_PARADISE LOST_
_Paradise Lost_ is in several ways one of the most wonderful of the
works of man. And not least in the circumstances of its composition.
The Restoration found Milton blind, and to blindness it added
disappointment, defeat, obscurity, and fear of the public or private
revenge of his victorious enemies. Yet out of such a situation as this
the most indomitable will that ever inhabited the soul of a poet
produced three great poems, every one of which would have been enough
to give him a place among the poets who belong to the whole world.
The first and greatest of these was, of course, _Paradise Lost_.
Unlike many great poems, but like all the great epics of the world, it
obtained recognition at once. It sold well for a work of its bulk and
seriousness, and it received the highest praise from those whose word
was and deserved to be law in questions of literature. Throughout the
eighteenth {143} century its fame and popularity increased. Literary
people read it because Dryden and Addison and all the established
authorities recommended it to them, and also because those of them
whose turn for literature was a reality found that these
recommendations were confirmed by their own experience. But the poem
also appealed to another and a larger public. To the serious world it
appeared to be a religious book and as such enjoyed the great advantage
of being thought fit to be read on the only day in the week on which
many people were accustomed to read at all. This distinction grew in
importance with the progress of the Wesleyan revival and with it grew
the number of Milton's admirers. When Sunday readers were tired of the
Bible they were apt to turn to _Paradise Lost_. How many of them did
so is proved by the influence Milton has had on English religious
beliefs. To this day if an ordinary man is asked to give his
recollections of the story of Adam and Eve he is sure to put Milton as
well as Genesis into them. For instance, the Miltonic Satan is almost
sure to take the place of the scriptural serpent. The influence Milton
has had is unfortunately also seen in less satisfactory ways. He
claimed to justify the ways of God to men. Perhaps he did so to his
own mind {144} which, in these questions, was curiously matter-of-fact,
literal, legal and unmystical. He was determined to explain everything
and provide for all contingencies by his legal instrument of the
government of the world: and he did so after the cold fashion of a
lawyer defining rights on each side, and assuming that the stronger
party will exert his strength. So far as his genius made his readers
accept his views of the relation between God and man it cannot be
denied that he did a great injury to English religious thought.
Everybody who stops to reflect now feels that the attitude of his God
to the rebel angels and to man is hard and unforgiving, below the
standard of any decent human morality, far below the Christian charity
of St. Paul. The atmosphere of the poem when it deals with these
matters is often suggestive of a tyrant's attorney-general whose
business is to find plausible excuses for an arbitrary despot. Milton
had his share in creating that bad sort of fear of God which is always
appearing as the thorn in the theological rose-bed of the eighteenth
century, and, later on, becomes the nightmare of the Evangelical
revival. None of these conceptions, the capricious despot, the
remorseless creditor, the Judge whose {145} invariable sentence is hell
fire, have proved easy to get rid of: and part of their permanence may
be laid to the account of _Paradise Lost_.
But Milton, who is like the Bible in so many ways, is not least like it
in his happy unconsciousness of his own immorality. The writer of the
story of Samuel and Agag, or that of Rebekah and Jacob, was perfectly
unaware that he was immoral: and so was Milton in _Paradise Lost_: and
so also and for that very reason were the majority of their readers.
Happily most of us when we read a book that makes for righteousness are
like children reading Shakspeare, who simply do not notice the things
that make their elders nervous. It is not that we refuse the evil and
choose the good: we are quite unaware of the presence of the evil at
all. No doubt that sometimes makes its influence the more powerful
because unperceived: and for this kind of subtle influence both Milton
and the Old Testament have to answer. But with many happy natures an
escape is made by the process of selection: and, as they manage to
acquire the God-fearing righteousness of the Old Testament without its
ferocity, so they manage to receive from Milton his high emotional
consciousness of life as the glad and {146} free service of God and to
ignore altogether his intellectual description of it as a very
one-sided bargain with a very dangerous Potentate.
Nor must Milton be made, as he often is, to bear more blame in this
matter than he deserves. Divine tyranny with hell as its sanction was
no invention of his. The Catholic Church, as all her art shows, had
always made full use of it. And the new horror of his own day, the
Calvinist predestination, he expressly and frequently repudiates. The
free will of man is the very base of his system. In it men may suffer,
as it seems to us, out of all proportion to their guilt; but at least
they suffer only for deeds done of their own free will.
But the true answer to the charge of corrupting English religious
thought so often brought against Milton is that while the harm he did
must be admitted it was far outweighed by the good. It could not be
for nothing that generations of readers, as they turned over Milton's
pages, found themselves listening to the voice of a man to whom God's
presence was the most constant of realities, the most active of daily
and hourly influences: who, from his youth up, visibly glowed with an
ardent desire for the service of God and man: who, whatever his faults
were, had nothing {147} base or mean about him, habitually thought of
life as a thing to be lived on the heights, and by his exalted spirit
and unconquerable will enlarges for those who know him the whole
conception of what a human being may achieve. It could not be for
nothing that on the topmost heights of English poetry stood a man who
could scarcely finish a single one of his poems without some soaring
ascent to heaven and heavenly things: whose most characteristic
utterances for himself are such lines as
"Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven";
or--
"As ever in my great Task-Master's eye:"
and for others as well as for himself such a hope as that which
concludes his _At a Solemn Music_--
"O, may we soon again renew that song,
And keep in tune with Heaven, till God ere long
To his celestial concert us unite,
To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of light!"
_Tu habe Deum prae oculis tuis_, says the author of _The Imitation_:
"Have thou God {148} before Thine eyes." And so by his poetry and by
his life says Milton. The influence of such a man, whatever the faults
of his intellectual creed, can hardly on the whole have been anything
but a good one, either on those who heard his living voice or on those
who for two hundred years have caught what they may of it from the
printed pages of his books.
So much it seemed worth while to say in defence of Milton whose sins in
these matters have always been exaggerated by his ecclesiastical and
political opponents. But the effect, good or bad, which a great poem
produces on opinion is a mere by-product: its essential business is
nothing of that sort but the production in the minds of competent
readers of the pleasure proper to a great work of the imagination. And
this is the criterion by which the _Paradise Lost_, like every other
work of the kind, must primarily be judged.
