Milton
by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh · English · Gutenberg #21677 · 380,121 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Milton
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Milton
Author: Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
Release date: June 4, 2007 [eBook #21677]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21677
Credits: E-text prepared by Malcolm Farmer, Stephen Hutcheson, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MILTON ***
E-text prepared by Malcolm Farmer, Stephen Hutcheson, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
MILTON
by
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
Author of
'Style,' 'Wordsworth,' &c.
Tenth Impression
London
Edward Arnold
41 & 43 Maddox Street, Bond Street, W.
1915
TO
R. A. M. STEVENSON
WHOSE RADIANT AND SOARING INTELLIGENCE
ENLIGHTENED AND GUIDED ME
DURING THE YEARS OF OUR LOST COMPANIONSHIP
THIS UNAVAILING TRIBUTE OF
MEMORY AND LOVE
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PAGE
"Sciences of conceit"; the difficulties and imperfections of literary
criticism; illustrated in the case of Shakespeare; and of Milton;
the character and temper of Milton; intensity, simplicity,
egotism; his estimate of himself 1
CHAPTER I
John Milton
His birth, and death; his education; early life in London; ships and
shipping; adventurers and players; Milton and the Elizabethan
drama; the poetic masters of his youth; state of the Church of
England; Baxter's testimony; growing unrest; Milton's early
poems; the intrusion of politics; the farewell to mirth; the
Restoration, and Milton's attitude; the lost paradise of the
early poems; Milton's Puritanism; his melancholy; the political
and public preoccupations of the later poems; the drama of
Milton's life; his egotism explained; an illustration from
_Lycidas_; the lost cause; the ultimate triumph 12
CHAPTER II
The Prose Works
Poets and politics; practical aim of Milton's prose writings; the
reforms advocated by him, with one exception, unachieved;
critical mourners over Milton's political writings; the mourners
comforted; Milton's classification of his prose tracts; the
occasional nature of these tracts; allusions in the early prose
works to the story of Samson, and to the theme of _Paradise
Lost_; Milton's personal and public motives; his persuasive vein;
his political idealism; Johnson's account of his political
opinions; the citizen of an antique city; Milton's attitude
towards mediaeval romance, and towards the mediaeval Church; his
worship of liberty; and of greatness; his belief in human
capacity and virtue; Milton and Cromwell; Milton's clear logic;
his tenacity; his scurrility, and its excuse; his fierce and
fantastic wit; reappearance of these qualities in _Paradise
Lost_; the style of his prose works analysed and illustrated; his
rich vocabulary; his use of Saxon; the making of an epic poet 39
CHAPTER III
Paradise Lost: The Scheme
Vastness of the theme; scenical opportunities; the poetry independent
of the creed; Milton's choice of subject; King Arthur; _Paradise
Lost_; attractions of the theme: primitive religion, natural
beauty, dramatic interest; difficulties of the theme, and
forbidden topics; how Milton overcomes these difficulties by his
episodes, his similes, and the tradition that he adopts
concerning the fallen angels; the cosmography of _Paradise Lost_;
its chronology; some difficulties and inconsistencies; Milton's
spiritual beings, their physical embodiment; the poem no treasury
of wisdom, but a world-drama; its inhumanity, and artificial
elevation; the effect of Milton's simpler figures drawn from
rural life; De Quincey's explanation of this effect; another
explanation; the homelessness of Eden; the enchanted palace and
its engineer; the tyranny of Milton's imagination; its effect on
his diction 81
CHAPTER IV
Paradise Lost: The Actors. The Later Poems
Milton's argumentative end; its bearing on the scenes in Heaven; his
political bias, and materialism; Milton's Deity; his Satan; the
minor devils; Adam; Eve; personal memories; Adam's eulogy of Eve,
criticised by Raphael; Milton's philosophy of love and beauty;
the opinions of Raphael, of Satan, and of Mrs. Millamant; the
comparative merits of Adam and Eve; Milton's great epic effects;
his unity and large decorum; morning and evening; architectural
effects; the close of _Paradise Lost_; Addison and Bentley;
_Paradise Regained;_ the choice of subject; Milton's favourite
theme--temptation; other possible subjects; the Harrying of Hell;
_Samson Agonistes;_ the riddle of life. 126
CHAPTER V
The Style of Milton: Metre and Diction
Difficulties of literary genealogy; the ledger school of criticism;
Milton's strength and originality; his choice of a sacred
subject; earlier attempts in England and France; Boileau's
opinion; Milton's choice of metre an innovation; the little
influence on Milton of Spenser, and of Donne; Milton a pupil of
the dramatists; the history of dramatic blank verse; Milton's
handling of the measure; the "elements of musical delight";
Tennyson's blank verse; Milton's metrical licenses; the Choruses
of _Samson Agonistes_; Milton's diction a close-wrought mosaic;
compared with the diffuser diction of Spenser; conciseness of
Virgil, Dryden, Pope, Milton; Homer's repetitions; repetitions
and "turns of words and thoughts" rare in Milton; double meanings
of words; Milton's puns; extenuating circumstances; his mixed
metaphors and violent syntax, due to compression; Milton's
poetical style a dangerous model; the spontaneity and license of
his prose 170
CHAPTER VI
The Style of Milton; and its Influence on English Poetry
The relation of Milton's work to the 17th-century "reforms" of verse
and prose; the Classicism of Milton, and of the Augustans;
Classic and Romantic schools contrasted in their descriptions;
Milton's Chaos, Shakespeare's Dover Cliff; Johnson's comments;
the besetting sins of the two schools; Milton's physical
machinery justified; his use of abstract terms; the splendid use
of mean associations by Shakespeare; Milton's wise avoidance of
mean associations, and of realism; nature of his similes and
figures; his use of proper names; his epic catalogues; his
personifications; loftiness of his perfected style; the
popularity of _Paradise Last_; imitations, adaptations, and
echoes of Milton's style during the 18th century; his enormous
influence; the origin of "poetic diction"; Milton's phraseology
stolen by Pope, Thomson, and Gray; the degradation of Milton's
style by his pupils and parodists 218
EPILOGUE
Milton's contemporaries; the poetry of Religion, and of Love; Henry
Vaughan; the Court lyrists; Milton's contempt for them; how they
surpass him; Sedley; Rochester; the prophet of the Lord and the
sons of Belial; unique position of Milton in the history of our
literature 256
Index 265
INTRODUCTION
Francis Bacon, in one of his prose fragments, draws a memorable
distinction between "arts mechanical" and "sciences of conceit." "In arts
mechanical," he says, "the first device comes shortest, and time addeth
and perfecteth. But in sciences of conceit the first author goeth
farthest, and time leeseth and corrupteth.... In the former, many wits
and industries contributed in one. In the latter, many men's wits spent
to deprave the wit of one."
I fear that literary criticism of the kind that I propose to myself in
these chapters on Milton must be classified with the "sciences of
conceit." Indeed, Bacon puts it out of question that he himself would so
have regarded it, for he goes on to explain how, after the deliverances
of a master, "then begin men to aspire to the second prizes, to be a
profound interpreter and commentor, to be a sharp champion and defender,
to be a methodical compounder and abridger. And this is the unfortunate
succession of wits which the world hath yet had, whereby the patrimony of
all knowledge goeth not on husbanded and improved, but wasted and
decayed."
The blow is aimed at the scholastic philosophers, but it falls heavy on
the critics of literature, on all who "aspire to the second prizes," or
who think "that a borrowed light can increase the original light from
whom it is taken." It is a searching arraignment of all who set
themselves to expound in words the meaning and purpose of a master of
verbal expression. Yet the very breadth of the indictment brings comfort
and a means of escape. For the chief difficulties of an attempt to
understand and judge Milton are difficulties inherent in the nature, not
only of all criticism in the large sense, but also of all reading. In
this association with great spirits which we call reading we receive but
what we give, and take away only what we are fit to carry. Milton himself
has stated the doctrine in its most absolute form, and has sought an
enhanced authority for it by attributing it to the Christ--
Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior
(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep versed in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge,
As children gathering pebbles on the shore.
Literally taken, this is the negation of all the higher functions of
criticism, and the paralysis of all learning. Only his peers, it is
argued, can read Shakespeare intelligently; and, as if that did not give
him few enough readers, they are further told that they will be wasting
their time! But love, unlike this proud Stoicism, is humble, and
contented with a little. I would put my apology in the language of love
rather than of philosophy. I know that in Shakespeare, or in Milton, or
in any rare nature, as in Faire Virtue, the mistress of Philarete--
There is some concealed thing
So each gazer limiting,
He can see no more of merit
Than beseems his worth and spirit.
The appreciation of a great author asks knowledge and industry before it
may be attempted, but in the end it is the critic, not the author, who is
judged by it, and, where his sympathies have been too narrow, or his
sight too dim, condemned without reprieve, and buried without a
tombstone.
Imperfect sympathy, that eternal vice of criticism, is sometimes
irremediable, sometimes caused by imperfect knowledge. It takes forms as
various as the authors whom it misjudges. In the case of Shakespeare,
when we attempt to estimate him, to gauge him, to see him from all sides,
we become almost painfully conscious of his immensity. We can build no
watch-tower high enough to give us a bird's-eye view of that "globe of
miraculous continents." We are out of breath when we attempt to accompany
him on his excursions, where he,
through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.
He moves so easily and so familiarly among human passions and human
emotions, is so completely at home in all societies and all companies,
that he makes us feel hide-bound, prejudiced and ill-bred, by the side of
him. We have to widen our conception of human nature in order to think of
him as a man. How hard a thing it is to conceive of Shakespeare as of a
human spirit, embodied and conditioned, whose affections, though higher
mounted than ours, yet, when they stooped, stooped with the like wing, is
witnessed by all biographies of Shakespeare, and by many thousands of the
volumes of criticism and commentary that have been written on his works.
One writer is content to botanise with him--to study plant-lore, that is,
with a theatrical manager, in his hard-earned leisure, for teacher.
