composing in languages other than Italian, and quoting of the Bible or liturgy in Latin, are not paralleled in Milton. His epic has no macaronic moments. Possible reasons have been offered, but the chief one is that which pervades his whole grand style: whilst drawing on his knowledge of languages, it shall not cease to be English; and in this respect he sides with Virgil and the majority. Nonetheless, Dante's more visibly eclectic, even macaronic practice as regards Latinwm proves instructive. It has a different distance to travel, Italian being so much closer to Latin than English was. But in terms of frequency, angle, and profile Dante helped to instruct Milton. Although that frequency might have been universal since almost all of Dante's words trace back to Latin, Milton instead learnt selection from Dante, and tact, and dramatic placing. The Latinate words or forms or spellings are quite sparingly used, for a special stylistic impact such as onomatopoeia (ab antico) or a thematic one (rhyming Italian with Latin

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line-ends to insinuate harmonious continuity). It turns out that Dante's sparseness of Latinism fits my general account of Latinism: it is neither ubiquitous nor trivial, but found in significant clusters or individual moments of onomatopoeia or irony. (For after a certain point, the greater the frequency, the more marginal the utility.) By 'angle' of Latinism I mean that it makes us receive meaning more freshly or richly. 'Aequare' (Inf. xxvm. 20) means 'to level' or 'match' in an ordinary Italian way; but - with help from its Latin spelling, square it further recalls Virgil's use of it. That most apposite context is Aeneas's sense of his own 'inadequacy' to express the grief of the fall of Troy (11. 361—2).17 The Latin ancestry of the verb revives the dead metaphor within 'adequacy' to emphasize the poet's worry, shared by Milton and T. S. Eliot, to find a speech that can match the greatness of the subject. By means of it, acquiring a cultural prestige, a Roman virtue, the verb calls up Roman values: the Roman Church and Roman Empire still both exist and interact, so that the article of his faith is that both may be purged, or the one purify the other, to better his unjust world. To have continuous access to the mind of both Romes through language helps to encourage the wronged exile; not as a pastime or nostalgia, but as a creed. Examples of such Latinism are frequent in Dante, made unmistakable by spelling.18 Did Milton, too, keep himself going by a (so to speak)fortifying effect of languages used like this to corroborate sense, to place oneself in a scheme of life on earth that preceded and would survive the defeated present? Even if that expression of the claim is too speculative, Latin - and for Milton his other tongues - do fortify the style, and so help to uphold the value they express or hint at. I call this profile, or relief. The tongues have a lower profile, or stand in lower relief, than in Dante. They hint, they support, they come in aid of a simpler primary sense which lies open to the ordinary seventeenthcentury reader. The hinting matters most here: it is mostly the secondary senses of a common Latin-rooted English word which return the thought to classical rooting. To ignore the hinting as alien or needless is to ignore a living and central quality of Milton's style. (c) What is newest in Milton's multilingualism, is the number and diversity of the languages which he can bring into his English grand style. This holds, whether we think of his borrowing, modification, calquing, or paraphrase, all these being among his language-arts. Their force lies in the fact of versatile, end-specific combinings of tongues. I have already instanced the poem's exordium, 'Dove-like sat'st

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brooding5, and Satan's first speech, recollecting the Latin of Virgil's Hector. From the other end of the poem, I could adduce 'gliding meteorous', with its Homeric stressing (xn. 629). Instead, take the marvellous aptness of the expulsion by the 'brandished sword of God', 'that flaming brand' (xn. 633 and 643). Milton simultaneously recovers the Middle English connection of 'brand' (sword) with the verb 'brandish', links 'brand' as burning light with the flash of swords in action, and all of this with the Hebrew verb from Genesis; mithhapecheth, literally 'turning itself this way and that', but here condensed into a threatening passive, the 'happy seat' now 'waved over' by that flaming brand. At times like this Milton is movingly brilliant. Not in the way ofjoyce's cold fireworks, but rather in Shakespeare's way, the linguistic imagination fusing the distinct parts of a many-sided idea into a single summating image. Such effects are many, without being routine or ubiquitous. They include some of Milton's most dramatically powerful moments, as well as being among his most characteristic. Whatever may be the case with intensity or penetration, their intellectualrarcgtf surpasses Virgil's or even Dante's because the confluent language^ and their thought-worlds go wider, which in turn assists the conviction of comprehensive vision. (d) Multilingualism in Dante or Milton often amounts to allusion. Their parole refers outwards, not to its world or its langue but to other langues and their paroles. Yet effective allusion is allusion which is controlled. Control means we do not stay outside, but return at once illumined to the passage A good example of control is Paradiso vn. 1-3: 'Hosanna, sanctus Deus sabaoth Superillustrans claritate tua Felices ignes horum malacoth!' So singsJustinian, in Dante's Latin hymn-fragment, weaving in liturgical Latin and Hebrew: Justinian praises God in the languages of Jerusalem and Rome. However, the effect is not Miltonic. For one thing Dante may have mistranscribed 'mamlakoth'19, kingdoms, as 'malakoth'. (But scribes can err, too.) More significant, Milton would not push so far into macaronic. Though accused of linguistic pedantry, he never risks a 'malacoth'. Again, the two other Hebrew words embedded in this Latin amidst his Italian - 'Hosanna' and 'Sabaoth' - do not receive a translation or expansion within the surrounding Latin. Dante instead

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has his eye on the alliterative chain, sanctusl'sabaoth/'superillustrans; that is, on sound as part of image, of the radiance of the deity perceived in glory, 'doubly illumining with your brightness the happy fires of these kingdoms5. Further beauties include the shapeliness of the alliterated triad (Latin, Hebrew, Latin again); and the sense of heaven's spaciousness, since he has casually asserted 'kingdoms' within it. The image is not as Milton would or could have have done it. Milton would have had heaven's dwellers performing a symphony for God at stage centre, having much less feeling for differences of beatitude. Dante is strong where Milton is not; but also vice versa. Milton's 'dark with excessive bright' (in. 380) conveys the same human-viewpoint sense of 'too much', but intellectually by oxymoron rather than by image helped by allusion. He makes a caique of the Hebrew sense of the unassimilable brightness of the shekinah (dwelling, presence) of God. But there are so many reasons why Dante and Milton do their multilingual effects differently. Just as Milton's language-knowledge differs from Dante's, so must his deployment of it in his poem's texture. For example, because Milton is present in his poem as a voice or voices only whereas Dante is both travelling character and narrator, allusion is more seldom for recognition than for defamiliarizing. Very often we notice that the substance of Dante's allusions is ordinary or even homely - as befits a 'sermo humilis', explaining that the visionary's emotions are everyone's, or that the afterlife is like our life. Milton's, even when they seem homely, are directed at the feeling of the extraordinaryportentous, transforming the too-familiar fallen mundane. Take again the poem's close: on the ground Gliding meteorous, as Ev'ning mist Ris'n from a River o'er the marish glides, And gathers ground fast at the Labourer's heel Homeward returning. (xn. 628-32) Though we recognize the way mist seems to follow our steps, the treatment is aimed at its uncanny animation, a sense of mass pursuit: the fear of God, in no pious sense of 'fear', is felt. Yet the closing note of this attempt to understand Milton's emulation of Dante should not be difference. My claim is rather that Milton learnt from Dante the fundamentals of a multilingual vernacular epic, doing by his own means the same sort of thing. Just because Milton so distances himself from Dante's views (except when castigating papal politics), we

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recognize the strong affinity of vision. The nature of their contest can be glimpsed in one of those many allusions where similarity once noticed stresses Milton's habit of imperious appropriating. Few similes in Paradise Lost are more characteristic of his egotistical sublime than that where he compares the fallen angels to the fallen leaves of Vallombrosa: [Satan] stood and call'd His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intrans't Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades

High overarch't imbow'r . . .

(1. 300-4)

Editors duly note that classical epics (and the Bible) had equated fallen leaves with the numberless dead. But the angels are not dead, they are lost and futile; and these are the grounds of tenor and vehicle in Dante's version [Inf. in. 112-17): Come d' autunno si levan le foglie Tuna appresso de l'altra, fin che '1 ramo vede la terra tutte le sue spoglie, similemente il mal seme d'Adamo gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una, per cenni come augel per suo richiamo.20 Like Milton's,21 this powerful image comes early on, as part of the first wide-angle view of hell's company. Like Milton's, though quick, it is double: the behaviour of leaves then (connectedly) of birds, as Milton moves from Vallombrosa to Pharaoh's Egypt. Like Milton, Dante animates or humanizes the dead leaves, to keep the tenor active within the ostensibly separate vehicle (the deprived branch 'sees' its 'despoiled' leaves below it, the leaves 'strew' the brooks as if that was their purpose). Like Milton, Dante puns: it is the 'seed' of Adam who have become these waste leaves, while the name 'Vallombrosa' plays on the Psalmist's 'valley of the shadow' of death. Less certainly, I wonder whether Milton's 'imbower' is spelt with im- not the usual English em- to align it with his many Dantean process-verbs; and whether the grouping of elements from salvation-history in the follow-up (sedge, Red Sea, Pharaoh, Exodus) has been influenced by another of Dante's beginnings, his threshold of Purgatory (where the reeds express penitence). Assuredly, both double similes begin with 'autumn' and 'leaves', the keywords, together: Milton resembles Dante more than he does their shared models. Now no diminution whatever is felt from the recognition of Dante

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within Milton, here or elsewhere. Instead, the deep coherence and individuality of both poets is felt. Thus both similes imply that souls are free yet governed. Dante does it by likening Hell's new inmates to birds (falcons) obeying the call ('per suo nchiamo', being called back to the glove). Milton does it by the pun 'intranc't'. In trance they have made entrance to a dismal new life. He does it more by 'Etrurian shades', in which the epithet does wonderful multiple work for him - dark-sounding name of a long-fallen empire, name of the larger region balancing within the line that of the specific 'Vallombrosa'. More simply, Milton had been there: he is doctus, this time, from personal experience. Most simply of all, he gestures in the direction of the great predecessor poet, the Tuscan who had 'been there' in the other sense, he had 'seen' hell.22 This is how Milton enlarges his vision by working inside the tradition. He is inward with it through multilingualism, in strictly linguistic and extended senses alike; as Virgil and Dante had been, only more so. Milton is not a greater poet than they. But he is a greater multilingual poet, and one who emulates them best through that capacity.

CHAPTER 9

Multilingualism and the style of temperance in Paradise Regained

The multilingual features of Paradise Lost reappear, most of them, in its sequel. The difference is that they are used more sparingly, and as a more evidently local effect. As Milton matches an austere style to his austere conception of temperance, upheld by the second Adam, his multilingualism shares in the general austerity. He has not thinned out the texture uniformly, however. He has set up internal contrast between, on the one hand, stretches of narrative or dialogue in which hardly any texturing occurs except an obligatory biblical texture from his gospel1 subject and, on the other hand, irruptions of richer multilingual effect, for effects which I shall infer from a seriatim approach now. Yet contrast with Paradise Lost is not all we find in Regained from our perspective. Contrast also helps us understand Samson Agonistes, with which it was published in 1670-1, in such respects as that poem's further and different austerity of style, which in turn helps to render a changed presentation of theodicy. Even if Paradise Regained were (in the heretical view of one of my students) the dullest of all Milton's works, it bridges and illuminates his two greatest. Its being transitional may explain why it has proved hard to classify. Rather than seek to identify it as a 'brief epic' or 'didactic poem',21 see its resistance to generic classification — despite being the work of a poet with such a strong sense of genre - as a sign that Milton's style is altering. As Northrop Frye remarked, the poem is suigeneris. Milton changes from full epic towards dramatic poem by way of this austere agon of speech, between tempter and temperance, because it is brief and intellectual more than passionate, whilst Samson has focus more on passion. Some signs of this austerity appeared in the prophetic books of Paradise Lost, and in the cooling of style in Book XII contrasted with Book XI. More can be perceived in the altered emphasis on multilingualism; for it is now laconic and intermittent, yet when occasion demands it becomes pungent and witty or playful, even flamboyant. ife

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An opportunity to approach completeness of treatment is offered alike by the shortness of the poem and by the sparseness of interlingual effects. I take the opportunity, for the sake of a more inductive application of my previous method. What is revealed, as each of the four Books is combed for evidences of Milton's languages? BOOK I

The main material and texture of Book I are biblical. The synoptic gospels' enfance narratives are foremost, but so are the early chapters of the fourth gospel, together with Psalms and Job. This staple is relieved, however, by two Latin contributions: allusion to Virgil; and intermittent Latinisms of diction. Still, compared with the preceding epic, the texture is plainer, to the point of being surprising. Virgil is massively present at the outset. With I who erewhile the happy Garden sung must be linked Virgil's Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus avena (I am the one who formerly tuned my song on a slender pipe, and then leaving the woods made the nearbyfieldsobey the husbandman . . .)3 Then with 'one man's disobedience lost, now sing' and 'one man's firm obedience fully tried' (2, 4) must be linked Virgil's 'Arma virumque cano', 'Arms and the man I sing'.4 Milton links his temperate hero with Aeneas, as heroes of pietas and founders of a new and better world. Correspondingly, he closes Book I with a series of Virgilian signatures. 'He added not' (497) is the formulaic 'Nee plura [dixit]', understood. When Satan 'disappear'd / Into thin Air' diffus'd' (498-9), the phrase (not yet become cliche) calls up Virgil's 'in tenuem .. . evanuit auram'.5 And 'with sullen wing to double-shade' (500) improves on 'fuscis alis', 'with dusky wings'.6 In between the opening and ending come glancing allusions, direct echoes, and suggestive adaptations. The first include 'A gloomy consistory' (42), deriving in part from the 'concilium horrendum' of the Cyclopes, Aeneid in. 679; and 'rudiments of his great warfare' (157-9), 'belli rudimenta'j exact wording but no carry-over of dire context. Direct echoes include idioms appropriated, like phrases for meditation: 'much revolving in his breast' (185, 'Aeneas per noctem plurima volvens', 'sub pectore volvens': Aeneid 1. 305, 11. 10).

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More suggestive adaptations include clustering echoes of the mission of Rome (218, 222, 226: Aeneidvi. 851-3). To evoke the Son's childhood dreams of heroism Milton takes over, and interprets and subtly stretches, the prophecy of Anchises: 'rule with government.. . add civilization to peace . . . spare subjects and vanquish the proud' becomes To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke, Then to subdue and quell o'er all the earth Brute violence and proud Tyrannic pow'r . . . the stubborn only to subdue.7 And even so, the Son came to think, persuasion should precede coercion and fear (223), temperance replacing violence however controlled. Virgil, as poet of the world'sfirstepic of thinking choice, helps to keep up expectancy for the reader as Christ thinks out his mission; Virgil's noble version of Roman vocation is considered through interpretative quotation, but placed and rejected, in favour of the inward kingdom. Milton is embedding Virgil in Christ's musing so as to summarize, and forestall, Satan's offer of the kingdoms of this world (in Book III, and especially Book IV's parade of the glory that was Rome). Apart from Virgil, however, unmistakable allusions or Latinisms are rare in Book I (though more questionable examples abound). I review the incidence by clause, then phrase, then word. The syntax of 60-2 sounds like Tacitean oratory to me: At least if so we can, and by the head Broken be not intended all our power To be infring'd . . . 'By the head / Broken' means 'the prophecy about the breaking of my head'; a Latin idiom as in 'Paradise Regained', =the regaining of Paradise, but more condensed and abrupt than usual for Milton. Then the gawky accusative with infinitive ('intended that all our power should be infringed') sounds oratorical, as contextually it should; but it sounds precious or specious too. (As is the shift from 'broken' to 'infringed'.) Is the example contributing to a shaky speciousness of Satan's rhetoric in this poem? or to a 'ludic' dimension going wider than this Satan?8 Though it is certainly so striking as to deserve an explanation, my own speculation would instead be, to see the style neither self-ridiculing nor ludic but experimental. Did Milton attempt such a mannered condensation of style a la Seneca, or other model from the period of'Silver' Latin? And if so, was it because as Stoics they were among the false models of

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temperance, with Milton keeping decorum because Christ lived on earth in the time of Silver (ergo declining) Latin?9 As to phrases, one which demands thought describes the heavenly music at 171-2, 'the hand / Sung with the voice'. The unusual idiom recalls that in Latin trumpets regularly 'sing', while its paradox hints at the angelic harmony, vocal with instrumental. Among individual words, only 'unconniving' (363) is both neologism and Latinate. The sense is either literally 'never closing the eyes' or spiritually Vigilant'. Although the OED gives no earlier English examples, in Latin the verb (conivere/connivere) has the requisite senses, and the exact adjective (inconivus) is used by Apuleius and Aulus Gellius again later, in fact post-Silver writers. Most candidates for Latinism of diction wane or vanish upon closer inspection of the OED, One which remains is 'fraud' (322), seen from the victim's standpoint, to mean 'the state of being deceived'. This is Latin, not English, and Milton had used it of Eve (PL ix. 643). Rarer again are expressions based in Greek. When Satan boasts to 'the throng / Of his apostasy (145-6), the noun conjoins, as Corns10 observes, 'companions' and 'results' of his rebellion. But the noun in Greek has verb-force more than abstractness, so can be causative: Thucydides has 'apostasis' = instigation to rebel; suggesting in Milton 'the throng whom Satan made apostate'. Given Milton's predilection for renewing verb-force in other parts of speech, and the pause in God's long utterance after the word, I detect a triple not merely double impact in the Graecism. The collocation of 'hypocrites' with the 'atheous priest' (487), three Greek derivatives in a row, may be a twofold irony: Satan is exploiting Greek subtleties to hoodwink Christ, Milton is attacking priestcraft.11 Etymology is a prime way in which Satan's cynicism can combine forces with Milton's own sardonic edge. Hebrew (and Italian) figure hardly at all, yet. One point of Hebrew detail shows precision and strength. At 1. 33-4 Milton adapts Satan's answer to God from Job, to say he was 'roving still / About the earth'. The point to note is that the AV is literal and understated: 'from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it'. The Vulgate catches the intensification better, 'circuivi terram et j^rambulavit earn' ('I have gone round the earth and walked throughout it'). But the Hebrew has a more incremental parallelism, 'mishub haaretz umehithhalek bahe': the second verb is a hithpael form, reflexive or iterative or intensive in force. No aimless stroll is to be pictured, but a restless and

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mischievous prowling by the Adversary. 'Rove still5 is a brilliantly concise rendering of the spirit of the second verb, tossed off in the prevailing terse laconism. Offsetting the few uncertainties, and necessarily heightened because the surrounding texture is plainer and more reliant on the English Bible, such flashes of the multilingual in Book I attract attention. They arouse expectancy: if Milton is holding back, what is to come?12 BOOK II

Care with biblical names continues in Book II. At once (1-5) the future disciples seek Him whom they heard so late expressly calPd Jesus Messiah, Son of God declar'd . . . Though several divisions of the syntax of the titles are possible here, I take them as they read, a threesome in ascending order. Jesus' = Greek of Joshua' (Yehoshua), Saviour; name before title. 'Messiah', contrariwise, gives the Hebrew title, 'Anointed One', rather than the familiar name/Greek translation, 'Christ'. 'Son of God' proposes in English the highest status of all. A further careful touch occurs where the disciples raise the register of their yearning by invoking the 'God of Israel'to 'Send thy Messiah forth' (42-3). Mary's speaking of her 'exaltation' may glance at a possible meaning of her name in Hebrew ('Miriam', Mariam, Maria, 92).13 To different effect, 'Asmodai' at 151 is closer to the Hebrew vowel sound in 'Ashmedai' ('destroyer') than the usual (Latinate) 'Asmodeus' is [PL iv. 168); but rather than invoke correctness, or even general euphony, I take the reason to be metrical (since Milton uses another trisyllabic form, 'Asmadai', at the line-ending of PL v. 365). At all events, a playful pleasure in exercising the freedom of his language-knowledge, restrained in Book 1, is increasing. A new feature of Book II is its use of names in lists, somewhat like an epic catalogue, but quicker-moving, the impact being factual-honorific or scathing-dismissive. A first list deploys biblical names from the early ministry of Christ: 'Bethabara', 'Aenon', 'Salem old', 'Genezaret', and so on (20-5). Among them, note 'Perea' (24): described as beyond the Jordan, its name may mean 'beyond' (Greek peran/peraios). Three more such listings punctuate the beginning agon. Two are satiric, one of seduced nymphs and the other of heroic feasting-

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accoutrements; the last by contrast is a roll-call of saviours. The list of nymphs is part of Satan's rebuttal of Belial's suggestion to seduce the Son of God by women: a witty, disparaging tone is felt, both in the hustled listing and in his concise final 'etcetera' ('many more / Too long', 188-9: 'too long' to mention, he can't be bothered to finish the phrase any more than the female casualty-list. But the feasting-catalogue works differently, since it is fuller, and comes from the narrator now. First it swells, at the verbal flourish (and neologism) 'grisamber-steamed'; then the swelling carries on into listed provenances of luxury foods in antiquity, followed by mythical characters linked with feasting ('Amalthea's horn', 356). Only, such myths are lies, be they pagan or of medieval romance (358). The dry deflating tone shows control, though it may also risk diminishing the coming agon and victory of temperance. The final list comes as Christ's rebuttal of a temptation aimed at human weakness: Gideon, Jephtha, David (439) all saved Israel by attaining from 'lowest poverty to highest deeds' (438). A Roman (republican) list gets a more rapid recital, a single asyndetic line of the four names (446). Simply the pacing of the list expresses a moral disdain for this first 'temptation'. Satan does not really manage things any better than Belial's silly brainwave: such is the subtextual suggestion made by the accelerating listing. By contrast with Book 1, Virgil makes little contribution here, perhaps only the symbolic harpies who snatch away the feast (403). 'Harpy' comes from the Greek harpazein, to snatch: 'harpy' is pejorative, for a beastly, violent greedy grabbing. But Latin literature and language are still felt. This time, it is the satirists whose allusion helps Milton or Christ to denounce conspicuous consumption. I noted Horace, for 'credulous desire' (166); Lucretius on 'superstition' (296); Horace again for the fickleness of the hungry mob.14 Horace does more for Milton than concise castigation: he expresses sobriety memorably, to 'reign' first over appetite (466). Such morality suits a biblical debate about the 'Kingdom' of God, since it can be joined with the biblical wisdom writings, including the many Psalms which are more ethical than transcendental. Milton combines Roman with biblical sententiae (or his idiom ofjudicious brief temperance. Latinism otherwise is again sparse. For syntax, a Latin participial construction underlies 'Since first her salutation heard' (107,= post salutationem auditam); and in 'What doubts the Son of God to sit and eat?' may be heard Latin quid dubitas for 'Why not?' As to diction, 'preface'

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(115) to mean 'what he had said before' (Prae-fatio) is the one clear Latinizing coinage. 'Demonian' (= divine, 122: not in OED otherwise) seems from its spelling to come from Greek through Latin. To keep a sense of the proportion of Latinism in Book II, we can recognize that puns are more noticeable than Latinism, which does not here contribute to them. Is such restraint to be seen as a stylistic counterpart or embodiment of temperance? It seems so. But I would impute the choice to decorum less than to tactics, since next the style grows richer - for temptations to intemperance through glory. BOOK III

Milton exploits two fresh aspects of his multilingualism for Book III. First, wheti the claims and meaning of 'glory' are debated (7-250), his languages help him establish a discriminating, temperate glory over against false glories. Then the offer of 'all the glories of the world' changes its form: when they are imaged, panoramically, by speech then narration, something closer to the multilingual style of Milton's epic is deployed. Both aspects read thematically like a continuing of his epic; yet the particular prompting model is Spenser.15 To overgo Spenser's legend of temperance it is precisely his greater multilingual resources, especially language-scholarship, which Milton exploits. Satan first tempts Christ with 'fame and glory, glory the reward / That sole excites to high attempts . . .' (in. 25-6). Exempla follow, all of military conquest. Christ in reply asks, who is judge of glory, who gives it. If it is 'the herd confused', it is worthless. So far he sounds like a moralist, like Cicero or Seneca, preferring the glory accorded by the wise few claritas ('renown') as opposed to gloria.16 But he bypasses claritas in favour of acts which earn God's praise; which, in other words, bring the agent into relation with God's glory, the source of all value (60-8, 'This is true glory . . .') Next, by that same standard now it is established, Christ rejects world-conquering glory as false. It is marked as false by the blasphemous titles given out by the ignorant or terrified mob: destroyers are described as 'titled gods', 'benefactors', 'deliverers', and finally 'worshipped'. (The Greek world especially hailed the Ptolemies or the Roman emperors in these terms, which in biblical tradition - if used at all - were reserved for the faithful who helped God to 'deliver' Israel.) If there is any merit in glory, it is attained by different means and for a better motive. The means is 'patience, temperance' (92). And if the motive for heroic deeds is to gain glory, that forfeits the glory (100-4).

