PARADISE LOST: THE ACTORS. THE LATER POEMS
The difficulties which Milton felt and conquered in the making of his
epic masterpiece had their origin, for the most part, in the intractable
and barren nature of his chosen theme. The dangers that beset him, and
sometimes tripped his feet, arose, on the other hand, from his own
declared intention in the handling of that theme:--
That, to the highth of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence
And justify the ways of God to men.
The pursuit of this argumentative end led him through strange passes. A
less courageous or a more sensitive man might well have hesitated at the
entrance. But Milton hesitated at nothing. The ultimate mysteries of
human existence and Divine government were no mysteries to him.
The living Throne, the sapphire blaze,
Where angels tremble, while they gaze,
He saw;
--and he did not tremble. His persons are visible, their characters are
known, the nature of their relations is easily ascertained and expounded.
Everything, in short, is as plain as a pikestaff. So he came to picture
scenes which criticism is reluctant to traverse, and to make statements
which it is equally irreverent either to affirm or to deny.
Dr. Johnson, with a fearful and sincere piety, refused to follow Milton
into Heaven. "Of the agents in the poem," he says, "the chief are such as
it is irreverence to name on slight occasions." And again:--"The
characters in the _Paradise Lost_ which admit of examination are those of
angels and of man." It is impossible not to respect Johnson's attitude,
but later critics have found it difficult to follow his example, and
Milton himself would have been the last to claim sanctuary in Heaven for
the imaginations on which the whole fabric of the poem depends.
Coleridge is one of the very few critics who have praised the conduct of
the celestial part of the story:--"Wherever God is represented as acting
directly as Creator, without any exhibition of his own essence, Milton
adopts the simplest and sternest language of the Scriptures.... But, as
some personal interest was demanded for the purposes of poetry, Milton
takes advantage of the dramatic representation of God's address to the
Son, the Filial Alterity, and in _those addresses_ slips in, as it were
by stealth, language of affection, or thought, or sentiment.... He was
very wise in adopting the strong anthropomorphism of the Hebrew
Scriptures at once." Yet this is hardly an answer to the chief objections
that have been urged against Milton's conduct of the poem. These are
grounded, not on his adoption of the strong anthropomorphism of the
Hebrew Scriptures, but on the nature of the matter that he slips in, "as
if by stealth," and the character that he attributes to his Divine
persons. Had he been a pagan, pure and simple, he might have been frankly
and explicitly materialistic in his conceptions. Had he been touched by
the spirit of the greatest of Christian poets, he might have shrouded the
Godhead in a mystery of silence and light. But he had something to prove
to the men of his own time, and neither course served him.
Milton's theodicy is of his own devising, and is neither Catholic nor
Calvinist. His heresies may be reduced to a single point; the ultimate
basis on which he rests the universe is political, not religious. The
fierce simplicity of his processes of thought here led him straight into
a trap. Law to him is an expression of Will, enforced by due penalties.
As promulgated by human authority, laws are to be obeyed only if they do
not clash with the dictates of a higher Power. The laws of God are
subject to no such restraint. They are; and, save by faith, there is no
further word to be said. But Milton had set himself to justify these laws
by reason. Destitute as he was of speculative power, he attempted no
transcendental amalgam of diverse conceptions, of Love and Law, of Mercy
and Justice. He fell back on Law as the naked assertion of Will, and
helped out the ancient argument of the pot and the potter with a
utilitarian appeal, which he puts into the mouth of a Seraph, to the
happy working of the Divine laws in practice.
So it comes about that the main argument of the poem is founded on an
outrage done to religion. In the place and under the name of Him "with
whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning," Milton set up in
Heaven a whimsical Tyrant, all of whose laws are arbitrary and
occasional, and who exacts from his creatures an obedience that differs
from brute submission in one point only, that by the gift of free-will it
is put within their power to disobey. His commands, like his laws, are
issued from time to time. Sometimes they enjoin the impossible on his
subjects; as when Michael and Gabriel, at the head of the heavenly host,
are ordered to drive Satan and his crew out of Heaven into the abyss--a
task they prove wholly unable to accomplish. Sometimes orders are given
merely as an assertion of power, and to test submission; as when Raphael
is sent to keep the rebels confined in Hell, and explains subsequently to
Adam:--
Not that they durst without his leave attempt;
But us he sends upon his high behests
For state, as sovran King, and to inure
Our prompt obedience.
The particular event with which, according to Milton, the whole history
begins is presented with a crudity that would have horrified the Fathers.
The appointment of a Vicegerent to the Almighty, and the edict requiring
homage to be done to him, are announced "on a day" to the host of Angels
assembled by special summons for this purpose. During the night
following, one of the chief Archangels, thereafter called Satan, draws
off his forces to the north under pretext of preparing a welcome for the
new Commander, who is to make a progress through his domain, promulgating
more new laws. The purpose of the rebels is discerned by the All-Knowing,
who makes this strange speech to the Son:--
Let us advise, and to this hazard draw
With speed what force is left, and all employ
In our defence, lest unawares we lose
This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill.
It is unnecessary to quote more of the speeches in Heaven; they are
tangles of Scriptural phrase, from which there can be extracted neither
good divinity nor good humanity. "The glory of God," says the Wisdom of
Solomon, "is to conceal a thing; the glory of the King is to find it
out." But the glory of Milton's Deity is to explain a thing. The proud
voluble candour of some of these speeches reminds us only of the author
of _A Defence of the People of England_. In some of them there is even a
flavour of uneasy boastfulness, as of one who is anxious not to be
lessened in the estimation of the rebel adversary.