Another must needs read the Bible with him, although, when all is said,
Shakespeare's study was but little on the Bible. Others elect to keep him
to music, astronomy, law, hunting, hawking, fishing. He is a good
companion out of doors, and some would fain keep him there, to make a
country gentleman of him. His incorrigible preoccupation with humanity,
the ruling passion and employment of his life, is beyond the range of
their complete sympathy; they like to catch him out of hours, to draw him
aside and bespeak his interest, for a few careless minutes, in the trades
and pastimes that bulk so largely and so seriously in their own
perspective of life. They hardly know what to make of his "unvalued
book"; but they know that he was a great man, and to have bought a
wool-fell or a quarter of mutton from him, that would have been
something! Only the poet-critics attempt to see life, however brokenly,
through Shakespeare's eyes, to let their enjoyment keep attendance upon
his. And from their grasp, too, he escapes by sheer excess.
In the case of Milton the imperfection of our sympathy is due to other
causes. In the first place, we know him as we do not know Shakespeare.
The history of his life can be, and has been, minutely written. The
affairs of his time, political and religious, have been recorded with
enormous wealth of detail; and this wealth, falling into fit hands, has
given us those learned modern historians to whom the seventeenth century
means a period of five thousand two hundred and eighteen weeks. Milton's
own attitude towards these affairs is in no way obscure; he has explained
it with great fulness and candour in numerous publications, so that it
would be easy to draw up a declaration of his chief tenets in politics
and religion. The slanders of his adversaries he met again and again with
lofty passages of self-revelation. "With me it fares now," he remarks in
one of these, "as with him whose outward garment hath been injured and
ill-bedighted; for having no other shift, what help but to turn the
inside outwards, especially if the lining be of the same, or, as it is
sometimes, much better." In his poetry, too, he delights to reveal
himself, to take the knowing reader into his confidence, to honour the
fit audience with a confession.
But the difficulty is there none the less. Few critics have found Milton
too wide or too large for them; many have found him too narrow, which is
another form of imperfect sympathy. His lack of humour has alienated the
interest of thousands. His ardent advocacy of toleration in the noblest
of his prose treatises has been belittled by a generation which prides
itself on that flaccid form of benevolence, and finds the mere repeal of
the Licensing Act the smallest part of it. His pamphlets on divorce and
on government have earned him the reputation of a theorist and dreamer.
The shrewd practical man finds it easy to despise him. The genial
tolerant man, whose geniality of demeanour towards others is a kind of
quit-rent paid for his own moral laxity, regards him as a Pharisee. The
ready humourist devises a pleasant and cheap entertainment by dressing
Adam and Eve in modern garments and discussing their relations in the
jargon of modish frivolity. Even the personal history of the poet has
been made to contribute to the gaiety of nations, and the flight of Mary
Powell, the first Mrs. Milton, from the house in Aldersgate Street, has
become something of a stock comic episode in the history of English
literature. So heavy is the tax paid, even by a poet, for deficiency in
breadth and humour. Almost all men are less humorous than Shakespeare;
but most men are more humorous than Milton, and these, it is to be
feared, having suffered themselves to be dragooned by the critics into
professing a distant admiration for _Paradise Lost_, have paid their last
and utmost tribute to the genius of its author.
It may be admitted without hesitation that his lonely greatness rather
forces admiration on us than attracts us. That unrelenting intensity;
that lucidity, as clear as air and as hard as agate; that passion which
burns with a consuming heat or with a blinding light in all his writings,
have endeared him to none. It is impossible to take one's ease with
Milton, to induce him to forget his principles for a moment in the name
of social pleasure. The most genial of his personal sonnets is addressed
to Henry Lawrence, the son of the President of Cromwell's Council, and is
an invitation to dinner. The repast promised is "light and choice"; the
guest is apostrophised, somewhat formidably, as "Lawrence, of virtuous
father, virtuous son," and is reminded, before he has dined, that
He who of these delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.
But the qualities that make Milton a poor boon-companion are precisely
those which combine to raise his style to an unexampled loftiness, a
dignity that bears itself easily in society greater than human. To attain
to this height it was needful that there should be no aimless expatiation
of the intellect, no facile diffusion of the sympathies over the wide
field of human activity and human character. All the strength of mind and
heart and will that was in Milton went into the process of raising
himself. He is like some giant palm-tree; the foliage that sprang from it
as it grew has long since withered, the stem rises gaunt and bare; but
high up above, outlined against the sky, is a crown of perennial verdure.
It is essential for the understanding of Milton that we should take
account of the rare simplicity of his character. No subtleties; no tricks
of the dramatic intellect, which dresses itself in a hundred masquerading
costumes and peeps out of a thousand spy-holes; no development, one might
almost say, only training, and that self-imposed. There is but one
Milton, and he is throughout one and the same, in his life, in his prose,
and in his verse; from those early days, when we find him, an uncouth
swain,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay,
to the last days when, amid a swarm of disasters, he approved himself
like Samson, and earned for himself the loftiest epitaph in the language,
his own--
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame; nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
The world has not wholly misunderstood or failed to appreciate this
extraordinary character, as one curious piece of evidence will serve to
show. Milton is one of the most egotistic of poets. He makes no secret of
the high value he sets upon his gifts--"gifts of God's imparting," as he
calls them, "which I boast not, but thankfully acknowledge, and fear also
lest at my certain account they be reckoned to me many rather than few."
Before he has so much as begun his great poem he covenants with his
reader "that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward the
payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from
the heat of youth or the vapours of wine; ... nor to be obtained by the
invocation of dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer
to that eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge,
and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch
and purify the lips of whom he pleases; to this must be added industrious
and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and
generous arts and affairs; till which in some measure be compassed, at
mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to sustain this expectation from as
many as are not loth to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges
that I can give them." And when he came to redeem his pledge, in the very
opening lines of his epic, trusting to the same inspiration, he
challenges the supremacy of the ancients by his
adventrous song
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
"This man cuts us all out, and the Ancients too," Dryden is reported to
have said. But this man intended to do no less, and formally announced
his intention. It is impossible to outface Milton, or to abash him with
praise. His most enthusiastic eulogists are compelled merely to echo the
remarks of his earliest and greatest critic, himself. Yet with all this,
none of the later critics, not the most cavalier nor the dullest, has
dared to call him vain. His estimate of himself, offered as simple fact,
has been accepted in the same spirit, and one abyss of ineptitude still
yawns for the heroic folly, or the clownish courage, of the New
Criticism.
CHAPTER I
JOHN MILTON
John Milton, the son of a middle-aged scrivener, was born on Friday,
December the 9th, 1608, at his father's house in Bread Street, Cheapside;
and died on Sunday, November the 8th, 1674, in a small house, with but
one room on a floor, in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, London. Of his
father the records that remain show him to have been a convinced member
of the Puritan party in the Church, a man of liberal culture and
intelligence, a lover of music (which taste Milton inherited), a wise and
generous friend to the son who became a poet. We owe it to his wisdom
rather than to his prosperity that Milton was allowed to live at home
without any ostensible profession until he was thirty years of age and
more.
For the first sixteen years of his life Milton was educated partly at
home, by a Presbyterian tutor called Thomas Young, partly at St. Paul's
School, which he attended for some years as a day-scholar. From his
twelfth year onward he was an omnivorous reader, and before he left
school had written some boyish verses, void of merit. The next fourteen
years of his life, after leaving school, were spent at Cambridge, in
Buckinghamshire, and in foreign travel, so that he was thirty years old
before he lived continuously in London again.
We know pretty well how he spent his time at Cambridge and at Horton,
sedulously turning over the Greek and Latin classics, dreaming of
immortality. We know less about his early years in London, where there
were wider and better opportunities of gaining an insight into "all
seemly and generous arts and affairs." London was a great centre of
traffic, a motley crowd of adventurers and traders even in those days,
and the boy Milton must often have wandered down to the river below
London Bridge to see the ships come in. His poems are singularly full of
figures drawn from ships and shipping, some of them bookish in their
origin, others which may have been suggested by the sight of ships. Now
it is Satan, who, after his fateful journey through chaos, nears the
world,
And like a weather-beaten vessel holds
Gladly the port, though shrouds and tackle torn.
Now it is Dalila, whom the Chorus behold approaching.
Like a stately ship
Of Tarsus, bound for the isles
Of Javan or Gadire,
With all her bravery on, and tackle trim,
Sails filled, and streamers waving,
Courted by all the winds that hold them play.
Or, again, it is Samson reproaching himself,
Who, like a foolish pilot, have shipwracked
My vessel trusted to me from above,
Gloriously rigged.
The bulk of Satan is compared to the great sea-beast Leviathan, beheld
off the coast of Norway by
The pilot of some small night-founder'd skiff.
In his approach to the happy garden the Adversary is likened to
them who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabaean odours from the spicy shore
Of Araby the Blest, with such delay
Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league
Cheered with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles;
So entertained those odorous sweets the Fiend.
And when he draws near to Eve in the rose-thicket,
sidelong he works his way,
As when a ship, by skilful steersman wrought,
Nigh river's mouth, or foreland, where the wind
Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail.
There is nothing here that is not within the reach of any inland reader,
but Milton's choice of nautical similitudes may serve to remind us how
much of the interest of Old London centred round its port. Here were to
be heard those tales of far-sought adventure and peril which gave even to
the boisterous life of Elizabethan London an air of triviality and
security. Hereby came in "the variety of fashions and foreign stuffs,"
which Fynes Moryson, writing in Milton's childhood, compares to the stars
of heaven and the sands of the sea for number. All sorts of characters,
nationalities, and costumes were daily to be seen in Paul's Walk,
adjoining Milton's school. One sort interests us pre-eminently. "In the
general pride of England," says Fynes Moryson, "there is no fit
difference made of degrees; for very Bankrupts, Players, and Cutpurses go
apparelled like gentlemen." Shakespeare was alive during the first seven
years of Milton's life, and was no doubt sometimes a visitor to the
Mermaid, a stone's throw from the scrivener's house. Perhaps his cloak
brushed the child Milton in the street. Milton was born in the golden age
of the drama, and a score of masterpieces were put upon the London stage
while he was in his cradle. But the golden age passed rapidly; the
quality of the drama degenerated and the opposition to it grew strong
before he was of years to attend a play. Perhaps he never saw a play by
the masters during his boyhood, and his visits
to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native woodnotes wild,
were either excursions of the imagination or belong to his later
occasional sojourns in London. In his _Eikonoklastes_ he quotes certain
lines from _Richard III._, and here and there in his prose, as well as in
his verse, there are possibly some faint reminiscences of Shakespearian
phrases. So, for instance, in _The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_,
he seems to echo a famous speech of Macbeth, while he claims that his
remedy of free divorce "hath the virtue to soften and dispel rooted and
knotty sorrows, and without enchantment." But these are doubtless the
memories of reading. In the _Apology for Smectymnuus_, when he has to
reply to the charge that he "haunted playhouses" during his college days,
he retorts the charge, it is true, rather than denies it. Yet the retort
bespeaks a certain severity and preciseness in judging of plays and their
actors, which can hardly have found gratification in the licenses and
exuberances of the contemporary drama. It was not difficult, he remarks,
to see plays, "when in the Colleges so many of the young divines, and
those in next aptitude to divinity, have been seen so often upon the
stage, writhing and unboning their clergy limbs to all the antic and
dishonest gestures of Trinculoes, buffoons, and bawds." "If it be
unlawful," he continues, "to sit and behold a mercenary comedian
personating that which is least unseemly for a hireling to do, how much
more blameful is it to endure the sight of as vile things acted by
persons either entered, or presently to enter into the ministry; and how
much more foul and ignominious for them to be the actors!"
