a thing as second-hand poetry. Some poets, musing on the poetry of other
men, have unconsciously shaped it into something of their own: the new
conception is like the original, it would never probably have existed had
not the original existed previously; still it is sufficiently different
from the original to be a new thing, not a copy or a plagiarism; it is
a creation, though, so to say, a suggested creation. Gray is as good an
example as can be found of a poet whose works abound in this species
of semi-original conceptions. Industrious critics track his best lines
back, and find others like them which doubtless lingered near his fancy
while he was writing them. The same critics have been equally busy with
the works of Milton, and equally successful. They find traces of his
reading in half his works; not, which any reader could do, in overt
similes and distinct illustrations, but also in the very texture of the
thought and the expression. In many cases, doubtless, they discover more
than he himself knew. A mind like his, which has an immense store of
imaginative recollections, can never know which of his own imaginations
is exactly suggested by which recollection. Men awake with their best
ideas; it is seldom worth while to investigate very curiously whence
they came. Our proper business is to adapt, and mould, and act upon
them. Of poets perhaps this is true even more remarkably than of other
men; their ideas are suggested in modes, and according to laws, which
are even more impossible to specify than the ideas of the rest of the
world. Second-hand poetry, so to say, often seems quite original to the
poet himself; he frequently does not know that he derived it from an old
memory; years afterwards it may strike him as it does others. Still, in
general, such inferior species of creation is not so likely to be found
in minds of singular originality as in those of less. A brooding, placid,
cultivated mind, like that of Gray, is the place where we should expect
to meet with it. Great originality disturbs the adaptive process, removes
the mind of the poet from the thoughts of other men, and occupies it
with its own heated and flashing thoughts. Poetry of the second degree
is like the secondary rocks of modern geology—a still, gentle, alluvial
formation; the igneous glow of primary genius brings forth ideas like
the primeval granite, simple, astounding, and alone. Milton’s case is an
exception to this rule. His mind has marked originality, probably as much
of it as any in literature; but it has as much of moulded recollection
as any mind too. His poetry in consequence is like an artificial park,
green, and soft, and beautiful, yet with outlines bold, distinct, and
firm, and the eternal rock ever jutting out; or, better still, it is like
our own lake scenery, where nature has herself the same combination—where
we have Rydal-water side by side with the everlasting upheaved mountain.
Milton has the same union of softened beauty with unimpaired grandeur;
and it is his peculiarity.
These are the two contrasts which puzzle us at first in Milton, and which
distinguish him from other poets in our remembrance afterwards. We have
a superficial complexity in illustration, and imagery, and metaphor; and
in contrast with it we observe a latent simplicity of idea, an almost
rude strength of conception. The underlying thoughts are few, though
the flowers on the surface are so many. We have likewise the perpetual
contrast of the soft poetry of the memory, and the firm, as it were
fused, and glowing poetry of the imagination. His words, we may half
fancifully say, are like his character. There is the same austerity in
the real essence, the same exquisiteness of sense, the same delicacy of
form which we know that he had, the same music which we imagine there was
in his voice. In both his character and his poetry there was an ascetic
nature in a sheath of beauty.
No book perhaps which has ever been written is more difficult to
criticise than _Paradise Lost_. The only way to criticise a work of the
imagination, is to describe its effect upon the mind of the reader—at any
rate, of the critic; and this can only be adequately delineated by strong
illustrations, apt similes, and perhaps a little exaggeration. The task
is in its very nature not an easy one; the poet paints a picture on the
fancy of the critic, and the critic has in some sort to copy it on the
paper. He must say what it is before he can make remarks upon it. But
in the case of _Paradise Lost_ we hardly like to use illustrations. The
subject is one which the imagination rather shrinks from. At any rate, it
requires courage, and an effort to compel the mind to view such a subject
as distinctly and vividly as it views other subjects. Another peculiarity
of _Paradise Lost_ makes the difficulty even greater. It does not profess
to be a mere work of art; or rather, it claims to be by no means that,
and that only. It starts with a dogmatic aim; it avowedly intends to
‘assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to man.’
