[In the following excerpt, Davidson speculates on the relationship between Milton and Lawes through a reading of Milton's sonnet of praise to the composer.]

Milton's encomiastic sonnet to Henry Lawes opens with the highest praise for his eminent contemporary:

Harry, whose tuneful and well measur'd Song
First taught our English Music how to span
Words with just note and accent, not to scan
With Midas' Ears, committing short and long …(1)

These lines, according to Donald Tovey, reveal a Milton who has forgotten the precise and artistic word-setting achieved by the madrigal school in the preceding generation. Furthermore, Tovey charges that “the composer's preoccupation with the scansion of ‘just note and accent’ leads him to over-punctuate the words and interrupt the flow of his music.”² Thus in Tovey's estimation, the sonnet's claims about Lawes's primary place in the history of English music are not accurate. Eric Ford Hart, however, suggests that the poem's statements about Lawes's art have often been taken too literally when in fact Milton's intention was merely complimentary.³

Another approach to the poem is possible; I believe that the poem is neither inaccurate nor merely complimentary. The key to Milton's praise for Lawes as a composer and performer is to be found through a careful reading of the first line of the sonnet in which Milton speaks of Lawes's “tuneful and well measur'd Song.” What previously has not been noticed about this line is that Milton has set forth two categories—tuneful and well measured—and that Lawes is able to fulfill the requirements of each category.

Milton's sonnet demands that the words of a “well measur'd Song” be spanned “with just note and accent,” and not scanned “With Midas' Ears, committing short and long.” The story of how Midas got his ears is found in Book XI of Ovid's Metamorphoses, where it is related that Midas favored the rustic music of Pan over the more artistic music of Apollo, and as a reward for his misjudgment, was given asses' ears. Milton implies that only someone with asses' ears would be guilty of “committing [i.e., setting in conflict] short and long.”⁴ The reference is to the rhythmic values contained in the melodic line of vocal music: the length of the musical note should be determined by the quantity or length of the syllable. That music has quantity—duration—is undisputed. The use of the terms long and short is historically justifiable, since in mensural music of the Middle Ages a long appears to have been either twice or three times the length of a short.⁵

But the question of quantity as far as words are concerned—particularly the syllables of English words—is not so clear-cut as quantity in music. Quantity clearly exists in the English language, both as a measurable objective quantity having little or no linguistic significance and as a conscious and perceived quantity having linguistic significance.⁶ Whether quantity plays any important role in English verse is another question. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley believe that quantity is simply a variable which is dependent upon the individual reader; thus they hold that poetry relies for its characteristics not on quantity but on patterns of pitch and stress.⁷ It seems to me, however, that if Milton could have known about the opinions of Wimsatt and Beardsley, he would not have been in agreement with them. Evidence that Milton was looking for more than stress in his poetry is found in his prefatory note to Paradise Lost which speaks of the “true musical delight” of poetry; this delight “consists only in apt Numbers, fit quantity [italics mine] of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another.”⁸ The first and last part of the sentence need not worry us here, but the second part, speaking of “fit quantity,” should. What did Milton mean by quantity? If he thinks of quantity as weight, says G. Stanley Koehler, “he is saying nothing about English verse that requires comment.”⁹ But Koehler feels that Milton, having known the sweetness of sound which Latin quantitative verse possesses, would be reluctant to settle for more weight, but would want to bring quantity into English verse. This does not mean that Milton would give up accent in favor of quantity, but that, like Sidney, he would think that “the blessing of speech would be most polished by one who considered not only the ‘forcible quality’ [accentual weight] of the words, but their ‘best measured quantitie’” as well.¹⁰

If Milton recognizes both quality and quantity in poetry, how would he want these rendered musically? Would he want every stress to be tried irrevocably to a lengthened quantity, or would he ask that stress be differentiated from quantity in some way? Judging from Lawes's music which Milton liked, the latter seems to be true. In Song I from Milton's Comus,¹¹ Lawes set the first line, “From the Heav'ns now I fly,” to a long-short-long-short-short-long rhythmic pattern. If he were working only on a stress-quantity basis (i.e., stress equals quantity), the durations would have to be short-short-long-short-short-long. But if he is working on the assumption that meaning and function of words help to determine a quantity beyond stress, he would indicate a subtle difference in the length of the preposition “from” and the article “the”—which is, of course, what he does in making “from” a dotted eighth and “the” a sixteenth note. …

“Heav'ns,” the noun of the prepositional phrase, is rendered as a dotted half note, as befitting the word's importance. It seems to me that Lawes is doing something much more subtle than simply agreeing with Thomas Campion's principle that “in ioyning of words to harmony there is nothing more offensive to the eare then to place a long sillable with a short note, or a short sillable with a long note,”¹² for he is showing differences within the categories of long and short.