It was, at least, a happy chance that the first of Milton's verses to
appear in print should have been _An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatick
Poet, W. Shakespeare_, contributed to the Second Folio in 1632. The main
interests of the household at the Spread Eagle in Bread Street must have
been far enough remote from the doings of the companies of players. John
Milton the elder would probably have agreed with Sir Thomas Bodley, who
called plays "riffe-raffes," and declared that they should never come
into his library. The Hampton Court Conference, the Synod of Dort, the
ever-widening divisions in the Church, between Arminian and Calvinist,
between Prelatist and Puritan, were probably subjects of a nearer
interest, even to the poet in his youth, than the production of new or
old plays upon the stage. Milton's childhood was spent in the very
twilight of the Elizabethan age; it was greatly fortunate for him, and
for us, that he caught the after-glow of the sunset upon his face. He
read Spenser while Spenser was still the dominant influence in English
poetry. "He hath confessed to me," said Dryden, "that Spenser was his
original,"--an incredible statement unless we understand "original" in
the sense of his earliest admiration, his poetic godfather who first won
him to poetry. He read Shakespeare and Jonson in the first editions. He
read Sylvester's translation of _Du Bartas, His Divine Weekes and
Workes_; and perhaps thence conceived the first vague idea of a poem on a
kindred subject. It is necessary to insist on his English masters,
because, although the greater part of his time and study was devoted to
the classics, the instrument that he was to use was learned in a native
school. His metre, his magnificent vocabulary, his unerring phraseology,
took learning and practice. He attached a high value to his study of
English poetry. When he spoke of "our sage and serious Spenser (whom I
dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas)," he was
conscious that he was maintaining what seemed a bold paradox in an age
when scholasticism still controlled education. It is pleasant to think of
Milton during these early years, whether in London or at Christ's
College, in his "calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and
confident thoughts," before ever he had a hint that he must perforce
"embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, put from
beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of
delightful studies." From the first, we may be sure, he read the poets as
one poet reads another, and apprenticed himself to them for their craft.
He was never drawn out of the highroad of art by the minuter and more
entangling allurements of scholarship. In one of his Divorce pamphlets he
tells, with the inevitable touch of pride, how he never could delight in
long citations, much less in whole traductions, "whether it be natural
disposition or education in me, or that my mother bore me a speaker of
what God made mine own, and not a translator."
Milton was intended by his family, and by his own early resolves, for the
service of the Church. The growing unrest, therefore, in matters
ecclesiastical during the early part of the seventeenth century could not
but affect him. The various parties and tendencies in the Church of
England had never, since the Reformation, attained to a condition of
stable equilibrium. But the settlement under Elizabeth was strengthened,
and the parties bound together for thirty years, by the ever-present fear
of Rome. When that fear was allayed, and the menace that hung over the
very existence of the nation removed by the defeat of the Armada, the
differences within the Church broke out afresh, and waxed fiercer every
year. Shakespeare grew to manhood during the halcyon years between the
Marian persecutions and the Marprelate pamphlets--a kind of magic oasis,
which gave us our English Renaissance. Milton's youth breathed a very
different air. The Church, as it was, pleased hardly any party. Much of
the old temple had been hastily pulled down; the new government offices
that were to replace it had as yet been but partially built, and
commanded no general approval. Considered as a social organisation,
moreover, the Church throughout large parts of the country had fallen
into a state not unlike decay. Richard Baxter, whose testimony there is
no sufficient reason to reject, tells of its state in Shropshire during
the years of his youth, from 1615 onwards:--"We lived in a country that
had but little preaching at all: In the Village where I was born there
was four Readers successively in Six years time, ignorant Men, and two of
them immoral in their lives; who were all my School-masters. In the
Village where my Father lived, there was a Reader of about Eighty years
of Age that never preached, and had two Churches about Twenty miles
distant: His Eyesight failing him, he said Common-Prayer without Book;
but for the Reading of the Psalms and Chapters he got a Common Thresher
and Day-Labourer one year, and a Taylor another year: (for the Clerk
could not read well): And at last he had a Kinsman of his own (the
excellentest Stage-player in all the Country, and a good Gamester and
good Fellow) that got Orders and supplied one of his Places.... After him
another Neighbour's Son took Orders, when he had been a while an
Attorney's Clerk, and a common Drunkard, and tipled himself into so great
Poverty that he had no other way to live.... These were the
School-masters of my Youth ... who read Common Prayer on Sundays and Holy
Days, and taught School and tipled on the Weekdays, and whipt the Boys
when they were drunk, so that we changed them very oft. Within a few
miles about us were near a dozen more Ministers that were near Eighty
years old apiece, and never preached; poor ignorant Readers, and most of
them of Scandalous Lives." Some few there were, Baxter admits, who
preached in the neighbourhood, but any one who went to hear them "was
made the Derision of the Vulgar Rabble under the odious Name of a
_Puritane_."
In one of his Latin letters written from Cambridge, Milton himself speaks
of the ignorance of those designed for the profession of divinity, how
they knew little or nothing of literature and philosophy. The high
prelacy and ritualism of Laud on the one hand, the Puritan movement on
the other, each in some measure a protest against this state of things,
were at fierce variance with each other, and Milton's ear, from his youth
upward, was "pealed with noises loud and ruinous." The age of Shakespeare
was irrecoverably past, and it was impossible for any but a few
imperturbable Cyrenaics, like Herrick, to "fleet the time carelessly, as
they did in the golden world." The large indifference of Shakespeare to
current politics was impossible for Milton. "I had as lief be a Brownist
as a politician," said the folly of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and the wisdom
of Shakespeare. But now the Brownists and the politicians had it their
own way; and Milton was something of both.
His notable early poems, written at College and during his retreat in
Buckinghamshire, have therefore a singular interest and pathos. He was
not long for the world in which these poems move with so ineffable a
native grace. They are the poems of his youth, instinct with the
sensibility of youth, and of a delicate and richly nurtured imagination.
But they are also the poems of an age that was closing, and they have a
touch of the sadness of evening. "I know not," says Dr. Johnson, speaking
of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, "whether the characters are kept
sufficiently apart. No mirth can indeed be found in his melancholy, but I
am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth." It is true;
for both characters are Milton himself, who embodies in separate poems
the cheerful and pensive elements of his own nature--and already his
choice is made. There is something disinterested and detached about his
sketches of the merriment which he takes part in only as a silent
onlooker, compared with the profound sincerity of the lines--
And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The hairy gown and mossy cell,
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every star that heaven doth shew,
And every herb that sips the dew,
Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain.
The rising tide of political passion submerged the solemn Arcadia of his
early fancies. Like Lycidas, he was carried far from the flowers and the
shepherds to visit "the bottom of the monstrous world." Hence there may
be made a whole index of themes, touched on by Milton in his early poems,
as if in promise, of which no fulfilment is to be found in the greater
poems of his maturity. His political career under the Commonwealth is
often treated, both by those who applaud and by those who lament it, as
if it were the merest interlude between two poetic periods. It was not
so; political passion dominates and informs all his later poems,
dictating even their subjects. How was it possible for him to choose King
Arthur and his Round Table for the subject of his epic, as he had
intended in his youthful days; when chivalry and the spirit of chivalry
had fought its last fight on English soil, full in the sight of all men,
round the forlorn banner of King Charles? The policy of Laud and
Stratford kept Milton out of the Church, and sent him into retirement at
Horton; the same policy, it may be plausibly conjectured, had something
to do with the change in the subject of his long-meditated epic. From the
very beginning of the civil troubles contemporary events leave their mark
on all his writings. The topical bias (so to call it) is very noticeable
in many of the subjects tentatively jotted down by him on the paper that
is now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The corrupted
clergy, who make so splendid and, as some think, so irrelevant an
appearance in _Lycidas_, figure frequently, either directly or by
implication, in the long list of themes.
Without misgiving or regret, when the time came, Milton shut the gate on
the sequestered paradise of his youth, and hastened downward to join the
fighters in the plain. Before we follow him we may well "interpose a
little ease" by looking at some of the beauties proper to the earlier
poems, and listening to some of the simple pastoral melodies that were
drowned when the organ began to blow. _L'Allegro_ is full of them--
Sometimes, with secure delight,
The upland hamlets will invite,
When the merry bells ring round,
And the jocund rebecks sound
To many a youth and many a maid
Dancing in the chequered shade,
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday.
That is Merry England of Shakespeare's time. But already the controversy
concerning the _Book of Sports_ had begun to darken the air. Already the
Maypole, that "great stinking idol," as an Elizabethan Puritan called it,
had been doomed to destruction. Some years before _L'Allegro_ was
written, a bard, who hailed from Leeds, had lamented its downfall in the
country of his nativity--
Happy the age, and harmelesse were the dayes,
(For then true love and amity was found)
When every village did a May-pole raise,
And Whitson Ales and May games did abound;
And all the lusty Yonkers in a rout
With merry Lasses danced the rod about;
Then friendship to their banquets bid the guests,
And poor men far'd the better for their feasts.