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Nor is God, though he receives and requires glory (109-20), contradicting these discriminations: God creates, to do and share good freely; and glory is simply what the human beneficiaries return as thanks, recognition by glory being their sole means of thanks (123-33). Throughout, Milton reiterates the word, 'glory',17 to think out its inward nature, so probing much deeper than Guyon's short debate with Mammon (FQu. vii. 10-11), and thus answers Satanic and human doubts about the Father in Paradise Lost. Since I have already examined 'glory' there it suffices now to point out the implicit redefinition of glory; no longer confined to Latin gloria and its verb gloriari, where glory is a zero-sum game, but enlarged by the sense of divine bounty which inheres in Hebrew cabod (weight, worth) and shekinah (Greek doxa: the shining presence, Dantean life-giving light). The offered glory is Roman: the Son, and Milton, delatinize it to probe deeper. The staple texture of this probing is a plain-style sententia: to it, a few multilingual flourishes add life. Satan mockingly compares Christ's insight to 'Urim and Thummim, those oraculous gems / On Aaron's breast' (14-15). (Milton can mock too, shielded by Satan!)18 The narrating voice closes the debate on glory with the condensed ancient idiom, both Latin and Greek, 'Satan had not to answer' (146). We can take 'not' to be condensed for 'nothing' or 'not anything', but more powerfully we hear a rendering of 'non habuit dicere' or 'ouk esche legein', for 'he could not answer'. Throughout the temptation by words, Milton uses his languages to create a more subtle and demanding temptation than Spenser had done. The comparison becomes less one-sided, however, when Milton moves on to present the temptation of the kingdoms of the world by images. They are presented by image twice over in Book III (not to mention repeated in Book IV); once by Satan in a speech, once in narrator's description. The order is Spenser's: Mammon talks to Guyon, then offers him images. Satan shows Christ Assyrian then Babylonian then Persian empires, drawing upon biblical and ancient historiography in a sequencing that ingeniously combines the chronological and geographical. The texture is one of imposing names, from varying languages, governed too by considerations of euphony and a sort of interplay between comprehensibility and erudition: 'Nineveh' (275) comes from Hebrew and AV, but 'Salmanassar' (278) is Vulgate; 'Persepolis' (284) explains itself, but 'Hecatompylos' (287) needs and gets its gloss, 'her hundred gates' ('her' because cities are viewed as mothers, feminine in

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meaning as well as morphology, by the ancients whose historians Milton is using). The usual topos of the 'Parthian shot5 is wheeled out (306). Competence, Milton's as well as Satan's, is asserted by the shapes of the bodies of soldiery ('Rhombs and wedges' and so on, 309). A further parade of place-names follows in the narrator's voice, imaging the political grandeurs of the orient. Some of the detail comes from Ammianus Marcellinus, who had served in the Parthian campaigns of the EmperorJulian (the 'Apostate', we notice). Others seem to come from maps. Milton does an expert job. Part of it is multilingual, too. The Parthian archers shoot their showers of arrows backwards — the familiar image repeated, for its allegorical application (324, FQn. xi. 25-7). Virgilian 'clouds of foot' are present (327, Aeneid vn. 793). Elephants are 'endorsed' with towers of arches - 'strengthened' and 'backed' (329)19. To climax the majesty and giantism of world armies on the move, these visionary numbers exceeded even those of Boiardo's Agrican, who led no fewer than 2.2 million to prise Angelica away from her father the King of Cathay. World-history is being heaped up, even romance is being eclipsed. The force of the listing is multicultural, encompassing fiction with fact, to provoke thought. The thought provoked by such hyperbole is ironic. Barbara Lewalski notes that Agrican enticed some Christian knights to this pagan war party, which may mean thematically that such force is misguided. Certainly Satan's presentation is itself guardedly categorized, as a 'new train of words' (266). 'Train' is equivocal, meaning not only 'series' but 'artillery' or a 'line of gunpowder'. So the narrator's image must continue and amplify the 'train' in these senses, even if in some details — like the natural imagery and the giantism generally — the exaggeration implies that the engineer is being, rhetorically, hoist with his own petard. To put it another way, the colours and flourishes of multilingual texture in this set-piece are brighter than anything so far in the work. Satan must make a bigger effort, and not least through imagery because he has been routed in the debate preceding it. And Milton himself must make a bigger effort here; and does, equally in the texturing and in the ironizing. On that basis will be built the still finer imagery of Rome, and the cultural debate of Greece, in Book IV. Meanwhile, Book III closes upon affirmation by opposite, glorious imagery of the Exodus: 'Red Sea', 'Jordan', 'promised land' (438-9). The narrator is no less decided: 'So spake Israel's true King' (44i),20 in which the kingship of Christ is also affirmed in the redefining epithet, 'true' king.

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Just as Book IV is longer than the others, so its style is more varied: within the continuing even style of temperance, Milton now goes higher for climaxes. Debate, imagery and multilingual effects all intensify together. From this relative wealth of material I select as follows: (a) the imagery which at once proclaims that a higher register is available; (b) the intensified probing of identity through meanings of names and titles, which goes with a deepening of the debate about glory; (c) the more learned style used now by both contestants as the temptation shifts from power to wisdom; and (d) the correspondingly more multilingual style of the narrator. (a) Clarification is felt first: Satan is 'over-matched' (7), and to express that Milton follows up with a triple simile (10-20), unprecedented in this poem.21 First, we have the same agonistic conceit: 'As a man who had been matchless held . . . overreach't... to salve his credit, and for very spite . . .' Then comes an image of animals: 'Or as a swarm of flies . . .' Lastly, moving further away from the human, to the elemental this time: 'Or surging waves . . . ' Milton's main exemplars all contribute. The first resembles Dante's many comparisons of one agent with a wider class of persons- a subsuming, rather than transferred image, but equally part of the triad and the most psychologically penetrating. The second had had a long life in epic: Homer, Ariosto and (in his legend of Temperance, note) Spenser.22 The third, less homely and more expressive of the clash of mighty opposites, is Homeric and Virgilian.23 The combined impact is to alert us to the universal significance of the contest, nearing its decision; and to align it with the epic tradition. The triple, epic simile is multilingual in that Milton's languages gave him access to this resource: the emulation is masterful in its selections and appropriations. The fact that the image is epic does not mean the poem as a whole is epic, nor even brief epic. My point is that the register is perceived here moving towards epic. The poem is suigeneris, as Frye puts it, because it is gradually raising its register. (b) The rise shows multilingualism, too, becoming more prominent. Small touches,first,show the increased verve. There is a clever precision in Satan's angels being 'tetrarchs' (201) of fire, air, water and earth, because not only does 'tetrarch' mean ruler of a fourth part but the best-known tetrarch was Herod - dubious company. Satan is being clever, Milton is undercutting. An opposite impact is found also, in nomenclature which carries the authority of correct and apposite titling:

Multilingualism and the style of temperance in Paradise Regained

Where God is prais'd aright, and Godlike men, The Holiest of Holies, and his Saints . . .

175

(348-9)

That is the last, best reason why Christ prefers 'Sion's songs' to Greek ones. Apdy, then, Christ names the God whom Psalms address by a hypersuperlative honorific; for temperance includes being absolute where appropriate.24 The 'holy of holies' is the innermost, most sacred room within the one and only Temple of the Lord, and the phrase is a Hebrew superlative (qodesh qodeshim). Doubling the superlative, to 'Holiest of Holies', directs the gaze beyond the holiest place of God to holiness itself. The phrase is not so much a Hebraism, then, as an attempt to surpass or supersede Hebrew. The upsurge of praise befits a passage commending the Psalms as the greatest praise-poetry. (For good measure, the pair of lines is modelled on the parallelismus membrorum of the Psalms: each line has three semantic elements, which would be three words each in Hebrew, and the second line steps beyond the first on a basis of condensed repetition highlighting the incremental.) Whereas this splendour is a local rising, the steady overall rising can be tracked in such tides as 'Saviour' and 'Son of God'. The first of these is dependent on the second, so draws less probing. The narrator regularly introduces a speech of Christ or reference to him by 'our Saviour'; and the only slightflourishcomes at the end when this description of function is added to the tide of fundamental nature, 'the Son of God our Saviour meek' (636). A ratifying, 'QED' flourish. But 'Son of God' lies at the heart of the probing by Satan. What it means, is just what he wants to know. He says so, at 196-205. And at 500-40, he talks of nothing else. Milton rehearses the different senses, or emphases, which the phrase has in the Bible. Yes, Christ is 'Son of David', and this time - a mark of Satan's urgency - he concedes 'virgin-born' also (500). 'Messiah' too (502) may be name and nature, for Satan has heard the 'voice from heaven' term Christ 'the Son of God belov'd' (512-13); that is, the Sonship exceeds all usual honorific human sense. Christ is 'my adversary' (527) - rivalling and supplanting Satan, mankind's 'Adversary'. The struggle has convinced Satan that Christ is the 'utmost of mere man [acme of what is purely human], not more' (535-6). He must adopt 'another method' to find out 'what more thou art than man' (538). The method is the temptation to blasphemous miracle-working, a putting of God to the test on the pinnacle of the Temple (555). No reply in words is forthcoming, nor does Milton try to wrap up the sense in a definition. That is not only prudent: it keeps the emphasis on temperance, on nerve and balance of all sorts, human and

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understandable qualities of action. But in the 'heavenly anthems of his victory / Over temptation' we do hear Christ vindicated as 'True image of the Father', whether throned (as in Paradise Lost) or in human form 'still expressing / The Son of God' (601-2). The title is named three more times: simply at 626, where hell learns 'To dread the Son of God'; and the final salutation, Hail Son of the Most High, heir of both worlds, Queller of Satan, on thy glorious work Now enter and begin to save mankind.

(633-5)

Christ most fully expresses the glory of God to humanity, hence can save. The probing of opaque biblical titling shows Milton arguing questions of being through his languages and their scholarship. (c) To do it, Milton gives his characters a more learned style than hitherto. This especially suits the temptation through learning (195-365). But it is felt before and afterwards, too; at times drily, at times exuberantly; at times recalling the angelic expositions in Books VII-VIII and XI-XII of his epic, and if so, more engagingly. Three early instances set the tone. When Satan is 'thrown from his hope' (3), the condensed expression is from a Latin idiom, 'spe deiectus'.25 Rome, in the second, westward image of world-power, is screened by hills from 'cold Septentrion blasts' (31). Milton uses the grand word for 'north', but not merely for display of learning or to fill out the line. It is a sudden switch of narrative point of view, to empathy, through adopting the subjects' naming for the thing. It comes as a welcome humanizing touch in the poem; or a thematic one, if Rome needed to be saved. A different, ironical impression is made by the doubled coyness about how Christ can see Rome from Mesopotamia: 39-42, 55-8. By what strange Parallax or Optic skill Of vision multiplied through air, or glass Of Telescope, were curious to enquire . . . So speaks the narrator, teasingly. One technical Greek-based term offers an explanation or sop, but the second thwarts it, and the third baffles, till he says 'you don't need to know, nor will I tell you'. So we are detached from scientific curiosity by the time Satan gives a fourth version: so well I have dispos'd My Airy Microscope thou mayst behold Outside and inside both . . .

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Having had his frisk, Milton can render Satan's amazing technology quaint. Then when the agon warms up, both contestants are given multilingual scope. Satan gives Rome an authentic solidity of specification (61-9, including 'lictors' and 'turms') before attempting to dazzle with exotics like the 'Chersoness' (from Ariosto), 'Turbants' and 'Taprobane'. But Christ in reply is not to sound obscurantist or sulky, hitting back with a roll-call of fine wines (out of Roman poets); and luxury 'crystal and myrrhine' cups out of Pliny (117-19). Moreover, Romans' blood-sports in the arena render them 'effeminate' (142), where the adjective includes participial-causative force. The tension of the contest increases when not Rome but Greece - not material but intellectual glory - becomes the issue. Satan offers Greek literature before Greek thought: Christ, concentrating as ever, refutes the latter first; which enables him to close his striking reply with that glory of Hebrew, the Psalms. Satan's appeal is strewn with Greek names, known for glory and used correctly: 'Hymettus', 'Ilissus', 'Lyceum'; 'Melesigenes', 'iambic', 'democraty'. Greek poets, especially, receive intelligent praise, not different from Milton's commendations of the same authors in prose contexts. Milton must have enjoyed coining 'fulmined' (270): here, and hereabouts, he is drawing in an unusual source, Aristophanes.26 Christ, replying 'sagely', shows equal learning and a sharper logic. For example, he reintroduces the glory-debate and shifts its focus from Satan's bemusing plethora of schools of philosophy, to first principles: when pagan philosophers deny that there are gods or that they are moral or care about human life, they can only 'to themselves [humans] / All glory arrogate' (314-15). If philosophy is thus no more than ministering to human self-esteem, does 'glory' keep its root sense, of 'glorying' = 'boasting'? God gets no glory from them, and is reduced to mere 'usual names, Fortune and Fate' - in other words, a let-down, a delusion or evasion (318-21). More brilliantly, though, Christ reasons that Hebrew literature, too, outweighs Greek. This will be a hard position to uphold, surely: how will he do it? We lean forward expecting him to crash. Yet he rightly points out that the books of the Law and of Israel's history are 'strewed with hymns' - the delightful among the useful. (Milton had claimed this in Reason of Church-Government (1642), when again preferring Hebrew odes to Greek ones.)27 Moreover, 'our Psalms' are 'with artful terms inscrib'd' (335). Themselves most artful terms, the words mean 'artistic expres-

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sions' (abounding indeed in imagery, andfiguresof thought and speech); and 'terms of art' (like 'A MaskiP, Tor the chief musician'). 'Artful terms' suggests that Psalms contain their own critique, too, as Milton had again claimed in 1642. Thus they export well: they pleased even Israel's alien captors, and reference to this enters self-reflexively into Psalm 137.28 Above all, they praise what deserves praise ('God is praised aright'), whereas Greek verse praised 'the vices' of the Olympian gods (340). Christ wields Plato to discredit Homer and Pindar (and after all, the Psalms did endure better where odes counted, in liturgy). I stress the stout reasonableness of Christ's reasoning here because it has usually been dismissed, as provincial or doctrinaire, or given only the limited praise of saying what the dramatic situation needed him to say. Milton is differently engaged, and is not provincial. This is why he lets Christ use Greek arguments, with ascertainable cultural facts, to discredit the Greek glory which Satan is offering. It makes Samson Agonistes, following, a related but intriguingly different agon of the two cultures. In both works of his final diptych Greek and Hebrew test each other out. They probe each other in his continuously evolving, interpenetrative English. (d) Similarly, at his close Milton allows to himself as narrator a more learned, vivid multilingualism. Greek is prominent. Satan is 'Antaeus' to Christ's Hercules in 'Irassa' (563—5): in addition to the regulation renaissance equating of Christ with Hercules Milton glances at the Hebrew 'Satan = Adversary' in the name of 'Antaeus', in which 'Ant-' (anti) means 'opposite', 'hostile'. Christ - Hercules : Satan - Antaeus. 'Irassa' nearby (564) is purely learned, coming from Pindar. Latinisms, of coinage or revival, continue too. Satan's 'joyless triumphals' (578) are not only oxymoron but a coinage. 'Plumy vans' (583) Latinize the angels, who bring Christ from his 'uneasy station' (584, awkward 'standing' on the pinnacle). They bring him 'food, divine, / Ambrosial' (588-9), where the word-order conveys to those who need to be told that ambrosia was the food of the gods. It also puns on its Greek etymology (ambrotos, not-mortal). 'Ambrosial' drink, next (590), generalizes the word, to mean both 'divine' and 'fragrant': Greek is being Christianized. The Book of Revelation contributes the fount of life (590 again): and soon 'Abaddon', jointly with the book ofjob (624). That this Job's trial is over, Milton insinuates by altering the direction and intensifying the energy of his multilingual allusions.

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CONCLUSION AND TRANSITION

Paradise Regained, then, is a strenuous, intelligent work, whose texture assists and at times embodies its agon. From the particular perspective of this study, its restrained then gradually increasing multilingualism well demonstrates how much Milton could now do with this resource. And yet I sympathize with that student who found the work monumentally boring. It does lack something. What it lacks is passions. And that is surprising, in a work on the theme of temperance, the governing of passions. Whereas the first Adam fell through passion, the second triumphs by thinking — by thinking his way through temptations which arouse no passion in him. For humans who do experience passions, his agon has demonstrative and encouraging but not enabling power. And hence, surely, Milton imagined yet a third Adam. In the other half of his 1671 volume his Adam is one who has fallen through both passion and stupidity, and who recovers the effective use of heart and mind, both, for an act of deliverance. For this agon Milton must find a medium which expresses both passion and intellect, leading to disclosures of theodicy. He chooses dramatic form; Greek tragedy's language of passion and intellect and theodicy, for Hebraic and hence crypto-Christian content. He actually tells us this: witness his title, hybrid for a new growth, 'Samson Agonistes'; and his preface, on how a religious tragedy may be written. For this notable conclusion to his life's work, he creates a strange hybrid English. Moving beyond that of Paradise Regained, it works by a similarly rising register, to a more resounding triumphal paradox.

CHAPTER 10

Hebrew Meets Greek in Samson Agonistes

Samson Agonistes, which I date to 1671/ shows the multilingual Milton rejuvenated. And so, although it would be easy to illustrate once more his Latin and other languages irrigating the chosen style, I shall follow the poem's own attempt at something more strenuous. This is its mingling, or meeting, and at times fusing, of his two least related languages, Greek and Hebrew. The debate about this hitherto has been strange. Whereas Sir Richard Jebb found the poem more Hebraic than Greek, William Riley Parker found it abundantly Greek.2 Thereupon the debate moved on to particulars or to other matters, so neglecting the work's design, notwithstanding that for this occasion Milton published his fullest account of a work's aspirations. Here, then, the design will be explored locally, to show how Greek meets Hebrew in the texture; and pervasively to show how they meet in the structure and tragic effect. THE TITLE

'Samson Agonistes', manifestly, joins Hebrew to Greek. Does it even imply that such joining is to be a principle? Though it would be absurd to maintain that Milton was literally hinting and no one till I noticed the hint, he certainly follows entitling practices which can be observed elsewhere, and so point to a general principle. The Trinity Manuscript offers such parallels as these: 'Zedechiah neoterizori' (innovating), Jehu Belicola' (Baal-worshipper), 'Saul Autodaictes' (self-slayer), 'Gideon Idoloclastes' (Idol-smasher) (all from p. 34); also 'Baptistes' (the Baptizer).3 Most of the Greek epithets are adjectives having the force of a root verb. Like these, 'Samson Agonistes' announces that a Hebrew hero is to be presented from a Greek, tragic viewpoint, with focus on significant and self-summating action; a hero engaged in the action of agonizesthai (see below). 180

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What is more, the MS reveals how Milton's thinking developed. 'Agonistes' replaced Samson-epithets which had arisen from other episodes in the Book of Judges: Tursophoros' (Fire-bringer, Arsonist), 'Hubristes' (the Arrogant).4 'Agonistes' also replaces a first title for the episode he did choose, namely 'Dagonalia' ('The Festival of Dagon', not mentioning Samson). So when he moved on to 'Agonistes' Milton was rejecting other episodes along with the morally simple notion of Samson as hubristic; and also moving the chosen episode inward, so as to focus the meaning of that outward Dagon-climax upon the protagonist. A similar development, towards the more internal and active, and towards precise focus on an episode and its protagonist, can be seen with Elijah: 'Elias in the mount. 2 Reg.i. oreibates ['mountain-ranging'],5 or better Elias Polemistes' [cin his war-making'].6 The meaning of 'Agonistes' itself is a tale often told. Through its derivation from Greek agon, agonia, and the verb agonizomai it cannot but suggest a 'contending' or 'championing' hero, or a 'struggling', indeed 'agonizing' one; all which fit exactly. Agon is also the normal word for the 'conflict' or action of a drama, (especially of a comedy by Aristophanes), which prompts two more applications. First, metapoetically, the sobriquet might alert the audience to the action as fictive, as seeking a tragic effect. But secondly, and bridging the two groups of meanings because agonistes is the normal word for an actor, it becomes transferred to the hero being acted (hence 'protagonist'); Samson himself is a play-actor. He plays a part in the drama of the Judges, as he who 'shall begin to deliver Israel' (Judges 13. 5). More precisely, he succeeds in doing so, literally at the last gasp, because of how he 'made sport before' the Philistine lords (Judges 16. 25). It was a solo, since (line 1628) 'None [was] daring to appear Antagonist (note the eponymous root).7 Having played for them, he exposed the sport as mockery when he played his final trick on them: making the agon - finally, miraculously, paradoxically - 'no contest'. Without implying that Milton had all this in his head as he named the work, it comes straight out of his title and his subject together.8 Its suffix, too, has significance: '-istes3 points to a verb-root, to an action. (Compare again 'Idoloclastes', 'Polemistes', 'Autodaiktes' from the Trinity MS.) Not what has been done to Samson, nor his sufferings, but what he does in his 'agon': that is the eventual title's focus. Such befits a drama. It further befits Aristotle's theory of the paramountcy of action and so plot, together with the ubiquitous insistence of the Hebrew Bible

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upon God's saving acts. (The conjunction of Hebrew practice with Greek theory as well as its practice will receive more discussion in a moment.) TEXTURE: NAMES AND EPITHETS

Titles of characters hold a related interest. Smaller examples include 'Timnian' and 'Ascalonite'. Major ones include 'paranymph' and 'Nazarite'. And a little conundrum is the twin name for a single place, 'Azza' being simply the familiar 'Gaza'. The examples are taken seriatim. 'Timnian' and 'Ascalonite' are straightforward epithets formed by the long traditions of translation and commentary, which had moved like Milton's own thought from the Hebrew original through Greek and Latin into English. They are formed as epithets of place-origin on the usual principles, and sound right (some names defeat English: what is its adjective for a person from Kirkcudbright or Christchurch?) Milton goes with the grain, as in his Latin coinages. 'Paranymph', however, is a more deliberated choice, and probable coinage. In Greek, Paranymphos (adjective, or noun of either gender) means a groomsman or bridesmaid; etymologically, someone who is 'alongside a bride or groom', or 'present at a wedding'. However, since Samson's paranymph had taken over the Timnian bride (1018—22), the careful title is a mordant pun: the paranymph ended up 'alongside' the bride indeed. The chorus make the irony plainer at once ('Successor in thy bed', 1021). It is one of many times where an etymological reading is made clearer in the follow-up, either because this is how Milton worked out the name as image, or because he wished to share his wit with all readers. As for 'Nazarite', the -zar- spelling has of course the primary sense of 'Nazirite', person 'separated' and dedicated to the service of God (Heb. nazir, noun, from verb root NZR = to dedicate oneself). Yet the more correct form would be 'nazirite'. Renaissance usage liked the looser form because it recalled 'Nazarite' = Nazarene, Jesus as the man from Nazareth. As Milton did not distinguish when he might have done, did he too wish the glance at the later 'saving of Israel'?9 Lastly, the little conundrum of Azza = Gaza. 'Gaza', being the usual spelling of the Septuagint and the Latin translations, is Milton's own usual (so 'eyeless in Gaza', 41). Yet at 146-50, recalling Samson's former exploits, the chorus say he

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on his shoulders bore The gates ofAzza, Post, and massy Bar, Up to the hill by Hebron, seat of Giants old, No journey of a Sabbath day; and loaded so, like whom the Gentiles feign to bear up Heav'n. This spelling more accurately renders the Hebrew spelling, initial ayin with doubled zayin. Is the point, then, that in a context glorifying the hero's former championing of Israel the register rises to a more faithful transliteration? If so, the concluding allusion to the Gentiles' legend of Adas confirms that Milton is comparing cultures, and on his metde to grade the Hebrew as more authentic. Gentiles only 'feign', but let us hear the name of Gaza as it should be spoken. In the same spirit, he has moved from Greek-deriving talk of'Chalybean' steel and 'Adamantean proof (132-3) to a more celebratory Hebraizing register. He works in a mention of the Sabbath, with particular sidelong dexterity. 10 The whole passage, certainly, moves between Greek and Hebrew, both comparing and connecting them. And by the same token, all these examples show us Milton fusing Hebrew with Greek in his English. A similar pattern could be traced in the allusions. T E X T U R E : T H E IDIOM OF T H E CHORUS

The idiom of the chorus just quoted was straightforwardly celebratory, in a register that rises. Elsewhere, however, their idiom can be puzzling, until we recognize its multilingualism. For instance, they seem to move awkwardly from a majestic opening, God of our Fathers, what is man! into a groping or grumbling sequel: That thou towards him with hand so various, Or might I say contrarious, Temper5st thy providence through his short course, Not evenly . . .

