PARADISE LOST: THE SCHEME
A prerogative place among the great epics of the world has sometimes been
claimed for _Paradise Lost_, on the ground that the theme it handles is
vaster and of a more universal human interest than any handled by
Milton's predecessors. It concerns itself with the fortunes, not of a
city or an empire, but of the whole human race, and with that particular
event in the history of the race which has moulded all its destinies.
Around this event, the plucking of an apple, are ranged, according to the
strictest rules of the ancient epic, the histories of Heaven and Earth
and Hell. The scene of the action is Universal Space. The time
represented is Eternity. The characters are God and all his Creatures.
And all these are exhibited in the clearest and most inevitable relation
with the main event, so that there is not an incident, hardly a line of
the poem, but leads backwards or forwards to those central lines in the
Ninth Book:--
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth-reaching to the fruit, 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.
From this point radiates a plot so immense in scope, that the history of
the world from the first preaching of the Gospel to the Millennium
occupies only some fifty lines of Milton's epilogue. And if the plot be
vast, the stage is large enough to set it forth. The size of Milton's
theatre gives to his imagination those colossal scenical opportunities
which are turned to such magnificent account. De Quincey enumerates some
of them--"Heaven opening to eject her rebellious children; the
unvoyageable depths of ancient Chaos, with its 'anarch old' and its
eternal war of wrecks; these traversed by that great leading Angel that
drew after him the third part of the heavenly host; earliest Paradise
dawning upon the warrior-angel out of this far-distant 'sea without
shore' of chaos; the dreadful phantoms of Sin and Death, prompted by
secret sympathy and snuffing the distant scent of 'mortal change on
earth,' chasing the steps of their great progenitor and sultan; finally
the heart-freezing visions, shown and narrated to Adam, of human misery
through vast successions of shadowy generations: all these scenical
opportunities offered in the _Paradise Lost_ become in the hands of the
mighty artist elements of undying grandeur not matched on earth."
All these grandeurs and beauties are as real and living to-day as they
were on the day when Milton conceived them. But the other advantage
claimed for his epic, that it deals with matters of the dearest concern
to all of us, has been sharply questioned. It was Mr. Pattison's
complaint of _Paradise Lost_ that in it "Milton has taken a scheme of
life for life itself," and that it requires a violent effort from the
modern reader to accommodate his conceptions to the anthropomorphic
theology of the poem. The world is now thickly peopled with men and women
who, having bestowed their patronage on other ancestors, care little
about Adam and Eve, and who therefore feel that Milton's poem is wanting
in the note of actuality. Satan himself is not what he used to be; he is
doubly fallen, in the esteem of his victims as well as of his Maker, and
indeed
Comes to the place where he before had sat
Among the prime in splendour, now deposed,
Ejected, emptied, gazed, unpitied, shunned,
A spectacle of ruin.
"He who aspires," says Mr. Pattison, "to be the poet of a nation is bound
to adopt a hero who is already dear to that people." But how if the hero
subsequently fall out of vogue, and his name lose its power with a fickle
populace? Can even a poet save him?
The drifting away of the popular belief from the tenets of Milton's
theology doubtless does something to explain the lukewarm interest taken
by most educated English readers in _Paradise Lost_. But it is a mistake
to make much of this explanation. Certainly Milton held his own
theological beliefs, as expounded in the poem, in perfect good faith and
with great tenacity. But the generation after his own, which first gave
him his great fame, was not seduced into admiration by any whole-hearted
fellowship in belief. Dryden laments the presence in the poem of so many
"machining persons,"--as he calls the supernatural characters of
_Paradise Lost_. At almost the same date Dr. Thomas Burnet was causing a
mild sensation in the theological world by expounding the earlier
chapters of the Book of Genesis in an allegorical sense, and denying to
them the significance of a literal history. Voltaire, while he praises
Milton, remarks that the topic of _Paradise Lost_ has afforded nothing
among the French but some lively lampoons, and that those who have the
highest respect for the mysteries of the Christian religion cannot
forbear now and then making free with the devil, the serpent, the frailty
of our first parents, and the rib that was stolen from Adam. "I have
often admired," he goes on, "how barren the subject appears, and how
fruitful it grows under his hands."
It seems likely that Milton himself, before he was fairly caught in the
mesh of his own imagination, was well aware that his subject demanded
something of the nature of a _tour de force_. He had to give physical,
geometric embodiment to a far-reaching scheme of abstract speculation and
thought,--parts of it very reluctant to such a treatment. The necessities
of the epic form constrained him. When Satan, on the top of Mount
Niphates, exclaims--
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
when Michael promises to Adam, after his expulsion from the garden--
A Paradise within thee; happier far;
Milton must have known as well as any of his critics that this conception
of Hell and of Paradise, if insisted on, would have shattered the fabric
of his poem. His figures of Sin and Death were of his own invention, and
we must not suppose him so obtuse as never to have realised the part that
his shaping imagination bore in the presentment of other and greater
figures in the poem. In some respects he tried rather to impose a scheme
of thought and imagination upon his age than to express the ideas that he
found current. His theology and his cosmical conceptions are equally
tainted with his individual heresies. He flies in the face of the
Athanasian Creed by representing the generation of the Son as an event
occurring in time--"on such day as Heaven's great year brings forth." His
later poem of _Paradise Regained_ and the posthumous treatise of
Christian Doctrine show him an Arian; in the poem the Almighty is made to
speak of
This perfect man, by merit called my Son.
His account of the creation of the World as a mere ordering or
re-arrangement of the wild welter of an uncreated material Chaos receives
no countenance from the Fathers. In many points of theological teaching
he is compelled to form definite and even visual conceptions where
orthodoxy had cautiously confined itself to vague general propositions.