The next verse recalls that scene in _The Winter's Tale_ where
Shakespeare draws a vivid picture of Elizabethan country merrymaking--
The Lords of Castles, Manners, Townes, and Towers
Rejoyc'd when they beheld the Farmers flourish,
And would come down unto the Summer-Bowers
To see the Country gallants dance the Morrice,
And sometimes with his tenant's handsome daughter
Would fall in liking, and espouse her after
Unto his Serving-man, and for her portion
Bestow on him some farme, without extortion.
Alas poore Maypoles, what should be the cause
That you were almost banish't from the earth?
You never were rebellious to the lawes,
Your greatest crime was harmelesse honest mirth;
What fell malignant spirit was there found
To cast your tall _Piramides_ to ground?
* * * * *
And you my native towne, which was of old,
(When as thy Bon-fires burn'd and May-poles stood,
And when thy Wassell-cups were uncontrol'd)
The Summer Bower of Peace and neighbourhood,
Although since these went down, thou ly'st forlorn,
By factious schismes and humours over-borne,
Some able hand I hope thy rod will raise,
That thou maist see once more thy happy daies.
The hopes of the bard of Leeds were fulfilled at the Restoration.
Merriment, of a sort, came back to England; but it found no congenial
acceptance from Milton. The Court roysterers, the Hectors, Nickers,
Scourers, and Mohocks, among whom were numbered Sedley and Rochester, and
others of the best poets of the day, are celebrated by him incidentally
in those lines, unsurpassable for sombre magnificence, which he appends
to his account of Belial--
In courts and palaces he also reigns,
And in luxurious cities, where the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,
And injury and outrage; and, when night
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.
The public festivals of these later days are glanced at in _Samson
Agonistes_--
Lords are lordliest in their wine;
And the well-feasted priest then soonest fired
With zeal, if aught religion seem concerned;
No less the people on their holy-days
Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable.
There is no relaxation, no trace of innocent lightheartedness, in any of
the later poems. Even the garden of Paradise, where some gentle mirth
might perhaps be permissible, is tenanted by grave livers, majestic, but
not sprightly. In _L' Allegro_ the morning song of the milk-maid is
"blithe," and the music of the village dance is "jocund." But Eve is
described as "jocund" and "blithe" only when she is intoxicated by the
mortal fruit of the tree; and the note of gaiety that is heard faintly,
like a distant echo, in the earlier poems, is never sounded again by
Milton.
So it is also with other things. The flowers scattered on the laureate
hearse of Lycidas make a brighter, more various, and withal a homelier
display than ever meets the eye in the Hesperian wildernesses of Eden. Or
take the world of fairy lore that Milton inherited from the
Elizabethans--a world to which not only Shakespeare, but also laborious
and arrogant poet-scholars like Jonson and Drayton had free right of
entry. Milton, too, could write of the fairies--in his youth--
With stories told of many a feat,
How Faery Mab the junkets eat.
But even in _Comus_ the most exquisite passage of fairy description is
put into the mouth of Comus himself, chief of the band of ugly-headed
monsters in glistering apparel--
The sounds and seas, with all their finny drove,
Now to the moon in wavering morrice move;
And on the tawny sands and shelves
Trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves.
By dimpled brook and fountain-brim,
The wood-nymphs decked with daisies trim,
Their merry wakes and pastimes keep:
What hath night to do with sleep?
The song and the dance are broken off, never to be resumed, when the
staid footfall of the lady is heard approaching. Milton cannot draw
ugliness; it turns into beauty or majesty on his hands. Satan has a large
and enthusiastic party among readers of _Paradise Lost_. Comus, we are
told, stands for a whole array of ugly vices--riot, intemperance,
gluttony, and luxury. But what a delicate monster he is, and what a
ravishing lyric strain he is master of! The pleasure that Milton forswore
was a young god, the companion of Love and Youth, not an aged Silenus
among the wine-skins. He viewed and described one whole realm of pagan
loveliness, and then he turned his face the other way, and never looked
back. Love is of the valley, and he lifted his eyes to the hills. His
guiding star was not Christianity, which in its most characteristic and
beautiful aspects had no fascination for him, but rather that severe and
self-centred ideal of life and character which is called Puritanism. It
is not a creed for weak natures; so that as the nominal religion of a
whole populace it has inevitably fallen into some well-merited disrepute.
Puritanism for him was not a body of law to be imposed outwardly on a
gross and timid people, but an inspiration and a grace that falls from
Heaven upon choice and rare natures--
Nor do I name of men the common rout,
That, wandering loose about,
Grow up and perish as the summer fly,
Heads without name, no more remember'd;
so sings the Chorus in _Samson Agonistes_--
But such as thou hast solemnly elected,
With gifts and graces eminently adorned,
To some great work, thy glory,
And people's safety, which in part they effect.
Under one form or another Puritanism is to be found in almost all
religions, and in many systems of philosophy. Milton's Puritanism enabled
him to combine his classical and Biblical studies, to reconcile his pagan
and Christian admirations, Stoicism, and the Quakers. It was with no
sense of incongruity that he gave to the Christ a speech in praise of--
Quintus, Fabricius, Curius, Regulus,...
Who could do mighty things, and could contemn
Riches, though offered from the hand of Kings.
To reject common ambitions, to refuse common enticements, to rule
passions, desires, and fears, "neither to change, nor falter, nor
repent,"--this was the wisdom and this the virtue that he set before
himself. There is no beatific vision to keep his eyes from wandering
among the shows of earth. Milton's heaven is colder than his earth, the
home of Titans, whose employ is political and martial. When his
imagination deals with earthly realities, the noble melancholy of the
Greeks lies upon it. His last word on human life might be translated into
Greek with no straining and no loss of meaning--
His servants He, with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event,
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind, all passion spent.
He is therefore one of the few English poets (alone in this respect among
the greatest) who have not sung of Love. His only English love-poem, the
sonnet _To the Nightingale_, is his earliest and poorest sonnet. He
elected in his later poems to sing of Marriage, its foundation in reason,
its utility, its respectability and antiquity as an institution, and,
above all, its amazing dangers. He has thus lost the devotion of the
young, who, while they read poetry by the ear and eye for its sonorous
suggestions, and its processions of vague shapes, love Milton; but when
they come to read it for its matter and sentiment, leave him--in most
cases never to return. The atmosphere of his later poems is that of some
great public institution. Heaven is an Oriental despotism. Hell is a
Secession parliament. In the happy garden itself there is no privacy, no
individualism; it is the focus of the action, the central point of the
attack and the defence; and a great part of the conversation of its
inhabitants turns on the regulations under which they live. They never
forget that they are all mankind, and when their psalm goes up in
grateful adoration to their Creator, it is like the unanimous voice of
all nations and kindreds and people and tongues.
"The plan of _Paradise Lost_" says Johnson, "has this inconvenience, that
it comprises neither human actions nor human manners. The man and woman
who act and suffer are in a state which no other man and woman can ever
know. The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged; beholds
no condition in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself;
he has, therefore, little natural curiosity and sympathy." Milton, he
goes on to explain, "knew human nature only in the gross, and had never
studied the shades of character, nor the combinations of concurring or
the perplexity of contending passions."
He knew human nature only in the gross. He treated nothing less momentous
than the fortunes of the race. It is precisely from this cause that the
incomparable grandeur of Milton's characters and situations springs. The
conversations that he records are like international parleyings. Eve is
the official Mother of mankind. Adam walks forth to meet the angel, in
ambassadorial dignity, the accredited representative of the human race--
Without more train
Accompanied than with his own complete
Perfections; in himself was all his state,
More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits
On princes, when their rich retinue long
Of horses led and grooms besmeared with gold
Dazzles the crowd and sets them all agape.
And if the other characters of _Paradise Lost_ have this generic stamp,
it is because the chief character of all has it--the character of the
poet himself. It lends a strange dignity to the story of Milton's life
that in all his doings he felt himself to be a "cause," an agent of
mighty purposes. This it is that more than excuses, it glorifies, his
repeated magniloquent allusions to himself throughout the prose works.
Holding himself on trust or on commission, he must needs report himself,
not only to his great Taskmaster, but also from time to time to men, his
expectant and impatient beneficiaries. Even in _Lycidas_ he is thinking
of himself as much as of his dead companion--
So may some gentle Muse
With lucky words favour _my_ destined urn,
And as he passes turn,
And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud.
What if he die young himself? Are his dreams and hopes for his own future
an illusion? He agonises with the question in the famous digression on
poetry and poetic fame. But he consoles himself by appeal to a Court
where the success and the fame of this world are as straw in the furnace;
and then, having duly performed the obsequies of his friend, with
reinvigorated heart he turns once more to the future--"To-morrow to fresh
woods and pastures new." A singular ending, no doubt, to an elegy! But it
is blind and hasty to conclude that therefore the precedent laments are
"not to be considered as the effusion of real passion." A soldier's
burial is not the less honoured because his comrades must turn from his
grave to give their thought and strength and courage to the cause which
was also his. The maimed rites, interrupted by the trumpet calling to
action, are a loftier commemoration than the desolating laments of those
who "weep the more because they weep in vain." And in this way Milton's
fierce tirade against the Church hirelings, and his preoccupation with
his own ambitions support and explain each other, and find a fit place in
the poem. He is looking to his equipment, if perchance he may live to do
that in poetry and politics, which Edward King had died leaving
unaccomplished. When his own time came he desired to be lamented in no
other way--
Come, come; no time for lamentation now,
Nor much more cause. Samson hath quit himself
Like Samson, and heroicly hath finished
A life heroic, on his enemies
Fully revenged.
This overmastering sense of the cause breathes through all his numerous
references to himself. He stands in the Forum,
Disturbed, yet comely, and in act
Raised, as of some great matter to begin;
and addresses himself, as he boasts in _The Second Defence of the People
of England_, to "the whole collective body of people, cities, states, and
councils of the wise and eminent, through the wide expanse of anxious and
listening Europe." Having sacrificed the use of his eyes to the service
of the commonweal, he bates not a jot of heart or hope--
What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In Liberty's defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
And while thus his fighting years are filled with the exaltation of
battle, as he plumes and lifts himself upon the cause that is going
forward, the story of his closing years has in it much of the pathos of a
lost cause. It was remarked by Johnson that there is in the _Paradise
Lost_ little opportunity for the pathetic; only one passage, indeed, is
allowed by him to be truly deserving of that name. But the description of
the remorse and reconcilement of Adam and Eve, which Johnson doubtless
intended, will not compare, for moving quality, with the matchless
invocation to the Seventh Book--
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East. Still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.