(667-70)

As against the numerous expressions of misgiving by modern readers, 11 our present perspective discloses correctives. The chorus, who are of the tribe of Dan, begin very suitably. They speak in their collective character through the Psalmist's exclamation, 'What is man, that thou art mindful of him?' (Psalm 8. 4). Yet equally suitably they continue with a Greek-like argumentation: the substituting of Latinisms, like 'contrarious', for the opening biblical trumpet-blast

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registers the style of agonized thought, and attempted gnome. The chorus, like any Greek chorus, punctuates the epeisodia (divisions of the action) by musings of their own in their own idiom and metre. And if they then sound foolish, there are precedents enough in Sophocles: till they know the outcome, choruses can get things wildly wrong (as in the King Oedipus, when they look forward excitedly to finding out who Oedipus' birthparents were - 'perhaps some god .. .' (1098)). Contrariwise, when they do know the outcome, at the end, the chorus can sound vague or commonplace, summing things up with a thought of the inspirational magnitude of'Well I never...' The point is not that they are foolish, but that they are ordinary while the tragic events are extraordinary.12 Yet they have moments of rising to the occasion, as a later section will show. And lastly, all their utterances proceed by domiciling the Hebrew of the subject with the Greek (and Latin) of the genre within their strange gnomic English. Another instance is when the chorus try to understand women, and what is it that wins women's love. Lacking the Wife of Bath's instruction, they know only what women do not want: It is not virtue, wisdom, valour, wit, Strength, comeliness of shape, or amplest merit That women's love can win or long inherit; But what it is, hard is to say, Harder to hit, (Which way soever men refer it) Much like thy riddle, Samson^ in one day O r seven, though one should musing sit . . .

(1010-17)13

It is not the language now but the thought which is fusing Greek with Hebrew. The chorus are responding, as usual, to the epeisodionjust ended; and respond, this time, by propounding the essential enigma. They ponder the perplexities of man-woman relations, like most men do, without getting anywhere. Women are a puzzle to men, a 'riddle'. Not only does Samson's story contain riddles like this one, it is one. Riddles are diverse, they are a theme. More than that, riddles belong in Greek tragedy as much as in the Hebrew legend. Oedipus solved the Sphinx's riddle, but then the Delphic oracle's (whose every saying was an enigma) proved too much for him. Riddles become explicit in Oedipus and Samson: they saturate sex, life and theodicy. Milton chose a wonderful story for his tragic poem, then, one which spans enigmas from the buffoonish or folksy to those of the deepest lift-matters. He makes Greek meet Hebrew in the riddles of tragic paradox.

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I have mentioned the Oedipus, so admired by Aristotle. It is not a particular source of Milton's poem, any more than any other single Greek play is. We may recognize features of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus (blind hero, triumphal death), or of Aeschylus' Prom etheus Bound (immobilized and suffering hero, to whom come varied persuaders), or Euripides' Hercules Furens (death-agony of womanizer, involving deaths of others), and so on. But no single play has pre-eminence. The point is, rather, that Milton — as in this matter of riddles — works in the way of many; so many, in fact, that we should rather say he seeks the spirit of all. After all, that spirit is likelier than particular motifs to be found in a biblical subject. STRUCTURE: SUBJECT, OUTCOME, EFFECT

Milton seems to apprehend the spirit of Greek tragedy in the whole as in the parts. For example, if anyone should wonder why Milton chose (from his very diverse listing of biblical subjects in the Trinity MS) such a brutal and primitive action, it is simply enough explained by our present perspective. Tragedy is endemically primitive, in its choice of myths involving barbarism in certain royal families of the archaic age.14 Milton is making the biblical tragical by discerning the same spirit of tragedy in the more primitive stories of Israel. By going toJudges he is homing in on the oldest, most folkloric and primitive parts of the Bible (subject and narrative). Crudities like Samson's use of a donkey's jawbone as a weapon, or the secret strength of his hair, may seem to belong in the world of Obelix and Asterix. They are better seen as the quasi-magical extraordinary co-existing in heroes with the ordinary; and so to the finale, where the hero, literally, brings down the house. Tragedy is by nature primeval in its myths. Moreover, Milton has seen the necessity of irreversible horrors for tragedy (telling the secret, the blinding, the closing carnage). Better still, he has seen - with Aristotle in the Poetics, chapter 14 - that the irreversible horrors must be done between parties who are as close as possible to one another. From Medea to Othello, this goes to the heart of things. Dalila does such horrors to Samson; Samson does them to God, to whom as Nazirite he is closest. This last is Milton's finest innovation in Greek theory and practice. It is not exactly innovation, though, because it is so Hebraic. It is one of his most startling, penetrating fusions of Greek with Hebrew. The final bloodbath is both terrible and uplifting to hear of. Of course the action, and especially its ending, is revolting. Tragedy's best actions

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are. The Oedipus, the Medea, the Bacchae all attest this. They end, respectively, with a suicide and a blinding; a mother's murdering of her children to spite their worthless father; and a mother's hallucinated ritual dismemberment of her son followed by her awakening to recognize whose severed head she is brandishing in triumph. Most of these are narrated, but the awakening of Agaue, mother of Pentheus, is shown on stage, to become simultaneously one of the most revolting and heartrending and therefore tragic of all endings. I see no point in objections, from a liberal or Philistine viewpoint, to the gory ending of Samson.15 STRUCTURE: CATHARSIS

Mention of necessary closeness raises the issue of Milton's whole relationship to the thought of Aristotle in the Poetics. Not only is the preface to Samson Milton's fullest piece of self-explanation and published literary criticism, hence deserving constant revisiting: it is also a landmark in the reception-history of the Poetics. And certainly it shows how carefully Milton was thinking out his response to tragedy, for details and for the tragic effect. Affectivity, that of the tragic ending, comes first. The preface as a whole is on our present topic, how tragedy which is pagan and fictional may yet edify the devout; and first of all he explains katharsis, that paradox to explain tragic paradox. Milton's method of doing so displays one of the lifelong languageactivities we have traced: he translates the key sentence, with fidelity changing to appropriation, or perhaps mastery. His title-page proclaims in Greek then Latin Aristotle's definition of tragedy (chapter 6). Tragoidia mimesis praxeos spoudaias, &c.

Tragoedia est imitatio actionis seriae, &c. Per misericordiam & metum perficiens talium affectuum lustrationem. (Tragedy is the imitating of a serious action, &c, By means of pity and fear completing a 'lustration' of such passions.)16 The translation does not render the whole sentence, though. He omits the middle of the definition, so as to highlight its last word, catharsis. This he renders not as 'purgationem', the commoner and broader word in Latin, but as 'lustrationem', meaning not 'purging' so much as 'purifying' (so that a 'lustration' is a ritual cleansing). It seems that just as Aristotle moved tragedy from the domain of religion to that of psychotherapy, Milton is moving it back again. He is emphasizing its emotional effects, and the emotions are religious ones.17

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It is true that he soon speaks of 'purging' the passions. Yet at once he redefines this purging as 'to temper and reduce them to just measure', a mixture of images in which proportioning, music, and restoration combine with medicine. T o explain the impact of tragedy he is metaphorical, and eclectic, and refuses to sunder religion from medicine. Thereby, he brings Greek and Hebrew closer together. 18 He is thus availing himself of the best Greek theory of tragedy; but furthermore he is extending it to guide readers to the more religious impact he seeks in his own tragedy. He does something similar in the closing chorus. All is best, though we oft doubt, What th5 unsearchable dispose Of highest wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close. Oft he seems to hide his face, But unexpectedly returns And to his faithful Champion hath in place Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns And all that band them to resist His uncontrollable intent; His servants he with new acquist Of true experience from this great event With peace and consolation hath dismist, And calm of mind, all passion spent.

(I745~5S)

This moves from thought to feelings; and finally emphasizes religious feelings - 'peace and consolation'. To be more exact, the first ten lines of this 'sonnet' are thinking, from a standpoint of God's actions, about the meaning of the agon just concluded, and its meaning for the 'Agonistes' (now vindicated as a 'faithful Champion' and glorious witness). The last four continue thoughtfully referring the action to God ('His servants', meaning the Danites themselves but extending to the wider circles of witness). But the thoughts move - by way of 'experience' and 'event' towards the feelings which thought is prompting: 'peace', 'consolation', 'calm'. 19 Last of all, the poem states these eventuating feelings: the positive emotions are present because 'passions' - strong and turbulent internal forces or afflictions - are 'spent'. For the reader, that means that having been 'well imitated' they are 'brought to a just measure with a kind of delight'. One may still find the effect trite, or dispute the guidance. I myself find the effect no more trite than we find it in Greek closing choruses

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generally, and presume that is where Milton was heading. As for the guidance, it seems both clearer and more unusual than those all-purpose Greek closures. I conclude from the originality and particularity of this chorus, and its appropriateness to the poem (and also the preface), that Milton gave unusual care to the whole rationale of tragic effect, thinking through with the maximum of important detail how a Greek ordonnance could bring a Hebrew subject to life; the sort of life which mattered, which here was not belief-life but emotional life. STRUCTURE: ECLECTICISM

The preface merits its status in the theorizing of tragic effect as much as the poem does in the practice of it. Intelligent eclectic recourse to the well-springs is manifested in both. And 'eclecticism5 means more than selection. It means the exercising of clear, innovative choice. Practising Imitatio in the ancients' own way, Milton renews and extends what he brings from the ancients to his Hebrew material. For example, the second most demanding sentence of the preface is the one on plot. Merely to put this after catharsis, and as a tailpiece to so many other matters, is to distinguish one's stance from that of Aristotle, who devotes most of the rest of chapter 6 to insistence on the paramountcy of plot over the other five elements he discerns within tragedy. Milton skips all that. In what he does state, he is distancing himself from Aristotle and from insistence on Stagiritical infallibility: Of the style and uniformity, and that commonly calPd the Plot, whether intricate or explicit, which is nothing indeed but such economy, or disposition of the fable as may stand best with verisimilitude and decorum; they only will best judge who are not unacquainted with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three Tragic Poets unequalFd yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavor to write Tragedy.20 This confronts Aristotle's preference for the 'intricate' (or 'complex' plot, that which hinges on a sudden change of fortune for the protagonist, chapter 10), only to sidestep it. He had already placed it third, in a subordinate phrase. Milton knows, what critics have laboriously found, that his plot may be viewed variously; as hinging on a late, surprising upturn of Samson's fortune, or contrariwise as all occurring after his decisive hamartia, the oath-breaking blabbing, or as proceeding throughout inside Samson's mind rather than in any outward dealings. Without saying Aristotle is discarded, Milton shifts the focus elsewhere.

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First, he gives his Horatian, neoclassic credentials: Verisimilitude and decorum', as in 'not produced beyond the fifth Act'just previously.21 Yet finally the appeal is not to either body of ancient theory, but to the best practice: to the best Greeks, all three of them. Note that he makes no compliments or concessions to English drama, which he must have regarded as an erroneous hybrid ('intermixing Comic stuff with Tragic sadness and gravity'); and that he names all three Greeks, even Aeschylus, usually the least revered and known of them. He wants his preface to be grounded in Greek, its practice even more than its theory. He wants to make this grounding unmistakable. This acute, pondered, eclecticism continues. I could happily go on to argue that he is giving us a Sophoclean hero (like Ajax or Oedipus, faulty yet upright protagonists, suffering but still choosing) in an Aeschylean situation and structure (like that of Prometheus) growing to a Euripidean impact (as Samson moves through bitterness to a late sense of thauma, wonderment, for chorus then audience).22 But I will not spell this out. Instead, I wish to locate, in order to genealogize, the moment where Milton's daring eclecticism makes the decisive shift towards final wonder; the moment where Greek becomes Hebrew, without ceasing to be Greek. THE PINDARIC MOMENT: ZION S EPINIGIAN ODE

The moment comes at line 1660, because here the chorus becomes Pindaric. Greek meets Hebrew in their victory-ode. It shifts the whole work from groping to affirmation, celebration, and so catharsis. Long before, Milton had hoped for an 'occasion . . . to imitate those magnific Odes and Hymns wherein Pindarus and Callimachus are in most things worthy . . .'23 Yet then he had found that biblical songs excelled them, 'not in their divine argument [subject-matter] alone, but in their very critical art of composition . . .' (So here in Samson we can expect some 'argument' of divine action, conveyed by a 'critical art': we find the latter in the preface too, and both as he begins the gradual articulating of catharsis.) Further, in 1642 he located in odes 'the power to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right tune'. This was using the identical metaphors, of catharsis as balance, proportion and musical harmony, which stand out in the preface. So it is by a long-held principle that Greek meets Hebrew in the epinician ode, when it clarifies and intensifies the saving change by which Jehovah disglorifies Dagon, at Dagon's own festival.

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It proves more rewarding, though, to chart the detail by which Milton makes Pindaric corroborative. First, together, the chorus weigh the tragic paradoxes: revenge, glorious, at great cost (1660). They struggle to interpret the tragic oxymoron: Victorious . . . self-killed / Not willingly'.24 Next comes an attempt at understanding: Horace's less exalted, more secular ode contributes 'dire necessity' (1665-6).25 And so they move back to a still precarious mixture of Horace with Hebraic jubilation, Samson's record-breaking body-count (1667-8) ascribed to the 'law' of necessity ('dire necessity' = dira necessitas). Only, now the chorus divides. Antiphony - the medium of Pindaric and tragic chorus equally with that of the Psalms of Israel- heightens the register, intensifies the search for the sense. We may also glimpse a Hebraic 'parallelismus membrorum', paralleling of sense-units, in the paired adjectives of 1669 ('jocund or sublime'); or in the syntactic and rhythmic balance in 1670 ('drunk with Idolatry, drunk with Wine'); or gathering up larger units as we reach them - the larger repetitions within the subordinate clause to 1674. Whereupon, that clause and its six lines are counterbalanced, and in the upshot outweighed by the main clause and its seven lines, stating God's deliverance.26 As in these rhythms and balances, so in the allusion and sense. A Hebraic title of God is given, 'Our living Dread' (1673): 'living' plays on the root-letters Y-W-H of the name of God, as in '1 AM', while 'Dread' means the god 'we' (Israel) fear - respect, terror, and source of life, all in one. ('Dread', Pahad, is a name of God in Genesis 31.42 or Isaiah 8.13.27) Greek is not forgotten at all. The 'spirit of frenzy' sent upon the Philistines is both the ancient idea that 'quern deus vult perdere prius dementat',28 and the panic fear sent upon armies by the god Pan, who gives his name to such 'panic'. The madness is also the tragic progression of hubris-ate-nemesis, as the chorus proceed to moralize: Who hurt thir minds, And urg'd them on with mad desire To call in haste for thir destroyer; They only set on sport and play Unweetingly importun'd Their own destruction to come speedy upon them.

(1676-81)

Milton superbly puts the old tag into words of his own, fusing the Greek maxim with Israel'sfiercejoy. This rendering uses more words: another uses fewer, 'blindness internal' (1686), so piercingly apt to this action. Yet the ode has still not peaked. The conception of Greek tragedy

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just proclaimed is not the height of Greek tragic wisdom, nor fully enough what the ode has to say about the action. Similarly, rhyme is intermittent, and when present is pararhyme only ('desireV'destroyer', 'inviteV'reprobate'). T h e second semichorus is given a different, still more impassioned idiom to encompass that; the at last fully Pindaric idiom, of pure images, and of sweeping transitions between them (together with full rhyme). 29 Partial truths (Greek or Hebrew) are now to be transcended: But he though blind of sight Despis'd and thought extinguish't quite, With inward eyes illuminated [contrast 'blindness internal'] Hisfleryvirtue rous'd [main verb, active in voice] From under ashes into sudden flame, [in which the images of light and fire are becoming steadily stronger, like a flame rekindling] And as an ev'ning Dragon came, [from a flame to a flying creature, but the flyer is a fiery one] Assailant on the perched roosts, And nests in order rang'd Of tame villatic30 Fowl; but as an Eagle [strongest predator bird, fire image now in abeyance] His cloudless thunder bolted on thir heads. [The eagle is now Zeus's, therefore capable of thundering too: thunder keeps lightning, and so fire, impending; the imagery resembles an avalanche more than it does a kaleidoscope] So virtue giv'n for lost, Deprest, and overthrown, as seem'd, [momentarily analytical, and suspending images pour mieux sauter, into the most extended image of all, the nine-line concluding simile] Like that self-begott'n bird In the Arabian woods embost, That no second knows nor third, And lay erewhile a Holocaust, [Milton chooses from among his languages and cultures here, to climb a big new step to the conception of the event as a holocaust, meant here solely in the sense a 'whole and pure burnt sacrifice'.] From out her ashy womb now teem'd, ['gave birth', or to link vehicle to tenor, 'delivered'] Revives, reflourishes . . . [a frisky neologism, an onomatopoeia well-placed] . . . then vigorous most When most unactive deem'd,

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And though her body die, her fame survives, A secular bird, ages of lives. ['Secular' with 'ages of lives' brings into view not simply Horace once more, of tyhe 'carmen saeculare', or song to celebrate the new age, but the biblical 'saecula saeculorum', being an intensifying or superlative Hebraic genitive like 'king of kings'.] So the marvel is permanent. Its effects will last; so will its fame; which will itself uphold the effects, upon 'Israel5. Manoa's speech, following, confirms the victory.31 So does the closing chorus, moving (as we have said) from deciphering the meaning in 'this great event' to its emotional, spiritual benefit.

COROLLARIES

If the principle that 'Hebrew meets Greek5 in Samson Agonistes does play this sort of part in the poem, how large is that part? A major part? How major? Fundamental? To put it at the most modest level, I have been conducting a 'precriticism5 of the poem, a 'recovery of its conditions of understanding5.32 Milton is pursuing a novel application of eclecticism, an English dramatic poem founded on Greek and Hebrew. Since Greek and Hebrew fuse in its careful entitling, we risk misunderstanding if we ignore or take too lightly its other such fusings - in the preface as well as in the poem itself. The preface aims to direct the reader's sense of effect, then implies a subject and design, which keep firmly within a proclaimed allegiance to genre, tragedy. This is what Milton wanted the reader to think he was doing. So much for modesty: perhaps he was doing what he wanted us to think he was doing. Suppose, amongst the plethora of current interpretations, the Babel of autobiographical or historical readings,33 we concentrated our full gaze where he bade us, on the ending, the effect, the catharsis . . . I have two particular reasons for advocating this ostensibly naive endeavour. The first is my personal, homespun theory of tragic effect. Seeing tragedy in the theatre or cinema, or reading it as we should at a single sitting, we finish and strive to think it out. We strive harder the more it has moved us, and so commune with more other people. The debate begins, we diverge, we disagree. And no wonder, since tragedy has to centre on paradoxes in life itself; and no two people see paradox or life in exactly the same way. But that is only the product of the experience, in fact only one side of the product. Equally if not more

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important is the process, in which emotions outstrip and outweigh thoughts; and the emotional part, likewise, of the final sense or product. Thought divides us in our responding, because thought brings rival emphases from divergent life-experience; but emotion unites us. In the theatre, just as the end comes, we feel as one. We know this, yet in conducting critiques we forget it, or take it for granted. Milton, however, did not. His chorus, regularly, moves between thinking and feeling. And he gives the last word to their feeling. Just as his preface's emphasis on catharsis suggests, he seeks to unite, not divide, his readers. He seeks to unite them on the grounds of feeling, as aroused by the meeting of Greek forms with Hebrew subject, both profoundly apprehended and unswervingly directed. My second reason is more pragmatic. Now is an excellent time to declare a personal moratorium on biographizing Samson, because we have so much to do to understand the tragic effect itself. (No one in Shakespeare studies wins kudos by inferring from Lear's ravings that Shakespeare himself had just had a scorching row with his daughters!) There are better tools to probe Greek tragedy than previously. The study of Greek tragedy has been moving away from religious studies of origins - as if all tragedy were 'really' sacrifice, or sparagmos (ritual dismemberment and communion). It has also moved away from too rigidly moral a perception - as if, because Oedipus comes to grief he were in some way a bad man, too zealous for the truth perhaps! Instead, a study such as that of Brian Vickers34 directs attention where Greek tragedies require it to be directed (and Aristotle had also perceived this), namely at persons like ourselves or somewhat better, doing and suffering terrible things, with respect to those closest to them. Intellectually, therefore, paradoxes and dilemmas abound. Emotionally, however, this is what lives are made up of. Tragedy's more concentrated and rigorously worked-out dosage of such acts becomes a purge of our own fears, a purifying of our own pity, to the extent that we recognize ourselves in their heightened Passion.35 It would be paying Samson an unusual and overdue compliment if we gave the poem this sort of attention, after prolonged immersion in the same Greek exemplars which he commended to our attention. It would in fact enable all of us, whether or not we have much sympathy with Milton's religious ideas and other intellectual baggage, to share in the experience he has to offer. His late choice of a tragedy as genre, since drama of all the genres most precludes opinionation, might even mean he thought so too, and (what with the preface) was coming halfway to meet his readers in 1671.36

CHAPTER II

The impact of Milton's languages upon his mature English verse styles

It will not have escaped notice that in treating of Greek and Hebrew within Samson Agonistes I have spent more time on the idiom of its choruses than on the speeches given by or to the protagonist. Does this fact indicate a paucity of illustration that 'Hebrew is Greek' within the episodes and action? And if it does, is the thesis thereby weakened or even invalidated? To go wider still, is the 'multilingual' approach to Milton's other two major poems vitiated by a cognate disproportion, namely that the languages appear more naturally in the narrator's commentary than on the lips of the speaking characters? Consideration of these questions will bring me to conclusions about the role of Milton's tongues within his best performances as a renaissance Christian humanist. In respect of this 'disproportion', the performances show a common tendency. LANGUAGES WITHIN SAMSON

First, there is a very natural reason why choruses should have the most Greek and Hebrew in their texture. The reason is genre, and its decorum. Within a tragedy the narrator's own voice is not to be heard: no 'tragic voice' can replace the 'epic voice' of Paradise Lost. The latter's narratorial omniscience is forfeited. On the other hand, though content to forego telling us what to think, Milton guides how we feel. The chorus of Greek tragedy is the obvious means, since they respond to each portion of the action at once after it, and do so emotionally not normatively. So Greek and Hebrew mingle, abound, and stand out in the choruses. Less explicitly than the preface, but more so than the episodes, they are making a scripturally sanctioned subject cathartic. To enhance that guidance the chorus is replete with the mental resources of the two controlling languages. They have them in excess of what actual young Danites might be expected to have; but this is for the 194

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sake of legitimate communicative force, since we are not interested in the Danites as personalities. So they not only know the books of the Law very well, they even proleptically know the Psalms and the Prophets, not to mention having the odd glimpse of the New Testament. Similarly, they are given a multilingual vocabulary, to guide the readers emotionally. Its sudden splendours are precisely what give guidance, because — like rhetoric, or any grand style - splendours convince through emotion aroused by imagination. To object to their idiom, then, would be like complaining that in opera the chorus can sing. Contrariwise, the Herculean hero might be expected to have less of languages and their cultures in his speeches. They might impede the directest expression of his passions, or might distract attention. Certainly they are less needed in Samson himself to the extent that they abound in the commentary of the chorus, who are there only to interpret him to us. The less Samson's self-expression is culturally particularized, the more his agon and agony are universalized. We might even expect an inverse proportion to be the decorum. But this emphasis, though broadly true, is not entirely true, for these reasons. First, he does benefit from multilingual texture, albeit in a reduced measure. Secondly, things look different when we reckon in - as we have not yet done - the Latinism and derived Italianism of the play's texture. Thirdly, the poem's theme of glory is fundamentally thought out from a multilingual mind, harnessing philology in the three sacred languages to the defining of Samson's glory under God's. First, then, Samson is given language about himself as Nazirite and about God which evinces Hebraism; Hebraism of thought, though, rather than diction. Thus he speaks of himself (31) as a 'person separate to God': the Latinizing passive-participial translates 'Nazarite'. It is the chorus who first use the actual word 'Nazarite' (318). So finally, and on that basis, Samson himself can use it, of his relation to the Law which sanctions it: Nothing to do, be sure, that may dishonour Our Law, or stain my vow of Nazarite.