So that the description of Sin and Death and of the causeway built by
them between Hell-gates and the World, much as it has been objected to
even by admirers of the poem, is only an extreme instance of the defining
and hardening process that Milton found needful throughout for the
concrete presentment of the high doings which are his theme. He congealed
the mysteries of Time and Space, Love and Death, Sin and Forgiveness,
into a material system; and in so doing, while paying the utmost
deference to his authorities, he yet exercised many a choice with regard
to matters indifferent or undefinable. Thus, for instance, he borrows
from the Talmud the notion that Satan first learned the existence of a
prohibited tree from overhearing a conversation between Adam and Eve. He
was surely conscious of what he was doing, and would have been not
ill-pleased to learn that the Universe, as he conceived of it, has since
been called by his name. It is Milton's Paradise Lost, lost by Milton's
Adam and Eve, who are tempted by Milton's Satan, and punished by Milton's
God. The stamp of his clear hard imagination is on the whole fabric; and
it is not much harder for us to coax ourselves into the belief that his
is indeed the very world we inhabit than it was for the men of his own
time. The senses and the intellect are older than modern science, and
were employed to good effect before the invention of the spectroscope; it
is they in their daily operation that make it difficult to leap the gulf
which separates the amenities and trivialities of common life from the
solemn theatre of the poet's imagination. The objection that the poem has
lost much of its value because we are compelled to imagine where our
elders believed is of little weight in a case like this, where our lack
of belief is not brought home to us until insuperable difficulties are
placed in the way of our imagination. Where Milton was freest, there we
follow him most gladly; where he wrote in fetters, as notably in some of
the scenes transacted in Heaven, our imagination, not our belief, is the
first to rebel.
We are deceived by names; the more closely _Paradise Lost_ is studied,
the more does the hand of the author appear in every part. The epic poem,
which in its natural form is a kind of cathedral for the ideas of a
nation, is by him transformed into a chapel-of-ease for his own mind, a
monument to his own genius and his own habits of thought. The _Paradise
Lost_ is like the sculptured tombs of the Medici in Florence; it is not
of Night and Morning, nor of Lorenzo and Giuliano, that we think as we
look at them, but solely of the great creator, Michael Angelo. The same
dull convention that calls the _Paradise Lost_ a religious poem might
call these Christian statues. Each is primarily a great work of art in
each the traditions of two eras are blended in a unity that is indicative
of nothing but the character and powers of the artist. The _Paradise
Lost_ is not the less an eternal monument because it is a monument to
dead ideas.
We do not know exactly when Milton made his choice of subject. His Latin
verses addressed to Manso, Marquis of Villa, in January 1638-9, show that
Arthur and the Round Table was at that time the uppermost theme in his
mind, and that the warlike achievement of heroes was the aspect of it
that most attracted him. After his return to England in 1639, it is
mentioned once again in his elegy on Charles Diodati, and then we hear no
more of it. In the tentative list of subjects, made in 1641, Arthur has
disappeared, and the story of _Paradise Lost_ already occupies the most
conspicuous place, with four separate drafts suggesting different
treatments of the theme.
It would be idle to speculate on what Milton might have made of the
Arthur legends. One thing is certain; he would have set up the warrior
king as a perfectly objective figure, hampered by no allegory, and with
no inward and spiritual signification. The national cause, maintained
heroically in a hundred battles, and overwhelmed at last by the brute
violence of the foreign oppressor, was subject enough for him; he would
never have marred his epic by sickly irresolution and the struggles of a
divided will in the principal characters. Perhaps his mind reverted to
his old dreams when he came to describe the pastimes wherewith the rebel
angels beguile their time in Hell:--
Others, more mild,
Retreated in a silent valley, sing
With notes angelical to many a harp
Their own heroic deeds, and hapless fall
By doom of battle, and complain that Fate
Free Virtue should enthrall to Force or Chance.
Their song was partial; but the harmony
(What could it less when Spirits immortal sing?)
Suspended Hell, and took with ravishment
The thronging audience.
This is only one of the very numerous places in _Paradise Lost_ where,
before he is well aware of it, we catch Milton's sympathies dilating
themselves upon the wrong side.
His researches in British annals, begun at the time when he was still in
quest of a theme, convinced him that the whole story of Arthur was
"obscured and blemished with fables." He foraged among other British
subjects, feeling that the great poem which was designed to raise England
to the literary peerage and set her by the side of countries of older
fame must deal with a theme of truly national import. Some of the
subjects that he jotted down were obviously of too incidental and trivial
a nature for his purpose, and a wise instinct confined him to the earlier
history of the island, where his own freedom of treatment was less likely
to be hampered by an excess of detail. And then, precisely how or when we
do not know, the idea came to him that he would treat a subject still
larger and of a more tremendous import,--the fortunes, not of the nation,
but of the race:--
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.
The attractions that this theme, once hit on, exercised on Milton's mind
may easily be guessed. In the first place, it was a sacred subject: an
opportunity for leading poetry back to its divine allegiance; and, by the
creation of a new species of epic, an escape from a danger which must
have been very present to his mind--the danger of too close an imitation
of the ancients. More specific reasons concurred in recommending it. In
the Garden of Eden he might present to an age which was overrun with a
corrupt religion and governed by a decadent court the picture of a
religion without a church, of life in its primitive simplicity, and of
patriarchal worship without the noisome accretions of later ceremonial.
His attitude to the Laudian movement is eloquently expressed, at this
same time, in the treatise _Of Reformation in England_, where he
describes how the religious teachers of his own and preceding ages "began
to draw down all the divine intercourse betwixt God and the soul, yea,
the very shape of God himself into an exterior and bodily form, urgently
pretending a necessity and obligement of joining the body in a formal
reverence and worship circumscribed; they hallowed it, they fumed it,
they sprinkled it, they bedecked it, not in robes of pure innocency, but
of pure linen, with other deformed and fantastic dresses, in palls and
mitres, gold, and gewgaws fetched from Aaron's old wardrobe or the
flamen's vestry: then was the priest set to con his motions and his
postures, his liturgies and his lurries, till the soul by this means of
over-bodying herself, given up justly to fleshly delights, bated her wing
apace downward: and finding the ease she had from her visible and
sensuous colleague, the body, in performance of religious duties, her
pinions now broken and flagging, shifted off from herself the labour of
high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull and
droiling carcase to plod on in the old road and drudging trade of outward
conformity."