The poem, as we have it, is the long delayed result of an intention
formed in Milton's strangely ripe and resolute youth. Before he was
thirty he spoke openly to his friends of writing a great poem which
was, as he shortly afterwards had no hesitation in telling the public,
to be of the sort that the world does not willingly let die. At first
the subject was to have been the Arthurian legend which {149} poets of
all ages have found so fruitful. But that was soon abandoned,
apparently for the reason that a little examination of the authorities
convinced the poet that it was not historically true. This fact has a
literary as well as a biographical importance. Great artist as Milton
was, he seems to have confused truth of art with truth of fact. He
preferred a Biblical subject because it was his belief that every
statement in the Bible was literally true. This belief, except from
the emotional fervour it inspired in him, was a positive disadvantage
to him as a poet. It circumscribed his freedom of invention, it
compelled him to argue that the action of his drama as he found it was
already reasonable and probable instead of letting his imagination work
upon it and make it so; it made him aim too often at producing belief
instead of delight in his hearers. This, of course, had obvious
drawbacks as soon as people ceased to regard the first chapters of
Genesis as a literal prose record of events which actually happened.
For a hundred and fifty years many people read the _Paradise Lost_ and
supposed themselves to be enjoying the poem when what they were really
enjoying was simply the pleasure of reading their own beliefs expressed
in magnificent verse. In the same way many {150} religious people
imagine that they enjoy early Italian art when they in fact enjoy
nothing but its religious sentiment. But neither art nor poetry can
live permanently on these extraneous supports. So when less interest
came to be felt in Adam and Eve there were fewer readers for _Paradise
Lost_. But the readers who were lost were not those that matter. For
it is a complete mistake to say, as is sometimes said, that the fact
that the story of _Paradise Lost_ was once believed and now is so no
longer is fatal to the interest of the poem. That is not so for the
right reader: or at least, so far as it is so, it is Milton's fault and
not that of his subject. The _Aeneid_ loses no more by our disbelief
in the historical reality of Aeneas or Dido than _Othello_ loses by our
ignorance whether such a person ever existed. The difficulty, so far
as there is one, is not that many readers disbelieve the story of
Milton's poem: it is that he himself passionately believed it. If he
had been content with offering us his poem as an imaginative creation,
if he had not again and again insisted on its historical truth and
theological importance, no changes in the views of his readers, no
merely intellectual or historical criticism, could have touched him
more than they can Virgil. As a poet he is {151} perfectly
invulnerable by any such attacks: it is only so far as he deserted
poetry for the pseudo-scientific matter-of-fact world of prose that he
fails and irritates us. All the poetry of _Paradise Lost_ is as true
to-day as when it was first written: it is only the science and logic
and philosophy, in a word the prose, which has proved liable to decay.
There is always that difference between the works of the imagination
and those of the intellect. A hundred theories about the Greek legends
of the Centaurs or the Amazons may establish themselves, have a vogue,
undergo criticism and finally be exploded as absurdities: that is the
common fate of intellectual products after they have done their work.
But the Centaurs of the Parthenon and the Amazons of the Mausoleum are
immortally independent of all changes of opinion.
This is the first disadvantage of the subject chosen by Milton, that he
believed in it too much. The fact that he did so and thought its prose
truth all-important at once limited the freedom of his imagination and
diverted him from the single-minded pursuit of the proper end of
poetry. He was evidently quite unaware of this drawback and it has
been little, if at all, noticed by his critics. {152} On the other
hand, he was perfectly aware of what would appear to other people to be
the disadvantages involved in the choice of a subject so unlike those
of previous epics. He speaks more than once of the novelty of this
theme, the best-known allusion being the beautiful introduction to Book
IX., in which he describes his subject, that of the human sin and the
divine anger
"That brought into this World a world of woe,
Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery,
Death's harbinger:"
and contrasts it with those other sins and other angers on which Homer
and Virgil built their poems. But he is not afraid of the contrast: he
thinks it is all to his own advantage--
"Sad task! yet argument
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;
Or Neptune's ire or Juno's, that so long
Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea's son:
If answerable style I can obtain
Of my celestial Patroness who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated verse,
{153}
Since first this subject for heroic song
Pleased me, long choosing and beginning late,
Not sedulous by nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only argument
Heroic deemed--"
The whole passage is too long for quotation. Indeed, as we have
already had occasion to notice, it is one of the difficulties of
discussing Milton that quotation is almost always compelled to do him
an injury by giving less than the whole of any one of those
long-sustained flights of music in which he rises and falls, turns to
the left hand or the right, as his imagination leads him, but always on
unflagging wings of undoubted and easy security. But enough has been
quoted here to illustrate the poet's direct challenge of Homer and
Virgil in this matter of subject. He was perfectly well aware that he
was making an entirely new departure, not only from the subject of the
ancients but also, as is shown by his detailed condemnation of "tilting
furniture, emblazoned shields" and the rest, from those of such poets
as Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. He did it deliberately, with open eyes.
And there is no doubt that he was at least partly right. To this day
he and Dante, in their different ways, enjoy a common advantage {154}
over Homer, and still more over a poet mainly of fancy like Tasso, in
the fact that their subject, that of the meaning and destiny of human
life, is one in itself of profound and absorbing interest to all
thinking men and women. Even if their treatment of it be in some parts
and for some people unsatisfying or irritating they at least have
started with that advantage. A dangerous advantage because, as we have
seen in Milton's case and might also see in Dante's, tempting them to
go outside the pure business of their art; but still in itself an
advantage. Milton was probably also right in feeling that the fighting
element in the old poets had been greatly overdone. The most
interesting parts of the _Iliad_ for us to-day are not battles, but
such things as the parting of Hector and Andromache and the scene
between Priam and Achilles. Where the fighting still moves us, as in
the case of Hector and Achilles, or Virgil's Turrus and Pallas, it is
mainly for the sake of an accompanying human and moral interest
altogether above its own. The miscellaneous details of weapons and
wounds which evidently once gave so much pleasure are now equally
tedious to us whether it is Homer or Malory or Morris who narrates
them. They can no longer give interest; they can only receive it {155}
from such intrinsic interest as may belong to the combatants.
