Set Pieces
JOHN HOLLOWAY
Milton and English Art Marcia R. Pointon (Manchester UP 90s) Paradise Lost was reprinted a hundred times in the course of the eighteenth century: which is twice as often as the works of Shakespeare. In other words, Milton was for a long time the best known of our writers. and it is no wonder that one artist after another drew inspiration from his work and tried to illustrate it. Mrs Pointon, in her terse, scholarly, richly detailed book, has no difficulty in showing that there grew up a well-marked 'tradition of Milton illustration'. In fact, that tradition was something of an epitome of English art itself.
In my own opinion, Milton was done little service either by his first illustrators at the end of the seventeenth century and thereabouts, or by those in the nineteenth century with 'which this book closes. As. behind the illustrations, one glimpses the paradigm to which on the whole they con- form, one sees why this is so. For much late seventeenth century art, and for Milton in some ways as well, though he rose alto- gether above it, the paradigm was the great stage moment—the coup de theatre. Milton's early illustrators, like Thornhill, Medina or Cheron, all depend on it. The figures are posed as if for a burst of applause. Their baroque gestures make them look as if, in the tense excitement of the moment, they have nearly lost their balance and have to recover it.
On the other hand, the sense of place is as vague as one expects on the stage; and the conventionalised greenery merely looks as if it has not yet wilted. Victorian illus- trators, with one glorious exception, look as if they had another paradigm: the pageant— or maybe the waxworks. All is static group- ing and rhythmicised posture; while the dis- tinctively Victorian brand of cloying dignit) would make one think (if, of course, one didn't know the verse) that it was odd this poet made even one edition, let alone hundreds.
The glorious exception was of course Samuel Palmer: but Palmer was the last phase of a great double discovery that came to Milton's illustrators late in the eighteenth century; and meant, in fact, that others caught up with how Milton had been of his own time but also vastly in advance of it The first part of the discovery was that the human body had more interest than the cones. spheres and cylinders of the life class. because it was a primary expression of emotion inasmuch as it incarnated, released
or imprisoned energy. Figures in the early xlilton illustrations are sometimes firmly airborne 'on the wire; otherwise they are firmly stage-stuck, and with both feet.
But Fuseli's angels and devils—and his Adam and Eve too—inhabit a strange, vieightless world, where life does not reduce 10 wired or walking, and where place and ;pace interfuse. By the same token light and shadow cease to function as conventional 'effects'. They glow, or darken, from within, as index of self-engendered good or evil. "1 hen it is only one step to John Martin's landscapes, where the emotional charge is transferred from the people to the place; or to Blake's, where the human creativity seems to break out over again, in the lyric- ism of flower and tree which is not mere greenery, but life and growth in all things.
This is what brings one back to the verse, with its quick, condensed sense of reality, and its power for effects which are true to experience though they heighten it and go beyond it. ". . On their naked limbs the flowery roof/Showrd roses, which the Morn
repair'd'; . . he led his radiant Files,/ Da/ling the moon'. Palmer's unique achieve- ment was to see life's most familiar details— the 'dry smooth-shaven Green' that Milton has in 11 Penseroso, or the 'minute drops from the Eaves' after rain—as all one with the 'strange mysterious dream' with which Milton himself interfused them. After all, it :s the stage which makes for staginess: Mil- Ion's sense of reality was realler than that. 1 he plain and the strange, the 'smell of field and grove' and 'Universal Pan' (to quote from his account of Eden), or the 'hedgerow I Ims'. and the 'Eastern gate' of sunrise ..411egro) were always close together for rim—close, in fact, with a kind of authori-
tative terseness that some critics, in all periods, have been inclined to take for emptiness.
A passage quoted from Palmer by Mrs Pointon makes the essential point: 'I did begin this meditation of a subject which for twenty years has affected my senses with a seven-fold inwardness', it was II Penseroso made him write that; and the outcome was such work as his Water Murmuring or The Bellman: work that invites meditation on the scale that went into its making, until we realise that the poetry has been enriched, not impoverished, by the illustrator, and that in- wardness is outwardness too.
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