The attitude reflected in these passages is confident and liberal. Milton looks upon music as a great moving and determining force in life. Its immediate appeal is sensuous, but its ultimate touch, on the one hand calming, reassuring, healing, on the other rousing, stimulating, emboldening, is upon the vital interests of man's spirit. This interpretation is prevailingly Greek; in Plato and Aristotle lies its confirmation. Milton adopted their general concept of the function of music, and into his specific notion of its humanizing power and service introduced nothing discordant. He believed that music had a purgative virtue, calmed perplexity, banished anguish, doubt, fear, sorrow, and pain, charmed its devotees, shut them away from ‘eating cares,' dispelled their weariness, kindled fire in the heart of warriors, and incited them to heroic deeds; that it was as much the gift of 'hearteasing mirth' as of 'divinest melancholy'; that it lifted men to Heaven, and brought Heaven down to men. Because of all these things, it appeared to him no less imperative than to Plato that men 'practise music,' and recognize in its strains the echoes of the universal harmony.

If such was Milton's idea of music, every word that he said of it has significance for this essay. A poet who cared less for the art might speak less precisely-might, for example, in an instance like the following, be content to satisfy his metre either with 'artful' or with 'artless.' Not so Milton. When he writes,

To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice

Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air,1

the import relates the words to the 'wanton heed' and 'giddy cunning' of the 'melting voice' in L'Allegro, to the

1 Sonnet 17.11-12.

artful strains of the shepherd in Comus, and to the ‘artful and unimaginable touches' mentioned in the tractate Of Education. Such phrases are explicit proof of Milton's notion that music required more of a proficient than that he be genially receptive toward his endowment; they show that, in his eyes, poet and musician, and indeed all artists, alike win their way through laborious effort, to a ready and graceful manipulation of their media.2

As might be expected, the terminology of this cherished art came freely into Milton's diction. Words that to-day have lost musical significance retained for him either full musical value or strong musical suggestion. If his mental associations with terms likeʻjar," jangle," noise,' and' chime,' are taken into account, certain passages surprise us with a richer meaning. A few illustrations will suffice. The gates of Heaven emit harmony as they move, but 'the infernal doors' of Hell fly open

3

With impetuous recoil and jarring sound.'

In the ode On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, the thrilling sound that holds Heaven and Earth in happy union is spoken of as composed in part of a divinely-warbled voice, in part of a stringed 'noise' that accompanied it. To Milton's

See above, p. 41.

See Milton's Knowledge of Music, by William Henry Hadow, in Milton Memorial Lectures, ed. by Percy W. Ames 1908, p. 19: 'It will be observed that one of Milton's favorite epithets for music is "artful"kunstmässig. He is no believer in the supersition, not wholly dead even at the present day, that music is a matter of some remote and unaccountable inspiration which needs no intellectual gift and no training in craftsmanship. On this point he well knew what he was saying.'

P. L. 7.206.

P. L. 2. 880. Compare the 'jarring atoms,' in the first stanza of Dryden's Song for St. Cecilia's Day, under which Nature lay until 'the tuneful voice' was heard that called forth universal harmony.

imagination the 'jangling noise of words' that arose from the builders of the Tower of Babel was more than loud and rasping. It smote the ear, but distressed it, too, with a discordant resonance, comparable to that described in the lines,

Arms on armor clashing brayed

Horrible discord, and the madding wheels

Of brazen chariots raged; dire was the noise of conflict.1

The sense that Milton attaches to 'chime,' though not uncommon in poetry, is rare outside the poets. We seldom think of any object as chiming' except bells. But Milton has 'chiming strings" and the 'melodious chime... of harp and organ," as Cowper has 'the chimes of tinkling rills,' and Wordsworth 'the chiming hounds' or 'the chiming Tweed.' For the incidental though always correct usage of more precise terms like diapason, descant, number, proportion, close, concent, symphony, and harmony, the reader is referred to Dr. Spaeth's Glossary and Index.