So far Milton had some justification for preferring his own subject to
those of Homer and Virgil. But, so far as we can judge, he was
entirely unconscious of its disadvantages: as well of those which it
shares with the _Iliad_ and _Aeneid_ as of those peculiar to itself.
Of the former, the most conspicuous is that inevitably involved in the
introduction of divine persons into the action. Everybody feels that
Homer's gods constantly spoil the interest and probability of his
story, while very rarely enhancing its dignity. One never understands
why they can do so much, and yet do no more, to affect the action.
Their interference is always irritating, generally immoral, and on the
whole ineffective. Their omnipotence is occasional and irrational:
they are limited in the use of it by each other, and all alike, even
Zeus, are limited by a shadowy Law or Fate in the background. Their
interventions only make the struggle seem unfair or unreal, and we are
glad to be rid of them.
Milton is still more deeply involved in the same difficulty. All his
personages except two are superhuman. It is his great disadvantage as
compared with Dante that the {156} main lines of his story are all
scriptural and therefore outside the influence of his invention, that
his actors are divine, angelic, or sinless beings, and therefore such
as can provide little of the uncertainty of issue or variety of temper
and experience which are the stuff of drama. He is hampered by having
constantly to assert the true free will and responsibility of Satan for
his rebellion and of Adam for his disobedience, even to the extent of
putting argumentative soliloquies confessing it into their own mouths.
So far he succeeds: both are felt to be free in their fatal choice.
But the war in heaven can arouse no interest because its issue is
obviously foregone, and much of the action of the rebel angels
necessarily conflicts with the frequent statements that they can do
nothing except as permitted by their Conqueror. At one moment they
know their powerlessness, at another they hope for revenge and victory.
These are grave difficulties which deprive large parts of the poem of
that illusion of probability or truth without which poetry cannot do
its proper work. A further difficulty, from which ancient poets were
free, arises from the purely intellectual and spiritual nature of the
Christian God. It is as if Homer had had to deal with the divine unity
of Plato instead of {157} with his family of loving, quarrelling,
fighting gods and goddesses. A being who is Incomprehensible as well
as Almighty and Omniscient can hardly be an actor in a poem written for
human readers. The gods in the _Iliad_ shock us because they are too
like ourselves: Milton's God may sometimes shock us too: but He is more
often in danger of fatiguing us by His utter remoteness from our
experience, by His dwelling not merely, not indeed so often as we could
wish, in clouds and darkness, but in a world of theological mysteries
which necessarily lose more in sublimity than they gain in clearness by
being perpetually discussed and explained. Dante's poem is at least as
full as Milton's of obscure theological doctrines and attempts at their
explanation; but, either by virtue of the plan of the _Divina Commedia_
or by some finer instinct of reserve and reverence in the poet, we
never find ourselves in Dante as we do in Milton exercising our
critical faculties, whether we will or no, on the very words of God
Himself. If we reject an argument as unconvincing or fallacious, it is
on Virgil or Statius, Beatrice or Thomas Aquinas, that we sit in
judgment. The Divine Mind, intensely and constantly felt as its
presence is from the first canto of the poem to the last, is yet felt
always as from behind a {158} curtain which can never be raised for the
sight of mortal eyes.
Still, it must be admitted that, impossible as was the task of making
the Infinite and Eternal an actor and speaker in a human poem, Milton's
very failure in it is sublime. His prodigious powers are nowhere more
wonderfully displayed than in trying to do what no one, not even
himself, could do. The second half of his third book, for instance, is
far more interesting than the first, but it may well be doubted whether
the mere fact of his accomplishing the first at all is not a greater
proof of his poetic genius. Nowhere does that unfailing certainty of
style, in which he has scarcely an equal among the poets of the whole
world, stand him in such astonishing stead as in these difficult
dialogues in heaven.
"Father, thy word is passed, Man shall find grace;
And shall Grace not find means, that finds her way,
The speediest of thy wingèd messengers.
To visit all thy creatures, and to all
Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought?
Happy for Man, so coming;"
On the side of invention there is nothing remarkable; but, on the side
of art, what a {159} divine graciousness there is in its tone and
manner; what incomparable skill in the management of the verse! Note
the quiet monosyllabic beginning, taking note, as it were, of the
decree of mercy, and then the expansion of it, the loving voice
pressing forward in freer movement as it confidently proclaims the
happy results that cannot fail to follow. And observe the peculiarly
Miltonic interlacing of the whole, line leading to line and word to
word: the "grace" of the first line giving the key to the "grace" of
the second, the repeated "find" of the second line and the repeated
"all" of the fourth, the "comes" of the fifth line leading on to the
"coming" of the sixth. To make a list of such details as these is not
to explain the effect which they produce; that is the secret of
Milton's genius. So is that cunning variety in the rhythm of the
verses: three pauses in the first line, two in the second, only one in
the third: the principal pause after the sixth syllable in both the
first two lines, and yet the words and their accents so artfully varied
that not the slightest monotony is felt; the suggestion of easy flight
in the smooth unbroken movement of the third line--
"The speediest of thy wingèd messengers."
{160} Milton knew that an utterance of this kind, in which the Bible
had anticipated him a hundred times, admitted of no novelty in itself;
and his reverence forbade him to give his invention free rein in these
high matters. But what he could do he did. The matter of the speech
he leaves as he found it; what the Son says every reader has heard
before: but after this manner he has not heard it. In passing through
Milton's hands all has been transformed into a new birth by the
consummate craftsmanship of a supreme artist.