It may be pleaded that the epical necessities of the poem imposed finite
conceptions, of one sort or another, upon Milton; and that, when once he
had begun to define and explain, he was carried further and further along
that perilous way without being fully conscious of whither he was
tending. Yet his persistent accumulation of harsh and dread traits seems
wilful in its nature; he bases his description, no doubt, on hints from
Scripture, but he pays no attention to any that do not fall in with his
own narrow and gloomy conception. Satan is permitted to rise from the
burning lake--
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation.
When he arrives at the foot of the stairway that joins Heaven and the
World--
The stairs were then let down, whether to dare
The Fiend by easy ascent, or aggravate
His sad exclusion from the doors of bliss.
Astronomy, it is suggested by "the affable Archangel," has perhaps been
made a difficult subject in order to produce the droll fallacies of
astronomers:
He his fabric of the Heavens
Hath left to their disputes--perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide.
And this conjecture is borne out by what happened when the builders of
the tower of Babel were frustrated, for then--
Great laughter was in Heaven,
And looking down to see the hubbub strange
And hear the din.
Milton, in short, has hardened the heart of the God that hardened
Pharaoh's heart, and has narrowed his love and his power.
Some kind of internal blindness must have visited him if he did not
perceive what must inevitably be the effect of all this on the sympathies
and interest of the reader. And the irony of the thing is that his own
sympathies were not proof against the trial that he had devised for them.
He lavished all his power, all his skill, and, in spite of himself, the
greater part of his sympathy, on the splendid figure of Satan. He avoids
calling _Paradise Lost_ "an heroic poem"; when it was printed, in 1667,
the title-page ran merely--_Paradise Lost, A Poem in Ten Books_. Had he
inserted the word "heroic," the question as to who is the hero would have
been broached at once. And to that question, if it be fairly faced, only
one answer can be given,--the answer that has already been given by
Dryden and Goethe, by Lord Chesterfield and Professor Masson. It was not
for nothing that Milton stultified the professed moral of his poem, and
emptied it of all spiritual content. He was not fully conscious, it
seems, of what he was doing; but he builded better than he knew. A
profound poetic instinct taught him to preserve epic truth at all costs.
And the epic value of _Paradise Lost_ is centred in the character and
achievements of Satan.
Satan unavoidably reminds us of Prometheus, and although there are
essential differences, we are not made to feel them essential. His very
situation as the fearless antagonist of Omnipotence makes him either a
fool or a hero, and Milton is far indeed from permitting us to think him
a fool. The nobility and greatness of his bearing are brought home to us
in some half-dozen of the finest poetic passages in the world. The most
stupendous of the poet's imaginative creations are made the foil for a
greater than themselves. Was ever terror more magnificently embodied than
in the phantom figure of Death?--
The other Shape--
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb;
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
For each seemed either--black it stood as Night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,
And shook a dreadful dart: what seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
Satan was now at hand, and from his seat
The monster moving onward came as fast
With horrid strides; Hell trembled as he strode.
This is the passage that drew from Burke a rapture of praise. But as it
stands in the poem its elevation is a scaffolding merely, whence we may
view the greatness of Satan:--
The undaunted Fiend what this might be admired--
Admired, not feared (God and his Son except,
Created thing naught valued he nor shunned).
The same magnificent effect of suggestion is wrought even more subtly in
the scene where Satan approaches
the throne
Of _Chaos_, and his dark pavilion spread
Wide on the wasteful Deep.
Courteously and fearlessly Satan addresses himself to the monarch of the
nethermost abyss. His speech contains no threats; he asks guidance in his
quest; and, with politic forethought, promises that that quest, if
successful, shall restore an outlying lost province to Chaos. There is
nothing in his words to cause consternation; but the King is afraid:--
Him thus the anarch old,
With faltering speech and visage incomposed,
Answered:--"I know thee, stranger, who thou art--
That mighty leading Angel, who of late
Made head against Heaven's King, though overthrown."
In the war on the plains of Heaven Satan ranges up and down the fighting
line, like Cromwell; he fortifies his comrades to endurance, and
encourages them to attack. In Hell he stands like a tower:--
His form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured.
In his contests with Michael in Heaven and with Gabriel on Earth he never
falls below himself:--
"If I must contend," said he,
"Best with the best--the sender, not the sent;
Or all at once."
But his motive passions, it is objected, were envy, ambition, and hate,
and his end was a crime. To which objection a modern poet has replied
that a crime will serve as a measure for the spirit. Certainly to Satan
there could never be imputed the sin of "the unlit lamp and the ungirt
loin." And Milton has not left him devoid of the gentlest passion, the
passion of pity:--
Cruel his eye, but cast
Signs of remorse and passion, to behold
The fellows of his crime, the followers rather
(Far other once beheld in bliss), condemned
For ever now to have their lot in pain--
Millions of Spirits for his fault amerced
Of Heaven, and from eternal splendours flung
For his revolt--yet faithful how they stood,
Their glory withered.
Thrice he attempts to address them, and thrice--
in spite of scorn
Tears, such as Angels weep, burst forth.
His followers are devotedly attached to him; they admire him "that for
the general safety he despised his own"; and the only scene of rejoicing
recorded in the annals of Hell, before the Fall of Man, is at the
dissolution of the Stygian Council, when the devils come forth "rejoicing
in their matchless Chief."
As if of set purpose to raise Satan high above the heads of the other
Archangels, Milton devises a pair of similar scenes, in Heaven and in
Hell. In the one Satan takes upon himself the unknown dangers of the
enterprise that has been approved by the assembly. In the other, which
occurs in the very next book, the Heavenly Powers are addressed from the
Throne, and asked--
"Which of ye will be mortal, to redeem
Man's mortal crime, and just, the unjust to save?
Dwells in all Heaven charity so dear?"