In passages where sound is not involved, Milton's free introduction of musical terms is again likely to hinder our understanding of his thought. Samson, lamenting his folly cries:

Tell me, friends,

Am I not sung and proverbed for a fool
In every street? Do they not say, 'How well
Are come upon him his deserts'? Yet why?
Immeasurable strength they might behold
In me; of wisdom, nothing more than mean.
This with the other should, at least, have paired;
These two, proportioned ill, drove me transverse."

'P. L. 6.209-211.

P. R. 2.363.

'P. L. 11.558-559. 'S. A. 202-209.

The last sentence will not be clear until the technical words, 'proportioned' and 'transverse' are explained and compared with others--for example, those in At a Solemn Music,1 or those in the Eleventh Book of Paradise Lost which read:

His volant touch,

Instinct through all proportions low and high,

Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.2

Similarly, a technical explanation is needed for a passage like that in Tetrachordon, where an undue insistence upon the letter of the New Testament is spoken of as sounding 'disproportion to the whole Gospel.'4

In all likelihood Milton realized the danger of his facility with technical words. Indeed, in this very matter of musical terminology he made an effort to simplify his usage. Some of the examples given by Professor Lockwood in her article on Milton's Corrections to the Minor Poems are

1 See especially lines 17-23.

P. L. 11.557-559. See Hadow, Milton's Knowledge of Music, pp. 19, 20 (cited above p. 45, n. 2). The author calls these lines 'the best description of a fugue ever written.' After noting the correctness of the technical terms, he says: 'And what makes them the more remarkable is the date at which they appeared. The first scientific treatise on fugue was that of Fux; the first, supreme, master of fugal writing was John Sebastian Bach. When Paradise Lost was printed, Fux was a child of three, and Sebastian Bach was not yet born. The artists from whom Milton gained his knowledge must have been the first pioneers-the two Gabrielis at Venice, Frescobaldi, and his pupil Frohberger at Rome. With the two latter he was probably in personal contact; in any case we may wonder at the insight which enabled him to state with such truth and justice a highly technical form that was still in its infancy.' Hadow says that Frohberger was studying with Frescobaldi when Milton visited Rome in 1638.

This title, Tetrachordon, itself proves Milton's familiarity with rare musical terms; he had in mind the earliest Greek harmony of four parts. • Tetrachordon (Matt. 19.9), Works 4.233.

'Mod. Lang. Notes 25.201. Or see Cooper, Methods and Aims in the Study of Literature, pp. 68–69.

pertinent. 'In Solemn Music 3,' we learn, ""Mixe your choise chords" is changed to "wed your divine sounds," and in a line later entirely omitted, "chromatik jarres" is erased for "ill sounding"; Comus. . . 242, "hold a counterpoint" [becomes] "give resounding grace." " We are reminded again of 'the last fault. . . in Milton's style' which Addison noted in his essay on the defects of Paradise Lost. Without doubt music was one of the 'several other arts and sciences' besides navigation, architecture, and astronomy, that frequently tempted the poet to substitute 'what the learned call technical words' for such 'easy language as may be understood by ordinary readers."1

A majority of the musical metaphors in Milton are not very complex, and merely show how easily, if not instinctively, his mind when in search of expression borrowed words, phrases, or ideas suited to figurative employment, from the sister art of poetry. In An Apology against a Pamphlet, for example, he introduces a digression from his stern argument thus: 'That I may, after this harsh discord, touch upon a smoother string." In The Reason of Church-Government he resigns himself to the burdensome duty of censure, sometimes imposed by the possession of wisdom, as follows: 'But when God commands to take the trumpet and blow a dolorous or a jarring blast, it lies not in man's will what he shall conceal. And in the Remonstrant's Defence, being a little less watchful for ‘easy language,' he writes:

We shall adhere close to the Scriptures of God which He hath left us as the just and adequate measure of truth, fitted and proportioned to the diligent study, memory, and use of every faithful man, whose

1 See above p. 36, n. 1.

* Works 3.298.

• Works 3.140.