16
PARTISAN REVIEW
A forrest huge of spears : and thronging helms
A ppear,'d, and serried shields in thick array
Of depth immeasurable
...
This scene has all the baroque "great imagined space" in which fig–
ures move freely. In the verse-paragraph there is the same handling
of masses as in the colossal drama of St. Peter's, or the full-blooded
performance of Rubens in the Medici series. The Miltonic Eden with
its slope hills, cool recesses, and vernal ·groves in which dance the
Graces and Hours is a pastoral more monumental than the Poussins
ever painted. In the milder, more gently modulated tones of Claude's
rhetoric are
ll
Penseroso
and
L'
Allegro,
with their lyric shimmer
and evanescence of russet lawns, fallow gray, and glooming battle–
ments. Never was T. S. Eliot more perverse than in observing that
Milton fails in visual imagination and that ·his poetry is not "serious."
Then too there is the Miltonic realism, the distinctively baroque jux–
taposition of the actual with the elaborate, the august, the idyllic,
the idealized. This sort of play with realistic detail-the cock strutting
to the barn door in
L'Allegro-shows
how the baroque assimilated
the genre. The homely passages so consummately handled in the
paysage
by Ruysdael or Hobbema reappear in Milton's cottage chim–
ney smoking between aged oaks. One suspects that critics have been
amiss regarding the scene in which Eve, the hausfrau, prepares for
Adam and Raphael the dinner that will not cool. We may not
li~e
the culinary apparatus; it seems incongruous, coming as it does in
conjunction with the large dignity of Adam our primitive great sire.
Traditionally "epic" as such apparatus may be, here is also a char–
acteristically baroque effect- the intrusion of everyday matters along
with elevated passages. To our eye, a distracting naturalism appears
everywhere in the baroque: in the muscularity of certain statuary by
Michaelangelo, in the curious little dogs that bound about the corners
of Rubens' most elaborate spectacles, in the violent accent upon non–
essentials in the painting of Rembrandt, in the rustication of stones
in facades designed by Vanbrugh. These culinary matters were no
less "low" for Milton than for us. That is the point. They
are
"low."
So far it has seemed that Milton is "externally" baroque, that
his baroque quality depends largely upon elaboration and rhetoric.
But he is baroque in an inward sense as well. As Wolffiin says, the
baroque, in spite of its exploitation of the surface, has a certain incon–
clusiveness, an unwillingness to say everything clearly. Undoubtedly