(1385-6)

Elsewhere, he uses the idea, diversely and thematically: 'consecrated Gift' (1354) glances at the purpose of the 'separating', while a bleak negative appears as set-apart-ness of the wrong sort, 'inseparably dark' (154). A similar calquing tendency is observable in Samson's ways of entitling God, even quite indirect ones. Thus in 'Heaven-gifted' strength and 'high gift of strength' the 'gifts' of 'heaven' are taken with utmost

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seriousness by 'John5 ('Yah natan5, 'God-has-given') Milton.1 And as for direct names and titles and attributes of God, they are many but calqued in Samson's utterance. God is 'deliverer5, but without any hint that this attribute is proclaimed by the name Joshua /Jesus (contrast Paradise Lost, XII. 310). Again, Samson calls God 'the living God5 (1140), which exploits the derivation of 'Yahweh5 from the verb to be, HaYaH, yet only to the extent that (say) the Kingjames version and plain monolingual homiletic does. Though the implication or subtext may be learned, the usage is not, it is distinctly familiar. Simpler still are names like 'Israel's God5 (1150) or the pithy tautology in 'combat to decide whose god is God5 (1176). As for Greek, it is not surprising that a hero who is drawn from Hebrew myth into a Greek, tragic agon should let loose against the huffings of Harapha the occasional Euripidean gnomic one-liner, like 1091: 'The way to know were not to see but taste5. But secondly, the exclusion hitherto of Latinisms modifies the situation much more, being quite evenly spread amongst characters and chorus. It is the chorus who receive the coinage, 'obstriction5 (312).2 But Samson can speak of 'diffidence of God5 (in the active sense, 'failure to trust5), and of hearts 'propense enough before / To waver5 (453-5, a cluster, emphasized by word-order). He has another cluster, of denunciatory adjectives this time, at 533-8: 'fallacious-venereal-voluptuous-lascivious-deceitful5. Manoa, and even Harapha, receive the benefit of Latinizing eloquence. Harapha speaks of testing Samson 'in camp or listed field5, where 'camp5 means 'field of battle5, as in Rome's 'Campus Martius5. Manoa waxes witty. When Samson as 'single combatant / Duelled their armies5 (354-5), 'duelled5 is used in the Latin way to equate with bellare, of which it is simply the old spelling.3 Milton shows how the branches of the word join at its root, to gain the ironic progression 'single - duelled - armies - himself an army5. As to Samson himself, his Latinism at times marks a surge in register. Thus he lashes himself at 625 with the strong verbs 'Exasperate, exulcerate5, matched by sound and placing into hendiadys. This is in his homos, or lyric of lament, whose passionate rising rhythm the Latinisms serve.4 Idioms of Latin are harder to trace, because the whole style seeks condensation. Nonetheless, we see it helping this condensing in locutions like 'mine5 = my people (like mei or nostri) at 291, and 'thine5 ('your people5, to Harapha) at 1169. Elsewhere, syntax which is English may also be Latinate: the more assured Latinism one finds in the work, the more likely that marginal cases come thence too. Thus at 291 again, 'Me easily indeed mine may neglect5, the whole inverted word order is the

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sort of thing which makes perfect sense in an inflected language, and to my mind should be heard as Latinism since it already contains the Latinate usage 'mine' for 'my side'. T h e line's entire conviction comes from the sense's hinging on the hyperbaton: 'me - mine - neglect'. O r again, at 'miseries / So many and so h u g e . . . / . . . ask a life to wail' (65-7) the Latin incremental alliterative of tot tantaque is heard. And the Greek epexegetic infinitive, 'to wail', belongs with the Latinism; not merely because the poet knew and thought in both languages, but because Latin did. Milton imbibed both together. Something similar is attested by Manoa's patterning, [Dagon hath] deliver'd Thee, Samson, bound and blind into their hands, Them out of thine, who slew'st them many a slain

(437-9)

T h e second 'them' is like a Latin dative ('dative of advantage or disadvantage'). T h e internal or predicative object ('slew'st them many a slain') sounds like English translating an idiom more at home elsewhere. Those words in that order are all needed, however, not only for compression but for rhythms and figures - like the repeated but varied 'their'/'them', placed to mime retaliation by the Philistines, and to mime disgraceful collapse in Samson ('thee'/'their' : 'them'/'thine' in a chiasmus, but one which ends with more of 'them', so getting the last word.) Thirdly, the matter of glory, discussed above for epic on the basis of J o h n Rumrich's study, renews itself in Samson, more than Rumrich worked out. 5 T h e central theme is that Glory has been won, then lost, then sought and won again by the hero, who fitfully recognizes that his glory is bound up with God's. And the central method of this thematic insistence is an inventive, multilingual play upon the word 'glory'. It is used by Samson or about him, freely. Examples include Manoa's coinages, such as Israel's God 'disglorified' (442)6 or the new passive, 'gloried' ('Your once gloried friend', 334). T h e root sense of the word in Latin is felt whenever 'glory' is a pride in winning, as when H a r a p h a speaks of the 'glory of Prowess' (1097): Samson rejoins that H a r a p h a is a boaster (1102), in effect a 'miles gfonbsus'. This irony of vaingloriousness is less certainly present when Dalila finds it 'glorious to entrap / A common enemy' (855-6), or Samson himself laments proudly that he had once been 'gloriously rigged' (200) - like a war-ship, a thing. No irony at all is present in the chorus' apostrophe to The glory late of Israel, now the grief

(179)

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for this aligns the hero who was once the pride of Israel with the biblical 'Ichabod', 'the glory has departed' (i Samuel 4. 21).7 To sum up, the meeting of Greek with Hebrew is decisive in the idiom of the chorus, yet not absent from that of the hero - and the other characters, when speaking about him. Latin, whether gnomic or caustic or condensed, is more evenly present. All three tongues are woven into the whole texture. They enter decisively to raise the tone, and especially (as Pindaric) to make epinician convincing. THE SENSE OF DEITY IN MILTON S BIBLICAL POEMS

Consideration of the matter of glory leads me to reflect on the whole sense of deity in this last of the three biblical poems. That sense of deity is vital but changing in them, and both qualities owe much to Milton's languages. In Paradise Lost the Father is a speaking, acting personage, combined from the Zeus of Homer and the 'jealous' (prerogativeclaiming)Jehovah. In ParadiseRegainedhe is much less in evidence: he acts through Messiah, and to a large extent speaks through him; and Messiah draws on his Hebrew thought and culture as well as its law and spirituality. Samson Agonistes moves further along the road of indirection. God is the subject of address and of conflicting emotions, but does not speak. Now this is more than just a donnee of drama, since while that genre precluded an omniscient authorial voice, Greek tragedy (and not least Milton's admired Euripides) often included a final theophany. Milton foregoes this ending, for the more human-centred one we have analysed. The sense of divine action is therefore more inductive than deductive, more surprising, it resembles occasions of miraculous national survival in history (not only biblical). In place of explicit theophany Milton chose the Messenger-speech (the exangelos) to describe the miracle. Such narrative could still have involved deity, to a greater or lesser degree. In the Hippolytus the exangelos describes how the hero is destroyed by a monster sent by the god Poseidon; in the Bacchae the wonder-working of the maenads is narrated. But no voice from the heavens or supernatural invention occurs in Milton's poem. He centres it all on Samson; on his reviving hair and strength, but increasingly on his spiritual state. Samson feels 'rousing motions' (1382). He feels sure he can now act worthily of'Our God, our Law, my Nation' and himself (1425). Some 'providence' guided the messenger to Manoa and the chorus after the cataclysm (1545). The 'Cataphracts' paraded (1619), a Graecizing neologistic metonymy for the

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men in mail, not the mail itself. The Philistines 'clamoured' their god (1621), but Samson in his display feats found 'no Antagonist5 (1628) - no one who would 'act' with him in his drama. 'Eyes fast fixt he stood as one who pray'd' (1638): the absolute phrase may be Latin or Greek. The 'as' withholds certainty about the praying. We assume it was prayer, identical with the 'revolving' in his mind which comes next. And so to the deed itself: heralded by a classical simile, 'As with the force of winds . . . ' (1647), it moves to Samson's 'horrible convulsion' of the pillars (1648). Here, unusually, 'convulsion' is active not passive, directed from agent to thing. Since usually the word (and verb) describe how a person is 'convulsed', undergoing not inflicting, the word is suggestive of the surprise: Samson, and his strength, do what is normally the prerogative of earthquakes or other 'acts of God'. God, though not seen by direct theophany or voicing, is felt in the final act of his consecrated agent. Language is the sole creator of the feeling, and languages (plural) play a part in that. The part is a quieter one while the exangelos narrates, but straight afterwards it rises and rises in the choric Pindaric. SAMSON, PARADISE LOST AND PARADISE

REGAINED

In Samson, then, Milton's languages are most in evidence when its chorus is performing its Greek, reactive role. Yet they shape the protagonist's voicing, too. Indeed, they shape each character. This includes the chorus leader (koruphaios) when conversing as a character. It is a curious linguistic fact that Greek tragedies used two distinct forms of Greek: chorus-leaders find themselves speaking ordinary Attic (Athenian) iambics when conversing person to person, whereas in the sung-and-danced tragic choruses they are given not just a distinct metre but also a distinct dialect (Doric Greek). Milton keeps a similar decorum, by metre and register though not dialect: we might say, his more gnomic, multilingual style of the odes is his equivalent of the odic dialect. But it remains continuous with the dialogue. Should we expect something similar, or something different, in Milton's two narrative poems? Can they handle multilingualism and register as the dramatic poem must? Of course, since they do not switch metres,8 their continuity will be greater. But are there places, or purposes, where a choric ruminativeness occasions the onset of a heightened, and heightening multilingualism? And is rumination the only sort of climax helped by that onset? And for that matter, do both blank verse narratives work alike? I shall argue that indeed the two do

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not work alike, in this respect and in others; and that whereas multilingualism in Paradise Lost connects that poem with its exemplars (Virgil and Dante), it differentiates the sequel sharply from it - aligning it more with Samson, but chiefly vindicating its own distinctiveness. It is sui generis precisely because it makes an issue, a central theme, out of the Questione della Lingua itself.

Choric commentary and rumination are more plastic and integrated in Paradise Lost than they could ever be in a Greek tragedy. The epic voice can interject at any time, and at any length - from a phrase to a paragraph. The epic persona will exert a more continuous gravity and insight than is required of the Danites. To put it crudely, it helps the action of Samson if they are occasionally limited or obtuse or silly: no such backslidings are admissible for the persona of the poet of epic, for whom the downfall and recovery of humankind is always the issue. He must practise eternal vigilance. Now part of that vigilance is a multilingual alertness and resourcefulness. We have seen how the sense of godhead is immeasurably strengthened thereby: the divine is presented by allusion, name, pun, parallel, myth, the whole conviction that this poet has read God in the books of nature and culture equally with Scripture itself. I have called this intensity Milton's possession of the old quality of a votes, the being doctus. This means more than 'learned': it is what helps the poet fulfil his own aspiration, 'to be the relater and interpreter of the best and sagest things among my own citizens in the mother tongue5 (Hughes, p. 658). Yet we must not pre-empt that voice to the poet-figure, and most certainly must not conceive it narrowly. Any character in the poem may speak multilingually, and with the concomitant appropriate density: hence my unwillingness to downgrade Eve's description of God's command as the 'sole daughter of his voice'. Her most prominent Hebraism is her last moment of unfallen linguistic glory. The poet can express strong emotion, though characters more often do it. Contrariwise, characters can be stirred to a wisdom of living among languages, a little exceeding their decorum for the sake of sublimity, though such wisdom remains the narrator's regular perquisite. Indeed, almost half the poem transcends this separation altogether, since when angels speak Milton is making them his 'interpreters and relaters'. To do so accords perfectly with the tradition, and indeed the development, of multilingual epic. Dante had interpreted and related by such proxies, Virgil and Beatrice, following but exceeding the Aeneid in this. Milton through Raphael then Michael exceeds Dante. It is not

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accidental but central, therefore, that Latinism should swell and glow, increase and stand out, in the books of archangelic instruction. They enrich the narratives of the heavenly war and creation. They are almost the only embellishment of the prophetic books. They are this poem's guides to wisdom, relating and interpreting best and sagest things in the best and sagest English, drawn from the original tongues of the sages themselves, and the Latin of the traditions of their interpretation. Milton's tongues achieve the expression of a holy wisdom, whether by his speaking persona directly or by holy emissaries. Half the conviction lies, as for Dante, in his having so many available voices of beatitude. Paradise Regained, however, although it employs the same tongues, uses them much more sparingly. Even figures point to it: the epic narrator speaks fewer lines (558) than the Son (596) or Satan (896), with other voices not in contention (172). Now figures never tell all. The narrator does speak multilingually, from the Virgilian outset in fact. Nonetheless, the poem moves from less to more multilingual, in step with its move to increasing reliance on dialogue. The main action and substance of the poem being Satan and the Son talking together, with narratorial linkages so brief that the poem becomes almost a staid sort of drama, the multilingualism if any should belong to the characters. To an unparalleled extent, it does. It must. It is the action. Milton extends the traditional gospel temptations into a colossal searching of guides to intellectual and moral life; world-empires especially Rome, Greece especially Athens, Israel especiallyJerusalem. The languages of each are naturally, decorously felt within the presentation of each. More than that, they are necessary to the conviction of the action. Milton exploits his languages and their cultures, his lifelong absorption in language studies, to dramatize the choice, here at the crisis of the ministry of the Messiah. Milton must 'do the different voices' of each. He does not oversimplify any of them. No one could make the Assyrian Empire look charming, but thereafter Satan conveys the excitement of knowing and viewing the great arc of empires in time as in place (Milton conflates the two). This is done in narrator-voice then Satan's. But artfully, Christ knows Roman history (mysteriously cognizant in AD 30 of what Tacitus would write). Satan knows Scripture, since traditionally 'the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose'; but he knows Greek literature too, from end to end. The talk of each is made conversant, and thereby convincing: Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called

(iv. 259)

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In context, the salvation-culture must defeat world-culture (or the second Adam must tumble). Messiah need only draw to win. THE DIALECTIC WITHIN CHRISTIAN HUMANISM

Yet the debate cannot be won. I have absolutely no doubt that Milton thought the Psalms the best poetry. Affectively, that is true. They have done more, for more people, than any European poetry. Nevertheless, we must see how totally engaged Milton is in his strange, didactic demonstration; and see how completely it fulfils the side of his intellect which we have been tracing throughout this study. Temperance is prioritizing (as reason is but choosing). Milton would assent to Messiah's prioritizing among songs. But unlike Messiah, Milton must know the magnitude of pagan achievement in order to place it; and placing it is not all for him, though it was for the second Adam. Milton must also use it. It is a means to an end. Yet paradoxically, it is a means of such inherent value that it may be safely enjoyed for its own sake. He does so; not only in his private studies, but here in this work, which would be provincial, as Robert Adams once challenged, if it were not that Milton through Satan could once again play among his languages and their cultures. This is what makes it such a unique, uniquely personal poem. The theme hangs over from Paradise Lost. The method, spareness then surge, looks on to Samson. But the multilingual method becomes theme in Paradise Regained, the only time it does. Like a golfer with a social conscience, or Dorothea Brooke with horse-riding, Milton sometimes looks critically at his favourite form of play, sometimes gets on with the enjoyment of powerful expression by means of it. It was the occupational worry of the renaissance Christian humanist. Anecdote has it that one of the Church Fathers used his copy of Aristophanes as a pillow. Was he enjoying a good companion, or punishing himself with a stiff neck? Perhaps both. But Milton knows his priorities. This poem thinks them out. He is neither provincial nor schizophrenic. Contrast Richard Bentley, later, the great corrector of Milton's style: late in life he confessed he had been 'too devoted to those old pagans'. Milton's more creative mind need never say that.

APPENDIX

Translating Milton's Latin Poems into English

Rather than pursuing the goal of consistency and using a single preferred translation of Milton's Latin, I have been using a variety of versions, including my own, ad hoc. In the Preface I explained that thereby I hoped to pick the most accurate translation for each passage of Latin, and further to give readers the chance to compare versions and methods of translating. This Appendix confronts the problem of translating more directly, both in principle and practice. That much seems owed to an author who did much translating and thought hard about it, one who had strong preferences and so might even have implicit guidance to offer to his own future translators. To recall chapter 4, Milton preferred verse translations for verse originals. And he preferred afidelitywhich began from literal rendering, though it might surge away into a final act of appropriating the original. As opposed to Milton's own preferences, most recent English translations of his Latin verse favour prose, nor are they as literal as their flatness makes the unwary suppose. I shall shortly compare several modern versions of a single short passage to illustrate the two points. Then, however, I shall go on to propose a different approach, and try albeit clumsily to illustrate it. This approach turns verse into verse. In doing so it emphasizes rhythm, in fact approximating to the original rhythm. Rhyme is ignored because rhyme is alien to the sort of Latin verse Milton wrote. (He admired Virgil in the Note on 'The Verse' of Paradise Lost in 1669 for his lack of rhyme.) Even if my practice and principle alike are rejected, the underlying question deserves to be asked: in a milieu where the best poems of Homer and Virgil and Dante1 are eagerly translated into verse by good poets, when will Milton's Latin (though of lesser stature) get its belated due? First, to show that most available versions are into a drab prose which is less literal than it seems, I quote the versions by Hughes, Carey, and Campbell of the opening lines of Milton's ode 'Ad Rousium'. This ode, 203

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remember, is the most effervescent, excited, and metrically experimental of all Milton's Latin verses. You would hardly guess any of that from the following: Gemelle cultu simplici gaudens liber, Fronde licet gemina . . .2 'Twin-membered book rejoicing in a single cover, yet with a double leaf. . .' (Hughes) 'Twin-born book, rejoicing in a single cover but with a double title-page . . .' (Carey) 'Two-part book, cheerful in your single covers but with a double leaf . . .' (Campbell) To their credit, all three versions pivot the sense on the little numerical paradox, of twin/single/double, which renders the Latin series 'gemelle V'simplici V'gemina'. But all miss out the diminutive suffix in 'gemelle', though it suits a first book of verse and betokens a tone of affection in Milton's personification of his book as offspring. All make too much of'licet': it means a mild 'though' rather than a firm 'but' or 'yet', and it is subordinating 'gemina' not 'simplici' (two books in one birth, Latin and English). It is in fact so easy to be literally exact in expansive, interpretative prose that I wonder why the emphasis was shifted. More troubling is the rendering of 'cultu' by all three versions as 'cover'. Even if this word is an elastic, vague one in classical Latin, here it does not mean 'cover', but 'dress' or perhaps 'dwelling-place'. Though the contextual or speaker's meaning, as distinct from the word's meaning, is 'cover', the interpretative rendering 'cover' misleads. Because Milton has just personified the book, he gives it the human attribute of owning a cultus. Some of the warm arch affection towards the twinned firstborn is forfeited by the prose translators quoted, and needlessly. My advocacy of verse-translation is made on two further grounds. On principle, why not give Milton's verse the kind of translation he himself gave to verse of all sorts? And pragmatically, it seems time to give Latin-less readers a change from flatfooted prose: to do this would also give readers who do have Latin something more challenging, and awakening. Reasons of principle and practicality converge, as it happens, for the particular ode here. Its rhythms are so startling and novel that the reader needs to feel their eccentric abandon, within the English. Let the bold

Translating Milton's Latin Poems into English

205

translator sweat to determine each rhythm in this poem with its bewildering eclecticism, its licences and inordinate number of resolutions! Such a translator is facing a real challenge on our behalf- the challenge of deciding what the rhythms are, every single one. No commentator seems to have done this. A verse-translator, by the nature of the task, has to. Perhaps one will rise to the challenge, and recover for us all the heady Pindaric swirl Milton heard in to head, on 23 January 1647. The first line is iambic trimeter, that is, twelve syllables, three metra, in rising rhythm. This makes a firm, declarative opening apostrophe. The second line, a parenthesis, loosens and quickens the sound, into dactyls, in fact into the front half of Latin's highest metre, the hexameter; if anything, the tone rises (just as 'gemelle', diminutive, receives new weight from the changed suffix at this line-end, as 'gemina'). The third line continues the dactylic, whilst refusing the option of full hexameter in favour of _ ww_ „ „_ M_ w

(Munditieque nitens non operosa)

then _ w w_ w x (Qu am manus attulit) then ~ ~- ~-

x

(Iuvenilis olim) . . .

The free frisking is felt in the fact that no two lines repeat a rhythmic pattern exactly. In English the opening lines might mimic the Latin's iambic firmness, and following weight then frolic, like this: My twin-born book, rejoicing in the single home Of your bilingual pages, Shining in glory of your unlaboured fineness Given you once by a hand That was youthful then . . . 'Bilingual' is inexact for 'gemina', but (apart from the fact that rhythm drove me to it) its prefix and idea do aim the idea of twinning at the languages, as theme alike of the strophe and my study. In the last two lines I have robbed Peter to pay Paul: line 4 has an extra unstressed syllable, line 5 lacks a final one (the weak anceps, or allowed variable stress in the quantitative scheme of Latin metre following Greek). Such

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liberties may surely be taken in Englishing an ode which has already taken outrageous liberties with Latin. One modern translator who does offer verse is Robert Hodge.3 This book is a twin, that delights in its simple elegance but sprouts a double leaf shining with casual polish which a youthful hand once brought it . . . Hodge captures the dactylic bounce of some lines of the original, and makes that his own staple. So doing, he omits the eclectic variety, for example the opening in iambics, and thus sacrifices the feeling that Milton (like irregular Pindarics in contemporary English) is making the rhythm up as he goes along. Similarly with the sense, 'elegance' is good for 'cultu', and Hodge opens with a bounce; and yet he unaccountably omits the vocative, the author's address to his book. In this ode, Milton is not on his dignity. Elsewhere in his Latin poems, however, dignity is often the point. English versions should strive for the weighty dignity of hexameter in the Latin poems which adopt this metre. Three of them close Milton's Sylvae in a rising series: cAd Patrem' (thanking his father); Mansus (a poem of guest-friendship, thanking his host in Naples; and the Epitaphium Damonis, the due grave-gift to his oldest friend. All express pietas, and seekgravitas, by the natural rhythmic means. Here, then, no metrical liberty would be appropriate. Instead, why not try hexameter in English, after the method of Clough in The Bothie or Longfellow in Evangeline? Hodge, again, comes close to mimicry of rhythm, with dactylic line-openings, but veers after the caesura into something indeterminate. Very typical is this: Tu quoque in his, nee me fallit spes lubrica Damon4 (_

w w«_

_ i_ ,i_ i_ _ •_

w w

i_ _ j

nt

h e quantity-based hexameter)

becomes You too, my Damon - no specious hopes deceive me (l

I

I

I

X

/ /

I

I

X

I

X

I

X^

I would rather he had gone the whole hog ('You live in these, Damon: hope's fallacy can't disappoint me') I

X

.