Then the noise that he had heard, in imagination only, thirty years
earlier, assails his bodily ears; as evening sets in, the wonted roar is
up, not in the wild woods of fancy inhabited by the sensual magician and
his crew, but in the unlighted streets of Restoration London, as a chorus
of cup-shotten brawlers goes roaring by. The king is enjoying his own
again; and the poet, hunted and harassed in his last retreat, raises his
petition again to the Muse whom he had invoked at the beginning of his
task,--not Clio nor her sisters, but the spirit of heavenly power and
heavenly wisdom; his mind reverts to that story of Orpheus which had
always had so singular and personal a fascination for him; of Orpheus,
who, holding himself aloof from the mad amorists of Thrace, was by them
torn to pieces during the orgy of the Dionysia, and sent rolling down the
torrent of the Hebrus; and he prays to his goddess and guardian--
But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard
In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears
To rapture, till the savage clamour drowned
Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her son. So fail not thou, who thee implores;
For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream.
Disappointed of all his political hopes, living on neglected and poor for
fourteen years after the Restoration, and dying a private citizen,
passably obscure, Milton yet found and took a magnanimous revenge upon
his enemies. They had crippled only his left hand in silencing the
politician, but his right hand, which had hung useless by his side for so
many years while he served the State, was his own still, and wielded a
more Olympian weapon. In prose and politics he was a baffled man, but in
poetry and vision he found his triumph. His ideas, which had gone
a-begging among the politicians of his time, were stripped by him of the
rags of circumstance, and cleansed of its dust, to be enthroned where
they might secure a hearing for all time. The surprise that he prepared
for the courtiers of the Restoration world was like Samson's revenge, in
that it fell on them from above; and, as elsewhere in the poem of _Samson
Agonistes_, Milton was thinking not very remotely of his own case when he
wrote that jubilant semi-chorus, with the marvellous fugal succession of
figures, wherein Samson, and by inference Milton himself, is compared to
a smouldering fire revived, to a serpent attacking a hen-roost, to an
eagle swooping on his helpless prey, and last, his enemies now silent for
ever, to the phoenix, self-begotten and self-perpetuating. The Philistian
nobility (or the Restoration notables) are described, with huge scorn, as
ranged along the tiers of their theatre, like barnyard fowl blinking on
their perch, watching, not without a flutter of apprehension, the vain
attempts made on their safety by the reptile grovelling in the dust
below--
But he, though blind of sight,
Despised, and thought extinguished quite,
With inward eyes illuminated,
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame,
And as an evening dragon came,
Assailant on the perched roosts
And nests in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl, but as an eagle
His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads.
So Virtue, given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay erewhile a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deemed;
And, though her body die, her fame survives.
A secular bird, ages of lives.
CHAPTER II
THE PROSE WORKS
It is customary for the friends of Milton to approach his prose works
with a sigh of apology. There is a deep-rooted prejudice among the
English people against a poet who concerns himself intimately with
politics. Whether this feeling has its origin in solicitude for the poet
or for the politics is hard to determine; indeed it is pretty generally
maintained that each is detrimental to the other. But seeing that for one
man in the modern world who cares for poets there are at least ten who
care for politics, it is safe to assume that the poets, when they are
deprived of the franchise, are deprived rather to maintain the purity and
efficiency of politics than for the good of their own souls. They have
been compared to birds of Paradise, which were long believed to have no
feet; and the common sense of the English people, with a touch of the
municipal logic of Dogberry, has enacted that whereas they have no feet,
and have moreover been proved to have no feet, it shall be forbidden
them, under the strictest pains and penalties, to alight and walk. Their
function is to beautify the distant landscape with the flash of wings.
For most men common-sense is the standard, and immediate utility the end,
whereby they judge political questions, great and small. Now common-sense
judges only the questions that are brought home to it by instant example;
and utility is appealed to for a verdict only amid the dense crowd of
actual conflicting interests. Neither the one nor the other is
far-sighted or imaginative. So it comes about that the political system,
in England, at least, is built up piecemeal; it is founded on appetites
and compromises, and mortared by immemorial habit. To explain this
process, and to transfigure it in the pure light of imagination, was the
work of the great poet-politician, Edmund Burke. But the poet usually
goes a hastier way to work. Looking at the whole domiciliary structure
from outside, he finds it shapeless and ugly, like an ant-heap; and
volunteers to play the architect. His design treats the details of
individual habit and happiness in strict subordination to the desired
whole. What he wants is consistency, symmetry, dignity; and to achieve
these he is willing to make a holocaust of human selfishnesses. He may be
a deep scholar and thinker, but he is apt to forget one point of ancient
wisdom,--that it is the wearer of the shoe, and not the cobbler, who best
knows where the shoe wrings him.
The speculations of the poet awaken no hostile resentment so long as they
are admittedly abstract. He is at liberty to build his Republic, his City
of the Sun, his Utopia, or his New Atlantis, amid the indifferent
applause of mankind. But when his aim becomes practical and immediate,
when he seeks to stir the heap by introducing into it the ruthless
discomfort of an idea, a million littlenesses assail him with deadly
enmity, and he is found sorrowfully protesting his amazement:--
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.
So he is brought, with great reluctance, to the estimate of men which is
expressed by Milton in _The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_; "being
slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the
public state conformably governed to the inward vicious rule whereby they
govern themselves. For indeed none can love freedom heartily but good
men."
Milton cannot claim the exemption from censure which is allowed to the
theorists, the builders of ideal states somewhere in the clouds. On his
own behalf he expressly disclaims any such intention. "To sequester out
of the world," he says, "into Atlantic and Utopian politics, which never
can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely
as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God has placed us
unavoidably." Poetry might well have served him, if his object had been
to add another to imaginary commonwealths. He took up with politics
because he believed that in the disorder of the times his ideas might be
made a "programme," and carried into effect.
It was in 1641, when already "the vigour of the Parliament had begun to
humble the pride of the bishops," that he first intervened. "I saw," he
says, "that a way was opening for the establishment of real liberty; that
the foundation was laying for the deliverance of mankind from the yoke of
slavery and superstition.... I perceived that if I ever wished to be of
use, I ought at least not to be wanting to my country, to the church, and
to so many of my fellow-Christians, in a crisis of so much danger; I
therefore determined to relinquish the other pursuits in which I was
engaged, and to transfer the whole force of my talents and my industry to
this one important object." So he wrote the treatise in two books, _Of
Reformation in England, and the causes that hitherto have hindered it._
His later pamphlets are all similarly occasional in nature, written with
a particular and definite object in view. In these he advocates as
practicable and much-needed reforms, among other things, the
establishment of a perpetual republic on the lines of an oligarchy; the
abolition of bishops, religious ceremonials, liturgies, tithes, and,
indeed, of all regular payment or salary given to ministers of religion;
the supersession of universities and public schools by the erection of
new academic institutions, combining the functions of both, "in every
City throughout this Land"; the legalisation of free divorce; and the
repeal of the ordinances compelling all books to be licensed. If he did
not advocate, in any of the works put forth during his lifetime, the
legal toleration of polygamy, it was probably only because he perceived
that that, at least, did not fall within the scope of practical politics.
He defends it in his posthumous treatise, _De Doctrina Christiana_.
It will readily be seen that on almost all these questions Milton was not
only--to use the foolish modern phrase--"in advance of his time," but
also considerably in advance of ours. Twenty years after his death the
Licensing Acts were abolished; for the rest, his reforms are yet to
accomplish. It is an odd remark of one of his learned biographers that
the _Areopagitica_ is the only one of all Milton's prose writings "whose
topic is not obsolete." It is the only one of his prose writings whose
thesis commands the general assent of modern readers, and is, therefore,
from his own practical point of view, obsolete.
The mere enumeration of his opinions suffices to show that Milton's is a
sad case of the poet in politics. The labours of the twenty prime years
of his manhood have been copiously bewailed. To have Pegasus in harness
is bad enough; but when the waggon that he draws is immovably stuck in
the mud, and he himself bespattered by his efforts, the spectacle is yet
more pitiable. Many of his critics have expressed regret that he did not
make for himself an artificial seclusion, and continue his purely
poetical labours, with the classics for companions. The questions that
drew him into politics were burning questions, it is true; but were there
not others to deal with them, good, earnest, sensible, homely people?
Samuel Butler has enumerated some of those who were dedicating their time
and thought to politics at this important crisis:--
The oyster-women locked their fish up,
And trudged away to cry "No Bishop":
The mouse-trap men laid save-alls by,
And 'gainst ev'l counsellors did cry;
Botchers left old cloaths in the lurch,
And fell to turn and patch the Church;
Some cried the Covenant, instead
Of pudding-pies and ginger-bread,
And some for brooms, old boots and shoes,
Bawled out to purge the Common-house:
Instead of kitchen-stuff, some cry
A gospel-preaching ministry;
And some for old shirts, coats or cloak,
No surplices nor service-book;
A strange harmonious inclination
Of all degrees to reformation.
But what was Milton doing in this malodorous and noisy assembly? Might he
not with all confidence have left the Church to the oyster-women, and the
State to the mouse-trap men? The company that he kept with them ruined
his manners; he had to speak loud in order to be heard, to speak broad in
order to be respected; and so (bitterest thought of all!) he lost
something of that sweet reasonableness which is a poet's proper grace.
The answer to this strain of criticism is to be found in the study of
Milton's works, poetry and prose--and perhaps best in the poetry. We
could not have had anything at all like _Paradise Lost_ from a dainty,
shy poet-scholar; nor anything half so great. The greatest men hold their
power on this tenure, that they shall not husband it because the occasion
that presents itself, although worthy of high effort, is not answerable
to the refinement of their tastes. Milton, it is too often forgotten, was
an Englishman. He held the privilege and the trust not cheap. When God
intends some new and great epoch in human history, "what does he then,"
this poet exultantly asks, "but reveal himself to his servants, and, as
his manner is, first to his Englishmen?" To his chief work in poetry he
was instigated by patriotic motives. "I applied myself," he says, "to
that resolution which Ariosto followed against the persuasions of Bembo,
to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my
native tongue, not to make verbal curiosity the end (that were a toilsome
vanity), but to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest
things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother
dialect."