In this point of view we have always had a sympathy with the Cambridge
mathematician who has been so much abused. He said, ‘After all, _Paradise
Lost_ proves nothing;’ and various persons of poetical tastes and
temperament have been very severe on the prosaic observation. Yet,
‘after all,’ he was right. Milton professed to prove something. He was
too profound a critic—rather, he had too profound an instinct of those
eternal principles of art which criticism tries to state—not to know
that on such a subject he must prove something. He professed to deal with
the great problem of human destiny; to show why man was created, in what
kind of universe he lives, whence he came, and whither he goes. He dealt
of necessity with the greatest of subjects. He had to sketch the greatest
of objects. He was concerned with infinity and eternity even more than
with time and sense; he undertook to delineate the ways, and consequently
the character of Providence, as well as the conduct and the tendencies
of man. The essence of success in such an attempt is to satisfy the
religious sense of man; to bring home to our hearts what we know to be
true; to teach us what we have not seen; to awaken us to what we have
forgotten; to remove the ‘covering’ from all people, and ‘the veil’ that
is spread over all nations; to give us, in a word, such a conception of
things divine and human as we can accept, believe, and trust. The true
doctrine of criticism demands what Milton invites—an examination of the
degree in which the great epic attains this aim. And if, in examining it,
we find it necessary to use unusual illustrations, and plainer words than
are customary, it must be our excuse that we do not think the subject can
be made clear without them.
The defect of _Paradise Lost_ is that, after all, it is founded on a
_political_ transaction. The scene is in heaven very early in the history
of the universe, before the creation of man or the fall of Satan. We have
a description of a court. The angels,
‘By imperial summons called,’
appear
‘Under their hierarchs in orders bright:
Ten thousand thousand ensigns high advanced,
Standards and gonfalons ’twixt van and rear
Stream in the air, and for distinction serve
Of hierarchies, and orders, and degrees.’
To this assemblage ‘th’ Omnipotent’ speaks:
‘Hear, all ye Angels, progeny of light,
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Pow’rs,
Hear my decree, which unrevoked shall stand:
This day I have begot whom I declare
My only Son; and on this holy hill
Him have anointed, whom ye now behold
At my right hand; your Head I him appoint;
And by myself have sworn, to him shall bow
All knees in Heav’n, and shall confess him Lord:
Under his great vicegerent reign abide
United as one individual soul
For ever happy. Him who disobeys,
Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day,
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls
Int’ utter darkness, deep ingulph’d, his place
Ordain’d without redemption, without end.’
This act of patronage was not popular at court; and why should it have
been? The religious sense is against it. The worship which sinful men
owe to God is not transferable to lieutenants and vicegerents. The whole
scene of the court jars upon a true feeling. We seem to be reading about
some emperor of history, who admits his son to a share in the empire, who
confers on him a considerable jurisdiction, and requires officials, with
‘standards and gonfalons,’ to bow before him. The orthodoxy of Milton is
quite as questionable as his accuracy. The old Athanasian creed was not
made by persons who would allow such a picture as that of Milton to stand
before their imaginations. The generation of the Son was to them a fact
‘before all time;’ an eternal fact. There was no question in their minds
of patronage or promotion. The Son was the Son before all time, just as
the Father was the Father before all time. Milton had in such matters
a bold but not very sensitive imagination. He accepted the inevitable
materialism of biblical, and, to some extent, of all religious language
as distinct revelation. He certainly believed, in contradiction to the
old creed, that God had both ‘parts and passions.’ He imagined that earth
‘Is but the shadow of heaven and things therein,
Each to other like more than on earth is thought.’
From some passages it would seem that he actually thought of God as
having ‘the members and form’ of a man. Naturally, therefore, he would
have no toleration for the mysterious notions of time and eternity
which are involved in the traditional doctrine. We are not, however,
now concerned with Milton’s belief, but with his representation of his
creed—his picture, so to say, of it in _Paradise Lost_; still, as we
cannot but think, that picture is almost irreligious, and certainly
different from that which has been generally accepted in Christendom.
