METAPHTSICALS AND BAROQUE
15
attitude toward Milton would seem to commit him to this very
"naked" protestantism.
One might venture the surmise that sooner or later any reversion
to ritual in religion or politics will involve a toleration of the ritual of
verse, which in its largest sense is rhetoric-the sort of rhetoric to be
found in its most ritualistic form in Homer, Virgil, Dante,
Beowulf,
or_Milton. It is the rhetoric of Aristotle, Quintilian-and the Jesuits.
Any
such toleration will mark the retreat from individualism. in poetry
and the criticism of poetry. It will also mark, certainly, a reversion
from what Richards has aptly called the modern "dissolution of con–
sciousness," the psychological individualism that evoked, first, the
private language of modern poetry, then the criticism of Richards
himself. A more sympathetic evaluation of Milton may be the first
token of a reaction in poetry that has already occurred on one level'
in Anglo-Catholici'lm and on another level in Eliot's "royalism."
VII
For us, at the moment, the issue lies beween Donne and Milton.
And it is Donne who is, after all, an eccentriq figure. Milton stands
more nearly at the center of the seventeenth century. He exhibits
almost every baroque "manner"; perhaps
Samson Agonistes
and
Paradise R egained, .
alone, are not "mannered" (they suggest, in–
stead, a grave academism) . To be sure Milton does not represent
the explosive baroque; he often bears himself, as in
Comus,
with the
Augustan restraint of the Poussins. We may say, nevertheless, that
the decorative and even gorgeous "movement" of Miltonic prose, of
Lycidas,
of
Paradise Lost
represents an Anglican art of the counter–
reformation:
Th'imperial ensign, which full high advanc't
Shan like a meteor, streaming to the wind
With gems and golden lustre rich imblaz'd,
Seraphic arms and trophies: all th e while
Sonorous mettal blowing martial sounds:
At which the universal host upsent
A shout that tore H ell's concave, and beyond
Fright ed the reign of Chaos and old N ight.
All in a moment through th e gloom were seen
T en thousand banners rise into th e air
With orient colours waving: with them rose