Thus the poet escapes, as far as it was possible to escape, from the
difficulties created for him by his acceptance of divine Persons as
actors in his drama. But the escape could only be partial. It is true
that as Johnson says, "whatever be done the poet is always great": but
greatness of style often struggles in vain against the incongruity of a
verbose and argumentative Deity. Such gods as Virgil's Venus and Juno
may hurl rhetorical speeches at each other without much ill effect, but
we feel that it was a lack of the sense of mystery in Milton that kept
him from realizing that the one God, Creator, Father and Judge of all,
cannot with fitness debate or argue: He can only decree. "Let thy
words be few"; that is even truer, we {161} instinctively feel, of
words put into His mouth than of words addressed to Him. Milton's God
suffers even more than Shakspeare's Ghosts from a garrulity which
destroys the sense of the awe properly belonging to a supernatural
being; and the grim laughter of the Miltonic heaven is in its different
way even more fatal to that awe than the Jack-in-the-box appearances
and disappearances of the dead Hamlet and Banquo.
Such are some of the difficulties, in part overcome by the poet and in
part unperceived, inherent in the subject of _Paradise Lost_. One
more, the greatest of all, remains. Poetry is a human art and its
subject is human life. In the story Milton set himself to tell there
are only two human figures; and how can they, living as they do in
isolated perfection and sinlessness, without children or friends,
without learning or art or business, without hopes or fears or
memories, without the experience of disease or the expectation of
death, and therefore without the joy, as we know it, of life and
health, how can they provide material for a poem that can interest
beings so utterly unlike them as ourselves? The answer is twofold. It
is partly that they do fail to provide that material. The _Paradise
Lost_ has in fact far less of ordinary human life in {162} it, far less
variety of action, than the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. This was probably
unavoidable but it was probably also Milton's deliberate intention. It
was not his nature to care much about the small doings of ordinary
people in everyday life. The line which he most often repeats in
_Paradise Lost_ is the very opposite of those which are repeated so
often in the _Iliad_, verses of no noticeable poetic quality, just
doing their plain duty of linking two speeches or two paragraphs
together: such as--
_hos oi men toiauta pros allêlous agoreuon_
What Milton chooses for repetition is, on the other hand, one of his
stateliest lines, the magnificent--
"Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers."
The choice is characteristic of the man. His "natural port," as
Johnson well said, "is gigantic loftiness," and his end to "raise the
thoughts above sublunary cares or pleasures." So it may well be that
this disadvantage of his subject did not weigh with him as much as it
would have done with most poets. But he was not altogether blind to
it, and the amazing skill he shows in partly getting over it is the
other half of the answer to {163} the question asked just now. His
action up to the moment of the Fall is the inhuman one of a few days in
hell, heaven, and a small sinless spot of earth: and the Fall does not
increase the number of actors. Yet into the mouths of this tiny group
of persons Milton may be said to have brought all the history of the
world and all its geography, art, science and learning, the Jew, the
Christian and the Pagan, Greek philosophy and Roman politics, classical
myth, mediaeval romance, and even the contemporary life of his own
experience. This is partly done, as Virgil had done it, by the way of
a prophecy of future ages: but to a much greater extent by the way of
similes which are more elaborate and learned in Milton than in any
poet. By their assistance he gives rest to the imagination exhausted
by the sublimity of heaven and hell, bringing it home to its own
familiar earth, to scenes whose charm, unlike that of Eden or
Pandemonium, lies not, in the wonder their strangeness excites but in
the old habits, experiences and memories which they recall. So, after
the strain of the great debate with which the second book opens, he
soothes us with the beautiful simile of the evening after storm--
"Thus they their doubtful consultations dark
Ended, rejoicing in their matchless Chief;
{164}
As, when from mountain-tops the dusky clouds
Ascending, while the North-wind sleeps, o'erspread
Heaven's cheerful face, the louring element
Scowls o'er the darkened landskip snow or shower,
If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet,
Extend his evening beam, the fields revive,
The birds their notes renew, and bleating herds
Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings."
Note how large and general it is. Its method is the classical appeal
to universal knowledge and feeling, not the romantic method of
strangeness of sentiment and detailed particularity of truth. Matthew
Arnold once recommended those who cannot read Greek or Latin to read
Milton as a far better key than any translation can be to the secret of
the greatness of the ancient poets. This is the truth: and not only
for the reason on which Arnold laid just stress--the "sure and flawless
perfection of rhythm and diction" in which, as he truly says, Milton is
unique among English poets: but also for his classical habit of mind,
for his central sanity, for the sureness with which he makes his call
on the thoughts and emotions, not of eccentric {165} or exceptional
individuals, but of the men and women of all times and all nations.
Yet he can use his similes, as we said, to introduce the life of his
own day and still generally carry his classical manner with him. So in
the following simile he begins with the Homeric wolf and ends with the
Roman and Laudian clergy. Satan has leapt over the wall of Paradise:
and the simile begins--
"As when a prowling wolf,
Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,
Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve
In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,
Leaps o'er the fence with ease into the fold:
Or as a thief bent to unhoard the cash
Of some rich burgher, whose substantial doors,
Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault,
In at the window climbs, or o'er the tiles:
So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold:
So since into his Church lewd hirelings climb."
The last line smacks perhaps more of the angry pamphleteer than fits
with classical sanity: but how admirably the London citizen's house
gives vivid reality to the beautiful remoteness of the wolf which
English shepherds had long forgotten to fear; how the recollection,
present to every reader's {166} mind, of that very same simile in the
Gospel of St. John, prepares the way for its religious application
here: how the attention is seized by that magnificent line of arresting
mono-syllables, each heavy with the sense of fate--
"So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold!"
It used to be said that Milton uses mono-syllables to express slowness
of action. But that is notably not the case here. And in the main it
seems that he uses them, as Shakspeare often did, for expressing the
solemnity of grave crisis, or for deep emotion, when anything fanciful,
ornate or verbose would be fatal to the simplicity, akin to silence,
which all men find fitting at great moments. So Shakspeare makes Kent
say at Lear's death--
"Vex not his ghost; O let him pass! he hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer."
And so Milton uses these tremendous mono-syllables, like a bell tolling
into the silence of midnight, to force our attention on the doom of all
the world that took its beginning when Satan entered Paradise--
{167}
"So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold."
So again, with less solemnity as befitting a less awful person but
still with arresting and delaying emphasis, he records the actual
eating of the fatal apple--
"she plucked, she eat:
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe,
That all was lost."