He asked, but all the Heavenly Quire stood mute,
And silence was in Heaven: on Man's behalf
Patron or intercessor none appeared--
Much less that durst upon his own head draw
The deadly forfeiture, and ransom set.
No wonder that Landor--although in another place he declares that Adam is
the hero of _Paradise Lost_, and that "there is neither truth nor wit" in
giving that name to Satan--is nevertheless startled by this passage into
the comment, "I know not what interest Milton could have had in making
Satan so august a creature, and so ready to share the dangers and sorrows
of the angels he had seduced. I know not, on the other hand, what could
have urged him to make the better ones so dastardly that even at the
voice of their Creator not one among them offered his service to rescue
from eternal perdition the last and weakest of intellectual beings."
When Satan first comes in sight of Paradisal bliss and the new-created
pair, here surely was a chance for attributing to him the foul passions
of envy and hate unalloyed? On the contrary, he is struck with admiration
for their grace and infused divinity. He could love and pity them--so he
muses--though himself unpitied. He seeks alliance with them, and is
prepared to give them a share in all he has--which, it must be allowed,
is the spirit of true hospitality. He feels it beneath him to attack
innocence and helplessness, but public reasons compel him to do what
otherwise he would abhor:--
So spake the Fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds.
But no imputation is cast on the sincerity of the plea, and we are left
to conceive of Satan as of a lover of beauty reluctantly compelled to
shatter it in the pursuit of his high political aims. In the same way,
when he finds Eve alone, on the morning of the temptation, he is disarmed
by her beauty and innocence, and, for a spell, is struck "stupidly good."
Truly, Adam might boast, with Gibbon, that he fell by a noble hand.
It is possible that by the time he had completed the Fourth Book, Milton
became uneasy as to the effect he was producing. Up to that point
magnanimity and courage had been almost the monopoly of Satan. He had
been the Great Dissenter, the undaunted and considerate leader of an
outcast minority. But now, in the description of the war in Heaven, there
came a chance of doing something to right the balance. Milton makes the
most of the episode of Abdiel, who has been led away with the rest of
Satan's followers, upon false pretences, and who, when he discovers the
true purpose of the expedition, makes a lonely stand for the right:--
Among the faithless faithful only he; ...
Nor number nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind,
Though single.
And Abdiel, when he meets Satan again after the outbreak of the war,
glories in his nonconformity, and hisses out defiance:--
Thou seest
All are not of thy train; there be who faith
Prefer, and piety to God, though then
To thee not visible when I alone
Seemed in thy world erroneous to dissent
From all: my Sect thou seest; now learn too late
How few sometimes may know when thousands err.
In this way Milton attempted to allay his scruples, and to divide the
honours of dissent. Later on, after the Fall, when Satan returns to Hell
with tidings of his exploit, the change of all the devils to serpents,
and of their applause to "a dismal universal hiss" was perhaps devised to
cast a slur upon the success of his mission. Some critics have professed
to discern a certain progressive degradation and shrinkage in Satan as
the poem proceeds. But his original creation lived on in the imagination
and memory of Milton, and was revived, with an added pathos, in _Paradise
Regained_. The most moving of all Satan's speeches is perhaps the long
pleading there made in answer to the challenge of Christ, and its tone of
unutterable despair is deepened by the terrible severity of the speech
made in answer.
The other leaders of the rebel troops take little part in the action
outside the scene of the Infernal Council. In his memories of the Long
Parliament Milton could easily find examples of the types he has embodied
under the names of Belial, Mammon, Moloch, and Beelzebub. Nor has he
forgotten the Westminster Assembly of divines. The precise employments of
that historic body are described by him as the recreation of the lost
spirits:--
Others apart sat on a hill retired,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate--
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute--
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
It ill became Milton to cast contempt on these reasonings, seeing that a
whole system of them was necessary for the argument of his poem. He is so
little of a philosopher that he seems hardly to be conscious of the
difficulties of his own theory. Both in _Paradise Lost_ and in the
_Treatise of Christian Doctrine_ he enlarges with much dogmatism and some
arrogance on the difference between foreknowledge and foreordination. He
rejects predestination decisively, but he not only does not answer, he
does not even so much as mention, the difficulty that arises in
attempting to distinguish between what is foreordained by Omniscience and
what is foreknown by Omnipotence. Pope compared some of the speeches
delivered in Heaven to the arguments of a "School-divine." The comparison
does injustice to the scholastic philosophers. There was never one of
them who could have walked into a metaphysical bramble-bush with the
blind recklessness that Milton displays.
It is time to return to Eden and its inhabitants. They have little to do
but "to lop and prune and prop and bind," to adore their Maker, and to
avoid the prohibited tree. It would perhaps have been impossible for a
poet with more dramatic genius than Milton to make these favourites of
Heaven interesting in their happy state, while yet the key that was to
admit them to our world of adventure and experience, of suffering and
achievement, hung untouched on a tree. And Adam, from the wealth of his
inexperience, is lavishly sententious; when anything is to do, even if it
is only to go to sleep, he does it in a high style, and makes a speech.
Milton plainly saw the danger of arousing a sense of incongruity and
ludicrous disproportion from the contest between these harmless tame
creatures and the great forces of Satan's empire. So he makes man strong
in innocence, and, unlike the fallen angels, exempt from all physical
pain or wound. He even goes so far as to make Satan afraid of Adam, of
his heroic build and intellectual power. This last, it might be said, is
a fear not explained by anything that we are privileged to hear from the
lips of Adam himself; but perhaps, in the case of our great ancestor, we
shall do well to remember Hamlet's advice to the players, "Follow that
lord, and look you mock him not."