But Adam and Eve, Milton is careful to explain, were not ritualists. They
recite their evening hymn of praise as they stand at the entrance to
their shady lodge:--
This said unanimous, and other rites
Observing none, but adoration pure
Which God likes best, into their inmost bower
Handed they went.
The traits of Milton's Puritanism peep out at unexpected places in the
poem. The happy Garden, Adam is told, will be destroyed after the Flood,
for a reason that would have been approved by the image-breakers of the
Commonwealth:--
To teach thee that God attributes to place
No sanctity, if none be thither brought
By men who there frequent, or therein dwell.
The palace of Pandemonium is built by Satan's host in an hour, whence men
may
Learn how their greatest monuments of fame,
And strength, and art, are easily outdone
By spirits reprobate;
--a perfectly sound moral, well illustrating Mr. Swinburne's remark that
Puritanism has nothing to do with Art, and that the great Puritans and
the great artists have never confused them.
Milton must also have been drawn to the theme of _Paradise Lost_ by the
scope it promised for scenes of quiet natural beauty:--
All that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring
And bloom profuse and cedar arches.
His imagination was so susceptible to a touch of beauty that even in the
bare sketch he has left for a drama dealing with the story of Lot and his
escape from Sodom we see how likely he was, here also, to fall into the
error of _Comus_. As Lot entertains the angels at supper, "the Gallantry
of the town passe by in Procession, with musick and song, to the temple
of Venus Urania." The opening Chorus is to relate the course of the city,
"each evening every one with mistresse, or Ganymed, gitterning along the
streets, or solacing on the banks of Jordan, or down the stream." But in
the story of the Garden of Eden the beauty was, for once, on the side of
the morality; innocence and purity might be depicted, not, as in a fallen
world, clad in complete steel, but at ease in their native haunts,
surrounded by all the inexhaustible bounty of an unsubdued and
uncorrupted Nature.
The chief dramatic interest of the poem, however, comes in with the great
outcast angel, stirred up by his passions of envy and revenge to assault
the new-created inhabitants of the Garden. It seems likely that Milton
was drawn to this part of his theme by chains of interest and sympathy
stronger than he confessed or knew. He was an epic poet, striving to
describe great events worthily, but the dramatic situation betrayed him.
He knew only that he could draw a rebel leader, noble in bearing,
superbly outlined, a worthy adversary of the Most High. But it happened
to him, as it has happened to others who have found themselves in a
position where Satan could do them a service; before long, as if by some
mediaeval compact, the relations are reversed, and the poet is in the
service of the Devil. He can hardly have foreseen this chance; although
there are not wanting signs in the poem itself that, before it was half
completed, he became uneasily conscious of what was happening, and
attempted, too late, to remedy it. When he chose his subject he doubtless
intended that the centre of interest should be fixed in the Garden of
Eden, and did not perceive how of necessity it must tend to sink lower,
to that realm in the shadow of darkness, innumerably more populous,
inhabited by beings of a nobler origin, of greater (and more human)
passions, with a longer and more distinguished history, and with this
further claim upon the sympathy of the reader, that they are doomed to an
eternity of suffering.
It is worth our while as critics to try to put ourselves in Milton's
place at the time when he had made his choice, that we may realise not
only the attractions but also the difficulties of the theme. An Italian
poet of the early seventeenth century, Giovanni Battista Andreini, from
whose drama, entitled _Adamo_, Milton is alleged to have borrowed some
trifles, has made a very full and satisfactory statement of these
difficulties in the preface to his play. He mentions, for instance, the
unpromising monotony of Adam's life during the time spent in the earthly
paradise, and the difficulty of giving verisimilitude to the conversation
between the woman and the snake. But he waxes most eloquent on the last
and greatest difficulty--"since the composition must remain deprived of
those poetic ornaments so dear to the Muses; deprived of the power to
draw comparisons from implements of art introduced in the course of
years, since in the time of the first man there was no such thing;
deprived also of naming (at least while Adam speaks or discourse is held
with him), for example, bows, arrows, hatchets, urns, knives, swords,
spears, trumpets, drums, trophies, banners, lists, hammers, torches,
bellows, funeral piles, theatres, exchequers, infinite things of a like
nature, introduced by the necessities of sin;... deprived moreover of
introducing points of history, sacred or profane, of relating fictions of
fabulous deities, of rehearsing loves, furies, sports of hunting or
fishing, triumphs, shipwrecks, conflagrations, enchantments, and things
of a like nature, that are in truth the ornament and the soul of poetry."
All these difficulties for Andreini's drama were difficulties also for
Milton's poem. Yet no reader of _Paradise Lost_ is found to complain that
the poem is lacking in poetic ornament. Milton has successfully
surmounted or evaded many of this formidable catalogue of limitations,
without the sacrifice of dramatic propriety. It is true that in the
course of their morning orisons, addressed to their Maker, Adam and Eve
apostrophise the Mists and Exhalations--
that now rise
From hill or steaming lake, dusky or gray,
Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold;
--where, a purist might urge, neither of them had any right to be
acquainted with paint, or skirts, or gold. But anachronisms like these
are, after all, only a part of the great anachronism, or postulate
rather, whereby Adam and Eve are made to speak the English tongue. In the
Twelfth Book Michael is guilty of a graver lapse where he mentions
baptism without explanation or apology. On the other hand, Raphael, who
had a pleasanter occasion and more time for his retrospective summary,
explains the military manoeuvring of angels by what Adam had already seen
of the flight of birds, and after describing the great war in Heaven and
the fierce hosting of the opposed forces, ventures, at a later point in
his story, to illustrate the flowing together of the congregated waters
at the Creation by a simile drawn, with apology, from the massing of
troops:--
As armies at the call
Of trumpet (for of armies thou hast heard)
Troop to their standard, so the watery throng,
Wave rolling after wave.