So he suspends the flow of the richest and most elaborate of his
similes by the slow-moving monosyllables of
"which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world:"
So he strikes the deepest note, beyond all politics, of his debate in
hell:
"And that must end us; that must be our cure--
To be no more:"
So again he closes the first Act of _Paradise Regained_ with a verse of
solitary awe--
"And now wild beasts come forth the woods to roam."
{168}
But to return to the similes. Milton uses them, as we have seen, to
introduce things familiar and contemporary into the remote and majestic
theme of his poem. But he also uses them to introduce the whole world
into Eden, all later history into the beginning of the world, all the
varied glories of art and war, poetry and legend, with which his memory
was stored, into an action which was only partly human and provided no
scope at all for any human activities except of the most primitive
order. So the palace of Hell is, he tells us, something far beyond the
magnificence of "Babylon, or great Alcairo"; and the army of rebel
angels far exceeds those
"That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each side
Mixed with auxiliar gods; and what resounds
In fable or romance of Uther's son,
Begirt with British and Armoric knights;
And all who since, baptized or infidel,
Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban,
Damasco, or Marocco or Trebisond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore,
When Charlemain with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabbia."
So, in another of his returns to those tales and fancies of the Middle
Age which, in spite {169} of his intellectual and moral rejection of
their falsity, yet always moved him to unusual beauty of verse, he
compares the dwarfed rebels of Hell to the
"faery elves,
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the Earth
Wheels her pale course; they, on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds."
So Eve at her gardening recalls Pales, or Pomona or
"Ceres in her prime,
Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove."
And so, in an earlier book, the beauty of Paradise itself, too great to
be directly told, is, like the splendour of Pandemonium, conveyed to us
by the most perfect of those negative similes which, forced upon Milton
by the narrow bounds of his story, are perhaps the most distinctive of
all the glories of _Paradise Lost_. It is too long to quote in full:
but a few lines may be given: and they must include the first four, one
of which has just {170} been quoted, verses of such amazing beauty
that, if Milton could be represented by four lines, these might well be
the chosen four--
"Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers.
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and the inspired
Castalian spring, might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive."
But it is time to leave Milton's similes, though similes play a more
important part in _Paradise Lost_ than in any other epic. Indeed their
necessary absence is a great element in the comparative dulness of the
books given over to the discourses of Raphael and Michael. A single
chapter in a little book of this kind can only deal with one or two
aspects of so great a subject as _Paradise Lost_. That being so, it is
best, perhaps, to touch on points in which Milton stands pre-eminent or
unique. The similes are one of these. Another is the splendour of the
Miltonic speeches. It is one of the defects of _Paradise Lost_ that
its actors are seldom soldiers whom all the ages agree to admire, and
often theologians whom all fear or dislike, or politicians whom all
obey {171} and despise. Yet how magnificently Milton turns this
weakness into a strength! His speeches have not the eternal humanity
of Homer's: but as oratory, above all as debating oratory, they have no
poetic rivals outside the drama. The poet who had lived through the
Long Parliament and the trial of Strafford knew the art of speech as
Homer could not know it. It may seem strange to us that the political
struggle of his day affected him so much more than the military; but
the fact is so. Pym and Hampden are felt in _Paradise Lost_ far more
than Fairfax or Cromwell. The speeches of the second book could only
have been written by the citizen of a free state who had lived through
a crisis in its fortunes. Other speeches in the poem--that
incomparable one of Eve to Adam in the fourth book, "Sweet is the
breath of morn," those that pass between Eve and Adam after the Fall
and Adam's Job-like lament in the tenth book--have a purer human beauty
about them: but of the oratory of debate no poem in the world provides
a more magnificent display than the second book of _Paradise Lost_.
The debate is a real debate. The opening of Moloch, "My sentence is
for open war," would be instantly effective in any Parliament in the
world. It {172} rouses attention by its directness, it compels
adherence as only courage can. To undo its effect Belial has to employ
the most subtle of all oratorical arts, that of accepting the arguments
which he dare not directly combat and then gradually turning them to
the confusion of their author. So he and Mammon bring the assembly
completely round to the mood of ease and acquiescence. Then follows
the tremendous figure of Beelzebub, an aged Chatham or Gladstone, who
"in his rising seemed
A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat and public care;
And princely counsel in his face yet shone,
Majestic though in ruin. Sage he stood,
With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies; his look
Drew audience and attention still as night,
Or summer's noon-tide air."
Yet Milton's consciousness of the situation as it really would be is
such that Beelzebub does not dare to revive Moloch's defeated policy of
war. To talk of fighting to cowed rebels who have just been taught the
too pleasant lesson of the folly of further resistance would have been
useless. So he begins by telling them that the ease promised to them
is a delusion: they may submit, but submission {173} will never win
them peace, or deliver them from their victorious enemy. Peace, then,
they cannot have; and must have war: but it need not be open or
dangerous: craft has its weapons as well as force: "what if we find
Some easier enterprise" than the perilous folly of assaulting heaven?
Such a sketch may just serve to show that the great debate is a living
thing in which we feel the temper of the audience submitting to the
successive orators and in its turn reacting upon them. Another proof
of the actuality of Milton's oratory is the way in which it can be
quoted.
"I give not Heaven for lost;"
"Which, if not victory, is yet revenge:"
"What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome:"
"what peace can we return
But, to our power, hostility and hate?"
"This would surpass
Common revenge, and interrupt his joy
In our confusion:"
{174}
"Advise if this be worth
Attempting, or to sit in darkness here
Hatching vain empires:"
"What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not, what resolution from despair:"
"on whom we send
The weight of all and our last hope relies:"
"This enterprise
None shall partake with me."
All these have been or could well be hurled by contending
Parliamentarians across the table of the House of Commons, often with a
fine irony, the Miltonic magnificence emphasizing the pettiness of the
ordinary political squabbles. But, of course, the theological
questions which are at the root of Milton's debate make many of the
arguments inapplicable to politics: indeed, what is probably the most
remembered passage in all the speeches has nothing to do with social or
political activities but draws its poignant interest from the secret
thoughts that visit the hearts of men when they are most alone--
"And that must end us; that must be our cure,
To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
{175}
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense and motion?"