There is plenty of "verbal curiosity" in Milton's poetry; he is in some
respects the finest craftsman who ever handled the English speech: so
that this declaration is the more timely to remind us by how wide a chasm
he is separated from those modern greenhouse poets who move contentedly
in an atmosphere of art ideals and art theories. He had his breeding from
the ancient world, where AEschylus fought at Marathon, and he could not
think of politics as of a separable part of human life.
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair,
is a lyric ideal that may quite well consist with political indifference,
but how should an epic inspiration be nourished where the prosperity of
the State is lightly esteemed? Even had poetry lost by his political
adventures, he would have been content that politics should gain. And
politics did gain; for Milton's prose works raise every question they
touch, even where they cannot truly be said to advance it. It is as
unseemly for the politicians to complain of his choice, as it would be
for the herdsmen of King Admetus to complain of the presence among them
of a god. The large considerations and high passions imported into the
treatment of practical questions by a Milton, or a Burke, have done much
to keep even party politics at a high level in England, so that civil
servants and journalists may join in the hymn of the herdsmen--
He has been our fellow, the morning of our days,
Us he chose for house-mates, and this way went.
God, of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darkened
That had thee here obscure!
In a long autobiographic passage in the _Second Defence of the People of
England_ Milton makes a formal classification of his prose works written
before that date. All of them, he says, were designed to promote Liberty.
By the accidents of the time he was induced to treat first, in his
anti-episcopal pamphlets, of religious liberty. Once that controversy was
fairly ablaze, in the name of the same goddess he applied his incendiary
torch to humbler piles. "I perceived," he says, "that there were three
species of liberty which are essential to the happiness of social
life--religious, domestic, and civil; and as I had already written
concerning the first, and the magistrates were strenuously active in
obtaining the third, I determined to turn my attention to the second, or
the domestic species." He includes in this division of his work the
Divorce pamphlets, the tractate _Of Education_, and the _Areopagitica_,
as dealing with the "three material questions" (so he calls them) of
domestic liberty, namely, "the conditions of the conjugal tie, the
education of the children, and the free publication of the thoughts."
It seems a strange conception of domestic liberty which makes it rest on
a threefold support--divorce at will, an unrestrained printing-press, and
the encyclopaedic education of polyglot children. But the truth is that
Milton's classification is an after-thought. The pamphlets that he names
were all written by him much about the same time, between 1643 and 1645;
but the true history of their origin is more interesting and less
symmetrical than the later invented scheme of classification. The Divorce
pamphlets were written because Milton was unhappily married. The
_Areopagitica_ was written because his heterodox views concerning
marriage had brought him into collision with the Presbyterian censors of
the press. His treatise on education was written because he had
undertaken the education of his own nephews, and had become deeply
interested in that question. In all three his own experience is the first
motive; in all three that experience is concealed beneath a formidable
array of general considerations, dogmatically propounded.
The case is the same with regard to the pamphlets that treat of religious
and civil liberty; they are not only occasional, but intensely personal,
even in their origins. The earliest of them, the five ecclesiastical
pamphlets of the year 1641, deal with a question which had been of
intimate concern to Milton ever since the beginning of his Cambridge
days. The celebrated controversy with Salmasius and his abettors,
concerning the death of King Charles, is a gladiatorial combat from which
every element save the personal is often absent. In these bouts offensive
biography and defensive autobiography serve for sword and shield. This
personal character of the prose writings, while it has repelled some
readers interested mainly in the questions discussed, has attracted
others who are interested chiefly in the writer. A rich harvest of
personal allusion has been gathered from the controversial treatises, and
perhaps, even now, the field has not been gleaned to the last ear. It is
worthy of remark, for instance, how Milton's pre-occupation with the
themes which he had already pondered, and turned this way and that in his
mind, to test their fitness for a monumental work, shows itself in his
choice of figure and allusion. Attention has often been called to the
elaborate comparison, founded on the history of Samson, in _The Reason of
Church Government urged against Prelaty_:--
"I cannot better liken the state and person of a king than to that mighty
Nazarite Samson; who being disciplined from his birth in the precepts and
the practice of temperance and sobriety, without the strong drink of
injurious and excessive desires, grows up to a noble strength and
perfection with those his illustrious and sunny locks, the laws, waving
and curling about his god-like shoulders. And while he keeps them about
him undiminished and unshorn, he may with the jawbone of an ass, that is,
with the word of his meanest officer, suppress and put to confusion
thousands of those that rise against his just power. But laying down his
head among the strumpet flatteries of prelates, while he sleeps and
thinks no harm, they, wickedly shaving off all those bright and weighty
tresses of his law, and just prerogatives, which were his ornament and
strength, deliver him over to indirect and violent counsels, which, as
those Philistines, put out the fair and far-sighted eyes of his natural
discerning, and make him grind in the prison-house of their sinister ends
and practices upon him: till he, knowing this prelatical rasor to have
bereft him of his wonted might, nourish again his puissant hair, the
golden beams of law and right; and they, sternly shook, thunder with ruin
upon the heads of those his evil counsellors, but not without great
affliction to himself."
This ingenious allegorical application naturally finds no place in the
grave poem of Milton's latest years. And yet, in one passage at least,
his earlier love for the high-figured style took him captive again. The
strong drink from which the Samson of the play abstains is strong drink,
not "injurious and excessive desires." There is no hint of prelatical
conspiracy in the enticements of Dalila. But perhaps some faint
reminiscence of his earlier fable concerning Samson's hair recurred to
Milton's mind when he gave to Manoa a speech comparing the locks of the
hero to the strength, not of the law, but of a nation in arms:--
And I persuade me God had not permitted
His strength again to grow up with his hair,
Garrisoned round about him like a camp
Of faithful soldiery, were not his purpose
To use him further yet in some great service.
The theme of _Samson Agonistes_ had thus already taken possession of
Milton's imagination when he wrote his first prose tractates. But the
same writings furnish even stronger evidence of his early dallyings with
the theme of _Paradise Lost_. "It was from out the rind of one apple
tasted," he says in the _Areopagitica_, "that the knowledge of good and
evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world." And
again, in _The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_:--"The academics and
stoics ... knew not what a consummate and most adorned Pandora was
bestowed upon Adam, to be the nurse and guide of his arbitrary happiness
and perseverance, I mean, his native innocence and perfection, which
might have kept him from being our true Epimetheus." Some of these
references show the imaginative scheme of the _Paradise Lost_ in the
process of building. In one passage, for instance, of the last quoted
treatise, Milton expounds the pagan belief that God punishes his enemies
most when he throws them furthest from him:--"Which then they held he
did, when he blinded, hardened, and stirred up his offenders, to finish
and pile up their desperate work since they had undertaken it. To banish
for ever into a local hell, whether in the air or in the centre, or in
that uttermost and bottomless gulf of chaos, deeper from holy bliss than
the world's diameter multiplied, they thought not a punishing so proper
and proportionate for God to inflict as to punish sin with sin." It would
seem as if the poet had not as yet fixed the situation of his local hell,
but remained suspended between rival theories. The other idea, of the
Divine permission and impulse given to hardened sinners, finds a
conspicuous place in the poem. In one instance, at least, a figure drawn
from the story of the Creation is violently handled to serve strange
uses. The evolution of the four elements from the chaotic welter of hot,
cold, moist, and dry, is adduced as a proof that the laws of God and of
nature approve free divorce:--"By his divorcing command the world first
rose out of chaos, nor can be renewed again out of confusion, but by the
separating of unmeet consorts."
Allusions of this kind occur most frequently in the earlier prose
writings, while the studies that had been interrupted by controversy were
yet fresh in Milton's memory. They would hardly be worth the quotation,
were it not that they are another evidence of the transparency of his
mind. In looking through his prose works you see traces of all that was
engaging his imagination and thought at the time. Poetry is the highest
of expressive arts; and poets are the worst dissemblers or economisers of
truth in the world. Their knowledge, like their feeling, possesses them,
and must find expression as argument, or illustration, or figure,
whatever the immediate matter in hand. The prose works of Milton are
thus, from first to last, an exposition of himself. The divorce
pamphlets, especially, are hot with smothered personal feeling. Long
years afterwards, when time and change had softened and blurred it in
memory, his early misadventure was reflected in more than one passage of
the later poems. The humble plaint of Eve, and the description of her
reunion with her alienated lord, in the Tenth Book of _Paradise Lost_,
doubtless contains, as has often been said, some reflection of what took
place at a similar interview in 1645, when Mistress Mary Milton returned
to her offended husband. That one principal cause of the rupture has been
rightly divined, by Mr. Mark Pattison and others, is probable from
certain remarkable lines in the Eighth Book, where Adam describes how he
was presented with his bride:--
On she came,
Led by her Heavenly Maker, though unseen,
And guided by his voice, nor uninformed
Of nuptial sanctity, and marriage rites.
Even at so wide a remove of time, the poet's wounded pride finds
expression in this singular theory--or, rather, in this more than dubious
piece of self-justification.
But although the hurt he had suffered, in his most susceptible feelings,
gives eloquence and plangency to his divorce pamphlets, it was not merely
to voice his sufferings that he wrote those pamphlets. Most men in
Milton's position, married to "a nothing, a desertrice, an adversary,"
would have recognised that theirs was one of those exceptional cases for
which the law cannot provide, and would have sat down under their unhappy
chance, to bear it or mitigate it as best they might. Some poets of the
time of the Romantic Revival would have claimed the privilege of genius
to be a law unto itself; the law of the State being designed for the
common rout, whose lesser sensibilities and weaker individuality make
them amenable to its discipline. Milton did neither the one thing nor the
other. The modern idolatry of genius was as yet uninvented; he was a
citizen first, a poet and an unhappy man afterwards. He directed his
energies to proving, not that he should be exempted from the operation of
the law, but that the law itself should be changed. He had entered into
marriage, with full ceremonial ushering, by the main door; he would go
out the same way, or not at all. Thus even in this most personal matter
he pleads, not for himself, but for the commonweal. He cannot conceive of
happiness as of a private possession, to be secretly enjoyed; it stands
rooted, like justice, in the wise and equal ordinances of the State; and
the only freedom that he values is freedom under the law.