There remains a more important person--Eve. And with Eve, since the
beginning of Milton criticism, there enter all those questions concerning
the comparative worthiness and the relative authority of husband and wife
which critics of Milton so often and so gladly step aside to discuss.
Every one knows the line:--
He for God only, she for God in him.
Almost every one knows the lines:--
Nothing lovelier can be found
In woman than to study household good,
And good works in her husband to promote.
Milton certainly shared the views of Knox concerning the "Monstrous
Regiment of Women." It is unnecessary to meet him on his own ground, or
to attempt a theory that shall explain or control Eve, Cleopatra, Joan of
Arc, Catherine of the Medici, Mary Powell, and others of their sex. Such
theories prove only that man is a generalising and rationalising animal.
The poet brought his fate on himself, for since Eve was the mother of
mankind, he thought fit to make her the embodiment of a doctrine. But he
also (a thing of far deeper interest) coloured his account by the
introduction of personal memories and feelings. Of Eve, at least, he
never writes indifferently. When he came to write _Samson Agonistes_, the
intensity of his feelings concerning Dalila caused him to deviate from
the best Greek tradition and to assign inappropriate matter to the
Chorus. And even in his matter-of-fact _History of Britain_, the name of
Boadicea awakens him to a fit of indignation with the Britons who upheld
her rule. There is full scope in _Paradise Lost_ for similar expressions
of indignation. Adam, after the Fall, speaks of his wife as
Not to be trusted--longing to be seen
Though by the Devil himself.
In the Eleventh Book the daughters of men are described as bred only
to sing, to dance,
To dress, and troll the tongue, and roll the eye.
But Milton, it is sometimes forgotten, was also the author of that
beautiful eulogy of Eve in the Eighth Book:--
When I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in herself complete, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say
Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.
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 an exact parallel to Florizel's praise of Perdita in _The Winter's
Tale_:--
When you speak, sweet,
I'd have you do it ever: when you sing,
I'd have you buy and sell so, so give alms,
Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs,
To sing them too; when you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; move still, still so,
And own no other function: each your doing,
So singular in each particular,
Crowns what you are doing in the present deed,
That all your acts are queens.
But Florizel addresses his praise to the lady herself; while Adam, who
had never been young, confides it in private to Raphael, after dinner,
and studies a more instructive and authoritative strain in his
conversations with Eve. And now comes a point worthy of remark. The
Angel, to whom, it cannot be doubted, Milton committed the exposition of
his own views, after hearing this confession, frowns, and administers a
tart reproof. He describes Eve, somewhat grudgingly, as "an
outside--fair, no doubt," and peremptorily teaches Adam the duties of
self-appreciation and self-assertion:--
Oft-times nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right
Well managed. Of that skill the more thou know'st,
The more she will acknowledge thee her head,
And to realities yield all her shows.
And in the sequel, Adam bitterly laments that he had failed to profit by
this advice. He might have been comforted by the wisdom of Chaucer's
Franklin:--
When maistrie cometh, the god of love anon
Beteth his wynges and, farewel, he is gon!
The explanation of all this is clear to see. Milton was not, as he has
sometimes been described, a callous and morose Puritan. He was
extraordinarily susceptible to the attractions of feminine beauty and
grace. Adam's confession is his own. But the ideal of character that he
had put before himself caused him passionately to resent this
susceptibility. It was the joint in his harness, the main breach in his
Stoicism, the great anomaly in a life regulated as for his Task-master.
He felt that beauty was a power not himself, unbalancing and disturbing
the rational self-centred poise of his soul. There have been poets whose
service of Venus Verticordia was whole-hearted. But to Milton the power
of Beauty was a magnetism to be distrusted for its very strength. He felt
something of what he makes Satan express, that there is terror in love
and beauty "not approached by stronger hate." The Chorus in _Samson
Agonistes_ makes a similar observation:--
Yet beauty, though injurious, hath strange power
After offence returning, to regain
Love once possessed.
To escape from the dominion of the tyrant is the duty of a wise man. When
Raphael remarked that "Love ... hath his seat in Reason, and is
judicious," he committed himself to a statement which a longer experience
of the world would have enabled him to correct. But Milton wished it
true; and perhaps even lured himself into a belief of its truth. At any
rate, when Satan, in _Paradise Regained_, expounds his opinion on the
matter, it is found, for once, to be in substantial agreement with
Raphael's:--
Beauty stands
In the admiration only of weak minds
Led captive; cease to admire, and all her plumes
Fall flat, and shrink into a trivial toy,
At every sudden slighting quite abashed.
It is a great loss to literature that Mrs. Millamant, the delightful
heroine of Congreve's comedy, was no reader of Milton. Her favourite
author was Suckling:--
I prithee spare me, gentle boy,
Press me no more for that slight toy,
That foolish trifle of a heart.
If she had a copy of the _Paradise Regained_, doubtless it stood in some
conspicuous place, and was never opened,--like Mrs. Wishfort's "books
over the chimney--Quarles and Prynne, and 'The Short View of the Stage,'
with Bunyan's works, to entertain you." But all unawares she has answered
the contention of Satan:--"O the vanity of these men!--Fainall, d'ye hear
him? If they did not commend us, we were not handsome! Now you must know
that they could not commend one, if one was not handsome. Beauty the
lover's gift!--Lord, what is a lover, that it can give? ... One no more
owes one's beauty to a lover than one's wit to an echo."
Like most men of an impressionable temperament and a strong will, Milton
was not sympathetic, nor curious to place himself where he might see the
world from a point of view other than his own. Besieged by their
sensations and impressions, concerned above all things with maintaining
their opinions and enforcing their beliefs on others, such men find
enough to do within the citadel of their own personality. To judge from
some passages of his works, one half of the human race was to Milton an
illusion to which the other half was subject. One who is in love with his
own ideas cannot but be disappointed alike with existing institutions and
with the tissue of surprises that is a person. Milton's disappointment,
which had inspired the early Divorce pamphlets, finds renewed expression
in Adam's prophecy of unhappy marriages--a notable parallel to the
similar prophecy in _Venus and Adonis_--
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.
