Sable Clouds and Silver Linings

Abstract

The title of this chapter points forward to the passage from Milton’s A Masque, to be explored in its final section, as summarised in the lines echoed here (A Masque, 221–5). But it also implies a successful resolution, or exploitation, of the problem which dogs every attempt to locate pathos satisfactorily within rhetoric — or to accommodate rhetoric itself to the conscious and careful use of language as a tool for investigation and decision. How does emotion stand in relation to clear perception, right choice and enacted purpose? The Lady’s vision (perhaps reinforced for Milton’s Ludlow audience by a piece of primitive stage machinery, a visible rhetoric) illustrates a general principle about the use of pathos by Milton and other writers: the progression away from the kind of emotion which darkens and confuses — the perturbatio of the Stoics — to that which enlightens and directs, from sable clouds to silver linings. But to reflect the dynamic of emotion and perception, the movement from outward deception or misconstruction to inward substance, good or bad — a movement figured by Plato, and subsequently by Erasmus, as the opening of a Silenus (see below), and one which makes the pleasure of discovery integral to truth — will involve a constant stress on the connections between pathos and its two associated principles, ethos and logos (whatever period we survey and whatever terms, then current, approximate to these Aristotelean concepts).