X

I

I

I

/

/

I

I

X

X

I

X

X

I

X

To conclude, there is a reason why Milton's Latin attracts no good poet-translators, no verse-translators. The reason is not merely the

Translating Milton's Latin Poems into English dearth of such, but the torpid amplitude of many of the poems themselves. 'The extreme allusiveness and amplification, the flamboyant rhetoric of neo-Latin do not translate easily into modern prose.55 Yet that reason hardly justifies boring Milton readers by leaden prose. A new and different effort is needed, building on Hodge's verve but going further, towards accuracy and authentic rhythm alike. The poems in Latin not only cover a wide range of themes and tones and genres, they show a more playful and confiding Milton than is met in his English poems of the same period.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION: MILTON S LANGUAGES IN THE CONTEXT OF RENAISSANCE MULTILINGUALISM

1 Tom MeArthur (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the English Language, (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 673. 2 Given upper-case /to distinguish the Roman idea from Aristotle's mimesis on the one side and from Plato's derogatory sense, 'imitativeness', on the other. 3 Reason of Church-Government, Book 2, as printed in Merritt Y. Hughes (ed.) Milton. Complete Poems andMajor Prose (NewYork: Macmillan, 1957), p. 668: n. 161, ibid., cites Giovanni Pigna's life of Ariosto. This text of Milton is used wherever possible, hereafter 'Hughes'. 4 The material summarized in this paragraph comes from Graham Castor and Terence Cave (eds.), Neo-Latin and the Vernacular in Renaissance France, (Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. xii and xv-xvi; hereafter 'Castor and Cave, Neo-Latin and the Vernacular*. See also R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge University Press, 1954), pp. 323-6; hereafter 'Bolgar, Classical Heritage'. 5 Jozef IJsewijn, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies (New York and Oxford: NorthHolland Publishing Co., 1977), p. 43. 6 J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England; The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990); hereafter 'Binns, Intellectual Culture*. This study gives massively convincing evidence of the vigour and importance of English Latin culture, well into the seventeenth century. Its detailed prosopography shows what intellectuals actually published and read in Milton's world: a body of work ignored now, but for Milton and his peers an equiponderant culture with that of English. 7 Epitaphium Damonis, (171-2), Hughes, p. 137. 'Damon' is Diodati. Coming from a Protestant Italian family originating in Lucca, Diodati had relatives in Europe, and went there to study. He spoke or wrote in several languages, and their letters show them playing with languages to each other. (Milton corrected a mistake of Diodati's in his letter in Greek! See also chapter 5.) 8 See Bolgar, Classical Heritage, ch. 8, esp. p. 303. 9 Aramaic was also known as 'Chaldee'. It was probably also the language of 208

Notes to pages j—13

209

Jesus: see Angel Saenz-Badillos, A History of the Hebrew Language, tr. John Elwolde (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 167-71, esp. p. 170. 10 Edward Phillips, Milton's nephew, records that Milton taught him Syriac as well as Aramaic, along with Hebrew. See Gordon Campbell and Sebastian Brock, 'Milton's Syriac', Milton Quarterly 27. 2 (1993), 74-7. 11 Vouched for by the locus classicus, 'Ad Patrem5, 78-85, Hughes, pp. 84-5, along with Latin, Greek and Italian. 12 See the Testimonia to Poems, 1645, Francini's Ode, line 60: not printed in Hughes, but see Gordon Campbell (ed.), John Milton. The Complete Poems (London: Everyman, 1980), p. 106; hereafter 'Campbell'. See also Campbell's essay, 'Milton's Spanish', forthcoming in Milton Quarterly. 13 See Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton's History ofBritain. Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 195-6. The clue is that Milton makes heavy weather of awkward passages in a Latin translation, of lucid Old English originals. 'His response to these passages shows no hint of understanding the reasons for this odd Latin' (p. 195). I labour the point because the possibility of Milton knowing OE, and thus the Genesis 'B', is raised perennially - for example in 1994 on the Old English e-mail talk-group. 14 See for example William Riley Parker, Milton. A Biography, 2 vols., (Oxford University Press, 1968), vol. 1, p. 1008; hereafter 'Parker'. 15 See Binns, Intellectual Culture, p. in; and on Weston generally, pp. xiii, 110-14, 487 nn. 1-7. 16 For this paragraph and the next see Leonard Forster, The Poet's Tongues. Multilingualism in Literature (Cambridge University Press with Otago University Press, 1970), pp. 38-42; hereafter 'Forster, Poet's Tongues'. 17 See discussion of 'Ros' ('Dew') in H. M. Margoliouth (ed.), The Poems & Letters of Andrew Marvell, 2 vols., (Oxford University Press, 1962), vol. 1, p. 219. Margoliouth quotes H. J. C. Grierson for the idea that the Latin was written first, and served as a guide for the English poem. Margoliouth himself thinks 'the poems are experiments on the same themes, made at about the same time, in Latin and English'. 18 See Harris F. Fletcher, Milton's Intellectual Development, 2 vols., (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956-61); and Donald L. Clark, John Milton at St Paul's School, A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New

19

20 21 22

York: Columbia University Press, 1948). The point was memorably made by Leo Miller in his paper to the Third International Milton Symposium, Florence (1988), and is documented throughout his subsequent book John Milton's Writings in the Anglo-Dutch Negotiations 1651-4 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1992). Castor and Cave, Neo-Latin and the Vernacular, p. xvi. Vida's Christiad is the most complete and distinguished example. Possibilities include Jephthes for Samson, polemical/political works for the Defensio Prima, historical work for the History of Britain, the satirical Franciscanus for his epic satire on the Gunpowder Plot, In Quintum Novembris.

210

Notes to pages 16-22

23 'Being in Two Minds: the Bilingual Factor in Renaissance Writing', a paper heard at the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies symposium in Copenhagen (1991) and now published in Ann Moss et al. (eds.), Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Hajhiensis (Binghamton: MRTS, 1994), 61-74. 24 Hughes, p. 30.

I THE MULTILINGUAL SELF PRESENTED IN MILTON S POEMS, 1645

1 The text of Dante here and throughout comes from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Translated with a Commentary by Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen

2 3 4

5

6

Series 80 (Princeton University Press, 1970-5). The reference here is to vol. 1., Inferno, pp. 2-3. Translations from Dante come from Singleton unless otherwise stated. His edition is referred to hereafter as 'Singleton (ed.), Divine Comedy'. Longfellow's poem is Mezzo Cammin, Updike's is Mid-Point. 'I. M.' would cover a considerable number of names of authors, since Mis a common first letter in English surnames, and / back then covered given names beginning both /and J ('Jacob', 'James', John', Joseph', and so on). This line of thought is typified by Parker, pp. 287-8. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959). A fuller consideration of the issues of Milton's selfpresentation is to be found in my essay, 'Milton's Self-Presentation in Poems . . . 164$ in Milton Quarterly 25. 2 (1991), 38-48. For instance, Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., Visionary Poetics: Milton's Tradition and His Legacy (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1979). Two works which do examine the Poems, whole and on their own terms, are Louis L. Martz, Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton's Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980) and C. W. R. D. Moseley, The Poetic Birth: Milton's Poems of1645 (Menston: Scolar, 1991). Martz's book is referred to hereafter as 'Martz, Poet of Exile', and Moseley's as 'Moseley, Poetic Birth'. For Aristotle, see Nicomachean Ethics, vi. 7-8, and W. D. Ross, Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1923), pp. 217-18. Aristotle is cited from Classical Literary Criticism. Aristotle On the Art of Poetry, Horace On the Art of Poetry, Longinus On the

Sublime, tr. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), referred to subsequently as 'Classical Literary Criticism'. The polarity of otium/negotium is often on Cicero's lips in the dialogues. It is pursued with superb fullness into the Renaissance by Brian Vickers, in 'Leisure and Idleness in the Renaissance: the Ambivalence of Otium\ in Renaissance Studies, 4. 1 (1990), 1-37 and 4. 2 (1990) 107-54. 7 'Gemelle cultu simplici gaudens liber, / Fronde licet gemina' ('Twinmembered book rejoicing in a single cover, yet with a double leaf), Hughes, p. 146. The translations here and elsewhere are Hughes's unless otherwise stated. How best to translate Milton's Latin verse into English for modern readers is discussed in the Appendix. 8 See Martz, Poet of Exile, p. 42.

Motes to pages 22-30

211

9 Hughes, p. 55; my own translation. 10 When the sonnets move from English into Italian they go from roman to italic print, a visual pun. Since such things were in general the province of the printer, I would not insist that Milton thought up the pun, but it adds to the impression of liveliness. 11 See John B. Dillon, 'Surdeo, Saumaise, and the Lexica: An Aspect of Milton's Latin Diction', in Humanistica Lovaniensia 27 (1987), 238-52; hereafter 'Dillon, "Surdeo"'. 12 Hughes, p. 142; my own translation. 13 The deciding is discussed in detail in chapter 3. 14 See Martz, Poet of Exile, ch. 3; my translation. 15 Thus Elegiae II—V and VII receive a statement ;Anno Aetatis 16' or the like, whereas Elegiae I and VI do not. 16 Epistolae Familiares (Familiar Letters) x, 21 April 1645, to Carlo Dati, hereafter 'Ep. Fam.'; my own translations unless stated otherwise. For Latin text see The Works of John Milton: The Columbia Edition, General editor Frank Allen Patterson, 18 vols., (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-8), xii. 49. This work is abbreviated hereafter to 'ColWorks', and its subsequent 2-volume index (1940) to 'Collndex*. 17 He makes a revealing remark in the covering letter, Ep. Fam. X again, that he uses a Protestant way of talking about the Pope, to be taken with a pinch of salt. I say 'revealing', because it shows him aware of what roles require offensive vigour when he was attacking the Gunpowder Plot, emollience now towards Catholic friends. 18 I incline to this view of J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London: Routledge, 1964).

2 THE DEVELOPMENT AND QUALITY OF MILTON S MULTILINGUAL VERSE

1 23 January 1647; Hughes, p. 146. 2 See John Milton, Poems upon Several Occasions, ed. Thomas Warton, 2nd (rev.) edn, (London: G. G. J. andj. Robinson, 1791). 3 See Philip J. Ford, George Buchanan. Prince of Poets (Aberdeen University Press, 1982), ch. 2, hereafter Tord, Buchanan'; and my own essay, 'The PreCriticism of Milton's Latin Verse, Illustrated from the Ode "Ad Ioannem Rousium",' in OfPoetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P. G. Stanwood (Binghamton: MRTS, 1995), 17-344 Hughes, p. 26 ('dearer than was the great Stagirite to his magnanimous pupil'). 5 Making a quick comparison with Marvell's cRos' I noticed the same tendency, in 'fastigia sphaerae' (5) and 'mollia strata pede' (10). 6 The idea of any language having 'completed' its development may be found tendentious, a misapplied teleology. The idea is implicit in the idea of 'renaissance', however, and in turn implies a canon, governing usage as well

212

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22

23

Notes to pages 31-7 as themes. It helps explain why the bolder stylists often chose the mother tongue in which to practice emulation: a harder midwifery is needed for such 'rebirth'. See, for example, Odes in. 30. 10-12. Rouse had upheld this principle rather valiantly, in refusing to issue a book to Charles I, on the grounds that the Bodleian was not a lending library and its librarian was bound by oath to keep all its statutes. Later, his successor did the same in the same circumstances to Cromwell as Lord Protector. And both would-be borrowers acquiesced, oaths being held sacred. For 'playing' as a model of influence, see my essay, 'Milton Playing with Ovid' in Milton Studies 25 (1989), 3-19. Hughes, p. 6; his translation, modified. 'The fable of the peasant and the landlord', Hughes, p. 7. Hughes, pp. 12 and 21. Elegia 11. 3-4, Hughes, p. 12; my translation. Elegia in. 68, Hughes, p. 23; Ovid, Amoves, 1. v. 26. The Faerie Queene, II. vii. 33. See The Two Gentlemen of Verona I. ii, early and comic, but also Othello 1. iii. 158-66. Hughes, p. 8. Gordon Williams, The Nature of Roman Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 62, referred to henceforth as 'Williams, Roman Poetry'. I discuss this principle of'amalgam' in 'Artistry and Originality in Milton's Latin Poems', Milton Quarterly 27. 4 (1993), 138-49. Hughes, p. 58. Hughes, p. 37. Hughes, p. 50. Elegia VI is latest of the series, chronologically, so it is discussed here last in the account of Milton's developing experimentation with Ovid. In 1645, though, he placed VII last, to gain the farewell to Ovid by means of the palinode, doing double duty by closing not only that ultra-Ovidian poem but the whole Ovidian experimentation. Such is the view ofjohn Carey in 'The Date of Milton's Italian Poems', RES n. s. 14 (1963), 383-6. For a contrary view, see Leo Miller, 'Milton's Patriis Cicutis\ in NQ226 (1981), 41-2. I side with Carey because the alternative reading of Elegia vi. 87-90 is too flat and repetitive for an ending. The poem would end up, 'The Nativity Ode is my Christmas present to Christ, and you're going to get it too, and it's in English, so be its judge': the thought goes in a dull circle compared with 'The Ode is my Christmas present to Christ; and you'll get a present too, my attempts in your ancestral language, Italian. So be their judge'. I discuss the matter further in my essay, 'The Audiences of Milton's Italian Verses' in Renaissance Studies 8. 1 (1994), 76-88, hereafter cited as 'Hale, "Audiences'". I refrain from calling them 'elegies', because their mood is seldom (as English uses the word) 'elegiac' - only in the short Elegia II, where 'Elegeia' appears at the end, personified. The name refers to metre, which because of

Notes to pages 38-42

213

Rome's elegists (Propertius and Tibullus as well as Ovid) connoted erotic. 24 Greek has a larger vocabulary than Latin, and its articles and particles give its verse a fluidity which Latin lacks: all the more, then, are Horace's (and by extension Milton's) Alcaics a tour de force. 25 Hughes, pp. 11-12: 'Among the blest in Elysium may you walk for ever' (Hughes' words, but transposed to secure a more striding rhythm for this Vice-Chancellor's pacing through heaven). 26 Hughes, pp. 15-21. 27 For example, lines 80-5 (Hughes, p. 17). The influence of Buchanan was first noted by Warton. It is discussed by John Carey, in The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alistair Fowler (London: Longman, 1968), pp. 39-40. This edition, for which Fowler edited PL and Carey all the rest, is henceforth abbreviated to 'Carey and Fowler'. Buchanan's poem is discussed in its own terms by Ford, Buchanan, pp. 55-9. 28 I discuss these neologisms in 'Notes on Milton's Latin Word-Formation in the Poemata of 1645, m Humanistica Lovaniensia 43 (1994), 405-10. 29 'Born of Mars' (53, the citadel of Rome); 'Wearer of the triple crown' (55, the Pope) ; 'made of bread' (56, a sneer at the Mass): all three are found at Hughes, p. 16. 30 Hughes, p. 17. Respectively, 'and the vast procession of mendicant brothers' and '[followers of Bacchus] when they chant their orgies on Theban Aracynthus'. In the second example, Milton employs primitive names for primitive rites, to scorn papal Rome as antediluvian: -ynthus words are primeval in Greek, just as Echion was far back in Theban history (and Thebes itself was scorned as backward by Athens). 31 See Philip Hardie, 'The Presence of Lucretius in Paradise Lost, Milton Quarterly 29. 1 (1995), 13-24. 32 So says John Aubrey, in his 'Brief Life' of Milton: see The Early Lives of Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Constable, 1932), p. 6; hereafter 'Darbishire (ed.), Early Lives'. Cf. Lycidas 124, where the slightly older Milton waxes satirical: 'Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw' (Hughes, p. 123). 33 Hughes, p. 33. 34 Further proofs include the powerful close, where he manages to fuse Lucretius with his own orthodoxy, in that the idea of a final bonfire comes in the New Testament as well as the Roman Epicurean. 35 The sequence was not taken rigidly: Spenser never wrote a 'Georgics' between his pastoral and epic, nor for that matter was it believed that the Eclogues were Virgil's first work of all. 36 E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1953), pp. 231-2 with 201, n. 35. 37 Details are readily available in commentaries, such as that of Walter MacKellar (ed.), The Latin Poems of John Milton, Cornell Studies in English 15 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), pp. 332-53; hereafter 'MacKellar (ed.), Latin\ 38 I discuss the punctuation of the early editions of Milton's Latin verse in 'The

214

39

40

41 42

Notes to pages 42-52 Punctuation of Milton's Latin Verse: Some Prolegomena', Milton Quarterly 23. 1 (1989), 7-19. I discuss accentual symmetry in 'Sion's Bacchanalia: An Inquiry into Milton's Latin in the Epitaphium Damonis\ Milton Studies 16 (1982), 115-30. The basic research was done for Virgil and Roman poets by W. F.Jackson Knight, Accentual Symmetry in Virgil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1950). Entropaden, in Psalm 114, line 5 is found only in Hesychius, the grammarian of the fifth century AD (Hughes, p. 114). As the adverb meaning 'headlong' in Homer is '/wotropaden', metrically similar, I conjecture Milton did not have his lexicon handy or did not check it, staying elevated above such mundane checking by furor poeticus - as indeed, his letter to Gil indicates. Ep. Fam. 5, to Alexander Gil, Jr; ColWorks xn. 16-17. The risk of special pleading is felt. I risk it all the same because (a) little has ever been published on these verses, (b) much of that little is by Landor at his most liverish, and (c) my own essay 'Milton's Poems in Greek' (in The Interpretative Power. Essays Presented to Professor MargaretDalziel, ed. C. A. Gibson

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

(Dunedin: Department of English, University of Otago, 1982) is not readily available. Hughes, p. 115; 'O King, if you make an end of me, an observer of the laws and a doer of absolutely no harm to any man . . .' Hughes, p. 116. This time I adapt his translation, to restore the echo in the last word, 'olessas', of 'oleses' in the first line: both are about 'making an end'. Hughes, pp. 114-15; lines 8 and 15. line 8, Hughes, p. 3. For fuller treatment of this topic, see Hale, 'Audiences'. Hughes, p. 54, Sonnet II, lines 1-2: 'Donna leggiadra, il cui bel nome onora / L'erbosa val di Reno, e il nobil varco' ('Gentle and beautiful lady, whose fair name honours the verdant valley of Reno and the glorious ford'). Hughes, pp. 55-6. The phrasing of Guido di Pino is as cited in the introduction to Helen Darbishire, ed. The Poetical Works of John Milton, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), vol. 11, p. 319; hereafter 'Darbishire (ed.), PoeticaP. See Hale, 'Audiences', pp. 84-5. Hughes, p. 53; my translation. 3 THE ITALIAN JOURNEY (i 6 3 8 - 9 ) AND LANGUAGE-CHOICE

1 Forster, The Poefs Tongues, pp. 54-5. 2 The date of'Ad Patrem' remains disputed. I myself accept arguments for a dating early in the 1630s, because it seems most natural to take 'abductum' (line 75, 'withdrawn from the din of the city') to mean the withdrawal from London to Horton. Yet I would not also insist that the poem precedes the Italian sonnets: it is simply for convenience that my exposition considers these next after it. 'Psalm 114' is dated to November 1634 by the letter concerning it to Alexander Gil (see n. 12, below).

Notes to pages 52-60

215

3 Hughes, p. 82. 4 Translations for this chapter, unless otherwise stated, are John Carey's in Carey and Fowler; pp. 91-6 for the Italian poems. 5 Carey translates 'maiora' absolutely, as 'more considerable things' (p. 154). I would rather supply 'officia' ('kindnesses') from the line before. 6 As in the incessant epithet 'phis' for Aeneas. It is by 'pietas' that Aeneas can take his father out of Troy, and found the new Troy through his own son. 7 Forster, The Poet's Tongues, p. 47, and notes on the line in Sergio Baldi's edition of Milton's Italian poems: 'Poesie italiane di Milton', in Studi Secenteschiy (1966), 103-30. Carey's translations are at Carey and Fowler, pp. 91-6. 8 See also Ray Fleming, 'Sublime and Pure Thoughts, "Without Transgression": The Dantean Influence in Milton's "Donna Leggiadra"', in Milton Quarterly 20 (1986), 38-44. A further echo from Dante's Francesca may be present in rv. 4, 'Gia caddi' ('I have now fallen': cf. 'E caddi come corpo morto cade' (Inferno v. 142, 'And I fell as a body falls dead'); Singleton (ed.), Divine Comedy, p. 56. 9 Hughes, p. 55. 10 In the Apology for Smectymnuus (1642), Hughes, pp. 693-4. 11 Text from Hughes, pp. 114-15; translation from Carey and Fowler, p. 229, except that in some particulars I have made corrections: a full discussion of points at issue is found in my essay, 'Milton as a Translator of Poetry', Renaissance Studies 1 (1987), 252, n. 19. 12 The letter is Ep. Fam. 5, quoted from ColWorks, xn, 16-17. Although it is not certain that this letter to Gil refers to Psalm 114, the remarks fit it, and no other extant poem by Milton fits. 13 See Second Defence (1654), Hughes, p. 829. 14 Hughes, p. 30. 15 Hughes, p. 130. The translation is from Carey and Fowler, pp. 264-5. 16 As argued by Roberta F. Brinkley, Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century, Johns Hopkins Monographs in Literary History, 3 (repr. London: Frank Cass, 1967); hereafter 'Brinkley, Arthurian Legend?. 17 Hughes, pp. 132-9 for text; Carey and Fowler, pp. 281-2, for translation. 18 Latin letters of Milton to Diodati are Nos. 6 and 7 in Ep. Fam. Two of his Latin Elegiae (I and VI) are verse-letters to Diodati. 19 The ode 'Ad Ioannem Roiisium' (1647) is his only later substantial Latin poem. It is in completely different vein, metre, genre and tone from any previous Latin poem of Milton: more than most, it is occasional. 20 'Haec' at 180 and 181, 'these thoughts', referring to poetic plans and Manso's 'cups' brought back together from Italy, shows that the imagined conversation with Damon proceeds throughout the Arthur-passage. 21 Made a paragraph, a distinct unit of the thought, by the refrain line (161). 22 Jerram, Masson and others are summarized by Douglas Bush in A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), vol. 1, pp. 315-17; hereafter 'Variorum*.