But, with all this, of our two grand parents Eve is the better drawn and
the more human. Milton did not intend that it should be so, but he could
not help it. One consequence of the doctrine--
He for God only, she for God in him--
is that Adam's single impulse of unselfishness, whereby he elects to
share the offence and punishment of Eve, is a vice in him, a "bad
compliance." Self-abnegation, the duty of Eve, is hardly within the right
of Adam; and Dr. Johnson expressed a half-truth in violently paradoxical
terms when he said that Milton "thought woman made only for obedience and
man only for rebellion." It would be truer, and weaker, to say that
Milton thought woman made for the exercise of private, and man for the
exercise of public, virtues. Hence in their mutual relations Eve carries
off all the honours, for her duty towards Adam coincides with her
inclination, while in his case the two are at variance. There is no
speech of Adam's to be matched with the pleading intensity of Eve's
appeal, beginning--"Forsake me not thus, Adam!"--and to her Milton
commits the last and best speech spoken in Paradise:--
But now lead on;
In me is no delay; with thee to go
Is to stay here; without thee here to stay
Is to go hence unwilling; thou to me
Art all things under Heaven, all places thou,
Who for my wilful crime art banished hence.
She is generous and loving; her only reproach addressed to Adam is that
he acceded to her request, and permitted her, on that fateful morning, to
do her gardening alone, among the roses and myrtles. She is a fair
companion picture to set over against Dalila, and is utterly incapable of
Dalila's hypocrisy in justifying private treachery by reasons of public
policy. There is even a certain dramatic development in her character;
after she has eaten of the fruit, audacity and deceit appear in her
reflections; she meditates withholding from Adam the advantages of the
tree, in order that she may become--
More equal, and perhaps--
A thing not undesirable--sometimes
Superior.
It is easy to understand how tired Eve might well become (even before the
fallacious fruit was tasted) of Adam's carefully maintained superiority.
On thinking, however, of the judgment that she may have to suffer, and of
her own death, she resolves to draw him in, her motive being not fear,
but a sudden movement of jealousy at the thought of--
Adam wedded to another Eve.
This is as near an approach to drama in the handling of a human situation
as is to be found in all _Paradise Lost_.
But enough of this vein of criticism, which is justified only by the
pleasure of detecting Milton too imperfectly concealed behind his
handiwork. To treat the scenes he portrays as if analysis of character
were his aim, and truth of psychology his touchstone, is to do a wrong to
the artist. He is an epic, not a dramatic, poet; to find him at his best
we must look at those passages of unsurpassed magnificence wherein he
describes some noble or striking attitude, some strong or majestic
action, in its outward physical aspect.
In this, the loftiest part of his task, his other defects, as if by some
hidden law of compensation, are splendidly redeemed. While he deals with
abstract thought or moral truth his handling is tight, pedantic, and
disagreeably hard. But when he comes to describe his epic personages and
his embodied visions, all is power, and vagueness, and grandeur. His
imagination, escaped from the narrow prison of his thought, rises like a
vapour, and, taking shape before his eyes, proclaims itself his master.
No other poet has known so well how to portray, in a few strokes, effects
of multitude and vastness. Now it is the sacred congregation in Heaven:--
About him all the Sanctities of Heaven
Stood thick as stars, and from his sight received
Beatitude past utterance.
Now the warrior host of Hell:--
He spake; and, to confirm his words, outflew
Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs
Of mighty Cherubim; the sudden blaze
Far round illumined Hell.
In these, as in other like scenes, he preserves epic unity by throwing
the whole into the distance. So after the approach of the Messiah to
battle, "the poet," says Coleridge, "by one touch from himself--'far off
their coming shone!'--makes the whole one image." He describes at a
greater range of vision than any other poet: the frame-work of his single
scenes is often not less than a third of universal space. When he has
added figure to figure in the endeavour to picture the multitudinous
disarray of the fallen Angels on the lake, one line suffices to reduce
the whole spectacle to its due dimensions beneath that cavernous tent of
darkness:--
He called so loud that all the hollow deep
Of Hell resounded.
The same effect of number and vastness, diminished and unified by the
same reference to a larger setting, wherein all is seen at a glance, may
be noted in the description of the raising of Satan's standard in Hell:--
The imperial ensign, which, full high advanced,
Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind,
With gems and golden lustre rich emblazed,
Seraphic arms and trophies; all the while
Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds:
At which the universal host up-sent
A shout that tore Hell's concave, and beyond
Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night.
All in a moment through the gloom were seen
Ten thousand banners rise into the air,
With orient colours waving: with them rose
A forest huge of spears; and thronging helms
Appeared, and serried shields in thick array
Of depth immeasureable.
Sometimes a line or two gives him scope enough for the rendering of one
of these epic scenes, immense and vivid. The ruin and prostration of the
rebels is made visible in two lines:--
Cherub and Seraph rolling in the flood
With scattered arms and ensigns.
And the picture of the East rises at a touch:--
Dusk faces with white silken turbants wreathed.
In the drawing of single attitudes Milton studies the same large decorum
and majesty. He is never tempted into detail in the describing of gesture
or action; never loses the whole in the part. The bulk of _Paradise Lost_
was written between the sixth and the thirteenth years of his blindness.