Such phrases as ‘before all time,’ ‘eternal generation,’ are doubtless
very vaguely interpreted by the mass of men; nevertheless, no sensitively
orthodox man _could_ have drawn the picture of a generation, not to say
an exaltation, _in_ time.
We shall see this more clearly by reading what follows in the poem:
‘All seemed well pleased; all seemed, but were not all.’
One of the archangels, whose name can be guessed, decidedly disapproved,
and calls a meeting, at which he explains that
‘orders and degrees
Jar not with liberty, but well consist;’
but still, that the promotion of a new person, on grounds of relationship
merely, above, even infinitely above, the old angels, with imperial
titles, was ‘a new law,’ and rather tyrannical. Abdiel,
‘than whom none with more zeal adored
The Deity, and with divine commands obeyed,’
attempts a defence:
‘Grant it thee unjust,
That equal over equals monarch reign:
Thyself, though great and glorious, dost thou count,
Or all angelic nature join’d in one,
Equal to him begotten Son? by whom
As by his Word the mighty Father made
All things, ev’n thee; and all the Spirits of Heav’n
By him created in their bright degrees,
Crown’d them with glory, and to their glory named
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Pow’rs,
Essential Pow’rs; nor by his reign obscured,
But more illustrious made; since he the Head,
One of our number thus reduced becomes;
His laws our laws; all honour to him done
Returns our own. Cease then this impious rage,
And tempt not these; but hasten to appease
Th’ incensed Father and th’ incensed Son,
While pardon may be found, in time besought.’
Yet though Abdiel’s intentions were undeniably good, his argument is
rather specious. Acting as an instrument in the process of creation would
scarcely give a valid claim to the obedience of the created being. Power
may be shown in the act, no doubt; but mere power gives no true claim to
the obedience of moral beings. It is a kind of principle of all manner
of idolatries and false religions to believe that it does so. Satan,
besides, takes issue on the fact:
‘That we were formed then, say’st thou? and the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferr’d
From Father to his Son? Strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learned.’
And we must say that the speech in which the new ruler is introduced to
the ‘thrones, dominations, princedoms, powers,’ is hard to reconcile with
Abdiel’s exposition. ‘_This day_’ he seems to have come into existence,
and could hardly have assisted at the creation of the angels, who are not
young, and who converse with one another like old acquaintances.
We have gone into this part of the subject at length, because it is the
source of the great error which pervades _Paradise Lost_. Satan is made
_interesting_. This has been the charge of a thousand orthodox and even
heterodox writers against Milton. Shelley, on the other hand, has gloried
in it; and fancied, if we remember rightly, that Milton intentionally
ranged himself on the Satanic side of the universe, just as Shelley
himself would have done, and that he wished to show the falsity of the
ordinary theology. But Milton was born an age too early for such aims,
and was far too sincere to have advocated any doctrine in a form so
indirect. He believed every word he said. He was not conscious of the
effect his teaching would produce in an age like this, when scepticism
is in the air, and when it is not possible to help looking coolly on his
delineations. Probably in our boyhood we can recollect a period when
any solemn description of celestial events would have commanded our
respect; we should not have dared to read it intelligently, to canvass
its details and see what it meant: it was a religious book; it sounded
reverential, and that would have sufficed. Something like this was the
state of mind of the seventeenth century. Even Milton probably shared in
a vague reverence for religious language. He hardly felt the moral effect
of the pictures he was drawing. His artistic instinct too, often hurries
him away. His Satan was to him, as to us, the hero of his poem. Having
commenced by making him resist on an occasion which in an earthly kingdom
would have been excusable and proper, he probably a little sympathised
with him, just as his readers do.
The interest of Satan’s character is at its height in the first two
books. Coleridge justly compared it to that of Napoleon. There is the
same pride, the same satanic ability, the same will, the same egotism.