216

Notes to pages 60-4

23 Virgil is quoted from P. Vergili Maronis Opera, ed. F. A. Hirtzel (Oxford University Press, 1900), the translation being my own. 24 The similar if-clause in 'Mansus', 'O modo spiritus adsit', is a different worry - about talent, not life. The similarity marks change, and growth. 25 Reason of Church Government, Hughes, p. 668. 26 Brinkley, Arthurian Legend, p. 261. 27 The lists are dated 1639-41 by Masson and others since: see David Masson, The Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical and Literary History of His Time, 7 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1881-94), vol. n. 112-15; referred to hereafter as 'Masson, Life'. Of the non-biblical items only Venutius (AD 51) is British, and his story is in the Roman historian Tacitus. 28 Darbishire (ed.), Early Lives, p. 13. 29 Darbishire (ed.), Early Lives, pp. 72-73. The text and pointing of Satan's address to the sun are also taken from Phillips in Darbishire. Although Phillips may be merely mangling the published text, he may instead be recalling an earlier state of that text, and I quote him in case that is so. If it is, we have the passage built around the figure 'Glory . . . Glorious . . . Glorious', stepping upwards from the Sun's glory to Satan's to the Father's. And in that case, we could ask why Milton should think the concluding 'Glorious' inferior to eventual 'matchless'? Does the latter create a better clash with Satan's 'warring' against such a God (a self-contradictory enterprise), and introduce a more jagged, Anglo-Saxon finish? 30 Recent scholarship doubts the play is by Aeschylus, but this is immaterial for our purposes. Milton's allusions to Prometheus (see Collndex, s.v. 'Prometheus') are ambivalent. He is both innovator and thief, the champion of humanity and bringer of ills to us. See for instance the opening of the epigram 'In Inventorem Bombardae', Hughes, p. 14: 'Iapetionidem laudavit caeca vetustas' (my emphasis), 'In their blindness the ancients praised Iapetus' son'. 31 All come from the same triliteral root, where of course the writing down of solely the three consonants makes the three parts of speech look the same. The meaning of the name was common knowledge through expositors, yet Milton would also have read passages of Hebrew where all three parts of speech occur. 32 See F. T. Prince, The Italian Element in Milton's Verse (Oxford University Press, 1954), esp. ch. 7; hereafter 'Prince, Italian Element\ Prince (p. 121) says that in Milton and the Italians 'a quite direct, simple, or "logical" order of words is avoided in order to provide one in which the completion of the statement is either postponed or anticipated'. A notable instance in our passage would be 'to thee I call / But with no friendly voice' because the main line of discourse is at once turned aside into a grudging qualifier. Although Prince's chapter is impressionistic, and Italian is not the only possible origin of the effects being considered, he still most usefully draws attention to intersectings of languages in Milton's syntactical artifice. 33 John 3. 20, and cf. 5. 19. 34 Hippolytus 555.

Notes to pages 65-74

217

35 As at Lycidas 77, Hughes, p. 122, 'Phoebus replied and touched my trembling ears' echoes Eclogue vi. 3-4, 'Cynthius aurem / vellit et admonuit', 'Phoebus plucked at my ear and warned me'. 36 In chapter 6.

4 MILTON S ARTS OF LANGUAGE: TRANSLATING AND PHILOLOGY

1 See Dryden's preface to his translation of Ovid's Epistles (1680). I discuss Milton's verse-translating more fully in 'Milton As a Translator of Poetry', in Renaissance Studies 1. 2 (1987), 238-56; hereafter 'Hale, "Milton as Translator"'. This includes a check-list of his verse-translating, gathering up information generally left scattered round the contents-pages of editions and consequently ignored. 2 Hughes, pp. 3-5 for the Psalms, and 10 for the ode. 3 See Arnold Williams, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, General editor Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82), vol. 11., pp. 418-20 and 808-18; hereafter TPW. 4 TPW, 11. 478, from Milton's Postscript. 5 Hughes, pp. 139-40. Carey and Fowler, p. 283, give the Italian originals. 6 Hughes, p. 716. On p. 717 Hughes gives the Greek, reproducing the whole title-page. I discuss the translation points more technically in Hale, 'Areopagitica's Euripidean Motto', Milton Quarterly 25. 1 (1991), 25-7; hereafter cited as 'Hale, "Areopagitica" \ 7 Hughes, p. 141; Horace, Satires 1. xvi. 40. 8 Hughes, p. 143. 9 Hughes, p. 10.1 give reasons for dating this after 1645 in Hale, 'Milton As Translator', 243. 10 Hughes, p. 149; the versions are pp. 149-59. 11 I am summarizing here the fuller discussion in my essay, 'Why Did Milton Translate Psalms 80-88 in April 1648?', in Literature and History, 3rd series 3/2 (1994), special issue ed. John N. King, The English Renaissance and Reformation: Literature, Politics and Religion, 55-62. 12 William W. E. Slights, 'The Edifying Margins of Renaissance English Books', Renaissance Quarteiiy 42. 4 (1989), 682-716. 13 The over-copious or over-scrupulous opponent is said to 'Blur the margent' [margin] with tedious marginal notes; to be lost without the 'crutches of his margent'. The notes are there to help a poor case: the 'margent feeds the drought of his text'. See Apology for Smectymnuus (ColWorks, m, pp. 316, 323). Similarly in Colasterion and Hirelings. See also Parker, 1, p. 222. 14 Leo Miller, 'Some Inferences from Milton's Hebrew', in Milton Quarterly 18.2 (1984), 41-6; hereafter 'Miller, "Hebrew"'. The asterisk and dagger signs are those of Milton's 1673 edition. 15 Campbell, p. 505: 'The phrase Prae concussione is not a clarification of the Hebrew (it merely translates Milton's English phrase), but rather an assertion of Milton's preference for the meaning "shaking". The Hebrew

218

16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

Notes to pages 74-9

word means "youth" . . . but Milton has enlisted an homonymous root that means "to shake" to help him understand a difficult line.' Milton's notes on Greek verse are far the most rewarding. Those on Latin texts are few and insecurely attributed. Those on Italian texts hardly go beyond correcting typos; and similarly with Greek prose texts. See Lawrence Lipking, 'The Marginal Gloss', in Critical Inquiry 3 (1977), 609—55; H.J.Jackson, 'Writing in Books and Other Marginal Activities', in University of Toronto Quarterly 62. 2 (1993), 217-31; and Robin Alston, 'On the Margin', Bulletin of The Society for Renaissance Studies 11. 1 (1993), 6-13. I studied the three in close succession during December 1993, along with minor marginalia. Milton's edition of Lycophron's Alexandra is that of Stephanus (Geneva, 1601), bought by Milton in 1634. His marginalia are cited from the posthumously published commentary of Harris F. Fletcher, John Milton's copy of Lycophron's Alexandra in the Library of the University of Illinois', as prepared by John T. Shawcross for Milton Quarterly 23. 4 (1989), 129-58; hereafter 'Fletcher, "Lycophron"'. line 34 is found on p. 10 of Milton's copy, and discussed on p. 142 of Fletcher, 'Lycophron'. P. 46 of Milton's copy, Fletcher, 'Lycophron' p. 145. The translation is by the Dutch scholar Wilhelm Canter (1542-75). This excellent scholar is best known for his work on Greek tragedians, and so figures in Milton's marginalia to his Euripides (see below). P. 74, Fletcher, 'Lycophron', p. 150. In his copy of Aratus' Phaenomena and Diosemeia, now in the British Library. Kelley, Maurice and Samuel D. Atkins, 'Milton's Annotations of Aratus', PMLA 70 (1955), 1090-1106, and 'Milton's Annotations of Euripides', JEGP 60 (1961), 680-7; hereafter 'Kelley, "Aratus"', and 'Kelley, "Euripides"', respectively. I have found the old discussion and copious facsimiles by S. L. Sotheby, Ramblings in the Elucidation of Milton's Hand (London, 1861) very

26

27 28 29

illuminating, when not able to view the actual marginalia in the British Library and Bodleian. Details in Kelley, 'Euripides'. I have illustrated the significance of Milton's methods and resultant emendations in Hale, 'Milton's Euripides Marginalia: Their Significance for Milton Studies', in Milton Studies 27 (1991), 23-35The two volumes are: the Tragoediae of Euripides, pub. Stephanus (Geneva, 1602), now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The marks * and * appear in the printed text at the place which Milton is annotating. A second * or x begins his correlative marginal annotation. As argued by David Davies and Paul Dowling in ' "Shrewd Books, with Dangerous Frontispieces": Areopagitica's Motto', in Milton Quarterly 20. 2 (1986), 33-7. But see my caution regarding their reasoning about the

title-page of Areopagitica in Hale, 'Areopagitica\ 25-7. 30 See for example D. R. Shackle ton Bailey, Profile of Horace (London:

Notes to pages 80-3

31

32

33

34 35

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Duckworth, 1982), pp. 104-20, on the principles involved and how they make Bentley and Housman (despite errors) outstanding as textual critics. Remember, too, the veneration accorded till recently within high culture to such critics, so that in the time of Pope and Bentley 'critic' meant textual critic. No one can say where, if at all, Littleton (1719) or Ainsworth (1736) used Milton's Thesaurus for their dictionaries. See Parker, Milton, 1, p. 657 and 11, p. 1167. Even if their tide-page-claims to use Milton are only a puff, it is notable that they promote their own dictionaries by linking them to that of Milton as a major Latin writer and 'correct' Latin stylist. A matter still sub judice, having been raised by William. B. Hunter. I have found it hard to harness Leo Miller's lexicographical methods, so successful in working on State Papers, to De Doctrina. The problems include lack of obvious control texts and lack of lexicographical resources for neo-Latin prose. A group of us are trying to harness stylometric and other statistical techniques. I discuss these matters further in 'Milton's Accents', forthcoming in Renaissance and Reformation (1996). They are summarized in Appendix B of JohnT. Shawcross, John Milton. The Selfand the World (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993), pp. 285-8; hereafter 'Shawcross, Self. This language-preference accords with the number of Italian commonplaces, Milton's debt to Italian poets, his preference for Italian pronunciation of Latin, and indeed the seminal role of the Italian journey in his personal development. Otherwise, why go to Italy at all, and why stay there so long compared with the other European countries? Cicero's credo had been 'otium cum dignitate'. In certain crises of 1642-60 Milton must have felt impelled to give up otium for negotium; perhaps, after 1660, he setded for Cicero's kind of prodigiously productive otium. See for example G. K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge, 1962), for the career of John Lyly. Discontented because unemployed humanists are a feature of Jacobean tragedy, e.g. Bosola in Webster's Duchess ofMalfi. 5 MILTON'S LATIN PROSE

1 See especially Thomas N. Corns, The Development of Milton's Prose Style (Oxford University Press, 1982), hereafter 'Corns, Prose1] the same author's Milton's Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), hereafter 'Corns, Language'; and Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (eds.), Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974)2 Cited from ColWorks, xn. 288-91. The date of the Prolusion is unknown, but Parker, 1, p. 18, is surely right in linking it with the verses on the same theme, found with it; perhaps from when Milton was 14, in 1623. The theme ('Leave your bed early') comes from Lyly's Latin Grammar, another sign of school origin.

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Notes to pages 83-g

3 'It is a well-worn proverb which says "To rise at daybreak is the healthiest thing", yet no less true for being ancient; for if I try to reckon up in order one by one the benefits of this practice I shall seem to incur an arduous task: just get up, therefore, get up, you sluggard, and don't let bed keep you for ever! you don't know the delights which dawn offers you. Do you want to delight your eyes? Just look at the sun rising full of red, look at the clear sky, etc' (my translation). 4 Subordinate clauses respectively before and after the main clause. One which bisects the main clause is 'embedded'. The terms are adapted from Corns, Prose and Language. 5 There are clear echoes in this phrasing of the immature elegiac verses found in the same box, 'Surge, age surge . . .', as discussed in chapter 2. 6 'That sometimes sportive exercises are not prejudicial to philosophic studies' (ColWorks, xn. 205, tr. Bromley Smith). The prolusion is pp. 204-47 there, and quoted thence. 7 Still irresistible to adolescent wit. The quoted phrase means, 'lest his riddles be babbled out, not by his Sphinx but from his sphincter'. 8 ColWorks, 240. 11-16. He nicely points out that manhood is not reasonably equated with being a champion drinker (pancratice haurire: 'all-in' competitive drinking). 9 Possibly a favourite verb for Milton, as he uses it as the climax of his introduction to the commendations which herald the Poemata section of 1645. 10 See J. McG. Bottkol, 'The Holograph of Milton's Letter to Holstenius', PMLA 68 (1953), 617-27. See also Parker, Milton, p. 829, n. 49. The date of the original being one day earlier than the date on the letter as published, Milton's second thoughts might have begun as soon as he sent it off. If so, it is a human touch; but Bottkol is probably correct to assign most of the toning down to the 1670s. 11 'By this work of yours, Benedetto Bonmattei, the compilation of new institutes of your native tongue, now so far advanced that you are about to give it thefinishingtouch, you are entering on a path...' {ColWorks m\. 30-1, but it misses the metaphor of building, for which see next note). 12 The metaphor is set going by 'Institutions': instituere is to 'erect', 'establish'. 13 That the word has some special attachment to Etruscan and Roman towns is suggested by The Oxford Latin Dictionary (hereafter 'OxLD'). If so, here is the flattering presupposition that Florentine Italian has a special relationship with Rome; that Florence keeps up the speech of Rome, and does it best among the forms of Italian (and romance languages). 14 ColWorks, XII. 44, Letter 10: 'With how great and what new pleasure I was filled, my Charles, on the unexpected arrival of your letter . ..' The locution, 'my Charles', is normal as between friends in Latin. But notice the difference, of distance and warmth and whole relationship from the opening address of the letters to Holstenius, to Bonmattei, and even the two to Diodati (a closer friend, but apparently a less assiduous correspondent).

Notes to pages go-8

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15 ColWorks, XII. 51. The Columbia translation is clumsy through overpunctuation. But 'our peculiar way5 is clever: it means 'our own' way and yes, it is also 'peculiar' = odd: 'nostro more' has the same concessive / dismissive tone. Note the tense and mood and aspect of the final verb, 'loquendum erit': 'whenever I shall have to be writing', future and continuous and binding, all in the one idiom. Milton looks forward to continuing this correspondence, now resumed. 16 Relatively unguarded. The fair copy (printed facing ColWorks, xn. 50) is in Milton's mature hand, a fine firm specimen. The letter remains especially personal, for example in its reference to Milton's sending a copy of his Epitaphium Damonis (the anonymously published tribute of 1640), to Dati so that Dati but also the other Florentines named therein might write back (48-9). 17 Hughes, p. 132. I use the translation from Campbell, p. 540, because it achieves the plain style in English of this Latin (as opposed to the examples seen so far of the other Latin prose genres). This prose understates, moves briskly, practises economy in the service of self-effacement- 'to learn more', it implies, 'read the poem itself. 18 The neat antithesis is between prepositions, 'de' versus 'supra', in lines 2-3. The text and version (again excellent) are from Campbell, pp. 104 and 505. 19 Milton seems again worried about envy. He quotes Virgil on the title-page of Poems, 1645 to the same, apotropaic effect. 20 See n. 4 above. By way of further illustration, my own sentence in the text itself briefly embeds, then branches left, then right. 21 The text is that of ColWorks, vol. vn. 22 '... that I myself may be judged to have avoided' my opponent's silliness and verbosity. Notice the latter emphasis on stylistic fault in Salmasius. The firm clausula, a triple cretic ( - - - - ), helps establish the control, and the claim to be stylish. 23 The use of the orthodox, judicial idiom connotes a justness in the judgement itself. 24 God 'useth to cast down proud unbridled kings, puffed up above the measure of mankind' {ColWorks trn., n. 7) The odd ending, 'useth', may be the translator's way of alerting readers to an allusion. He does it again on p. 33, to translate (Horace). The archaisms turn out (vn. 564) to be fossils of the 1692 translation by Joseph Washington, retained for no stated reason: 'The present translation, then, though retaining some of the phrases of the old, was made directly from Milton's Latin'. 25 Venditare has exactly this sense twice in Plautus. Milton is beginning the casting of his opponents as comic buffoons which he will soon expand. 26 As nowadays with 'academic', used to mean 'so-called expert', 'impractical theorist'. 27 See J. M. French (ed.), The Life Records of John Milton (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949-58), 5 vols., v. 44-5; hereafter 'French, Life Records'. See also Parker, 1, p. 622.

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Notes to pages 99-102 CONCLUSION TO PART ONE MULTILINGUALISM IN MILTON'S LATIN PROSE

1 ColWorks VII. 307-11, where he taxes Salmasius with quoting speeches out of context: 'we must not regard the poet's words as necessarily his own, but notice which character says what within the poet's text' (Columbia translation, modified to bring out the contrast - cnon quid poeta, sed quis apud poetam quidque dicat'). In closing, Milton points out how insecure an interpretation is when drawn from words wrenched out of context, and how needful it is to know the full context. 2 ColWorks VII. 89, TPWw. 349. See Miller, 'Hebrew'. 3 'Gaudete scombri...', Carey and Fowler, p. 409; not in Hughes. The lines tell the mackerel ('scombri') to rejoice, as now that Samasius has unwisely gone into print there will be plenty of waste paper to wrap them in. 4 ColWorks, VII. 324-31. 5 A remarkable feat. He does it by adducing Roman norms to humanists who accept Rome as normative, for example as to their law ('reception countries', like the Dutch). 6 An odd choice, on which he insists in two letters (23, 26). Sallust's laconic style is part of the reason. And style is the man, for ancients and humanists. But above all, Sallust outshines the more obvious Roman choice, Tacitus, because he preceded and 'taught' Tacitus (who wrote in aemulatio): Sallust takes Milton back once again to origins, the causes of the downfall of the Republic. 7 And wrote a poem of self-praise about it, including the notoriously awful jingle: 'O fortunatam natam me consule Romam!' ('O Rome most fortunate, born in my consulate'). 8 In 'Forty Source Notes to Milton's pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Primd, Milton Quarterly 29. 2 (1995), 48-52, Michelle Valerie Ronnick presents 14 further allusions to Cicero (Sallust 3, Plautus 5, Terence 4). This gives an idea of Cicero's pervasive influence. A wide range of Cicero's works are evidenced, which illustrates Milton's humanist choosing of the apt exemplar. They include works attacking Verres and Antonius, both especially apt to Milton's attack on Salmasius, in the name of the res publica. Her Sallust allusions are to the 'war' against Catiline, apt again as an enemy of the state in Cicero's eyes. 9 ColWorks VII. 6. 10 ColWorks VII. 554-5, 11 Louis Martz commented on this in his plenary addess to the Fourth International Milton Symposium (Vancouver, 1991). I am grateful for the insight. 12 Quoted from Parker, p. 622. The terms of the contest are the shared humanist ones. Bouhereau's comments are in French, Life Records, v. 44-5, 4913 In the 1659 ending the example of Cicero is made more explicit: 'Consul ille Romanus', and 'illius consulis' {ColWorks VII. 556, TPWw. i. 536-7). 'Ille'

Notes to pages 104-8

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and 'illius' have the force of 'that well-known, pre-eminent instance of the class of "consul"', like 'that forbidden tree'. The tone here is calmer and more self-assured, which has interest because in 1659 some of Milton's output had a quite different tone (see the end of the Ready and Easy Way, for instance). INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO

1 George Steiner, What Is Comparative Literature? (Oxford University Press, !995)> PP- 15-16. 2 In the sense given by Gedric C. Brown, 'Horatian Signatures: Milton and Civilized Comunity', in Mario Di Cesare (ed.), Milton in Italy. Contexts, Images, Contradictions (Binghamton: MRTS, 1991) pp. 329-44; hereafter 'Di Cesare, Milton in Italy\ 3 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford University Press, 1973). 6 LATIN AND MILTON'S OTHER LANGUAGES IN THE STYLE OF PARADISE LOST

1 Carey and Fowler, p. 433. See also Corns, Language, p. 95. 2 But 'duped' is too severe. The first 200-odd years of editing had no access to the OED, nor to a good dictionary of English on James Murray's all-important historical principles. After the OED was finished, too, the Variorum or snowball principle would be influential until noticed and arrested. We find Fowler and Corns themselves, when not contesting the principle, suggesting new instances of Latinism; and naturally and rightly too, for readers to assess and choose. 3 Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (Oxford University Press, 1963); hereafter 'Ricks, Grand Style'. 4 FQ11. xii. 63. Spenser is cited from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Annotated English Poets series (London: Longman, 1977), p. 2935 Elegia vn. 90, Hughes, p. 61. This coinage was criticized by Salmasius, but Milton retained it in his 1673 Poems. Milton is upheld by Dillon, cSurdeo\ 6 See Elegia vi, 10 and 85, Hughes, pp. 50 and 53. Salmasius again ridiculed 'stellipar', as unclassical usage or as too miraculous. Again Milton ignored him in 1673.1 discuss these and other Latin verse neologisms in 'Notes on Milton's Latin Word-formation in the Poemata of 1645', Humanistica LovanienJWI 43 (1994), 404-10; esp. 405, 408. 7 Epitaphium Damonis 61 (Hughes, p. 134). Hughes renders it, 'the restless twilight of the windswept trees'; Carey and Fowler, p. 280, 'the restless twilight of the windswept wood'; Campbell, p. 541, 'the restless twilight of the trembling forest', so illustrating how translators build on each others' efforts. 'Restless' is onomatopoeic in English, but none of these renderings allows the verb-force into English: 'to-and-jro-driven darknesses of the shattered trees'; a stronger pathetic fallacy, because it recognizes that high winds

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8 9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

Notes to pages iog-18

uproot old trees and break offbranches. So, if you are out there, darkness is not still but dangerously mobilized by uncontrollable unseen windpower like the speaker's contextual emotions. See also Appendix, below. Hughes, p. 398. Henceforth, I give references to the major English poems simply by book- and line-number, rather than footnoting the pages in Hughes every time. The best discussion is still that ofJ. H. Finley, 'Milton and Horace: A Study of Milton's Sonnets', in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 48 (1937), 29-73. 'I would love to live with you, gladly die with you' [Odes in. ix. 24, well discussed in Carey and Fowler, p. 905. As Hippolyte Taine remarked, Milton 'has celebrated God the way most people pray to him, "suivant une formule apprise, non par un tressaillement spontane" ' ('following a learnt formula, not through a spontaneous thrill or shudder'): see Harry F. Redman, Jr., Major French Milton Critics ofthe Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994), p. 247. Milton's 'formula' is not the usual one, but one sort of theologian's, a biblical pastiche. See the discussion in Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition. Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 160 and n. 70; hereafter 'Highet, Classical Tradition'. Campbell, p. 569. Perhaps another frigidity through Latinism is x. 95-6, '. . . when he from wrath more cool / Came the mild judge ...' Whether 'from' yields the sense 'because of (an icy anger) or 'so far from' or 'changing away from', excessive meaning is being placed on the preposition merely because in Latin 'from' can mean all these. Reason of Church-Government, Hughes, p. 668. Corns, Milton's Language, p. 89. See also Corns, Milton's Language, p. 90. Small wonder that Wordsworth in the Prelude, tracing himself as 'inmate of this active universe' (his italics), seeks to revive Milton's Latinate participles. And (again) Wordsworth's many imitations, for instance the spirit that 'rolls' through all things in 'Tintern Abbey'. Binns, Intellectual Culture, p. xvi. The origin of'Paradise' in a Persian then Greek word for 'garden' remained operative in usage for a very long time. One would expect him to use the Junius-Tremellius Latin version of the Bible, being echt-Protestant, but in the only copy of that version available to me the Hebrew names look as if spelt for pronunciation by German native speakers. Vulgates, too, spell according to country of publication and that country's pronunciation, in other words for liturgical use. Milton's preferences seem to me also aural, yet not automatically based on English ways with Hebrew. Hughes, p. 34: 'But the almighty Father, by founding the stars more strongly, has taken thought for the universe'.