Since the veil had fallen he had lived with the luminous shapes that he
could picture against the dark. The human face had lost, in his
recollection of it, something of its minuter delineation, but nothing of
its radiance. On the other hand, the human figure, in its most
significant gestures and larger movements, haunted his visions. His
description of the appearance of the wife whom he had never seen is an
early model of many of his later drawings. She comes to his bedside and
leans over him, stretching forth her arms:
Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
Adam and Eve, as they are first seen in Paradise, have the same shining
quality, the same vagueness of beauty expressing itself in purely
emotional terms. Satan standing on the top of Mount Niphates, looking
down on Eden spread out at his feet, and then with fierce gesticulation
addressing himself to the sun at the zenith, is one of the dim solitary
figures that dwell in the mind's eye. No less impressive and no less
indefinite are those two monumental descriptions of the rebel leader; the
first, of his going forth to war in Heaven:--
High in the midst, exalted as a God,
The Apostate in his sun-bright chariot sat,
Idol of majesty divine, enclosed
With flaming Cherubim and golden shields.
and the other, of his encounter with Gabriel:--
Satan, alarmed,
Collecting all his might, dilated stood,
Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremoved:
His stature reached the sky, and on his crest
Sat Horror plumed; nor wanted in his grasp
What seemed both spear and shield.
In these, and in a hundred other notable passages, the images are as
simple and broad as the emotional effects that they produce,--the sun,
flame, gold, a mountain, the sky.
Some of the scenes and situations delineated by Milton are of a gentler
and more elusive virtue than these terrors and sublimities. His
descriptions of morning and evening are always charged with emotion--the
quiet coming-on of night in Eden; or the break of day in the wilderness
of the Temptation, with a sense of joy and relief "after a night of storm
so ruinous." His feeling for the imaginative effects of architecture in a
landscape is extraordinarily subtle. One, at least, of these effects is
hardly to be experienced among the hedgerows and farmsteads and placid
rambling towns of England. Travellers in Italy, or in the East, are
better able to understand the transfiguration of a landscape by the
distant view of a small compact array of walls and towers perched on a
vantage-ground among the hills of the horizon. The lawlessness of Nature,
the homelessness of the surface of the earth, and the fears that haunt
uninhabited places, are all accentuated by the distrust that frowns from
the battlements of such a stronghold of militant civility. For this
reason, perhaps, the architectural features in certain pictures and
drawings have an indescribable power of suggestion. The city,
self-contained and fortified, overlooking a wide expanse of country,
stands for safety and society; the little group of figures, parleying at
the gate, or moving down into the plain, awakens in the mind a sense of
far-off things,--the moving accidents of the great outer world, and the
dangers and chances of the unknown. Bunyan, whose imagination was
nourished on the Eastern scenery and sentiment of the Bible, shows
himself powerfully affected by situations of this kind, as where, in the
beginning of the _Pilgrim's Progress_, he describes the man with his face
from his own home, running from the City of Destruction, and the group of
his kindred calling after him to return:--"but the man put his fingers in
his ears, and ran on crying, Life, Life, Eternal Life: so he looked not
behind him, but fled towards the middle of the plain."
Such another figure is Milton's Abdiel, who escaped from the rebel
citadel--
And with retorted scorn his back he turned
On those proud towers, to swift destruction doomed.
The perils of his flight are vaguely indicated by a few admirable touches
in the opening of the next Book:--
All night the dreadless Angel, unpursued,
Through Heaven's wide champaign held his way, till Morn
Waked by the circling Hours, with rosy hand
Unbarred the gates of Light.
A more signal instance of the same poetic effect is to be found in the
wonderful close of _Paradise Lost_, where Adam and Eve are led down from
the garden by the archangel Michael, and are left standing in the vast
plain below:--
They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
Criticism might exhaust itself in the effort to do justice to the beauty
of this close. Of Adam and Eve it may be truly said that none of all
their doings in the garden became them like the leaving of it. Yet
Addison and Bentley, the ornaments of a polite and learned age, are at
one in their depreciation of the last two lines. Addison, after a formal
apology for "the smallest Alteration in this divine Work," boldly
recommends amputation; while Bentley, with the caution of a more
experienced surgeon, offers to crutch the lines on certain wooden
contrivances of his own. The three epithets, "wandering," "slow," and
"solitary," are all censured by him. Our first parents, he remarks, were
guided by Providence, and therefore needed not to wander; they were
reassured by Michael's predictions, and so might well display an engaging
briskness; while as for "their solitary way," they were no more solitary
than in Paradise, "there being no Body besides Them Two, both here and
there." He therefore suggests a distich more agreeable to the general
scheme:--
Then hand in hand with social steps their way
Through Eden took, with Heav'nly Comfort cheer'd
It is impossible to answer such criticism; the organs of human speech are
too frail. Let Bentley be left to contemplate with delight the hideous
gash that his chopper has inflicted on the Miltonic rhythm of the last
line. If Addison, for his part, had been less concerned with the opinions
of M. Bossu, and the enumeration of the books of the _AEneid_, he might
have found leisure to notice that the two later poems, _Paradise
Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_, are each brought to a close which
exactly resembles the close of _Paradise Lost_. After the splendours in
the last book of _Paradise Regained_--the fall of Satan, "smitten with
amazement," from the pinnacle of the Temple, the elaborate classical
comparisons of Antaeus and the Sphinx, and the triumphal chorus of Angels
who bear the Son of God aloft with anthems of victory--the poem ends with
the same exquisite lull:--
He, unobserved,
Home to his mother's house private returned.
And _Samson Agonistes_ brings as glorious a triumph to no less peaceful a
close:--
And calm of mind, all passion spent.
The dying fall is the same in all three, and is the form of ending
preferred by the musical and poetic genius of Milton.