Lawes goes far beyond the mere rendering of the quantity of poetry. In his Preface to Book II of Ayres and Dialogues (1655), Lawes says, “Yet the way of Composition I chiefly profess (which is to shape Notes to the Words and Sense) is not hit by too many.” Hart thinks that shaping “Notes to the Words and Sense” involves not just trying to write music in keeping with the general emotional tone of the words as the Elizabethans did, but actually capturing the meaning of the words in the musical setting.¹³ Since meaning is partially conveyed through pitch in spoken language, the musical settings, to be perfectly accurate, should follow the pitch levels of the spoken phrase. Returning to Song I from Comus, we find that the melodic contour of “From the Heav'ns now I fly” is much the same as that of the spoken words, provided that one uses a kind of heightened declamatory speech favored for the reading of poetry in the seventeenth century. …

The way the voice rises in pitch on “Heav'ns” and “fly” is imitated exactly in Lawes's musical setting of the phrase. Lawes's care in matching spoken pitch levels to musical settings might almost be said to anticipate the discoveries of the modern linguists George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith, Jr., who show that spoken English can be notated as having four different pitch levels.¹⁴ Lawes, with the whole musical gamut to choose from, does not limit himself to four pitch levels, but nevertheless, in his settings of the songs from Comus, he confines himself to a very small range—an octave and a fourth. In this practice, he is consistent with the insistence of the members of the Florentine Camarata upon a small vocal range to make vocal music more like heightened speech.¹⁵

Setting the sense of the words would also include the choice of modality or tonality, to express sadness, happiness, or in the case of a wandering tonality, confusion; it would include imitation and repetition, word-painting (although Lawes used this device more sparingly than his predecessors such as Campion and Morley), dramatic pauses or rests, and groupings of words and phrases to create either long connected thoughts or short disconnected ones. In order to show a word's importance, one might place it on a long note or a high note, or a combination of the two, a long high note. Chromatic rises and melodic leaps also would serve to make the music follow the sense more carefully.¹⁶

That Lawes is setting the meaning of the words is most clearly seen in “Ariadne Deserted,” which is the “Hymn, or Story” referred to in Milton's sonnet.¹⁷ It was praised in commendatory verse not only by Milton but also by John Phillips and John Cobb, and it was sung all the way to Erith by Samuel Pepys.¹⁸ In the song, Ariadne's distressed mind is shown in the tonality of the piece, which wanders from tonal center to tonal center. Then, the first word, “Theseus,” is set as a descending major third (D to B^b), which is very close to the actual sound of one person's calling another at a distance. The next phrase, “O Theseus,” descends along the intervallic distance of two minor thirds (E^b to C to A), considered plaintive and affecting in Renaissance and Baroque theory.¹⁹ “Hark” is set apart by rests preceding and following it, giving the word two dramatic pauses. “Alas deserted I complain” ends with the repetition of Cs, D, Cs, D, an instance of the use of the plaintive chromatic relationship.²⁰ “Pitty'd me” has a kind of sobbing rhythm. …

“And beating back that false & cruell name” has the familiar chromatics coupled with a faster rhythm to indicate agitation. The end of the whole sentence and the point of it all, “Did comfort and revenge my flame,” comes to a decisive cadence. Here Lawes shows himself to be a composer without peer insofar as setting the meaning of words is concerned.

Lawes's songs, well measured and true to the sense of the words as they are, are also supremely “tuneful,” as the first line of Milton's sonnet tells us. In order to verify this for ourselves, we have only to refer to Lawes's setting of Herrick's “Bid Me But Live” or to his setting of Waller's “Go Lovely Rose.” Is it any wonder that Herrick and Waller also presented encomiastic sonnets to the composer of these delicate melodies?

Lawes's tuneful songs are characteristically smooth: “To after age thou shalt be writ the man / That with smooth air couldst humor best our tongue.” Here “smooth” seems to be a complimentary term with none of the modern connotations of dishonesty or slickness as in “smooth operator,” but rather it has the meaning of effortlessness and grace. “Now my Task is smoothly done,” says the Attendant Spirit at the end of Comus, and he means that his task is well done, without any embarrassing bobbles. Earlier in Comus, the “smooth-dittied Song” of Thyrsis has been praised, and since Lawes played the part of Thyrsis and was, like Thyrsis, a household servant (tutor) for the Bridgewater family, this compliment has been applied by extension to Lawes's own smooth-dittied song.²¹ Lawes was both composer and performer in Comus, and thus it seems logical that “smooth air” and “smooth-dittied Song” refer both to his effortless composing²² and to his smooth countertenor voice.²³

A clear hint that the sonnet is praising Lawes as singer appears in line 10, where Lawes is called “the Priest of Phoebus' Choir,” and, in truth, Lawes was a member of the Choir of the Chapel Royal, the most prestigious position a professional musician could hold in those days. Lawes, a superb singer and composer, is compared in lines 12-14 to Casella, whom Dante met in the milder shades of Purgatory. Dante asks him to demonstrate whether one retains the power of song after “translation,” and Casella proves that he has, by singing a canzone with his own melody and Dante's own words.²⁴ Milton, who had heard the Italian singer Leonora Baroni and had lauded her in three poems, and who had loved Italian music so much that he had shipped home from Italy a “chest or two” of music books by “Luca Marenz[i]o, [Claudio] Monte Verde, Horatio Vecchi, [Antonio] Cif[r]a, the Prince of Venosa [Gesualdo], and several others,”²⁵ is giving Lawes a supreme compliment by preferring him to the Italians who since the time of Casella had been the avowed leaders in the world of music.