Notes to pages ng-24

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24 Another instance of self-quotation may be his 'labouring moon' {PL n. 665), from the 'faticosa luna' of Sonnet 4; but Juvenal (vi. 442) has 'luna laborans' for moon undergoing eclipse, which comes closer. 25 Similarly with 'know to know no more' at rv. 775. Carey and Fowler, p. 660 cite OED, s.v. 'know', sense iv. 12 to insist that the usage ('to be able') with bare infinitive is seventeenth-century English. The English usage of 'know how3 is commoner: to my way of thinking, Milton may well have meant the Greek usage (LSJ*eido, B. 2), which usefully embraces 'know how to' and 'be able to', though certainly the main point was to opt for the more compressed form. A similar instance is iv. 835-7, 'Think not, revolted spirit, thy shape the same, / Or undiminished brightness, to be known / As when thou stood'st...' Three different constructions follow the verb 'Think' - for compression and to express the forcefulness of the speaker (Gabriel). But an ad sensum fluidity is typical of Plato's Greek. Contextually, at this point of Book IV, Homer and Greek are being especially felt. 26 'Expert / When to advance, or stand, or turn the sway / Of battle, open when, and when to close / The ridges of grim war'. 'Ridges' and 'bridges' are equally hard to visualize, and to understand; but 'bridges' would at least sound Homeric. Charles Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 79, urges that 'ridges' are 'dykes', 'open spaces on the battlefield'. The latter meaning is given by commentators on Iliad iv. 371 to explain Homer's 'bridges' too. The intriguing point is whether Milton would imitate Homer without a clear, visual sense of how the ridges, or bridges, would be 'opened' and 'closed'. In context, he is saying the angels fought expertly, each one like a commander: how could 'each warrior single', even angelic,fillup or clear the 'open spaces' in battle? Either this is bombast, or Milton means salients, or his meaning eludes us still. 27 Although LSJ lists the word as 'meteoros', short e long 0, Homer has it closer to Milton's sound, long e short 0. It means 'in mid-air' (rneta + aeiro, raise, with a glance at aer, air?) 28 The example of'expanse', discussed above, is revealing because Milton gets the Hebrew 'wrong' where he could have got it 'right'. 29 Respectively, an epitomizing genitive (like 'sons of iniquity', the 'spitting image' of it); and a personification of'voice sent from heaven' (as angels, too, are 'voices' of God in a religion where divine utterance is radically performative, and God is heard more than seen). 30 Satan quotes Isaiah 14. 13-14, the prophecy of his own downfall. 31 The Hebrew prophets especially like the clash of two forms of the same triliteral root, which in written (that is, consonantal) form stands out even more. 32 'Gabri-eP = 'strength of God', and many more. 33 His Hebrew name presumably resembled the other archangelic names, taking the form -el, after the name of some quality of God. Candidates include 'Satanail' from the Slavonic Book of Enoch, ch. 31, 'SatomaiP and

226

34 35 36 37 38

39 40

Notes to pages 124-34

'Sothanel' (J. Martin Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition, (Oxford University Press, 1968), ch. 2. Luke 1. 35, 'the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee\ God creates by 'filling' at Genesis 1. 22, Exodus 28. 3. 'Infinitude' is rarer than 'infinity' in the seventeenth century, but closer to classical Latin. See, for example, for the cold Hell Inferno Cantos XXXII-XXXXIV, in Singleton (ed.), Divine Comedy, pp. 338-68; or Dantean pain at v. 120 (Francesca da Rimini, herself extending Virgil). See Prince, The Italian Element It is curious that in his Commonplace Book Milton summarizes Italian passages in Italian of his own, but not in French when summarizing French: see Shawcross, Self, Appendix A. The word's history links with Latin carmen and derivatives, but kept its Anglo-Saxon link with birdsong, either as charm or chirm. Since birds sang long before humans did, I find it 'charming' that Eve, here, uses the native word for aboriginal song. J- Weingreen, A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 136; hereafter 'Weingreen, Grammarfor Hebrew'. The context begins and ends biblically, from 'Messiah' (881) through the saints as a cloud of witnesses (883) to the reminders of Palm Sunday (885). To enrich this theophany, however, the narrative draws in more from Greek and Latin as it proceeds: what 'jubilee' begins 'triumph' follows up, and we note the line's zeugma (the 'joining' figure: 'Sung triumph and him . . .', a swift move from direct to indirect speech). 'He celebrated rode / Triumphant' keeps up the multilingual paean - as if making a convergent testimony. 7 MILTON'S LANGUAGES AND THE VOICES OF PARADISE LOST

1 Poetics, chs. 3, 5, 24; Classical Literary Criticism, pp. 34, 37-8 and 66-8. 2 R. O. A. M. Lyne, Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid (Oxford University Press, 1987); hereafter 'Lyne, Further Voices'. 3 Using William Ingram and Kathleen Swaim, A Concordance to Milton's English Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1972). 4 Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History. Essays in Statistics (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), esp. pp. 1-40. 5 The figures are: I (3 occurrences), II (4), III (4), IV (3), V (4), VI (3), VII (7), VIII (3), DC (6), X (9), XI (1) and XII (2). 6 Cf. German gehorchen. 7 Exodus 15. 26, where the AV's 'diligently hearken' renders Hebrew's iterated 'Hear', shamodtishmd:the infinitive absolute expresses emphasis in this usage (Weingreen, Grammarfor Hebrew, p.79), and Israel is told, 'Really listen!', that is, totally obey. 8 Related words like 'talk', 'speak' and their derivatives are less frequent. However, it is noticeable that Book VIII shows a surge in the use of'speak', and Book IX in the use of 'talk' and 'speak' (also the first recorded use of

Notes to pages 135-g

9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19

20

21 22 23

227

'speakable' in the active sense, 'able to speak5). VIII dwells on the power of speech in humans, for example to name, while once again the serpent's power of speech amazes Eve, for it contradicts the clear tenor of VIII. David Daiches felt the presence of merachepheth: see The Opening of PL, in The Living Milton: Essays by Various Hands, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 55-69. At Deuteronomy 32. 11, however, it means a parent bird hovering above its young, fluttering or hovering anxiously; this seems a little distant from the blunt English about a dove on the nest, hatching. The last book of the Bible is called 'Apocalypsis' in the Vulgate, though 'Revelation' in the AV. Both names had long standing in English, but Latin favoured 'Apocalypse'. See ch. 3: Hebrew satan means 'opposition', 'enmity', at its root. A tacit incentive to build Paradise Regained around some unfinished business of speech-duel, Satan at length speaking with God as well as Man in Messiah? Aeneid n. 274-5, 'Alas, to think how he once looked, how changed from that Hector who returned victorious, clad in the arms of Achilles!' This passage had been Milton's source for the climax of Epitaphium Damonis, 'O ego quantus eram' (129, Hughes, p. 136). Highet, Classical Tradition, p. 157. Carey and Fowler, p. 467; Capaneus at Inferno xrv. 63-6. Odyssey 1. 32-5, 'But they themselves [mortals] also by their own reckless sins have sufferings beyond their measure' tr. W. B. Stanford (ed.), The Odyssey of Homer, 2 vols. (London; Macmillan, 1947). The Odyssey begins, like the Aeneid and PL I and III, with theodicy. The Psalm is main source of the first part of the opening speech of the Father. Milton affects the letter r there, in Latinisms ('rage / Transports our adversary'), but the trick occurs also in the Hebrew. Carey and Fowler, pp. 774-5. William B. Hunter, The Descent of Urania. Studies in Milton, ig46-ig88 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989), p. 23, argues that Eve is understating here; not God's express command, but some inferior, less authoritative mode of speaking. 'Sole', however, does not read like understatement or excuse. I prefer the sense of epitome or absolute: that 'voice' is feminized, by Eve, is a glance at the topic of this chapter. Genesis 3. 8, 'mithhalek' (hithpael participle, reflexive-iterative usage, 'walking oneself about' like 'se promener' in French). See Ronald J. Williams, Hebrew Syntax. An Outline, 2nd edn (University of Toronto Press, l 91§\ PP- 28-9. Matthew 25. 21 and 1 Timothy 6. 12. See William M. Porter, Reading the Classics and Paradise Lost (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). John Peter Rumrich, Matter of Glory (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987); hereafter 'Rumrich, Matter of Glory*.

228

Notes to pages 140-52

24 Soon Milton hymns 'wedded love5 similarly, in Christian terms with Roman help: 'saints' and 'patriarchs' consort with a personified, winged 'Love', whose 'golden shafts' come from Ovid (rv. 763). The immanence of God in marriage is expressed and emphasized by the multilingual lushness. 25 The angel host are 'saints' at vi. 47, but because of'Messiah' and 'palms' the talk of Apocalypse draws in humans too. 26 Ovid, Metamorphoses, in. 402-36. 27 'And her immortal hair breathed from her head a perfume that was divine.' The leading word ambrosiae comes out of Greek, am-brotos = 'immortal'. The other key word is divinum, placed so as to go both with the smell and its originator. 28 'Vehement' is 'usually regarded' as parallel with Latin vaecors, 'senseless', although OxLD disagrees with OED on this. (Similarly, when Eve proposes a suicide pact (x. 1007), 'She ended here, or vehement despair / Broke off the rest'. She follows Adam into vehemence, mindlessness.) 29 Translation by Lyne, Further Voices, p. 125; see also his discussion. 30 Ricks, Grand Style, p. no. 31 Aeneidi. 11, 'tantaene animis caelestibus irae?', PL vi. 788: 'In heav'nly Spirits could such perverseness dwell?'

8 MULTILINGUALISM AND EPIC

1 From the Psalms, 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani' ('My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?', Matthew 27.46); from Aramaic, 'Talitha cumi' ('damsel, arise', Mark 5. 41). 2 'Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison'. The preservation, and the A-B-Aform, answer to some need- aural, historical, emotional, musical, all four? 3 'Hosanna', 'Alleluia', 'Amen'. 4 This is the Bible's own method, to include etymological or aetiological glosses. The process can be seen clearly where it is not very plausible, as at Exodus 2.10 ('and she called his name Moses, and she said, Because I drew him out of the water'): it is less likely that 'Moses' comes from mashah, 'draw out' than that the name means 'born from' in Egyptian, as in 'Tut Moses', 'born from Thoth'. 5 In ' "PZ, A Poem in Twelve Books" or Ten?', Philological Quarterly 74 (1995), 131-491 argue that Milton's changes from the 1667 to the 1674 edition of PL are guided by a recognition of its Virgilian aims and standing. 6 R. D. Williams (ed.), The Aeneid of Virgil, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1972), 1, p. 157; hereafter 'Williams (ed.), Aendd. 7 If Milton's 'man' represents homo (human) not vir ('male'), it may be because he is echoing the homo of Ennius behind Virgil's masculine suffix ('-us'). 8 Williams (ed.), Aendd, 11, pp. 413-14. 9 Williams (ed.), Aendd, 11. pp 485-6. 10 'As massive as Mount Athos or Mount Eryx or Father Appenninus . . .'

Notes to pages 154-65

229

11 See Singleton (ed.), Divine Comedy, 1. 1, p. 618, apropos of Inferno xxxm. 80: 'del bel paese la dove '1 si suona', 'of the fair land where the si is heard'. 12 Singleton (ed.), Divine Comedy, 11. 2, p. 234. The line goes on to refer to Paris by the early, more Latinate form of the name, Parisi not Parigi: 'quell' arte / ch' alluminar chiamata e in Parisi'. 13 'Orribile' 10 times in Inferno, 3 in Purgatorio. 'Ruinare' 4 times, 'rovinare' once in the poem. Similar figures for 'livido'. 14 Verses appropriated in due time, in another way and for other purposes, by the other great English multilingual poet, T. S. Eliot: 'Ara vos prec... / Poi s'ascose nel foco che li affina' (see The Waste Land, 427, and Eliot's note there.) 15 See Singleton (ed.), Divine Comedy, 1. 2, p. 476. Virgil has just been speaking in his native dialect: 'parlavi mo lombardo' ('just now spoke Lombard'). 16 The horse 'bursts out, either to go and bathe in the river where before capture he loved to bathe . . . with neck uplifted high he shakes himself, gamboling in all the pride of his strength' (my translation). 'Luxurians' used of an animal can mean simply 'frisk', 'act skittishly'; I have imputed a more human, moral emotion in the vehicle because of the tenor (Turnus charging into battle). 17 'Quis . . . posset lacrimis aequare labores?' ('Who could match our toils with tears?'). 18 The last of many comes in the poem's antepenultimate line: 'ma gia volgeva il mio disio e il velle3, 'but already my desire and my will were revolved...' (Parodiso, xxxm. 143: Singleton (ed.), Divine Comedy, in. 1. 380). 19 The error may be scribal, either in Dante or his source (Jerome). Or, whereas the plural of mamlekah requires doubled m, a form from meleketh would do. 20 'As the leaves fall away in autumn, one after another, till the bough sees all its spoils upon the ground, so there the evil seed of Adam [souls waiting to be ferried by Charon across the river Acheron]: one by one they cast themselves from that shore at signals, like a bird at its call'. 21 And like the parent image, Virgil Aeneid vi. 309-12; but in the points I mention Dante extends or changes, and Milton follows him in this. 22 Anecdotes talk of people in the streets seeing Dante and observing the marks of the fires of Hell on his grim face, 'for he has been there'. 9 MULTILINGUALISM AND THE STYLE OF TEMPERANCE IN PARADISE REGAINED

1 The three synoptic gospels for the story line, John as well for the idiom and personality of his Son of God. 2 The views of, respectively, Barbara K. Lewalski, Milton's Brief Epic (Providence: Brown University Press, 1966) and Louis L. Martz, Poet of Exile, ch. 15. We do not know enough about 'brief epic' to say what its decorum or idiom might be. Didactic does impinge, moving the action far towards demonstration; yet PR is nothing like any other didactic, certainly being no

230

Notes to pages i66-y2 'Georgic'. Frye's opinion is cited from Walter MacKellar (ed.), A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, vol. iv, PR, (London: Routledge, 1975),

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15

16 17 18

p. 10; hereafter 'MacKellar (ed.), PR. The work of Milton's own which it most resembles as 'brief epic' is the early In Quintum Novembris (Hughes, pp. 15-21). But although this shares the demonstrative tone, and a Satan who flies around and disguises to make mischief, the decorum is totally different. Its Latin is rich not temperate, indeed most of the excitement and passion reside in the violent juxtaposing of Virgilian dignitas with Juvenalian caustic. It is a satirical epic, using high and low registers together. It is only by contrast that this early experiment could explain the middle course followed in Milton's late one. Though the line is not by Virgil it had been traditionally thought his. See Williams (ed.), Aeneid, vol. 1., pp. 156-7. His translation is given above. Virgil means, 'after composing Eclogues I wrote Georgics; but now I move to epic'. I take it as read that the foremost allusion goes back to the start of PL ('Of man}sfirstdisobedience .. . till one greater man ...') My point is that in thus alluding to himself Milton also clarifies the Virgilian signature. 'Vanished into the thin breeze', Aeneid rv. 278. Aeneid win. 369. 'tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento / (hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem, / parcere subiectis et debellare superbos'. See Corns, Language, pp. 65-9. The value-loaded terms are traditional; after Golden (Cicero, Virgil, Horace) comes Silver (Seneca, Tacitus, Lucan). Corns, Language, p. 62. 'New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large' (Sonnet: 'On the New Forcers of Conscience', Hughes, p. 145) had already foregrounded etymology in order to denounce. Satan, here, impugns himself by choosing such discreditable company. We might recall the 'surge' by which some of his verse translations moved, late on, from literalness to appropriation. The connection is tenuous. Carey cites a sermon of John Donne's to the effect that Hebrew 'Miriam3 is related to marom, 'height', 'high ground', hence 'exaltation'. 'Exaltation' more straightforwardly alludes to the Magnificat. Horace, Odes iv. i. 30 and 1. v. 9. Lucretius De Rerum Natura iv. 580-1. The gorgeous images of futility of 'the kingdoms of this world' make up the second half of FQ11. vii, the 'delve' of Mammon. Like Spenser, Milton relies on speech and image. Unlike Spenser, he moves back and forth between them. As editors note: see for instance Carey and Fowler, p. 1118 on 111. 47-51. 'Glory' and derived forms occur some 32 times in PR III, oustripping other books of PR, or those of PL. No one, then or now, knows what they were or how they worked except that it was by divination on a binary principle, like heads-or-tails: see Roland De

Notes to pages 173-80

19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

231

Vaux, Ancient Israel, tr. John McHugh (Darton: Longman & Todd, 1961). A further significance of the words as a pair was that, beginning respectively with the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph and tau, they express God's comprehensiveness, like 'alpha and omega'. Milton ignores all such nuances here. Using the same pun as Jonson's, see Carey and Fowler, p. 1131. Milton's pronunciation of Israel' shifts among * /, /* and * * / (see Concordance). If the last, anapaestic, may be heard here, that revives the true Hebrew pronunciation, echoing the idea of authenticity in 'true King'. The same idea is felt in the spondees on either side, and in 'so spake' ('thus saith the Lord'). For a cognate climactic effect, triple similes are placed in PL (1. 284-99), early, but late in Samson (1692-1707), the companion piece to PR. Iliad, 2. 469, 16. 641 and 17. 570; Orlando Furioso 14. 109; FQ11. ix. 51. Iliad 15. 618, Aeneid vn. 586. As Aristotle had said, after much emphasis on virtue as a 'mean' or 'middle state' with respect to its objects. It is not half-heartedness or compromise or bargaining, but an absolute with respect to itself. Found in Roman historians, see MacKellar (ed.), PR, p. 178. Aristophanes said Pericles, like a Zeus, 'thundered and confounded Greece' (Acharnians, 530). The same author may be the source of humanist knowledge about Socrates' 'low-roofed tenement'. 'But those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets beyond all these [Greek odists], not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be easily made appear over all the kinds of lyric poesy to be incomparable' (Reason of Church Government, Hughes, p. 669). 'For there [in Babylon] they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion' (Psalms 137. 3).

1 0 HEBREW MEETS GREEK IN SAMSON

AGONISTES

1 Reasons for thinking the date of composition close to the date of publication, 1671, rather than in the 1640s somewhere, include the following, (i) Samson was published with PR, as a diptych. They share the theme of temperance, go well together, and if Samson were the earlier work, why publish it as the back half of the diptych? (ii) If it were a much earlier work, when exactly was it written? Further disagreements, and speculations, break out, for example over the dating of Milton's total blindness, (iii) I dislike the linkage of composition with biographical factors, not because 'the author is dead', but because to link them without firm evidence produces confusion. If the work reflects the blindness, then it cannot reflect the defeat of the Good Old Cause. (The two speculations cancel each other.) (iv) As will emerge here, the interlingual side of Samson shows Milton experimenting in a way which accords well with a development from PL through PR to this dazzling finale.

232

Notes to pages 180-6

2 R. C. Jebb, 'Samson Agonistes and the Hellenic Drama', in PBA 3 (1907-8), 341-8. W. R. Parker, Milton's Debt to Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1937). 3 The Trinity MS is quoted from John Milton. Poems, Reproduced in Facsimile from the Manuscript in Trinity College, Cambridge, with a Transcript (Menston: Scolar, I 97o)> PP- 34-94 'Hubristes' points to an Aeschylean or at least Sophoclean conception: hubris is central and abominable to the former, and problematized by the latter, but Euripides displaces it, to become an optional moral ingredient, not a religious centrality. 5 2 Kings 1. 9, 'he sat on the top of a hill' and brought down fire and death on the soldiers sent against him. 6 Similarly, the MS has Saul's suicide in the active epithet, 'Autodaictes' = 'self-slaying', whereas LSJgives the passive form, autodaictos, 'self-slain'. Milton inventedthis active, doing form, whose force is emphasized by the fact that suicide can be viewed either way, as done or suffered, being inherently both. 7 See F. M. Krouse, Milton's Samson and the Christian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), whose 'lovely semantic excursion' is summarized by Hughes, p. 541. 'Agonize', the verb, occurs in Edward Phillips' New World of Words (1658 and 1663). More searching is the examination by P. R. Sellin, 'Milton's Epithet Agonistes', in SEL 4 (1964), 137-62, an essay which excellently tracks the blending of Hebrew with Greek in the Samson story, not least its languages. 8 Still more subtleties are suggested by Sellin, ibid., 144-50. 9 This small speculation is as far as I would go with the reasoning of F. M. Krouse that Samson is a Christ-figure. To go any further would mar the aptness of Samson for tragic hero of the Greek sort, Aristotle's person like ourselves or slightly above. 10 Milton's languages may have further contributed: 'Like whom' = 'Like he whom', whose condensation resembles Latin's 'quern' for 'is quern'; and the accusative + infinitive construction in 'whom . . . feign to bear'. 11 Louis Martz, for example, explains the passage by reasoning that it is meant to seem lame; a contrast is being 'enforced' by the verse between Samson's 'grandeur of despair' and 'the commonplace musing of the chorus' {Poet of Exile, p. 280, and cf. p. 284 on lines 1025-60). 12 The closing words of King Lear aim at a similar distinction. 13 Martz, Poet of Exile, pp. 284-5, thinks the verse deliberately weak: the 'loss of dignity' is a 'drastic lowering' of the tone and manner, 'to relieve the violent tension of the previous scene [Dalila with Samson] by a touch of satirical humor'. 14 The oikiai, royal houses or 'families'; 'nowadays the best tragedies are written about a [mere] handful of families', Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 13, see Classical Literary Criticism, p. 48. 15 See Carey and Fowler, p. 335:'... the ending is indeed morally disgusting'.

Notes to pages 186-92

16 17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31

233

Noam Flinker argued similarly in a paper to the Fourth International Milton Symposium, Vancouver (1991). Hughes, p. 549; my translation. One cannot be certain. Italian commentators on the Poetics had also used lusfratio to translate catharsis, not to mention purificatio and expiatio. See B. R. Rees, 'Aristotle's Theory and Milton's Practice: Samson Agonistes\ Inaugural Lecture Delivered in the University of Birmingham, 1971, p. 8. The fact remains that purgatio was available and normal, and that Milton, despite being a stickler for accuracy in many contexts, chose the less narrowly medical rendering here. In the preface as a whole he seems keen to heap up and mingle metaphors for catharsis. It is such a difficult question, and indeed tragedy itself is so varied, that an eclecticism like Milton's seems almost a duty. Greek medicine was religious anyway, in therapies of the temple cults: see E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), ch. 4.1 have discussed the mixed metaphors of Milton's preface in 'Milton's Preface to Samson Agonistes\ in The Explicator, 52. 2 (1994), pp. 73"5'Event' here includes the Latin sense, 'outcome'. On thought and feeling in this chorus I am extending a hint from Campbell, p. 604, note on line 657. Hughes, p. 550. Ars Poetica, 189, see Classical Literary Criticism, p. 85. Horace says a play 'should not be either shorter or longer than five acts'. And then add that all three tragic exemplars mould all three aspects. Reason of Church Government (1642), Hughes, p. 669. Milton takes care about this, using a distinction from Greek philosophy: his Argument says, 'what Samson had done to the Philistins, and by accident to himself, where 'by accident'= per accidens, 'incidentally' but not as intention or main thing. Odes 3. 24. 6 and 3. 24. 8; see Carey and Fowler, p. 399. This is hard to be sure of. The phrases and lines can be balanced in several ways, not all of them resembling the explicit paired two- or three-word groups of a verse of a Psalm. At any rate, a binarism is noticeable, which is at least compatible with psalmody, and further with Greek danced chorus measure. This idea was developed by Michael Lieb in a paper to the Fifth International Milton Symposium in Bangor, 1995. 'Whom a god wishes to destroy, he first makes mad'. The Latin tag translates a fragment of Euripides. Pindar's odes stay on the heights throughout, unlike Milton's. Cf. the Rouse ode, discussed in chapter 2. Milton likes his odes to rise and rise, starting them off more quietly (like raga) so that the rise is felt throughout. Coinage from Latin or Italian here, as a minor multilingualflourishnear the climax. Manoa's 'valiant youth' (1738) and 'the Virgins also' (1741) keep up the

234

Notes to pages 192-g

Horatian tone: 'Virginibus puerisque canto', 'I sing for virgins and boys' {Odes 3. 1. 4). 32 Repeating the idea from Williams, Roman Poetry, pp. 61-2, as used in ch. 2. 33 Mysteriously omitting Manoa, however. If it is acceptable to infer Milton's feelings about Parliament and Restoration from passages in Samson, or scrutinize the poem's references to blindness, or to women, or hair-length, should one not equally note how Manoa harps on Samson's marriage, and infer that Milton senior so harped on Milton's? All such digressions seem needless. 34 Brian Vickers, Towards Greek Tragedy: Drama, Myth, Society (London: Longman, 1973). A similar approach had been taken towards Oedipus by E. R. Dodds, in The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other essays on Greek Literature and

Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). 35 'Passion' in the older sense of 'extended suffering', as in the Tassion' of Christ. 36 It may be worth adding that when Milton says the work was not intended for the stage, that entails no diminution in its tragic standing; for yet again he is following Aristotle, to whom reading a tragedy was valid equally with viewing it {Poetics, ch. 26). It is in the same spirit that Milton talks of the book of Revelation as 'the majestic image of a high and stately tragedy' (Hughes, p. 669). I I THE IMPACT OF MILTON'S LANGUAGES UPON HIS MATURE ENGLISH VERSE STYLES

1 Not far away is the New Testament thought of the 'talents' God gives, which must be rightly used: see Milton's Sonnets 7 and 20. 2 See Corns, Language, p. 59. 3 The first element 'du-' may have suggested duo, two, to give the usual romance-languages sense of'duelling', the ritualized and often representative fighting of one against one. 4 Other possible Latinisms include 'in fine' (702); the triple-adjective group at 827 ('Impartial, self-severe, inexorable'); 'inexpiable' (839), in fact a clustering in Samson's speeches to Dalila; 'aggravate' (1000). 5 Rumrich, Matter of Glory. It is one of the study's great merits that its theme illuminates much more than Rumrich explicitly undertakes. 6 For which see also Neil Forsyth,' "Of Man's First Dis"', in Di Cesare (ed.), Milton in Italy, pp. 345-69. 7 Phinehas' widow thus names his posthumous son because 'the ark of God is taken' in battle. Her husband has died there, and his father Eli has died of grief having 'judged Israel forty years' (1 Samuel 4. 18). Most of these elements belong also in Milton's story of Samson's 'judging', though rearranged, because they are a recurrent drama in the biblical history of Israel. 'Glory' is turned to 'grief, in a peripeteia of battle. 8 Milton wants the continuity of pentameter as well as iambic, even despite exemplars: Virgil's half-lines, imitated for special effect by Spenser.