Passages of a crowded and ostentatious magnificence are more frequent in
_Paradise Lost_ than in either of the two later poems. In _Paradise
Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_ the enhanced severity of a style which
rejects almost all ornament was due in part, no doubt, to a gradual
change in Milton's temper and attitude. It is not so much that his power
of imagination waned, as that his interest veered, turning more to
thought and reflection, less to action and picture. In these two poems,
at the last, he celebrated that
better fortitude
Of patience and heroic martyrdom
which he had professed to sing in _Paradise Lost_. We are told by his
nephew that he "could not bear with patience any such thing related to
him" as that _Paradise Regained_ was inferior to _Paradise Lost_. He was
right; its merits and beauties are of a different and more sombre kind,
yet of a kind perhaps further out of the reach of any other poet than
even the constellated glories of _Paradise Lost_ itself. It should be
remembered that _Paradise Lost_, although it was written by Milton
between the fiftieth and the fifty-seventh years of his age, was
conceived by him, in its main outlines, not later than his thirty-fourth
year. Two of the passages noticed above, where Satan addresses himself to
the Sun and where the Angel leads Adam and Eve out of Paradise, embody
situations which had appealed to his younger imagination. Some of the
very words of Satan's address were written, we learn from Phillips, about
1642. And the expulsion of Adam and Eve seems to contain a reminiscence
of the time when Milton was considering the history of Lot as a possible
subject for an epic. The lines--
In either hand the hastening Angel caught
Our lingering parents--
were perhaps suggested by the Scripture narrative--"And while he
lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his
wife,... and they brought him forth, and set him without the city"
(Genesis xix. 16).
The gravity and density of the style of _Paradise Lost_ would have been
beyond the power of youth, even of the youth of Milton; but the action of
the poem, with all its vividness and vigour, could perhaps hardly have
been first conceived in mature age. The composition was long deferred, so
that in the decade which witnessed the production of all three great
poems we see a strangely rapid development, or change rather, of manner.
In _Paradise Lost_ Milton at last delivered himself of the work that had
been brooding over him "with mighty wings outspread" during all the years
of his manhood. But his imagination could not easily emancipate itself
from that overmastering presence; and when he took up with a fresh task
he gladly chose a theme closely related to the theme of _Paradise Lost_,
and an opportunity of re-introducing some of the ancient figures. A
kind-hearted, simple-minded, pig-headed young Quaker, called Thomas
Ellwood, takes to himself credit for having suggested a sequel to the
story of the Fall. "Thou hast said much here," he remarked to Milton, "of
_Paradise Lost_; but what hast thou to say of _Paradise Found_?" The
words, as it seemed to Ellwood, sank deep, and did their work. "He made
me no answer, but sate some time in a muse, then brake off that discourse
and fell upon another subject." Perhaps while he sat in a muse Milton was
attempting to sound, with the plummet of conjecture, the abyss of human
folly, "dark, wasteful, wild." So early as in the fourth line of
_Paradise Lost_, and already very fully in the Third Book, he had treated
of _Paradise Found_ as an integral part of his subject. The episode of
the Eleventh and Twelfth Books was wholly concerned with it. It seems not
unlikely, however, that he caught at the suggestion as an excuse for a
new and independent work. One of the commonest kinds of critical
stupidity is the kind that discovers something "unfinished" in a great
work of art, and suggests desirable trimmings and additions. Milton knew
that _Paradise Lost_ was finished, in every sense. But room had not been
found in it for all that now held the chief place in his matured thought.
When he chose the theme of his great work, the actual temptation of man
probably bulked much larger in his design than it does in the completed
poem. His epic creatures, from being the machinery of the poem, usurped a
share of the control. With all Milton's care and skill, there is very
little interest in the actual plucking of the apple; Eve was too simple a
pleader to make much of the case for the defence. Yet human life
presented itself to Milton chiefly under the guise of a series of
temptations. The title of one of Andrew Marvell's pieces might well be
used to describe the whole canon of his poetry, from _L' Allegro_ to
_Samson Agonistes_--all are parts of _A Dialogue between the Resolved
Soul and Created Pleasure_. To his youthful fancy Mirth and Melancholy
present themselves in the likeness of rival goddesses, claiming
allegiance, and offering gifts. The story of Samson is a story of
temptation, yielded to through weakness, punished by ignominy, and, in
the end, magnificently expiated. In _Comus_ is shown how the temptations
of created pleasure may be resisted by the chastity of the "resolved
soul." In _Paradise Lost_, however, the resolved soul had somehow,
failing Man, found for itself a congenial habitation in the Devil. The
high and pure philosophy of the Lady and her brothers has no counterpart
in the later and greater poem. Milton, therefore, willingly seized on the
suggestion made by Ellwood; and in _Paradise Regained_ exhibited at
length, with every variety of form and argument, the spectacle of--
one man's firm obedience fully tried
Through all temptation, and the Tempter foiled
In all his wiles, defeated and repulsed
The subject of _Comus_ is repeated; but in place of the dazzling
allurement of the senses which is the temptation of the earlier poem,
there is the temptation of the will, the appeal made in vain by Satan to
those more strenuous and maturer passions of pride, ambition, love of
wealth, and love of power. Instead of the innocent and instinctive purity
of the Lady, which unmasks the fallacies of Comus, there is heard in
_Paradise Regained_ the voice of a high Stoical philosophy, strong in
self-sufficiency, rich in illustrations drawn from the experience of the
ages, and attributed, by this singular poet, to the Christ.