His character seems to grow with his position. He is far finer after
his fall, in misery and suffering, with scarcely any resource except
in himself, than he was originally in heaven; at least, if Raphael’s
description of him can be trusted. No portrait which imagination or
history has drawn of a revolutionary anarch is nearly so perfect; there
is all the grandeur of the greatest human mind, and a certain infinitude
in his circumstances which humanity must ever want. Few Englishmen feel
a profound reverence for Napoleon I. There was no French alliance in
_his_ time; we have most of us some tradition of antipathy to him.
Yet hardly any Englishman can read the account of the campaign of 1814
without feeling his interest in the Emperor to be strong, and without
perhaps being conscious of a latent wish that he may succeed. Our opinion
is against him, our serious wish is of course for England; but the
imagination has a sympathy of its own, and will not give place. We read
about the great general—never greater than in that last emergency—showing
resources of genius that seem almost infinite, and that assuredly
have never been surpassed, yet vanquished, yielding to the power of
circumstances, to the combined force of adversaries, each of whom singly
he outmatches in strength, and all of whom together he surpasses in
majesty and in mind. Something of the same sort of interest belongs to
the Satan of the first two books of _Paradise Lost_. We know that he will
be vanquished; his name is not a recommendation. Still we do not imagine
distinctly the minds by which he is to be vanquished; we do not take the
same interest in them that we do in him; our sympathies, our fancy, are
on his side.
Perhaps much of this was inevitable; yet what a defect it is! especially
what a defect in Milton’s own view, and looked at with the stern realism
with which he regarded it! Suppose that the author of evil in the
universe were the most attractive being in it; suppose that the source
of all sin were the origin of all interest to us! We need not dwell upon
this.
As we have said, much of this was difficult to avoid, if indeed it
could be avoided in dealing with such a theme. Even Milton shrank, in
some measure, from delineating the Divine character. His imagination
evidently halts when it is required to perform that task. The more
delicate imagination of our modern world would shrink still more. Any
person who will consider what such an attempt must end in, will find
his nerves quiver. But by a curiously fatal error, Milton has selected
for delineation exactly that part of the Divine nature which is most
beyond the reach of the human faculties, and which is also, when we try
to describe our fancy of it, the least effective to our minds. He has
made God _argue_. Now the procedure of the Divine mind from truth to
truth must ever be incomprehensible to us; the notion, indeed, of His
proceeding at all, is a contradiction: to some extent, at least, it is
inevitable that we should use such language, but we know it is in reality
inapplicable. A long train of reasoning in such a connection is so out
of place as to be painful; and yet Milton has many. He relates a series
of family prayers in heaven, with sermons afterwards, which are very
tedious. Even Pope was shocked at the notion of Providence talking like
‘a school-divine.’ And there is the still worse error, that if you once
attribute reasoning to Him, subsequent logicians may discover that He
does not reason very well.
Another way in which Milton has contrived to strengthen our interest in
Satan, is the number and insipidity of the good angels. There are old
rules as to the necessity of a supernatural machinery for an epic poem,
worth some fraction of the paper on which they are written, and derived
from the practice of Homer, who believed his gods and goddesses to be
real beings, and would have been rather harsh with a critic who called
them machinery. These rules had probably an influence with Milton, and
induced him to manipulate these serious angels more than he would have
done otherwise. They appear to be excellent administrators with very
little to do; a kind of grand chamberlains with wings, who fly down
to earth and communicate information to Adam and Eve. They have no
character; they are essentially messengers, merely conductors, so to say,
of the providential will: no one fancies that they have an independent
power of action; they seem scarcely to have minds of their own. No effect
can be more unfortunate. If the struggle of Satan had been with Deity
directly, the natural instincts of religion would have been awakened; but
when an angel possessed of mind is contrasted with angels possessed only
of wings, we sympathise with the former.
In the first two books, therefore, our sympathy with Milton’s Satan is
great; we had almost said unqualified. The speeches he delivers are of
well-known excellence. Lord Brougham, no contemptible judge of emphatic
oratory, has laid down, that if a person had not an opportunity of access
to the great Attic master-pieces, he had better choose these for a model.