In the main Milton studies propriety with regard to the forbidden matters
enumerated by Andreini. But he escapes from the full effect of the
prohibition by a variety of devices. In the first place, there are the
two chief episodes of the poem; Raphael's narration, from the Fifth to
the Eighth Book, imparted to Adam as a warning against impending dangers,
and conveying an account of the history of the Universe before the
Creation of Man; and Michael's narration, in the Eleventh and Twelfth
Books, consoling and strengthening Adam, before the Expulsion from the
Garden, by a rapid survey of the prospective history of the World from
that event down to the Millennium. Considered as a narrator, Michael is
very subject to dullness; were it not for the unfailing dignity and
magniloquence of his diction, his tale would be merely a bleak compendium
of the outlines of Scripture history; but to Raphael is committed the
story of the war in Heaven and its amazing sequel,--a story containing
passages so brilliant, and so little necessary to be narrated at length,
that there is some flavour of inconsistency in Milton's apology for his
theme, prefixed to the Ninth Book, where he describes himself as--
Not sedulous by nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only argument
Heroic deemed, chief mastery to dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabled knights
In battles feigned (the better fortitude
Of patience and heroic martyrdom
Unsung), or to describe races and games
Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields,
Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds,
Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights
At joust and tournament; then marshalled feast
Served up in hall with sewers and seneshals:
The skill of artifice and office mean;
Not that which justly gives heroic name
To person or to poem! Me, of these
Nor skilled nor studious, higher argument
Remains, sufficient of itself to raise
That name, unless an age too late, or cold
Climate, or years, damp my intended wing
Depressed; and much they may if all be mine,
Not hers who brings it nightly to my ear.
To depreciate war as a subject for the heroic Muse was ungrateful in
Milton, who had devoted the whole of his Sixth Book to a description of
the "wild work in Heaven" caused by the great rebellion, and had indulged
his imagination with some most extravagant fantasies; such as the digging
in the soil of Heaven for sulphur and nitre (where the soil of Hell, it
may be remarked, yielded gold to the miner), the invention of artillery,
and the use of mountains as missiles,
Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire.
He had, moreover, attained to the height of the sublime in that terrific
closing scene where the Son, riding forth in single majesty, drives the
rebel host over the crystal bounds of Heaven into the wasteful abyss.
Wars, in short, hold a conspicuous place in the poem,--conflicts and
broils so enormous that--
War seemed a civil game
To this uproar.
Races and athletic sports are among the melancholy diversions of the
dwellers in Hell during their forced leisure. Even tilts and tournaments
are not absent from _Paradise Lost_, but they are introduced by the
second of the devices which enable Milton to extend the scope of his
poem; the free and frequent use, namely, of illustrative and decorative
comparisons. Thus the spacious hall of Pandemonium is compared to--
A covered field, where champions bold
Wont ride in armed, and at the Soldan's chair
Defied the best of Panim chivalry
To mortal combat, or career with lance.
It is plain that although almost all of the characters of the poem are
precluded from making allusion to the events of human history, the poet
himself is free; and he uses his freedom throughout. Most of the passages
that have gained for Milton the name of a learned poet are introduced by
way of simile. At times he employs the simplest epic figure, drawn from
the habits of rustic or animal life. But his favourite figure is the
"long-tailed simile," or, as it is better called, the decorative
comparison, used for its ennobling, rather than for its elucidating
virtue. Here he parts company with Homer, and even with Virgil, who could
draw on no such vast and various store of history, geography, and
romance. From Herodotus to Olaus Magnus, and onward to the latest
discoveries in geography and astronomy, the researches of Galileo, and
the descriptions given by contemporary travellers of China and the
Chinese, or of the North American Indians, Milton compels the authors he
had read, both ancient and modern, to contribute to the gracing of his
work. It is partly this wealth of implicit lore, still more, perhaps, the
subtly reminiscent character of much of his diction, that justifies Mr.
Pattison in the remark that "an appreciation of Milton is the last reward
of consummated scholarship."
A third device, not the least remarkable of those by which he gives
elasticity to his theme, is to be found in the tradition that he adopts
with regard to the later history of the fallen angels. A misunderstanding
of four verses in the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah, and some cryptic
allusions in the Book of Revelations are the chief Scriptural authorities
for the Miltonic account of the Fall of the Angels, which is not borrowed
from the Fathers, but corresponds rather with the later version
popularised in England by the cycles of Miracle Plays. According to the
_Divine Institutes_ of Lactantius, the nameless Angel, to whom from the
first had been given power over the new-created Earth, was alone infected
with envy of the Son of God, his elder and superior, and set himself to
vitiate and destroy mankind in the cradle. He tempted Eve, and she fell;
after the expulsion from Paradise he set himself also to corrupt the
guardian angels who were sent down from Heaven for the protection and
education of the increasing race of men. In this attempt also he
succeeded; "the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair,
and they took them wives of all which they chose." And they forgot their
heavenly estate, and made for themselves a Godless dominion upon Earth.
This is the Fall of the Angels as it is narrated at greater length in the
recently recovered apocryphal _Book of Enoch_, and alluded to, perhaps in
the Epistles of Peter and of Jude, where are mentioned "the angels that
sinned," and "the angels which kept not their first estate." Milton's
version brings these angels to the earth, not as protectors of mankind,
but as conquerors come from Hell, to possess and occupy the spacious
world delivered over to them by the victory of Satan. From that point
forward, however, he adopts the tradition whereby Jerome, Lactantius, and
others had identified the fallen angels with the gods of the heathen.