If his only purpose had been to make a worthy epical counterpart to
_Paradise Lost_, those critics are doubtless right who think his chosen
subject not altogether adequate to the occasion. The Fall of Man is best
matched by the Redemption of Man--a subject which Milton, whether he knew
it or not, was particularly ill-qualified to treat. It is sketched,
hastily and prosaically, in the Twelfth Book of _Paradise Lost_; but
there is no escaping from the conclusion that the central mystery of the
Christian religion occupied very little space in Milton's scheme of
religion and thought. Had he chosen this subject, the account given, in
the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, of the Descent into Hell might have
furnished him with rich material for one part of his theme. The conquest
of the upper world by Satan, narrated in _Paradise Lost_, might have had
for natural sequel the triumphant descent into Hell of the King of Glory,
and the liberation of the captives. For Milton's grandiose epical vein
the theme has great opportunities, as a brief summary of the Gospel of
Nicodemus will show:--
Karinus and Leucius, sons of Simeon, being raised from the dead, write
what occurred during their sojourn in the realm of Hades: "While we were
lying, along with our fathers, in the depth of the pit and in the
uttermost darkness, suddenly there appeared the golden hue of the sun,
and a purple royal light shining in upon us. Then the father of all
mankind and all the patriarchs and prophets rejoiced, saying: 'That light
is the author of everlasting light, who hath promised to translate us to
everlasting light.' And Isaiah cried out, and said: 'This is the Light of
the Father, the Son of God, according to my prophecy that I prophesied
when I was alive upon the earth, "The land of Zabulon, and the land of
Nephthalim, beyond Jordan; the people which sat in darkness saw a great
light, and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is
sprung up." And now he has come, and has shone upon us who are sitting in
death.'
Then Simeon spoke in a like strain of exultation. John the Baptist
arrived, a herald of the King of Glory; and Seth, at the bidding of Adam,
told how Michael the Archangel had refused him oil from the tree of mercy
for the anointing of the body of Adam when he was sick, and had comforted
him with the assurance that when the years should be fulfilled Adam would
be raised up again, and led into Paradise.
And even while the saints were rejoicing there broke out dissension among
the lords of Hell. Satan, boasting of his latest exploit, told Hades, the
prince of Hell, how he had led Jesus of Nazareth captive to death. But
Hades was ill satisfied and asked, 'Perchance this is the same Jesus who
by the word of his command took away Lazarus after he had been four days
in corruption, whom I kept as dead?' And Satan answered and said, 'It is
the same.' And when Hades heard this he said to him, 'I adjure thee by
thy powers and mine, bring him not to me. For when I heard the power of
his word I trembled for fear, and all my officers were struck with
amazement.' And while they were thus disputing, suddenly there was a
voice as of thunder, and a shouting as of a multitude of spirits, saying,
'Lift up your gates, O ye princes, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting
gates, and the King of Glory shall come in.' Then Hades, hearing this,
said to Satan, 'Depart from me, and get thee out of my realm; if thou art
a powerful warrior, fight against the King of Glory.' And he cast him
forth from his habitations.
And while David and Isaiah were speaking, recalling the words of their
prophecy, there came to Hell, in the form of a man, the Lord of Majesty,
and lighted up the eternal darkness, and burst asunder the indissoluble
chains, and seizing Satan delivered him over to the power of Hades, but
Adam he drew with him to his brightness.
Then Hades receiving Satan reviled him vehemently and said, 'O Prince of
perdition, and author of extermination, derision of angels and scorn of
the just, why didst thou do this thing? All thy riches which thou hast
acquired by the tree of transgression and the loss of Paradise, thou hast
now lost by the tree of the cross, and all thy joy has perished.'
But the Lord, holding Adam by the hand, delivered him to Michael the
Archangel, and all the saints followed Michael the Archangel, and he led
them into Paradise, filled with mercy and glory."
Milton would hardly have entertained for a moment the idea of a subject
taken from one of the apocryphal gospels. And even if he had felt no
scruples on this point, the theme of the Harrying of Hell would hardly
have commended itself to him in his later years, least of all its
triumphant close. His interest was now centred rather in the sayings of
the wise than in the deeds of the mighty. The "crude apple that diverted
Eve" was indeed a simple theme compared with the profound topics that are
treated in _Samson Agonistes_. The dark tangle of human life; the
inscrutable course of Divine providence; the punishment so unwittingly
and lightly incurred, yet lying on a whole nation "heavy as frost, and
deep almost as life"; the temptation presenting itself in the guise
neither of pleasure, nor of ambition, but of despair; and, through all,
the recurring assertion of unyielding trust and unflinching acquiescence
in the will of God; the song of the Chorus--
Just are the ways of God
And justifiable to men--
finding an echo in Samson's declaration--
Nothing of all these evils hath befallen me
But justly; I myself have brought them on;
Sole author I, sole cause;
--these together make up a theme where there is no possible place for the
gay theology of _Paradise Lost_. The academic proof of God's justice,
contained in the earlier poem, if it were introduced into _Samson
Agonistes_ could be met only with the irony of Job: "Am I a sea, or a
sea-monster, that thou settest a watch over me?... What is man, that thou
shouldest magnify him, and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him,
and that thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every
moment?" The question has become a real one; not to be answered now by
the dogmatism and dialectic of a system. Milton's bewilderment and
distress of mind are voiced in the cry of the Chorus:--
Yet toward these thus dignified thou oft
Amidst their height of noon
Changest thy countenance, and thy hand with no regard
Of highest favours past
From thee or them, or them to thee of service.
And there follows their humble prayer, heard and answered with Divine
irony on the very day of their asking:--
So deal not with this once thy glorious champion,
The image of thy strength and mighty minister.
What do I beg? How hast thou dealt already?
Behold him in this state calamitous, and turn
His labours, for thou canst, to peaceful end.
In the days that now, as he looked back on his youth and manhood, must
have seemed to him both distant and barren, Milton had sought for
triumph, in action and in argument. His seeking was denied him; but he
found peace, and the grace to accept it.