Notes to pages 203-j

235

APPENDIX: TRANSLATING MILTON'S LATIN POEMS INTO ENGLISH

1 The likes of Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Day Lewis, Ciardi. 2 Hughes, p. 146, for text and translation; Carey and Fowler, p. 303.; Campbell, p. 545. 3 Robert Hodge (ed.), John Milton. Samson Agonistes, Sonnets, &c [sic], in The Cambridge Milton for Schools and Colleges, General Editor J. B. Broadbent (Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 97. 4 Epitaphium Damonis, lines 198-200; Hodge, pp. 122-3. 5 Moseley, Poetic Birth, p. 221. Moseley does not translate the ode, as it is not in Poems, 1645. His stated policy is to make his (prose) translations 'as literal as is reasonably comfortable' (ibid.).

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SECONDARY AND REFERENCE WORKS

Alston, Robin, 'On the Margin', Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies 11. 1 (i993)> 6 ~ I 3Bailey, D. R. Shackleton, Profile of Horace, London: Duckworth, 1982. Binns, J. W., Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England; The Latin Writings of the Age, Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990. Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence, Oxford University Press, 1973. Bolgar, R. R., The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries, Cambridge University Press, 1954. Bottkol, J. McG., T h e Holograph of Milton's Letter to Holstenius', in PMLA 68 (1953), 617-27. Brinkley, Roberta F., Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century, Johns Hopkins Monographs in Literary History 3, repr. London: Frank Cass, 1967. Campbell, Gordon and Sebastian Brock, 'Milton's Syriac', in Milton Quarterly 27. 2 (i993)? 74-7Carey, John, 'The Date of Milton's Italian Poems', in RESn.s. 14 (1963), 383-6. Castor, Graham and Terence Cave (eds.), Mo-Latin and the Vernacular in Renaissance France, Oxford University Press, 1984. Clark, Donald h.,John Milton at St Paul's School, A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education, New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. Corns, Thomas N., The Development of Milton's Prose Style, Oxford University Press, 1982. Milton's Language, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Curtius, E. R., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask, New York: Harper, 1953. Daiches, David, 'The Opening of Paradise Lost3, in The Living Milton: Essays by

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Various Hands, ed. Frank Kermode, New York: Macmillan, 1971, 55-69. Davies, David, and Paul Dowling, ' "Shrewd Books, with Dangerous Frontispieces": Areopagitica's Motto', in Milton Quarterly 20. 2 (1986), 33-7. De Jong, Irene J. F., Narrators and Focalizers. The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad, Amsterdam: B. R. Griiner, 1987. De Vaux, Roland, Ancient Israel, tr. John McHugh, Darton: Longman and Todd, 1961. Di Cesare, Mario A., Milton in Italy. Contexts, Images, Contradictions, Binghamton: MRTS, 1991. Dillon, John B., 'Surdeo, Saumaise, and the Lexica: An Aspect of Milton's Latin Diction', in Humanistica Lovaniensia 27 (1987), 238-52. Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational, Sather Classical Lectures 26, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief, Oxford University Press, 1973. , Evans, J. Martin, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition, Oxford University Press, 1968. Finley, J. H., 'Milton and Horace: A Study in Milton's Sonnets', in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 48 (1937), 29-73. Fleming, Ray, 'Sublime and Pure Thoughts "Without Transgression": The Dantean Influence in Milton's "Donna Leggiadra"', in Milton Quarterly 20 (1986), 38-44. Fletcher, Harris F., Milton's Intellectual Development, 2 vols., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956-61. John Milton's copy of \jycophxon^ Alexandra in the Library of the University of Illinois', as prepared by John T. Shawcross for Milton Quarterly 23. 4 (1989), 129-58. Ford, Philip J., George Buchanan. Prince ofPoets, Aberdeen University Press, 1982. Forster, Leonard, The Poet's Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature, Cambridge and Dunedin: Cambridge University Press and Otago University Press respectively, 1970. Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959. Hale, John K., 'Sion's Bacchanalia: An Inquiry into Milton's Latin in the Epitaphium Damonis\ Milton Studies 16 (1982), 115-30. 'Milton's Poems in Greek', in The Interpretative Power. Essays Presented to Professor Margaret Dalziel, ed. C. A. Gibson, Dunedin: University of Otago English Department, 1982. 'Milton as a Translator of Poetry', Renaissance Studies 1 (1987), 238-56. 'Milton Playing with Ovid', in Milton Studies 25 (1989), 3-19. 'The Punctuation of Milton's Latin Verse: Some Prolegomena', Milton Quarterly 23. 1 (1989), 7-19. 'Milton's Self-Presentation in Poems . . . 164^, in Milton Quarterly 25. 2 (1991), 38-48. 'Areopagitica's Euripidean Motto', in Milton Quarterly 25. 1 (1991), 25-27.

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'Milton's Euripides Marginalia: Their Significance for Milton Studies', in Milton Studies 27 (1991), 23-35. 'Artistry and Originality in Milton's Latin Poems', in Milton Quarterly 27. 4 (i993)5 I38-49'Milton's Latin Coinages', in Humanistica Lovaniensia 43 (1994), 405-10. 'Milton's Preface to Samson Agonistes\ in The Explicator 52. 2 (1994), 73-5. 'The Audiences of Milton's Italian Verses', in Renaissance Studies 8. 1 (1994), 76-88. 'Why Did Milton Translate Psalms 80-88 in April 1648?', in The English Renaissance and Reformation: Literature, Politics and Religion, ed. John N. King, special issue of Literature and History, 3rd series 3/2 (1994), 55-62. 'The Pre-Criticism of Milton's Latin Verse, Illustrated from the Ode "Ad Ioannem Rousium"', in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P. G. Stanwood (Binghamton: MRTS, 1995), pp. 17-34. 'Paradise Lost A Poem in Twelve Books, or Ten?', Philological Quarterly 74 (J995)> i3I~49Hardie, Philip, 'The Presence of Lucretius in Paradise Lost\ in Milton Quarterly 29. 1 (i995)? I3-24Highet, Gilbert, The Classical Tradition. Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, Oxford University Press, 1949. Hunter, G. K., John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier, London: Routledge, 1962. Hunter, William B., The Descent of Urania. Studies in Milton, iQ46-ig88, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press and Associated University Presses, 1989. Ingram, William, and Kathleen Swaim, A Concordance to Milton's English Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1972. IJsewijn, Jozef, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, New York and Oxford: NorthHolland Publishing Co., 1977. Jackson, Heather, 'Writing in Books and Other Marginal Activities', in University of Toronto Quarterly (92-93), 217-31. Jebb, R. C , 'Samson Agonistes and the Hellenic Drama', in PEA 3 (1907-08), 341-8. Kelley, Maurice and S. D. Atkins, 'Milton's Annotations of Aratus', in PMLA 70 (!955)> 1090-1106. 'Milton's Annotations of Euripides', in JEGP 60 (1961), 680-7. Knight, W. F. Jackson, Accentual Symmetry in Virgil, Oxford: Blackwell, 1950. Krouse, F. M., Milton's Samson and the Christian Tradition, Princeton University Press, 1949. Lewalski, Barbara K., Milton's Brief Epic, Providence: Brown University Press, 1966. Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott (eds.), A Greek-English Lexicon, revised by Henry Stuart Jones and others, with a supplement, Oxford University Press, 1968. Lieb, Michael, and John T. Shawcross (eds.), Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974. Lipking, Lawrence, 'The Marginal Gloss', in Critical Inquiry 3 (1977), 609-55.

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Lyne, R. O. A. M., Further Voices in Vergil'sAeneid, Oxford University Press, 1987. Martindale, Charles, John Milton and the Transformation ofAncient Epic, London: Croom Helm, 1986. Martz, Louis L., Poet of Exile: A study of Milton's Poetry>, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Masson, David, The Life ofJohn Milton: Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical and Literary History of His Time, 7 vols., London: Macmillan, 1881-94. Miller, Leo, 'Milton's Patriis Cicutis\ in JVQ,226 (1981), 41-2. 'Some Inferences from Milton's Hebrew', in Milton Quarterly 18.2 (1984), 41-6. John Milton's Writings in the Anglo-Dutch Negotiations 1651-4, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1992. Moseley, C. W. R. D., The Poetic Birth: Milton's Poems of 1645, Menston: Scolar, Moss, Ann, 'Being in Two Minds: the Bilingual Factor in Renaissance Writing', in Ada Conventus Neo-Latini Hafniensis, Binghamton: MRTS, 1994, ed. Ann Moss et al., 61-74. OED: The Compact Edition ofthe Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols. Oxford University Press, 1971. The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N. G. L. and H. H. Scullard, second edition, Oxford University Press, 1982. The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. Tom McArthur, Oxford University Press, 1992. Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare, Oxford University Press, 1982. Parker, William Riley, Milton's Debt to Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1937. Milton. A Biography, 2 vols., Oxford University Press, 1968. Porter, William M., Reading the Classics and Paradise Lost, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Prince, F. T., The Italian Element in Milton's Verse, Oxford University Press, 1954. Redman, Harry F., Jr., Major French Milton Critics of the Nineteenth Century, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994. Rees, B. K., Aristotle's Theory and Milton's Practice, University of Birmingham, 1971. Ricks, Christopher, Milton's Grand Style, Oxford University Press, 1963. Ronnick, Michelle Valerie, 'Forty Source Notes to Milton's Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Primd, Milton Quarterly 29. 2 (1995), 48-52. Ross, W. D., Aristotle, London: Methuen, 1923. Rumrich, John Peter, Matter of Glory, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987. Saenz-Badillos, Angel, A History of the Hebrew Language, tr. John Elwolde, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Saunders, J. W., The Profession of English Letters, London: Routledge, 1964. Sellin, P. R., 'Milton's Epithet "Agonistes"', in Studies in English Literature 4 (1964). I37-62Shawcross, John T.,John Milton. The Selfand the World, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993.

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Slights, William W. E., 'The Edifying Margins of Renaissance English Books', Renaissance Quarterly 42. 4 (1989), 682-716. Spitzer, Leo, Linguistics and Linguistic History: Essays in Statistics, New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. Steiner, George, What Is Comparative Literature?, Oxford University Press, 1995. Vickers, Brian, Towards Greek Tragedy: Drama, Myth, Society, London: Longman, \973'Leisure and Idleness in the Renaissance: The Ambivalence of otium\ in Renaissance Studies 4. 1 (1990), 1-37 and 4. 2 (1990), 107-54. Von Maltzahn, Nicholas, Milton's History ofBritain. Republican Historiography in the English Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1991. Weingreen, J., A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew, second edition, Oxford University Press, 1959. Williams, Gordon, The Nature of Roman Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1970. Williams, Ronald J., Hebrew Syntax. An Outline, second edition, University of Toronto Press, 1976. Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, Jr., Visionary Poetics: Milton's Tradition and His Legacy, San Marino: Huntington Library, 1979.

General index

Subjects mentioned too often to be usefully indexed include: Adam and names of all characters from poems; English (language); Greek; Hebrew; Italian; Language(s); Latin; Milton; Multilingualism. Aeschylus, 63, 99, 188, 216 n.30 agon (agonistes etc.), 181-2, 232 nn.7 and 8 amplificatio, 12, 27-8, 83, 85 Apollonius Rhodius, 29, 149, 150 Aramaic (language), 7, 148 Aratus, 76-8 Ariosto, 2, 61, 69 Aristophanes, 177, 202, 231 n.26 .Aristotle, 20, 30, 41, 81, 84, 85, 131, 132, 185, 186, 188-9, J 93J

2

3 J n-24, 233 nn.14

and

17, 234 n.36 Arthur (King), 56, 57, 62 Aubrey, John, 40, 62-3, 66, 213 n.32 Bentley, Dr Richard, 44, 75, 202, 219 n.30 Bible translations: Junius-Tremellius, xii, 225 n.22 King James Version (Authorized Version), xii, 45, 148 Septuagint, 7 Vulgate, xii, 6-7, 154, 225 n.22 Bible, books of: Job, 166, 168-9 Proverbs, 114 Psalms, 23, 43, 44-6, 70, 72-4, 138, 183, 232 n.28, 234 n.26 bilingualism, 13-14 Binns, J. W., 4, 117, 208 n.6, 225 n.20 Bloom, Harold, 14, 104 Bodleian Library, 31 see also Oxford University Bonmattei, Benedetto, 87-8 Bouhereau, Elie, 98, 102 Buchanan, George, 3, 12, 29, 39 Cambridge University, 4-5 see also Christ's College

campanilismo, 11

Castor, Graham, and Cave, Terence, 4, 11 catharsis, 186-8, 189, 192 Catullus, 31 Christ's College, Cambridge University, 4-5, 85

Cicero, 86, 87, 100, 101, 102, 222 n.8, 223 n.13 civilitas, 31

copia, 12, 27-8, 42 Corns, T. N., 82, 93, 105, 115, 167, 168, 230 n.8, 231 n.io Dante, 2-3, 7, 15, 19, 25, 48, 49, 53, 54, 69, 104, 138, 153-7, 200, 215 n.8 on volgare, 2-3

Dati, Carlo, 89-91, 92 Delia Casa, 7, 64 Diodati, Charles, 4, 5, 25, 35, 37, 47, 48, 49, 54, 58, 87, 91-3, 208 n.7 doctus poeta, 114, 115, 201

Dryden, John, 68, 97, 113 Du Bellay, Joachim, 3, 13 Dutch (language), 7, 8 Early Middle English: see Old English Eikon Basilike, 93, 95

Ennius, 151, 158 Euripides, 6, 69, 75, 77, 78-80, 86, 99, 186, 188, 196, 198, 234 n.28 Ford, Philip J., 29, 213 n.27 Forster, Leonard, 8, 51, 56 Fowler, Alastair, 105-7, IQ8> I09> I 2 9 French (language), 3-4, 7, 81, 226 n.37 German (language), 4, 7 242

General index Gil, Alexander, 4, 21 Goffinan, Erving, 19, 83 Holstenius, Lucas, 88-9 Homer, 43-6, 55-6, 70-1, 138, 139, 149, 152, 190, 198, 225 n.26 Hooft, P. C. 8 Horace, 10, 11, 29, 31, 32, 38, 39, 69, 71-2, 98, 109, 170, 233 n.21, 234 n.31 humanism, 1, 6, 202 Huygens, Constantijn, 8, 51 Imitatio, 1, 10-13, 28, 35-6, 39-40 intertextuality, 1-2, 10-13 Italian journey, Milton's, 5, 24-5, 56-61

Philologie, 26, 67

Pindar, and Pindaric, 31, 178, 189, 190, 191, 198, 206, 234 n.29 Pleiade, The, 3-4 polemic, 10, 93, 94-6, 97 precriticism, 28-32, 44, 192 Questione delta Lingua, 1, 2-6, 13-16, 49, 147,

200 Quintilian, 84 Ricks, Christopher, 106 Ronsard, Pierre de, 3

Jackson, Heather, 75

Sallust, 101, 222 n.6 Salmasius, 81, 93-8, 99, 224 n.6

Justa Edovardo King (1638), 21

serio ludere, 25-6

Lucretius, 40, 77, 118-19, 213 n.34 Lycophron, 75-6 Lyne, R. O. A. M., 132 Marshall, William, 22 Martial, 96, 99 Marvell, Andrew, 4, 209 n.17 Miller, Leo, 80, 209 n.19, 218 n.14, 219 n.32 Montaigne, Michel de, 13-14 Moseley, Humprey, 20-1 Moss, Ann, 13

243

Phillips, Edward, 62

Slights, W , 73, 74 Sophocles, 184, 185, 186, 188 Spanish (language), 7, 209 n.12 Spenser, Edmund, 41, 107-8, 171-2, 231 n.15 Spitzer, Leo, 133 Statius, 23-4, 25 Syriac (language), 7 Tacitus, 96, 167, 201, 222 n.6 Tasso, Torquato, 7, 48, 108, i n translating, xii, 10, 28, 67-74, 2O3~7> 2 2 4 n-7 see also Bible translations

negotium, 20, 81

OED, 106, 109, 209 n.13, 223 n.2, 226 n.38 Old English (and Early Middle English), 7, 70 otium, 20, 81 Ovid, 33-7, 97, 118-19 Oxford University and Bodleian Library, 31, 32 Petrarch, 23, 48, 54 philaletheia, 26, 75

Virgil, 23, 25, 41-3, 60-1, 114, 137-8, 143, 150, 150-3, 155, 158-9, 166-7, W i73> 203 the Virgilian rota, 41 Warton, Thomas, 28 Weckherlin, Georg Rudolph, 8, 51 Weston, Elizabeth, 8 Williams, Gordon, 36 Williams, R. D., 150, 151, 152 Wordsworth, William, 51, 225 nn.18 and 19

Index ofpassages from Milton

Ad Patrem, 22, 42, 52-3 Ad Rousium, 20-1, 28-9, 30-1, 203-6 Areopagitica, 69 At a Vacation Exercise, 4 - 5 , 16, 56, 84 Canzone: see Sonnets and Canzone (in Italian) Carmina Elegiaca, 34 Commonplace Book, 81, 85, 226 n.37 De Doctrina Christiana, 80, 82, 219 n.32 Defences: general, 82 Defensio Prirna, 93-8, 99-102 Elegiae: general, 38 Elegia I, 35 Elegia II, 34 Elegia III, 34-5 Elegia IV, 30, 36-7 Elegia V, 37 Elegia VI, 37 Elegia VII, 37 Epigrams (Latin), 38 Epistolarum Familianum Liber: general, 86-7 Letter VII, 87 Letter VIII, 87-8 Letter IX, 88-9 Letter X, 89-91 Epitaphium Damonis, 5, 19, 42, 57-61, 91-3 History of Britain, T h e , 6, 7, 70 In Ejfigiei Eius Sculptorem, 11, 46 In Obitum Procancellani Medici, 3 8 - 9 In Quintum Novembris, 39, 42, 108, 230 n.2 Judgement of Martin Bucer, The, 68, 69

Lycidas, 59, 65 Mane Citus Lectum Fuge, 8 3 - 4 Mansus, 57 Marginalia (in Milton's copies of Lycophron, Aratus and Euripides), 73-4, 74-80, 85, 86 Naturam JVon Pati Senium, 118 Of Education, 80 On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, 37, 56 Paradise Lost: general, 66, 108, 198-202 (Book 1.1-6) 158; (1.12-13) 135; (1.20-2) 135; (1.84-7) 137; (1.141) 116; (1.202) 122; (1.300-4) 163; (1.451) 122 (Book 11.113-14) 144; (11.151-3) m ; (n-4<>5) 123; (11.435) I255 (n.6oo) 126; (n.827) 126; (11.905) 116; (11.1049) n 6 (Book in. 3) 121; (111.7) 121, 127; (in. 84) 116; (in. 200) 124; (111.208) 116; (m. 352-3) 122; (111.380) 162; (in. 564) 127 (Book iv.1-12) 135-6; (iv. 32-41) 63-4, 136; (iv. 132) 118; (rv. 168) 124; (iv. 239-40) 144; (iv.246) 125; (iv.257) 125; (iv. 301) 122; (iv. 347) 123; (iv. 462-4) 142; (iv.506) 125; (iv. 642) 126; (rv. 651) 126; (iv. 705-19) 140, 141; (iv. 994-1004) 127 (Book v. 34) 142; (v.56-7) 142; (v. 623) 116; (v.766) 124; (v.86o) 121; (v. 890) 116 (Book vi. 25-8) 139; (vi.27) 125; (vi. 29) 124; (vi. 163) 121; (vi. 236) 122; (vi. 328) 116, 117; (vi. 355) 122; (vi.365) 124; (vi. 547) 121; (vl.587) 125; (vl.620) 117; (VI.623) 117; (vi. 669-77) 118-19; ( VL 77^) n 6 ; (vi.785) 116; (vi. 882-6) 141; (vi. 884) 128; (vi. 888-9) I 2 8

244

Index ofpassages from Milton (Book VII. 91) 124; (VII. 141-3) no; (vn. 162) 112-13; (VII. 168) 124; (VII. 168-9) I245 (VII. 216-17) 115; (VII. 263-70) 119-20; (VII. 325) 116; (VII. 438-40) 113; (VII. 462) 122; (VII. 482) 114; (VII. 619) 122; (Book VIII. 132) 128; (vm.157) 122; (vm.263) 143; (vm. 420) 116; (vm. 431) 116; (VIII. 525-6) 142-3; (vm. 533-4) 143; (VIII.576) I25; (VIII.577-8) III-I2, I44 (Book ix. 187) 121; (ix.510-30) 145; (ix. 532-3) 144; (ix. 547) 144; (ix. 644) 124; (ix. 653) 124, 138-9; (ix. 701) 144; (ix. 729-30) 144-5; (ix. 792) 121; (ix. 795) 127; (ix. 832-3) 109; (ix. 845-9) 109-10; (lx.901) 116, 116-17, 143 (Book x.97-8) 139; (x.210) 116; (x.294) 115; (X. 313-I4) II5; (X. 54O-1) 121 (Book xi.305-7) 121; (xi.487) 122; (xi.541) 116; (xi.562) 116; (xi.563) 125; (xi. 660) 122 (Book XII. 83) 143; (xii.205) 116; (xn.310) 124; (xn. 628-32) 162; (XII. 629) 123, 161; (xn. 633) (XII. 635) 116; (XII. 643) 161 Paradise Regained:

general, 80, 198, 201-2 (Book I) 166-9 (Book II) 169-71 (Book III) 171-3

245

(Book TV) 125, 174-8 Philosophus ad Regem, 44

Poems . . . 1645, 20, 28-9, 43-4 Prolusion VI, 84-5 Psalm 114 (in Greek), 43, 55-6, 70-1 Samson Agonistes:

general, 46, 180-2, 198-202 (line 31) 195; (65-7) 197; (147) 182-3; (J54) 195; (J79) 197; (200) 197; (291) 196-7; (312) 196; (318) 195; (334) 197; (354-5) 196; (437-9) 197; (453-5) 196; (442) 197; (533-8) 196; (667-70) 183; (702) 235 n.4; (827) 235 n.4; (839) 235 n.4; (855-6) 197; (1000) 235 n.4; (1010-17) 184; (1018-22) 182; (1091) 196; (1097) 197; (1102) 197; (1140) 196; (1150) 196; (1176) 196; (1354) J 95; to^-G) 195; (1619) 198-9; (1628) 199; (1638) 199; (1647-8) 199; (1660-1707) 189-92; (1673) I255 (J745-58) l 8 7 Sonnets and Canzone (in Italian), 22, 46-9, 53-5 Sonnets (in English), 235 n.i Thesaurus (Latin), 80, 219 n.31 Trinity Manuscript, 62, i n , 180, 181, 185, 216 n.27