Here we obviously go outside the dramatic probabilities: it is no
longer Belial who is speaking: it is the voice of a highly cultivated
and intellectual human being with all Greek thought behind him; it is,
in short, Milton himself. The whole poem is full of such
autobiographical confessional passages, either indirect like this or
open and undisguised like the great introductions to the first, third,
seventh and ninth books. This constant intervention of the poet in his
epic is one of the originalities of _Paradise Lost_, and certainly not
the least successful. The passages which are due to it have been
criticized as irregularities or superfluities, but, as Johnson justly
asked, "superfluities so beautiful who would take away?" Homer may be
said never to allow us to do more than guess obscurely at what he
himself was or thought or felt: so leaving room for the follies of the
criticism which supposes him to be a kind of limited company of poets.
Virgil spoke directly to his readers at least once in the _Aeneid_, in
the most magnificent, and {176} most magnificently fulfilled, of all
the poetic promises of eternal fame--
"Fortunati ambo! Si quid mea carmina possunt
Nulla dies unquam memori vos eximet aevo
Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit."
But it is less in such a direct intervention as this than in the whole
tone and temper of his poem that he reveals to us his delicate and
beautiful nature. Milton confesses himself in both ways. His high
seriousness, his proud and resolute will, his grave sadness at the
folly of mankind, are interwoven in the whole of his story. Then in
the speeches he will often, as in this of Belial, forget altogether who
is speaking and where and when, forget Satan and Adam, Eden and Hell,
and make his human escape to his own time and country and to himself.
The extreme limitations of his subject made something of this kind
almost necessary. When all had been done that simile and prophecy
could do to bring in the life of men and women as Milton's readers knew
it there still remained the difficulty that Adam and his angel visitors
must talk, and that before the Fall there was almost {177} nothing for
them to talk about. So they constantly talk as if they had all history
behind them and the world's processes were to them, as to us, old and
familiar things. "War seemed a civil game To this uproar," says
Raphael, as if he were fresh from reading Livy or Gibbon and had all
the wars of Europe and Asia in his memory. Often Milton calls
attention, as it were, to his own inconsistencies, putting in an
apology like that of Michael when he talks to Adam about Hamath and
Hermon--
"Things by their names I call though yet unnamed;"
but more often he leaves them unexplained, perhaps not even noticing
them himself. These difficulties are seen at their worst in the very
earthly geography of heaven and its very unheavenly military
operations: and, interesting as the passages are, it is difficult to
forget the incongruity of Raphael and Adam discussing the Ptolemaic and
Copernican theories of the universe, or Adam moralizing on the
unhappiness of marriage as if he had studied the divorce reports or
gone through a course of modern novels. Yet few and foolish are the
readers who can dwell on dramatic improbabilities when Adam {178} is
pouring out the bitter cry wrung from Milton by the still unforgotten
miseries of his first marriage--
"Oh! why did God,
Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven
With Spirits masculine, create at last
This novelty on Earth, this fair defect
Of Nature, and not fill the World at once
With men as Angels, without feminine,
Or find some other way to generate
Mankind? This mischief had not then befallen,
And more that shall befall; innumerable
Disturbances on Earth through female snares,
And strait conjunction with this sex. For either
He never shall find out fit mate, but such
As some misfortune brings him, or mistake;
Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain,
Through her perverseness, but shall see her gained
By a far worse, or, if she love, withheld
By parents; or his happiest choice too late
Shall meet, already linked and wedlock-bound
To a fell adversary, his hate or shame;
Which infinite calamity shall cause
To human life, and household peace confound."
It is obvious that in all this we hear the poet's own voice. But it is
scarcely fair to quote it without pointing out that it must {179} not
be taken alone. The common notion that Milton's own melancholy
experience had made him a purblind misogynist is a complete mistake.
No one has praised marriage as he has. The chastest of poets is as
little afraid as the Prayer Book of frank acceptance of the physical
facts which must commonly be the basis of its spiritual relation. It
is the whole union for which he stands, of body, mind, and spirit. He
puts into the mouth of this same Adam the most eloquent praise woman
ever received, culminating in
"All higher Knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded. Wisdom in discourse with her
Loses discountenanced, and like Folly shows;
Authority and Reason on her wait,
As one intended first, not after made
Occasionally: and, to consummate all,
Greatness of mind and nobleness their seat
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard angelic placed."
It is true that the reply of the Angel moderating these ardours is more
evidently Miltonic--
"what transports thee so?
An outside? fair no doubt and worthy well
Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love;
Not thy subjection. Weigh with her thyself;
Then value. Oft-times nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right."
{180} But, though in these last words Raphael entirely disappears in
Milton, the poet who could conceive the panegyric to which Raphael
replies, who could elsewhere make his hero say that he received "access
in every virtue" from the looks of Eve, had assuredly no low ideal of
what a woman may be. Adam speaks for him when he praises love as
"not the lowest end of human life;"
and he gives us a true corrective of the over-severe picture of Milton
which half-knowledge is apt to draw when he goes on to declare that
"not to irksome toil, but to delight,
He made us, and delight to reason joined."
But this is only one of many subjects on which Milton lets us hear his
own voice speaking through his characters. We hear it when Satan cries
to Beelzebub--
"Fallen Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering:"
when Raphael reports Nisroch as saying of pain and pleasure what may
well have been felt by the blind poet who owed his knowledge of
pleasure to memory only, while he knew {181} pain by the frequent
experience of one of the most painful of diseases--
"sense of pleasure we may well
Spare out of life, perhaps, and not repine,
But live content, which is the calmest life;
But pain is perfect misery, the worst
Of evils, and, excessive, overturns
All patience:"
we hear it when Adam, like a weary scholar, says that
"not to know at large of things remote
From use, obscure and subtle, but to know
That which before us lies in daily life,
Is the prime wisdom;"
when Raphael asks, like a Platonic philosopher,
"what if Earth
Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?"
when Adam, like a doubting Christian in an age of speculation,
hesitates for a moment about the efficacy of prayer--
"that from us aught should ascend to Heaven
So prevalent as to concern the mind
Of God high-blest, or to incline his will,
Hard to belief may seem:"
{182} and once more when Adam cries--
"solitude sometimes is best society,"
as if he, like the blind Milton, was worn out by twenty years of
contending voices, and longed for the relief of silent and lonely
thought.
