METAPHTSICALS AND BAROQUE
17
certain baroque obscurity is due simply to violence of expression, as
in
Donne, or to the extreme condensation and dislocation of imagery,
due to eccentric or wilful associations. Thus the baroque "distortion"
produces its own "suggestion" which is in part a result of "strange–
ness." This condensation, this suggestion are likewise in some of the
greatest passages of Milton, as arresting as they are inconclusive.
s·urely one of the fascinations of
Lycidas
is its obliqueness:
Next Camus, reverend Sire, went footing slow,
His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge,
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge,
Like to that sanguine flower inscrib'd with woe.
Ah; who hath reft (quoth he) my dearest pledge?
Last came and last did go,
The pilot of the Galilean lake,
Two massy keyes he bore of metals twain
(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain)
.
An almost cabalistic obscurity intensifies the Miltonic passages on
God. Like Rembrandt, like Michaelangelo, Milton is inscrutable with
an inscrutability more profound than Donne's, tantalizing as Donne's
may be.
With the coming of Dryden and the heroic play, this inscrutabil–
ity is wiped away. Although Dryden preserves the assertive, manly
rhythm of the baroque, its realism, attack, and almost metaphysical
accent, he is not so complex as Milton. We admire Dryden because
he is forthright, not as Donne or Milton are forthright-in expressing
perplexity-but rather as vigorously dealing with matters that have
been, for the moment, simplified. Dryden wavers, shifting as he does
between one resolution and another; but at every instant, he seems
clear enough. The inscrutability of both Donne and Milton is apt to
result from a painful perplexity at the moment of composition; hence
a deep baroque "distortion" and complexity. The rhetoric of the
heroic play is refreshing and kathartic. But the heroic play does not
have the inward agitation of the profounder baroque-the baroque
of Michaelangelo, of
The Duchess of Malfi
or
The Changeling,
of
Donne's
Divine Poems,
or of
Lycidas.
Donne, then, stands in genuine
relationship with Milton. Both must be seen against the authentic
"movement" of the seventeenth century. When thus seen, Milton is
the greatest of the baroque poets, the most polyphonic.