What is to be regretted about the orator is, that he scarcely acts up to
his sentiments. ‘Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,’ is, at
any rate, an audacious declaration. But he has no room for exhibiting
similar audacity in action. His offensive career is limited. In the
nature of the subject there was scarcely any opportunity for the fallen
archangel to display in the detail of his operations the surpassing
intellect with which Milton has endowed him. He goes across chaos, gets
into a few physical difficulties; but these are not much. His grand aim
is the conquest of our first parents; and we are at once struck with the
enormous inequality of the conflict. Two beings just created, without
experience, without guile, without knowledge of good and evil, are
expected to contend with a being on the delineation of whose powers every
resource of art and imagination, every subtle suggestion, every emphatic
simile, has been lavished. The idea in every reader’s mind is, and must
be, not surprise that our first parents should yield, but wonder that
Satan should not think it beneath him to attack them. It is as if an army
should invest a cottage.
We have spoken more of theology than we intended; and we need not say how
much the monstrous inequalities attributed to the combatants affect our
estimate of the results of the conflict. The state of man is what it is,
because the defenceless Adam and Eve of Milton’s imagination yielded to
the nearly all-powerful Satan whom he has delineated. Milton has in some
sense invented this difficulty; for in the book of Genesis there is no
such inequality. The serpent may be subtler than any beast of the field;
but he is not necessarily subtler or cleverer than man. So far from
Milton having justified the ways of God to man, he has loaded the common
theology with a new encumbrance.
We may need refreshment after this discussion; and we cannot find it
better than in reading a few remarks of Eve.
‘That day I oft remember, when from sleep
I first awaked, and found myself reposed
Under a shade on flow’rs, much wond’ring where
And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.
Not distant far from thence a murm’ring sound
Of waters issued from a cave, and spread
Into a liquid plain, then stood unmoved
Pure as th’ expanse of Heav’n.... I thither went
With unexperienced thought, and laid me down
On the green bank, to look into the clear
Smooth lake, that to me seem’d another sky.
As I bent down to look, just opposite
A shape within the wat’ry gleam appear’d,
Bending to look on me. I started back;
It started back: but pleased I soon return’d;
Pleased it return’d as soon with answ’ring looks
Of sympathy and love: there I had fix’d
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warn’d me. What thou seest,
What there thou seest, fair Creature, is thyself;
With thee it came and goes: but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow stays
Thy coming, and thy soft embraces, he
Whose image thou art; him thou shalt enjoy
Inseparably thine: to him shalt bear
Multitudes like thyself, and thence be call’d
Mother of Human Race. What could I do
But follow straight, invisibly thus led?
Till I espy’d thee, fair indeed and tall
Under a platan; yet methought less fair,
Less winning soft, less amiably mild,
Than that smooth wat’ry image. Back I turn’d:
Thou following cry’dst aloud, Return, fair Eve;
Whom fly’st thou?’
Eve’s character, indeed, is one of the most wonderful efforts of the
human imagination. She is a kind of abstract woman; essentially a
typical being; an official ‘mother of all living.’ Yet she is a real
interesting woman, not only full of delicacy and sweetness, but with all
the undefinable fascination, the charm of personality, which such typical
characters hardly ever have. By what consummate miracle of wit this charm
of individuality is preserved, without impairing the general idea which
is ever present to us, we cannot explain, for we do not know.
Adam is far less successful. He has good hair,—‘hyacinthine locks’ that
‘from his parted forelock manly hung;’ a ‘fair large front’ and ‘eye
sublime;’ but he has little else that we care for. There is, in truth,
no opportunity of displaying manly virtues, even if he possessed them.
He has only to yield to his wife’s solicitations, which he does. Nor are
we sure that he does it well. He is very tedious; he indulges in sermons
which are good; but most men cannot but fear that so delightful a being
as Eve must have found him tiresome. She steps away, however, and goes to
sleep at some of the worst points.