I'll look no more,

Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.

And at that we shudder. "For all beneath the moon," he adds, "would I not leap upright"; and though we know there is no cliff, we crouch with him, dizzy. Humanity recognizes and admits the limitations of its speech, and of its common weakness; and humanity replies to the admission with a thrill. It will strive to soar to unimaginable heights with Shelley, because it knows that Shelley is struggling, groping, yearning himself. Milton, the master, sweeping us along on his mighty pinion, seems sometimes to block the prospect with his own knowledge.

An illustration might be taken from painting. There are pictures so masterly, so complete, that they are like commands. "I will show you," the artist seems to say, "what you could never see for yourself. There it is; and there is nothing more to see." And from the mighty, masterly work we turn aside to some modest picture by a lesser man, and find in it nothing perhaps, of the splendour we have just left, but an outlet, a loophole of escape, in which the artist seems to say: "I could see no further. I do not know what is beyond." Thus he gives us not only the dear touch of bounded humanity, but the sense of mystery, of the immanence of the unknown and the unknowable, which bounded humanity, for all its greed of knowledge, hugs close in secret. In poetry the same effect is obtained not only by such direct means as Shakespeare used in the passage quoted, but by the reticences, the phrases which admit, as it were, that speech cannot express what is meant, the halfwords, half-sighs, like "The rest is silence," or "She should have died hereafter."

There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. . . .

lines which do no more than point to the infinite, and leave it infinite still. In Milton, bent as he was upon mapping out the infinite, explaining the strange, there are no such phrases. There are few, even, of those lines, of which there are many in Shakespeare, in Keats, in Wordsworth, which seem, as if by direct inspiration, to mean far more than the words say, to open the doors and set the mind wandering in ways not realised.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

The actual meaning of these words is as nothing compared with their effect upon the mind of the reader. It is not a verse as Abt Volger might say, but a star. [The Times Literary Supplement.]

But after all, these are questions of literary tact. And who will brutally blame some uncertainty of tact upon a blind man, who speaks, but can read no response, no sympathy, no quick answer in the eyes of his fellows: to whom returns not

Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom or Summer's Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine?

VII

The redemption after all, and last high vindication of this most magnificent poem are not to be sought in its vast conception or in its framing, grand but imperfect as Titanic work always has been and ever will be. To

find them you must lean your ear closely to its angelic language, to its cadenced music. Once grant that we have risen as Milton commands us to rise above humankind and the clogging of human passion, where will you find, but in Paradise Lost, language fit for seraphs, speaking in the quiet of dawn in sentry before the gates of Heaven?

And the secret of it?

I believe the grand secret to be very simple. I believe you may convince yourself where it lies by watching the hands of any good organist as he plays.

It lies-Milton had other secrets of course-but the main secret lies in the movement, the exquisitely modulated slide of his cæsura. Listen to it

Father, thy word is past, man shall find grace; And shall grace not find means, that finds her way, The speediest of thy wingèd messengers,

To visit all thy creatures, and to all

Comes unprevented, unimplor'd, unsought,
Happie for man, so coming; he her aide
Can never seek, once dead in sins and lost;
Attonement for himself or offering meet,
Indebted and undon, hath none to bring:
Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life
I offer, on mee let thine anger fall;
Account mee man; I for his sake will leave
Thy bosom, and this glorie next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly die
Well pleas'd

or

The Birds thir quire apply; aires, vernal aires
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
The trembling leaves, while Universal Pan

or

Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance
Led on th' Eternal Spring. Not that faire field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flours
Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis

Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world; nor that sweet Grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and th' inspir'd

Castalian Spring might with this Paradise

Of Eden strive;

Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide;
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

That is how I see Milton, and that is the portrait I would leave with you-of an old man, lonely and musical, seated at his chamber organ, sliding upon the keyboard a pair of hands pale as its ivory in the twilight of a shabby lodging of which the shabbiness and the gloom molest not him; for he is blind-and yet he sees.

I

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

I

REJOICE that the Board which regulates our English Tripos has so promptly and boldly admitted the two great plays, Measure for Measure and Antony and Cleopatra into the list of those chosen for specific study: and I rejoice for two reasons, on the minor of which let me first say a few words.

Their inclusion seems to me if I may use a word which promises to become too common-a sort of "gesture"; signifying that in casting the old, bad Tripos behind us, we have done with addressing ourselves coyly to potential schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, and propose to speak out to men and women. It is in part a chance that the inauguration of our new School of English up here has coincided with the return of young men from experiences that have made them impatient of humbug; as also that it coincides with a great enfranchisement of women and their return-or the return of the younger ones-from services in field or in hospital, which must have taught them, too, to look on life with wide-open eyes. Before this happened I said here, from this place, that if anyone is to study English literature in a University, English Literature with its whole content is the open field. A student may choose it or leave it alone, but