To the direct interventions of the poet there is less need to call
attention as, of course, no reader can miss them. They are probably
the most universally admired passages of the poem. Every reader who
deserves to read them at all finds himself unable to do so without
wishing to get them by heart. They do not rival the daring splendour
of the scenes in hell: nor perhaps the suave and gracious perfection of
the evening scene in Paradise in the fourth book; nor can they, of
course, exhibit the dramatic power of the scene that precedes and still
more of those that follow the Fall. But nothing in the whole poem
moves us so much. It is not merely that Milton has exerted his whole
mastery of his art to make their every line and every word please the
ear, awaken the memory, stimulate the imagination, lift the whole
mental and emotional nature of the reader up to a height of being
unknown to its ordinary experience. This he has {183} done in some
other parts of his poem. But, fine as some of his dramatic touches
are, the essence of his genius was lyrical and not dramatic or
objective at all. And so none of his characters, divine, diabolic or
human, will ever move us quite as he moves us himself.
Let us hear the most beautiful of all these confessions: and for once
let us indulge ourselves with the whole. The themes that make up
Milton's great symphony ought in truth always to be given unbroken, if
only that were possible. Indeed, there is a sense in which it may be
said that nothing less than the whole poem can do justice to a design
so majestic as that of _Paradise Lost_. But in any case it is certain
that no fragment of a few lines can convey a full impression of the
rhythmical, intellectual, imaginative unity of the Miltonic paragraph
or section. This is above all conspicuous in the great speeches and in
the elaborate introductions that precede the first, third, seventh and
ninth books. Here is the greatest of the four; the most famous of
Milton's personal interventions in his poem, and one of the most
wonderful things he ever wrote.
"Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born!
Or of the Eternal coeternal beam
{184}
May I express thee unblamed? Since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from eternity; dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate!
Or hearest thou rather pure Ethereal stream,
Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the Sun,
Before the Heavens, thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest
The rising World of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless Infinite!
Thee I revisit now with bolder wing,
Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detained
In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight,
Through utter and through middle Darkness borne,
With other notes than to the Orphean lyre,
I sung of Chaos and eternal Night,
Taught by the Heavenly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to re-ascend,
Though hard and rare; thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled. Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
{185}
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit; nor sometimes forget
Those other two equalled with me in fate,
So were I equalled with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old:
Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and, for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, Celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight."
{186}
Not all the poetry of all the world can produce more than a few
passages that equal this in moving power. Tears are not very far from
the eye that is passing over its page: tears in which sympathy plays a
smaller part than joy at the discovery that human words can be so
beautiful. But if Milton moves us more by his own personality than by
that of any of his creations, it is still true that he is not so
entirely without dramatic power as has sometimes been alleged. No one
would claim for him that he was one of the great narrative or dramatic
masters. But his weakness on these sides is so obvious that there has
been a tendency to exaggerate it. We notice the undramatic speeches of
Satan and Adam: we notice such things as Eve's dream in the fifth book
which, anticipating, as it does, so many of the details of her
temptation, renders her fall much less probable, and goes far to
destroy its interest when it occurs. But we are slower to notice the
admirable dramatic management of such a scene as that between Eve and
the Serpent in the ninth book. And yet how finely imagined it is, in
all its successive stages! Satan, at first "stupidly good," overawed
at Eve's beauty and innocence; then, recovering his natural malice, and
beginning his attempt by appealing to {187} two things, curiosity and
the love of flattery, which have always been supposed especially
powerful with women; and Eve, taking no direct notice of his
compliments and in appearance surrendering only to the other bait of
novelty and surprise; "how cam'st thou speakable of mute?" So the
scene begins. Flattery has ensured the tempter a favourable reception;
curiosity gives him the chance of an apparently telling argument. I
ate, he says, of the fruit of a certain tree and received from it
speech and reason. But I have found nothing to satisfy my new-won
powers till I saw thee, whom I now desire to worship as the sovran of
creation. She affects to rebuke the flattery, but naturally asks to be
shown the tree on which the wonderful fruit grows. It of course turns
out to be the Forbidden Tree: and Eve mentions the prohibition as a
thing final and unquestionable. He meets her refusal by giving a
sinister and plausible explanation of the prohibition. Why did God
forbid her the fruit? "Why, but to keep ye low and ignorant, His
worshippers?" God, he suggests, knows too well that as the fruit had
raised the serpent from brute to human, so it would raise the woman
from human to divine. Noon and hunger come to fortify his {188}
arguments; and, after a speech in which she adds one more of her own
drawn from the name, the Tree of Knowledge, given to the tree by God
Himself, she plucks and eats. In the first ecstasy of pleasure she
luxuriates in joy and self-confidence. Then she considers whether she
shall use her new powers to make herself the equal and even the
superior of Adam. The prospect tempts her: but she is not quite free
from fear that the threatened punishment of death may after all descend
upon her. And that suggests the picture of "Adam wedded to another
Eve," which brings her swiftly to the decision that Adam shall share
with her her fate, whichever it be, bliss or woe. In this, as later in
her hasty proposal of suicide, Eve is a living and convincing human
figure. To the stronger and wiser Adam it was harder to give life.
But what could be finer or truer than his instant repudiation of her
plausible tale--
"How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost,
Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!"
followed by his immediate resolution to die with her--
"And me with thee hath ruined: for with thee
Certain my resolution is to die.
How can I live without thee?"