Whether as conquerors or as corrupted guardians of the human race, they
seek the same ends,--to divert worship from the true God, and by the
destruction of man, to contrive a solace for their own perdition. They
are the inventors of astrology, sooth-saying, divination, necromancy, and
black magic; they were once the ministers of God, and still have a
presentiment of his acts, so that they can sometimes speak truly of the
future by means of oracles and magicians, claiming the while the credit
of bringing that to pass which in fact they only foresaw. Milton, in
adopting this doctrine, merely followed current belief, and did not, as
De Quincey seems to think, hit upon it by a fortunate stroke of genius.
He might have found it incidentally but fully set forth in so recent a
book as Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_, I. iv. "The fall of the angels,
therefore," says Hooker, "was pride. Since their fall, their practices
have been the clean contrary unto those just mentioned. For, being
dispersed, some in the air, some in the earth, some in the water, some
among the minerals, dens, and caves that are under the earth; they have
by all means laboured to effect a universal rebellion against the laws,
and as far as in them lieth utter destruction of the works of God. These
wicked spirits the heathen honoured instead of Gods, both generally under
the name of _dii inferi_, 'gods infernal,' and particularly, some in
oracles, some in idols, some as household gods, some as nymphs; in a
word, no foul or wicked spirit which was not one way or other honoured of
men as god, till such time as light appeared in the world, and dissolved
the works of the Devil." The argument which Milton himself sets forth for
the support of this view was accepted as conclusive in his own age. The
Ionian gods, he says, Titan, and Saturn, and Jove, and the rest, the
youngest branch of that evil and influential family, were--
Held
Gods, yet confessed later than Heaven and Earth
Their boasted parents.
They ruled the middle air and had access to no higher or purer heaven.
Howsoever Milton came by the doctrine, it was of enormous use to him; it
gave him names for his devils, and characters, and a detailed history of
the part they had played in human affairs; it was, in short, a key to all
the mythologies.
By these devices the author of _Paradise Lost_ escapes the impoverishment
of imagination that his subject seemed to impose upon him. On looking
once more over Andreini's list of prohibited topics, we are surprised to
find how many of them Milton has found a place for. He does introduce
points of history, sacred and profane; he relates fictions of fabulous
deities; he rehearses loves, furies, triumphs, conflagrations, and things
of a like nature. The principal conflagration that he describes is on a
very large scale; and the majestic ascent of the Son--
Up to the Heaven of Heavens, his high abode,
* * * * *
Followed with acclamation, and the sound
Symphonious often thousand harps, that tuned
Angelic harmonies,
is the grandest triumphal procession in all literature. On the other
hand, he manages to dispense with some of the institutions and implements
"introduced by the necessities of sin." He has swords and spears,
trumpets and drums in plenty. But he has no knives, nor hatchets, nor
bellows; and no theatres nor exchequers. There are no urns nor funeral
piles, because there is no death; or rather, because the only Death that
there is increases the number of persons in the poem by one. Sports of
hunting and fishing there are, of course, none; and, although it is an
heroic poem, the horse takes little part in the celestial war, is hardly
known in hell, and is unheard of on earth until Adam beholds in vision
the armed concourse of his corrupt descendants. Nevertheless, the general
impression left by the poem is one of richness rather than poverty of
poetic ornament. The wealth is most profusely displayed in the books
treating of Satan and his followers, but it is not absent from Eden nor
from the empyreal Heaven, although in the one case the monotony of the
situation, and in the other the poet's evident anxiety to authorise his
every step from Scripture, prevent the full display of his power. But
Milton is a difficult poet to disable; he is often seen at his best on
the tritest theme, which he handles after his own grave fashion by
comprehensive statement, measured and appropriate, heightened by none
save the most obvious metaphors, and depending for almost all its charm
on the quiet colouring of the inevitable epithet, and the solemn music of
the cadence:--
Now came still Evening on, and Twilight gray
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompanied; for beast and bird
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests,
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale.
She all night long her amorous descant sung:
Silence was pleased. Now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the Moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.
Darkness, silence, rest, the nightingale's song, the stars, the rising of
the moon--these are all the material of this wonderful passage. Yet did
ever such beauty fall with night upon such peace, save in Paradise alone?
Once he had got his story, based on his few authorities, with hints
unconsciously taken and touches added, perhaps, from his reading of other
poets--of Caedmon, Andreini, and Vondel, of Spenser, Sylvester, Crashaw,
and the Fletchers--Milton's first task was to reduce it to the strict
relations of time and space. His blindness probably helped him by
relieving him from the hourly solicitations of the visible world, and
giving him a dark and vacant space in which to rear his geometric fabric.
Against this background the figures of his characters are outlined in
shapes of light, and in this vacancy he mapped out his local Heaven and
Hell.
Heaven, as Milton portrays it, is a plain of vast extent, diversified
with hills, valleys, woods and streams. In the Second Book he speaks of
it as--
Extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round;
in the Tenth Book it is determined, and is square. It is bounded by
battlements of living sapphire, and towers of opal. In the midst is
situated a Mount, the dwelling place of the Most High, surrounded by
golden lamps, which diffuse night and day alternately--for without
twilight and dawn, his dearest memories, Heaven would have been no Heaven
to Milton. On a mountain far to the north of this great plain, Satan
erects his pyramids and towers of diamond and gold, and establishes his
empire, which lasts exactly three days. At his final overthrow the
crystal wall of Heaven rolls back, disclosing a gap into the abyss; the
rebels, tortured with plagues and thunder, fling themselves in
desperation over the verge. They fall for nine days, through Chaos. Chaos
is the realm of a king of the same name, who reigns over it with his
consort Night. It is of immeasurable extent, quite dark, and turbulent
with the raw material of the Cosmos. Just as Milton, for the purposes of
his poem, followed the older astronomy, and gave to it a new lease of
life in the popular imagination, so also he abides by the older physics.
The orderly created World, or Cosmos, is conceived as compounded of four
elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. None of these four is to be found
in Chaos, for each of them is composed of the simpler atoms of Hot, Cold,
Moist, and Dry, symmetrically arranged in pairs. Thus Air is Hot and
Moist, Fire is Hot and Dry, Water is Cold and Moist, Earth is Cold and
Dry. Before they are separated and blended by Divine command, the four
rudimentary constituents of creation are crowded in repulsive contiguity;
they bubble and welter, fight and jostle in the dark, with hideous
noises. In its upper strata Chaos is calmer, and is faintly lighted by
the effulgence from the partially transparent walls of Heaven.