Perhaps Milton was especially pleased with Lawes's attempt to create a new music especially suited to the English language and temperament. In contrast to Nicholas Lanier and “Giovanni Coprario” (John Cooper) who had visited Italy and self-consciously imported the Italian baroque style, Lawes was engaged in the development of a domesticated English musical style which paved the way for the music of Purcell. Some of the splendor and fire of Monteverdi is missing, but Lawes compensates for these lacks by his delicacy and extreme subtlety.

In “Ad Patrem,” Milton had confessed that he loved vocal music above all other kinds of music: “What pleasure is there in the inane modulation of the voice without words and meaning and rhythmic eloquence? … Orpheus … by his song—not by his cithara—… stirred the ghosts of the dead to tears.”²⁶ And it was Lawes, by his tuneful and well measured song, who stirred the hearts of many, including that of John Milton. Lawes knew best how to join words, meaning, and rhythmic eloquence with musical pitch, and thereby earned the place granted him by Milton—above Casella's Purgatory in the heavenly choir of Phoebus. As John Berkenhead said of Lawes, he was truly “a Man to tune an Angel by!”²⁷

Notes

1. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose. ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957), p. 144. Except for the Comus songs, all quotations from Milton are from this edition.

2. “Words and Music,” in The Main Stream of Music and Other Essays (Cleveland, 1961), p. 210.

3. “Introduction to Henry Lawes,” Music and Letters, XXXII (1951), 331n. However, it should be noted that Hart does not denigrate Lawes's work; on the contrary, he finds it to be extremely subtle and artistic in its setting of words. See also Willa McClung Evans, Henry Lawes: Musician and Friend of Poets (New York, 1941), pp. 180-182.

4. Henry J. Todd cites Richardson, who defined “committing” as “offending against quantity and harmony.”—The Poetical Works of John Milton, 5th ed. (London, 1852), IV, 218. Of course, the word “harmony” must here be taken in its aesthetic rather than its musical sense.

5. Cf. Walter Odlington, De Speculatione Musicae (1300), cited in Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages (New York, 1940), p. 272.

6. Bertil Malmberg, Phonetics, trans. Lily M. Parker and Bertil Malmberg (New York, 1954), pp. 74-79.

7. For a survey of some of the prevailing notions about meter, stress, and duration in English poetry, see W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Concept of Meter,” PMLA, LXXIV (1959), 585-598.

8. Hughes, p. 210.

9. “Milton on ‘Numbers,’ ‘Quantity,’ and Rime,” SP, LV (1958), 209.

10. Koehler, p. 210, quoting from Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith (London, 1904), I, 182.

11. The Mask of Comus, ed. E. H. Visiak and H. J. Foss (Bloomsbury, 1937). The example in the text from the first song from Comus is taken from this edition.

12. Thomas Campion, Observations in the Art of English Poesy, chap. i, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, 329.

13. Hart, p. 330.

14. George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith, Jr., An Outline of English Structure (Washington, D.C., 1956), pp. 36-45.

15. Pietro de Bardi, Letter to G. B. Doni (1934), in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York, 1850), pp. 364-365.

16. Hart, pp. 337-338.

17. Milton's marginal note to his sonnet as it appears prefixed to Choice Psalmes (London, 1648) indicates that the “Hymn, or Story” is “The story of Ariadne set by him [Lawes] in Music.” See Evans, p. 181.

18. Diary entry for November 19, 1665. See David G. Weiss, Samuel Pepys, Curioso (Pittsburgh, 1957), p. 54.

19. For a discussion of set musical patterns which represented certain ideas or emotions, see Manfred Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era (New York, 1947), pp. 388-390.

20. Ayres and Dialogues, For One, Two, and Three Voyces, The First Booke (London, 1653), p. 1. The notes corresponding to the words “pitty'd me” are … in Lawes's autograph manuscript (BM Loan Ms. 35).

21. Hughes, p. 92. See also Hughes, pp. 101-102.

22. See Todd, IV, 49.

23. Lawes is identified as a countertenor by Murray Lefkowitz, “The Longleat Papers of Bulstrode Whitelocke; New Light on Shirley's Triumph of Peace,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, XVIII (1965), pp. 46, 53.

24. Il Purgatorio, Canto II. The song is “Amor che nella mente mi ragiona” from the Convivio.

25. Edward Phillips, The Life of Milton, in Hughes, p. 1029.

26. Hughes's translation, p. 84.

27. The Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues, For One, Two and Three Voyces (London, 1655), sig. B⁴.