ify the story. For let us note that, in the
nature of things, the more adorned and involved our style (and Milton's
is both ornate and involved) the more difficulty we must find with these
flat pedestrian intervals. Milton may 'bring it off,' largely through
knowing how to dodge the interval and contrive that it shall at any rate
be brief: but, as Bagehot noted, when we come to Tennyson and find
Tennyson in "Enoch Arden" informing us of a fish-jowter, that:--

Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean-spoil
In ocean-smelling osier--

(_i.e._ in a fish-basket)

--and his face
Rough-reddened with a thousand winter gales,
Not only to the market town were known,
But in the leafy lanes beyond the down
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp
And peacock yewtree of the lonely Hall
Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering,

why, then we feel that the vehicle is altogether too pompous for its
load, and those who make speech too pompous for its content commit,
albeit in varying degrees, the error of Defoe's religious lady who,
seeing a bottle of over-ripe beer explode and cork and froth fly up to
the ceiling, cried out, 'O, the wonders of Omnipotent Power!' The poet
who commends fresh fish to us as 'ocean-spoil' can cast no stone at his
brother who writes of them as 'the finny denizens of the deep,' or even
at his cousin the journalist, who exalts the oyster into a 'succulent
bivalve'--

The feathered tribes on pinions cleave the air;
Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear!

I believe this difficulty, which verse, by nature and origin emotional,
encounters in dealing with ordinary unemotional narrative, to lie as a
technical reason at the bottom of Horace's advice to the writer of Epic
to plunge _in medias res_, thus avoiding flat preparative and catching at
once a high wind which shall carry him hereafter across dull levels and
intervals. I believe that it lay--though whether consciously or not he
scarcely tells us--at the bottom of Matthew Arnold's mind when, selecting
certain qualities for which to praise Homer, he chose, for the very
first, Homer's _rapidity_. 'First,' he says, 'Homer is eminently rapid;
and,' he adds justly, 'to this rapidity the elaborate movement of
Miltonic blank verse is alien.'

Now until one studies writing as an art, trying to discover what this or
that form of it accomplishes with ease and what with difficulty, and why