Below is Hell, newly prepared for the rebels. Like Heaven it is a vast
plain; a bituminous lake, played over by livid flames, is one of its
principal features; and hard by stands a volcanic mountain, at the foot
of which the devils build their palace, and hold their assembly. The
nine-fold gates of Hell, far distant, are guarded by Sin and Death, the
paramour and the son of Satan. No one has plausibly explained how they
came by their office. It was intended to be a perfect sinecure; there was
no one to be let in and no one to be let out. The single occasion that
presented itself for a neglect of their duty was by them eagerly seized.
During the nine days while the rebels lay on the burning lake, drowsed by
its fumes, the World was created. It consists, according to the astronomy
followed by Milton, of ten concentric spheres fitted, like Chinese boxes,
one within another, and the Earth in the centre. Nine of these are
transparent, the spheres, that is to say, of the seven planets (the Sun
and the Moon being reckoned as planets), the sphere of the fixed stars,
and the crystalline sphere. The outermost sphere, or _primum mobile_, is
opaque and impervious. The whole orbicular World hangs by a golden chain
from that part of the battlements of Heaven whence the angels fell. It is
connected with Heaven by richly jewelled stairs, to be let down or taken
up at pleasure, and can be entered only through an orifice or passage at
the top. Between the foot of the stairs and the entrance to the World is
a sea or lake of jasper and liquid pearl.
All the interest and meaning of the World is centred in one favoured spot
of Earth. Eden is a district of Mesopotamia, and the happy garden, called
Paradise, is situated in the east of Eden. It is a raised table-land,
surrounded on all sides by a high ridge of hill, thickly wooded, and
impenetrable. Its single gate, hewn out of a rock of alabaster, faces
eastward, and is accessible only by a pass leading up from the plain and
overhung by craggy cliffs. Through Eden runs a river which passes by a
tunnel under Paradise, and, rising through the porous earth, waters the
garden with springs. It was by this underground passage that Satan
entered the garden a second time, when, having been discovered by
Ithuriel, and expelled by Gabriel, he had circled the Earth seven times,
keeping on the shady side to avoid the gaze of Uriel, and at the end of
the week had resolved on another attempt.
The Fall of Man wrought some few changes in the physical configuration of
the Universe. Sin and Death built the mighty causeway that connects the
orifice of the World with Hell-gates. Provision had to be made under the
new dispensation for the peopling of the whole surface of the Earth; so
the axis was turned askew, and the beginning ordained of extremes of cold
and heat, of storms and droughts, and noxious planetary influences. Night
and day were known to man in his sinless state, but the seasons date from
his transgression.
The time-scheme of the poem is less carefully defined; indeed, it is not
certain that Milton intended accurately to define it. The recurrence of
the numbers three and nine, numbers traditionally honoured by poetry,
throws suspicion on the efforts of the exact commentators. Even in his
statements with regard to spatial relations the poet was not always
minutely consistent with himself. The distance from the plain of Heaven
to the plain of Hell is said in the First Book to be three times the
radius of the World, or, in his own words, the prison of Hell is
As far removed from God and light of Heaven
As from the centre thrice to the utmost pole.
The great globe, therefore, that hangs from the floor of Heaven reaches
two-thirds of the way down to Hell. Yet in the Second Book Satan, after a
long and perilous journey from Hell, comes in view of
This pendent World, in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude close by the moon.
So small is the World, compared with the wide extent of the empyreal
Heaven. But it is not easy to conceive how, in the limited space between
Heaven and Hell, the World could so appear to Satan.
A like curious consideration of the passages where time is mentioned
reveals a gap in the tale of days enumerated by Milton. We are not told
how long it took Satan to reach the Earth. Driven back on precedents and
analogies we find them conflicting. The outcast angels took nine days to
fall the same distance. But falling, as Moloch points out in his speech
at the Infernal Council, was to them less natural than rising; and
Raphael, who was subsequently sent to guard the gates of Hell during the
Creation, made the ascent easily in part of a day. If we allow a day and
a night for Satan's exploratory voyage, the action of the poem, from the
heavenly decree which occasioned the rebellion, to the expulsion of Adam
and Eve from Paradise, has been found to occupy thirty-three days, some
measured by a heavenly, some by an earthly standard. This would make Adam
and Eve about ten days old when they fell. But St. Augustine says that
they spent six years in the Earthly Paradise, and the question is better
left open.
A graver inconsistency is brought to light by a close study of the
framework of the poem. Milton seems to have hesitated as to which of two
theories he would adopt concerning the Creation of Man. After their fall
both Satan and Beelzebub mention a rumour which had long been current in
Heaven of a new race, called Man, shortly to be created. That rumour
could hardly have reached the rebels during the progress of the war. Yet
in the Seventh Book the Creation appears as a compliment paid to Satan, a
counter-move devised after the suppression of the great rebellion. The
Omnipotent thus declares his intention:--
But, lest his heart exalt him in the harm
Already done, to have dispeopled Heaven--
My damage fondly deemed,--I can repair
That detriment, if such it be to lose
Self-lost, and in a moment will create
Another world; out of one man a race
Of men innumerable.
This last is the account we must accept. Milton no doubt was attracted by
the dramatic superiority of this version, which makes the Creation of Man
a minor incident in the great war, so that the human race comes, a mere
token and pawn--
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.
But he was probably also aware that this view had not the highest warrant
of orthodoxy.