Like the citizen of some antique state, he discourses of marriage in the
market-place. In his efforts to be persuasive, both here and in the
_Areopagitica_, he humbles himself to management and the seasonings of
flattery. It is a new trade for him, and suits oddly with his pride. But
he hoped much, at this time, from the Parliament, that "select assembly,"
containing so many "worthy senators" and "Christian reformers," "judges
and lawgivers." In the enthusiasm of his hopes, he credits them with a
desire "to imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece," with a wisdom
greater than that of the Athenian Parliament, with a magnanimous
willingness to repeal their own acts at the dictate of the voice of
reason. And all this at a time when the Presbyterians were in the
ascendant, intent upon establishing a discipline neither old, nor
elegant, nor humane, so little acquainted with Greece, that it was one of
Selden's amusements to confute their divines by citing a reading from the
Greek Testament. Milton was destined to grievous disappointment, and his
rage against the Presbyterians, in some of his later pamphlets, was the
fiercer.
But although his pamphlets are both occasional and personal, and even
address themselves at times to conciliation and persuasion, the views
that they advocate and the system of thought that underlies them were not
the products of time and accident. Milton was an idealist, pure and
simple, in politics. Had he lived under the Tudor sovereigns, he would
have been reduced, with Sir Thomas More, Montaigne, and John Barclay, the
author of _Argenis_, to express himself by way of romance and allegory.
It was his fortune to live at a time when the Tudor state system was
breaking up with appalling suddenness, and along with it the Tudor
compromise in the affairs of the Church, imposed from above upon an
unawakened people, was falling into wreckage. Here was an opportunity
that has not often, in the world's history, come to a poet, of realising
the dream that he had dreamed in his study, of setting up again, for the
admiration and comfort of posterity, the model of an ancient Republic.
The best of all Milton's critics has left us the worst account of his
political opinions. Johnson's censure of _Lycidas_, much as it has been
ridiculed and decried, is judicious and discerning compared with his
explanation of Milton's political creed:--"Milton's republicanism was, I
am afraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire
of independence, in petulance impatient of control, and pride disdainful
of superiority. He hated monarchs in the State, and prelates in the
Church; for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be
suspected that his predominant desire was to destroy, rather than
establish, and that he felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance
to authority." It may, at least, be credited to Johnson for moderation,
that he requires only four of the Seven Deadly Sins, to wit, Pride, Envy,
Anger, and Sloth, to explain Milton's political tenets. Had he permitted
himself another sentence, an easy place might surely have been made for
Gluttony, Luxury, and Covetousness, the three whose absence cannot fail
to be remarked by any lover of thorough and detailed treatment in these
intricate problems of human character.
If, in our more modern fashion, we seek for the origin of Milton's ideas
in his education, his habits of thought, and his admirations, we shall be
obliged to admit that they are all rooted in his conception of the
ancient City State. It was the wish of Thomas Hobbes to abolish the study
of Greek and Latin in our schools and colleges, because this study
fosters a love of freedom, and unfits men to be the subjects of an
absolute monarch. His happiest illustration would have been the case of
his contemporary, Milton. Yet in all Milton's writings there is no trace
of the modern democratic doctrine of equality. A hearing is all that he
claims. So far from hating greatness, he carries his admiration for it,
for personal virtue and prowess, almost to excess. The poet who described
the infernal conclave in the Second Book of _Paradise Lost_ was not
likely to be insensible to the part played in politics by men of eminent
and dominating personality. To think of free government as of an engine
for depressing unusual merit was impossible for Milton. He lived in an
age that had found in Plutarch's men its highest ideals of political
character. Never, since their own day, had the "noble Grecians and
Romans" exercised so irresistible a fascination on the minds of men, or
so real an influence on the affairs of the State, as was theirs at the
time of the Renaissance. The mist in which they had long been enveloped
was swept away, and these colossal figures of soldiers, patriots, and
counsellors loomed large and clear across the ages, their majesty
enhanced by distance and by art, which conspire to efface all that is
accidental, petty, and distracting. We cannot see these figures as they
appeared to the Renaissance world. One of the chief results of modern
historical labour and research has been that it has peopled the Middle
Ages for us, and interposed a whole society of living men, our ancestors,
between us and ancient Rome. But in Milton's time this process was only
beginning; the collections and researches that made it possible were
largely the work of his contemporaries,--and were despised by him. When
he looked back on the world's history, from his own standpoint, he saw,
near at hand and stretching away into the distance, a desert, from which
a black mass of cloud had just been lifted; and, across the desert, lying
fair under the broad sunshine, a city--
With gilded battlements, conspicuous far,
Turrets and terrasses, and glittering spires.
It was towards this ancient civic life, with its arts and arms and long
renown, that he reached forth passionate hands of yearning. The
intervening tract, whither his younger feet had wandered, almost ceased
to exist for him; the paladins and ladies of mediaeval story were the
deceitful mirage of the desert; the true life of antiquity lay beyond. In
all his allusions to the great themes of romance two things are
noticeable: first, how deeply his imagination had been stirred by them,
so that they are used as a last crown of decoration in some of the most
exalted passages of his great poems; and next, how careful he is to stamp
them as fiction. His studies for the early _History of Britain_ had
cloyed him with legends conveyed from book to book. Once convinced that
no certain historical ground could be found for the feet among the whole
mass of these traditions, Milton ceased to regard them as eligible
subjects for his greatest poem. But their beauty dwelt with him; the
memory of the embattled chivalry of Arthur and Charlemagne recurs to him
when he is seeking for the topmost reach of human power and splendour
that he may belittle it by the side of Satan's rebel host; and the
specious handmaidens who served the Tempter's phantom banquet in the
desert are described as lovely beyond what has been
Fabled since
Of fairy damsels met in forest wide
By Knights of Logres, or of Lyones,
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore.
If Milton's attitude to mediaeval romance is one of regretful suspicion,
his attitude to the greatest of mediaeval institutions is one of bitter
contempt. He inveighs even against the "antiquitarians," such as Camden,
who, he says, "cannot but love bishops as well as old coins and his much
lamented monasteries, for antiquity's sake." For near twelve hundred
years these same bishops "have been in England to our souls a sad and
doleful succession of illiterate and blind guides." It is needless to
multiply extracts illustrative of Milton's opinions on the Church; behind
the enormous wealth of rhetoric and invective poured forth in his
pamphlets, the opinions that he holds are few and simple. When he had
been disappointed by the Presbyterians, and had finally turned from them,
his beliefs inclined more and more, in two points at least, to the tenets
of the newly arisen sect of Quakers--to a pure spiritualism in religion,
and the complete separation of Church and State. Their horror of war he
never shared. The model of the Church he sought in the earliest records
of Christianity, and less and less even there; the model of the State in
the ancient republics. All subsequent experience and precedent was to him
a hindrance and a mischief. So rapidly and easily does his mind leap from
the ancient to the modern world, that even when he speaks of his love for
the drama, as in his first Latin elegy or in _Il Penseroso_, it is
sometimes difficult to say whether he is thinking of the Elizabethan or
of the Attic dramatists.
The lodestar of his hopes is liberty, his main end the establishment of
"a free commonwealth." He knows as well as Montesquieu that democracy in
its pristine dignity can be erected only on a wide foundation of public
virtue. "To govern well," he declares in the treatise _Of Reformation in
England_, "is to train up a nation in true wisdom and virtue, and that
which springs from thence, magnanimity (take heed of that), and that
which is our beginning, regeneration, and happiest end, likeness to God,
which in one word we call godliness;... other things follow as the shadow
does the substance." In the same pamphlet this envious hater of greatness
remarks that "to govern a nation piously and justly, which only is to say
happily, is for a spirit of the greatest size, and divinest mettle." And
men worthy of this description had, as it seemed to him, arisen in his
own time. His praise of Cromwell and the leaders associated with him is
almost extravagant in its enthusiasm. "While you, O Cromwell, are left
among us, he hardly shows a proper confidence in the Supreme, who
distrusts the security of England, when he sees that you are in so
special a manner the favoured object of the Divine regard." His mind is
full of the achievements of Cyrus, Epaminondas, and Scipio; he denies to
the Protector no honour that may be drawn from these high comparisons.
And then, as in _Lycidas_, so also in _The Second Defence of the People
of England_, Milton concludes his celebration of another by a return to
himself and his pride in a duty fulfilled. Opportunity, he declares, is
offered for great achievements; if it be not seized, posterity will judge
"that men only were wanting for the execution; while they were not
wanting who could rightly counsel, exhort, inspire, and bind an unfading
wreath of praise round the brows of the illustrious actors in so glorious
a scene."
In the measures that he recommends to Cromwell as necessary for the
public welfare, his mistakes are the generous errors of an idealist. He
writes as if all were either Cromwells or Miltons, and worthy of the
fullest measure of liberty. "Now the time seems come," he exclaims,
"wherein Moses, the great prophet, may sit in heaven rejoicing to see
that memorable and glorious wish of his fulfilled, when not only our
seventy elders, but all the Lord's people, are become prophets." His
general propositions on the function of law are unimpeachable. "He who
wisely would restrain the reasonable soul of man within due bounds, must
first himself know perfectly how far the territory and dominion extends
of just and honest liberty. As little must he offer to bind that which
God hath loosened as to loosen that which He hath bound. The ignorance
and mistake of this high point hath heaped up one huge half of all the
misery that hath been since Adam." But with the application to issues of
the day it appears that the mistake has been all one way. "Laws are
usually worse in proportion as they are more numerous." The free spirit
of man can govern him without "a garrison upon his neck of empty and
over-dignified precepts."
Whether he treat of religion, of education, of divorce, or of civil
government, the error is always the same, a confidence too absolute in
the capacity and integrity of the reasonable soul of man. A liturgy, for
example, is intolerable, because it is a slur upon the extemporary
effusions of ministers of the Gospel. "Well may men of eminent gifts set
forth as many forms and helps to prayer as they please; but to impose
them on ministers lawfully called and sufficiently tried ... is a
supercilious tyranny, impropriating the Spirit of God to themselves."
Milton, we know, did not habitually attend public worship at any of the
conventicles of the sectaries, or perhaps he might have found reason to
modify this censure.