{189} The rest follows with equal probability. Once resolved to unite
his lot with hers, he soon finds arguments to prove that that lot is
not likely after all to be so dreadful. Having talked himself into the
surrender of his judgment he eats, and having eaten he goes at once all
lengths of extravagance, folly and sin. Then comes the reaction and
the inevitable mutual reproaches; with the fine natural touch of Eve
upbraiding Adam for his weakness in yielding to her request and
granting her the freedom which had proved so fatal. So the ninth book
closes. When the story is resumed in the second half of the tenth book
we get the tremendous lamentation of Adam, so strangely undramatic in
its argumentative justification of his own punishment, so full of true
drama as well as of magnificent lyrical power in its cry of human
misery and despair. Then follows the bitter attack upon Eve, as the
cause of all his woe: and the whole scene is concluded by her humble
and beautiful submission--
"While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps,
Between us two let there be peace:"
by their reconciliation, and by their quiet and resigned acceptance of
their common fate.
{190}
It was perhaps worth while to go through one act of Milton's drama in
this detail to give some idea of the skill which he has shown in
working up a few verses of Genesis into an elaborate story. But no
detail, no fragmentary notes of any kind, even when they deal with
matters in which Milton was far stronger than he was on the side of
narrative or drama, can do much to exhibit the greatness of _Paradise
Lost_. For that there is only one way, to read it. And, as we said
just now, to read the whole. It is true that you cannot read it for
the interest of the story as you can all the _Odyssey_, much of the
_Iliad_ and some of the _Aeneid_: but the poem is still a whole and you
need the whole to judge and understand it. And even the weaker books,
the fifth, the seventh and twelfth, contain episodes, like the scene
between Abdiel and Satan and the incomparable conclusion of the whole
poem, which are among the last a wise reader would wish to miss.
Moreover, where the story is dullest it has things which give, perhaps,
the most astonishing proof of Milton's power of style. It is true that
he does himself occasionally fall into the empty pomposity which
characterized his eighteenth-century imitators who fancied that big
words could turn prose into poetry. So he talks of dried fruits as
"what by frugal {191} storing firmness gains To nourish, and
superfluous moist consumes." But the thing most remarkable about this
is its extreme rarity. Taking the poem as a whole, the mighty music
scarcely ceases: the majestic flight of the poet continues
uninterrupted: no contrary winds disturb it, no weariness brings it
flagging down to earth. There is nothing, not even theological
disputes, out of which he cannot make fine verse, and occasionally
great poetry. There is nothing, however great, that he cannot make his
own. Just as Shakspeare took the noble prose of North's _Plutarch_,
and hardly altering a word made noble poetry of it, so Milton can take
the Bible. "For now," says Job, "I should have lain still and been
quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest." North could not
rise to the height of this. But even this Milton will dare to lay his
hand upon: and, if even he cannot lift it any higher, only he could
have touched it at all without desecration. "How glad," says Adam--
"how glad would lay me down
As in my mother's lap! There I should rest,
And sleep secure."
Or take a passage like that of the Son of God clothing Adam and Eve
after the Fall, where {192} many Biblical suggestions are gathered
together--
"As when he washed his servants' feet, so now
As father of his family he clad
Their nakedness with skins of beasts, or slain,
Or, as the snake, with youthful coat repaid;
And thought not much to clothe his enemies."
The full appreciation of a passage like this, so very simple, so
apparently obvious, yet so entirely in the grand style which, whether
his subject stoops or soars, very rarely fails Milton, is not a thing
of one reading or of two. Milton, the greatest artist of our language,
is naturally the most conspicuous instance of the law which applies to
all great art. Only natures as rarely endowed with the receptive gift
as he was himself with the creative can fully appreciate his work at
the first reading. Like all great works of the imagination it has
generally to train, sometimes almost to create, the faculties which are
to appreciate it aright. This is particularly true in the case of
classical art, where the emotional appeal, though just as real, is much
less apparent because it is so much more controlled by intellectual
sanity. Gothic {193} and Romantic art are commonly far more
instantaneous in the impression they make, perhaps because, according
to the ingenious suggestion of the Poet Laureate, they admit at once of
more daring flights of the imagination and of stronger realism than
classical art can bear. But it may well be doubted whether the wonder
and delight which every man of the most modest aesthetic capacity owes
to them can in the end keep pace with the slower growing appreciation
of the universality and sanity of classical work. But this is an old
dispute not likely to be settled this year or next. Nor does it affect
the fact that all great work, even Romantic or Gothic, gains by time in
proportion to its greatness. It is the only absolutely certain test of
greatness in art. The instantly popular tune is unendurable in six
months, the instantly popular novel or poem is totally forgotten in a
year or two. No one perceives the whole greatness of St. Paul's
Cathedral, or Sansovino's Library at Venice, or the music of Bach, or
the poetry of Milton, at the first sight or hearing. No competent eye,
ear or mind fails to perceive more and more of it at each renewed
experience. Whatever be the art, a picture, a piece of sculpture, a
book, the test is the same: the cheap, the sentimental, {194} the
sensational, the merely pretty, lose something, be it little or much,
at each renewal of acquaintance: the great work steadily gains. To
this test _Paradise Lost_ can fearlessly appeal. It is not meant for
idle hours or empty people. It is not amusing in the lower sense of
the word. It is not as exciting as it might well have been. It is
probably true that, as Johnson said with his usual honesty, "No one
ever wished it longer than it is": yet there is equal truth in another
remark of his, "I cannot wish Milton's work other than it is," and in
the implied answer to his bold question, "What other author ever soared
so high or sustained his flight so long?" The difficulty for Milton's
readers is that they do not easily soar, and still less easily sustain
their soaring. The great gifts which Johnson brought to the criticism
of literature lay far more in common sense and in a profound insight
into human life than in any real turn for poetry. Of that nearly every
one who to-day gives much time to reading poetry will probably have as
much as he. Such people are sometimes mistakenly content with a single
reading of _Paradise Lost_. They remember a few of its glories and the
rest of the poem they acquiesce in forgetting. Let them put it to the
test to which lovers of music {195} put the Symphonies of Beethoven and
lovers of sculpture the remains of the Parthenon and the temple of the
Ephesian Artemis. Let them give the little time required to read it
through every year, or every second year. They will find more in it
the second time than they did the first, and much more the fifth or the
tenth time. It will issue triumphantly from the trial: and before they
reach middle age they will know by their own personal experience, what
the best authorities have always told them, that this is one of those
rare works of human genius whose power and beauty may in sober truth be
called inexhaustible.
{196}