There is something absurd, perhaps even something repulsive, to the
modern mind in this careful, matter-of-fact anatomy of Milton's poem. But
it is a useful and necessary exercise, for all his greatest effects are
achieved in the realm of the physical and moral sublime, where the moral
relations are conditioned chiefly by the physical. There is no
metaphysic, nothing spiritual, nothing mysterious, except in name,
throughout the whole poem. The so-called spiritual beings are as
definitely embodied as man. The rules that Milton followed in dealing
with his heavenly essences are very fully laid down in the _Treatise of
Christian Doctrine_. He consigned the Fathers to limbo, and built up his
entire system from the words of Scripture. Now the Scriptures, in a
hundred passages, attribute human passions and actions to Divine beings.
We have no choice, said Milton, but to accept these expressions as the
truest to which we can attain. "If after the work of six days it be said
of God that 'He rested and was refreshed,' _Exodus_, xxxi. 17; if it be
said that 'He feared the wrath of the enemy,' _Deuteronomy_, xxxii. 27;
let us believe that it is not beneath the dignity of God ... to be
refreshed in that which refresheth Him, or to fear in that He feareth."
Milton had here the sharp logical dilemma that he loved. Either these
expressions are literally true, or they are not. If they are, well and
good; if they are not, how can we hope to frame for ourselves better and
truer notions of the Deity than those which he has dictated to us as
within the reach of our understanding, and fit and proper for us to
entertain? So also with angelic beings: Milton dismisses the nine orders
of the apocryphal hierarchy--although he enumerates five of them, in the
wrong order, in the roll of that recurring verse--
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers--
and bases himself upon Scripture. There he finds mention of seven chief
angels, with some kind of pre-eminence enjoyed by Michael. In the poem he
finds employment for only four, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel,
with a few Seraphim and Cherubim, to whom he invariably, and very
improperly, assigns a subordinate position.
His angels fight and play games, as they were doing at the gate of
Paradise on the evening when Satan first appeared there. They wear solid
armour, and so fall a ready prey to the artillery of their foes--
Unarmed they might
Have easily, as spirits, evaded swift
By quick contraction or remove; but now
Foul dissipation followed, and forced rout.
They eat and drink and digest; they even--and here, though we be armed
with triple brass, we cannot avoid a sense of shock--they even blush when
an indiscreet question is asked of them. When Raphael colours at the
inquisitive demands of Adam, it gives a melancholy force to his earlier
suggestion--
What if Earth
Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein
Each to other like more than on Earth is thought?
This is the scheme of things, and these are the actors, that Milton sets
in motion. We shall do well to accept the limitations he assigns, and to
look in his poem only for what is to be found there. It would be a
wearisome and fruitless quest to journey through the _Paradise Lost_ in
search of those profound touches of humanity, and those sudden felicities
of insight, which abound in the Elizabethans. Subtleties of thought, fine
observation of truths that almost evade the attempt to express them,
sentences and figures illuminative of the mysteries of human destiny and
the intricacies of human character--of all these there is none. If an
author's works are to be used as a treasury or garner of wise and
striking sayings, the harvest of sensibility and experience, _Paradise
Lost_ will yield only a poor handful of gleanings. One such reflection,
enforced by a happy figure, occurs in the Third Book, where Satan,
disguised as a youthful Cherub, deceives the Archangel Uriel--
So spake the false dissembler unperceived;
For neither man nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy--the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone,
By His permissive will, through Heaven and Earth;
And oft, though Wisdom wake, Suspicion sleeps
At Wisdom's gate, and to Simplicity
Resigns her charge, while Goodness thinks no ill
Where no ill seems.
Milton plainly had known hypocrisy, and had been deceived by it. But it
would be difficult to match this reflection with any single other passage
in the whole poem. To say that such reflections are common in Shakespeare
would be too moderate a statement; they are the very air he breathes. And
even in the lesser dramatists the happy embodiment of observation in a
telling figure is to be found on every page. An acute criticism, for
instance, is condensed in a dramatic form by Ford, where he describes
what may be called low politeness--
Smooth formality
Is usher to the rankness of the blood,
But impudence bears up the train.
The peculiar combination of formality and impudence that marks
ill-breeding was never more happily described than in this figure; the
mock solemnity of the usher comes first, and is soon followed by the
grimacing antics of the page, while each in his own way implies that the
advances of courtesy are a pomp and a deceit. Metaphors of the same kind
abound in the work of more modern analytic poets. Here is another parable
of a door-keeper, more poetic than Milton's:--
They say that Pity in Love's service dwells,
A porter at the rosy temple's gate.
I missed him going; but it is my fate
To come upon him now beside his wells;
Whereby I know that I Love's temple leave,
And that the purple doors have closed behind.
In Milton's poetry we find ourselves in a remote atmosphere; far indeed
from the shrewd observation of daily life, farther even from that
wonderful analysis of emotion which is the pastime of Shakespeare and of
Meredith. Beautiful figured writing and keen psychological observation of
this kind are beside the purpose of Milton, and beyond his power.
For the time we must forego the attempt to see into the life of things,
and must accept in imagination our position as citizens in this strange
majestic commonwealth of angels and men. It is no mean city. Noble shapes
pass before our eyes. High language is held, and great wars are waged.
Events of tremendous import roll on to their destined accomplishment.
Golden processions move across the dim expanse of Chaos. Worlds are blown
and broken like bubbles. There is concerted song, feasting, and
gratulation; dire plots are hatched and blaze forth into light; will
clashes with will; Heaven opens, and a torrent of flaming ruin is poured
forth into the deep. The Victor, ensconced in his omnipotence, is
fiercely triumphant; and in the dark below there is the dull gleam of
unconquered pride, deadly courage, and immortal despair. But in the midst
of all this vast rivalry of interests and jar of opposed systems, a cry
is heard, like that muffled cry which caught Macbeth's ear as he nerved
himself for his last fight. It is the cry of the human soul, left
homeless and derelict in a universe where she is the only alien. For her
the amaranth of the empyreal Heaven is as comfortless as the adamant of
Hell. She has lost her Paradise even while Adam's was building--the
Paradise where the flowers fade, and loves and hates are mortal.
In the poem itself signs are not wanting that Milton felt the terrible
strain imposed upon him by the intense and prolonged abstraction of his
theme--its unreality and superhuman elevation. Some of the comparisons
that he chooses to illustrate scenes in Hell are taken from the incidents
of simple rustic life, and by their contrast with the lurid creatures of
his imagination come like a draught of cold water to a traveller in a
tropical waste of sand and thorns. It is almost as if the poet himself
were oppressed by the suffocation of the atmosphere that he has created,
and, gasping for breath, sought relief by summoning up to remembrance the
sweet security of pastoral life. So, when the devils are shrunk to enter
Pandemonium, they are compared to
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.
The rejoicings, again, at the end of the infernal consultation, are
described in a figure that makes a like impression, and brings the same
momentary relief--
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.
The splendid artifice of contrast, noted by De Quincey as one of the
subtlest of Milton's devices, is illustrated, perhaps, by both these
passages. De Quincey instances neither, but chooses, as examples of the
way in which two images may act and react, heightening each other by
contrast--first, the use of architectural terms in describing Paradise;
next, the exhibition of a banquet in the desert in _Paradise
Regained_--"stimulating the sense of its utter solitude and remotion from
men and cities"; and, last and best, the comparison of Satan, in the same
poem, to an old man gathering sticks upon a winter's day. "The household
image of old age, of human infirmity, and of domestic hearths, are all
meant as a machinery for provoking and soliciting the fearful idea to
which they are placed in collision, and as so many repelling poles."
This is clever criticism and true philosophy. But the chief effect from
the more elaborate figures of this kind is to be found merely in the
reprieve and refreshment that they bring. There is a sense of pathos,
almost of tears, in being allowed, for one moment only, to taste reality
again, to revisit familiar scenes, before we are once more bound on the
slow wheel of unnatural events that is urged forward by the poet. Nothing
in Eden comes home to the feelings more directly than the simile used to
describe Satan as he watches Eve on the morning of the temptation--
As one who, long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight--
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound--
If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,
What pleasing seemed for her now pleases more,
She most, and in her look sums all delight:
Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This flowery plot, the sweet recess of Eve.
The Serpent is glad to escape from Hell, to breathe the morning air of
Eden. But how glad we are to escape from Eden
To breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms!
There are no villages and farms in Eden, no smell of hay, no sheaves of
corn, no cottages, no roads, and no trace of that most human of symbols,
the thin blue scarf of smoke rising from a wayside encampment. Even when
we are privileged to assist at the first festal celebration of
hospitality on Earth, the dinner given to the Angel, for which Eve
gathers
Fruit of all kinds, in coat
Rough or smooth rined, or bearded husk, or shell,
and heaps them, with bountiful hand, on the table of raised turf, we are
not perfectly at ease with our hosts. Not all the dignity of Adam, nor
all the beauty of Eve, can make us forget that they are nut-eaters, that
they have not the art of cooking, and do not ferment the juice of the
grape. A short stay in Eden teaches us the sad truth that we are
dependent, not only for the pleasures of our life, but even for many of
the dearest pleasures of our imagination, on the devices "introduced by
the necessities of sin." We cannot settle down in the midst of this
"enormous bliss"; we wander through the place, open-mouthed with wonder,
like country visitors admiring the Crown jewels, and then--we long to be
at home.
There are no children in any of Milton's poems. The introduction, in
_Paradise Lost_, of a real human child, such as Shakespeare brings into
_Coriolanus_ or _Macbeth_, would be like the bringing of a spark of fire
into a powder magazine. None of these edifying speeches could be made in
the presence of such an auditor, or such a critic. The whole system would
be blown into fragments; the artificial perspective that Milton preserves
with so great care would lose its glamour at a touch. Hell and Heaven and
Eden would dissolve away like the baseless fabric of a vision, a
scholar's nightmare, if once they were subjected to the free scrutiny of
a child.
_Paradise Lost_ will not bear--it could at no time, not even in the most
theological of ages, have borne--the more searching tests of realism, of
verisimilitude, and credibility. It is all the greater skill in the poet
that by his careful handling of our imagination and feelings he actually
does produce "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which
constitutes poetic faith." The less it will endure the trial as a system
or theory of the universe, the more wonderful does it appear as a work of
art. By the most delicate skill of architecture this gigantic filamented
structure has been raised into the air. It looks like some enchanted
palace that has lighted on the ground for a moment, resting in its
flight. It is really the product of the most elaborate and careful
engineering science; the strains and stresses put on every part of the
material have been calculated and allowed for. The poise and balance are
so minutely exact that it just stands, and no more. But that it should
stand at all is the marvel, seeing that it is spanned on frail arches
over the abyss of the impossible, the unnatural, and the grotesque. Let
it be granted that, in its main features, the system of _Paradise Lost_
does correspond with what was and is the religious creed of not a few
people. There is many a religious creed, strongly held, which is
convincing enough until the imagination begins to work it out in detail,
to try to realise it, in a clear light, as a connected whole. Then either
the imagination or the creed must give way. The remarkable thing about
Milton's achievement is that _Paradise Lost_ is both a creed and a
cosmical scheme of imagination, and that, except here and there, it is
impossible to point to parts of the poem and say, "Here he ceased to
believe," or "Here he gave up the effort to imagine." He both imagined
and believed throughout; he projected himself, like a sleep-walker, into
the mammoth caves of his antediluvian dreams, and lived among his own
radiant and shadowy creations. We need not, therefore, be surprised to
find that, in the first place, his daughters ran wild, and neither liked
nor understood their father; and that, in the second place, for the
rendering of his thought he invented a system of preternaturally majestic
diction, perfectly fitted for the utterance of his own conceptions, but,
when divorced from those conceptions, so monstrously artificial in
effect, that his imitators and followers, hoisting themselves on the
Miltonic stilts, brought the very name of "poetic diction" into a
contempt that has lasted for more than a century, and is not yet wholly
extinct.