Some of his impassioned pleadings were possibly not wholly without effect
on the politics of the time. It is interesting, at any rate, to find
Cromwell, in his letter written in 1650 to the Governor of Edinburgh
Castle, adopting one of the main arguments of the _Areopagitica_, and
enforcing it against the Presbyterians by a figure which may have been
borrowed from that tract. "Your pretended fear," he writes, "lest error
should step in, is like the man who would keep all wine out of the
country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise
jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition that
he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge." But Cromwell never
applied his logic to the removal of the restraint upon printing, which by
this same argument Milton had judged to be "the greatest displeasure and
indignity to a free and knowing spirit that can be put upon him." He was
too practical a statesman to be frightened into logic by a little paper
shot.
Logical Milton always was. He learned little or nothing from the
political events of his time. He was throughout consistent with himself;
prepared to take any risks that his advocacy might bring upon him, not
prepared to forego or modify his opinions because of human incompetence
or human imbecility. Between the consistent and unflinching Royalists on
the one hand, and the consistent and unflinching Republicans on the
other, the most of the population of England wavered and hung. But
half-measures and half-heartedness were alike unintelligible to Milton.
He fell upon the Presbyterians when they showed a disposition to palter
with the logical consequences of their own action, and scourged them
unmercifully. They had "banded and borne arms against their king,
divested him, disanointed him, nay, cursed him all over in their pulpits,
and their pamphlets." But when once the king was brought to trial, then
"he who but erewhile in the pulpits was a cursed tyrant, an enemy to God
and saints, laden with all the innocent blood spilt in three kingdoms,
and so to be fought against, is now, though nothing penitent or altered
from his first principles, a lawful magistrate, a sovereign lord, the
Lord's anointed, not to be touched, though by themselves imprisoned." He
prepares for them a similar dilemma, between the horns of which they have
since been content to dwell, in his treatment of the question of divorce:
"They dare not affirm that marriage is either a sacrament or a mystery
... and yet they invest it with such an awful sanctity, and give it such
adamantine chains to bind with, as if it were to be worshipped like some
Indian deity, when it can confer no blessing upon us, but works more and
more to our misery."
Milton's astonishment and indignation in cases like these are a
convincing evidence of his inability to understand average politics, and
that world of convenience, precaution, and compromise which is their
native place. His own tenacity and constancy have something grim about
them. Andrew Marvell, in his tract called _The Rehearsal Transposed_,
speaking of the intolerance of his adversary, Samuel Parker, says: "If
you have a mind to die, or to be of his party (there are but these two
conditions), you may perhaps be rendered capable of his charity." Neither
of these two conditions was a certain title to the charity of Milton. In
the _Eikonoklastes_ he pursues the dead king with jibe and taunt, and
exults over the smallest advantage gained. The opening words of the tract
show him conscious of the difficulty and delicacy of the part he acted in
making war on one who had "paid his final debt to nature and his faults."
But what then? If the king, being dead, could speak, the dead king must
be answered, and his gauntlet taken up "in the behalf of liberty and the
commonwealth."
The manner in which he conducts this and other controversies has brought
upon Milton's head universal reproach. He is intemperate and violent, he
heaps up personal scurrilities against his adversaries, and triumphs in
their misfortunes. There is nothing wherein our age more differs from his
than in the accepted rules governing controversy, and he has lost
estimation accordingly. Yet not a few critics, it may be suspected, have
allowed their dislike of the thing he says to hurry them into an
exaggerated censure on his manner of saying it. It is important, in the
first place, to remember that his violences are not the violences of the
hired rhetorician. He was prepared to stand by what he wrote, and he knew
the risks that he ran in those shifting and uncertain times. His life was
in danger at the Restoration, and was saved by some unknown piece of good
fortune or clemency. He was not a coward reviler, a "tongue-doughty
giant," whose ears are the most delicate part about him, but an open
fighter, who got as good as he gave. And then it is sometimes forgotten
that the most scurrilous of Milton's pamphlets were written in Latin, a
language which has always enjoyed an excellent liberty in the matter of
personal abuse; while even his English pamphlets, wherein at times he
shows almost as pretty a talent in reviling, were written for an audience
inured to the habitual amenities of Latin controversy. Sir Thomas More
was famous for his knack of calling bad names in good Latin, yet his
posterity rise up and call him blessed. Milton, like More, observed the
rules of the game, which allowed practices condemned in the modern
literary prize-ring. He calls Salmasius a poor grammarian, a pragmatical
coxcomb, a silly little scholar, a mercenary advocate, a loggerhead, a
hare-brained blunderbuss, a witless brawler, a mongrel cur; he reproaches
him with the domestic tyranny put upon him by that barking she-wolf, his
wife, and winds up with an elaborate comparison (not wholly unfamiliar to
modern methods of controversy) between Salmasius and Judas. With his
nameless opponent in the Divorce quarrel he deals--this time in
English--no less contemptuously: "I mean not to dispute philosophy with
this pork, who never read any." The creature is a conspicuous gull, an
odious fool, a dolt, an idiot, a groom, a rank pettifogger, a
presumptuous losel, a clown, a vice, a huckster-at-law, whose "jabberment
is the flashiest and the fustiest that ever corrupted in such an
unswilled hogshead." "What should a man say more to a snout in this
pickle? What language can be low and degenerate enough?" In the _Apology_
for Smectymnuus, Milton sets forth his own defence of his acrimony and
violence: "There may be a sanctified bitterness," he remarks, "against
the enemies of the truth;" and he dares to quote the casuistry of Electra
in _Sophocles_:--
'Tis you that say it, not I. You do the deeds,
And your ungodly deeds find me the words.
The exigencies of controversy revealed in Milton not only an
inexhaustible store of coarse invective, but also, at times, the flash of
real wit. "My fate," he says, with some sense of the incongruity of the
thing, "extorts from me a talent of sport, which I had thought to hide in
a napkin." We are privileged to hear Milton laugh. It is not mirthful nor
gentle laughter, but rather the fierce, harsh, vehement laughter of the
Hebrew Psalms, the laughter of scorn, the shooting out of the lips, the
saying "Ha, ha." He speaks with his mouth, and swords are in his lips.
Thus, of Alexander Morus, Professor of Sacred History at Amsterdam, whom
he suspected to be the author of a tract in support of Salmasius, he
says: "There is one More, part Frenchman and part Scot, so that one
country or one people cannot be quite overwhelmed with the whole infamy
of his extraction"; and he indulges himself in a debauch of punning on
_Morus_, the Latin word for a mulberry. In the prelatical controversy,
after discussing with his opponent the meaning of the word "angel," he
continues: "It is not ordination nor jurisdiction that is angelical, but
the heavenly message of the Gospel, which is the office of all ministers
alike.... And if you will contend still for a superiority in one person,
you must ground it better than from this metaphor, which you may now
deplore as the axe-head that fell into the water, and say, 'Alas, master!
for it was borrowed'; unless you have as good a faculty to make iron
swim, as you had to make light froth sink." In the _Apology_ for
Smectymnuus he heaps one grotesque comparison on another. His adversary,
the son of Bishop Hall, is like "some empiric of false accusations to try
his poisons upon me, whether they would work or not." The learning that
was displayed by the champion of Episcopacy and the very typographical
arrangement of his book incur an equal contempt: the margin of his
treatise "is the sluice most commonly that feeds the drought of his
text.... Nor yet content with the wonted room of his margin, but he must
cut out large docks and creeks into his text, to unlade the foolish
frigate of his unseasonable authorities." His best folios "are
predestined to no better end than to make winding-sheets in Lent for
pilchers." With this last stroke Milton is so well pleased that he
repeats the same prediction in an elaborated form over the works of
Salmasius, and even celebrates in numerous verse the forethought and
bounty of one who has thus taken pity on the nakedness of fishes.
The fantastic nature of these quips and taunts reminds us that Milton
belonged to the age of the metaphysical poets and satirists, the age of
Cowley, and Cleveland, and Butler. His prose works have been searched
chiefly for passages that may be used to illustrate his poetry; and
although the search has been rewarded with many natural coincidences of
expression, not a few passages of lofty self-confidence, and some
raptures of poetic metaphor, the result has been in the main a
disappointment. His admirers, too jealous for the poetic dignity of their
hero, have turned away sorrowfully from this memorial heap of odd-shaped
missiles, hurled from his dire left hand for the confusion of his
enemies. And yet, rightly judged, there is instruction, and an increased
reverence for the poet, to be found in these also--in all that wild array
of subjects and methods which he commands for the purposes of his prose,
but dismisses from the service of his verse. It was a strict and rare
selection that he made among the auxiliaries when he addressed himself to
the more arduous attempt. Here and there, even in _Paradise Lost_, his
education in the handling of satire and invective stood him in stead. The
poem contains more than one "flyting"--to use the Scottish term--and the
high war of words between Satan and Abdiel in heaven, or between Satan
and Gabriel on earth, could not have been handled save by a master of all
the weapons of verbal fence and all the devices of wounding invective. In
the great close of the Fourth Book, especially, where the arch-fiend and
the archangel retaliate defiance, and tower, in swift alternate flights,
to higher and higher pitches of exultant scorn, Milton puts forth all his
strength, and brings into action a whole armoury of sarcasm and insult
whetted and polished from its earlier prosaic exercise. Even the
grotesque element in his humour is not wholly excluded from the _Paradise
Lost_; it has full scope, for once, in the episodical description of the
Paradise of Fools--that barren continent, beaten on by the storms of
chaos, dark save for some faint glimmerings from the wall of heaven, the
inhabitants a disordered and depraved multitude of philosophers,
crusaders, monks, and friars, blown like leaves into the air by the winds
that sweep those desert tracts. Unlike the Paradise that was lost, this
paradise is wholly of Milton's invention, and is the best extant monument
to that spirit of mockery and savage triumph which is all the humour that
he knows.
The style of his prose works is a style formed upon oratorical models.
The long winding sentence, propped on epithets and festooned with
digressions, was the habitual vehicle of his meaning. The effect it
produces at its best was well described by Marvell, who, in a letter to
Milton thanking him for a copy of the _Defence of the People of England_,
remarks: "When I consider how equally it turns and rises with so many
figures, it seems to me a Trajan's column, in whose winding ascent we see
embossed the several monuments of your learned victories." The clink of
the rhyming couplet was not more displeasing to Milton's ear than the
continued emphatic bark of a series of short sentences. Accustomed as he
was to the heavy-armed processional manner of scholarly Renaissance
prose, he felt it an indignity to "lie at the mercy of a coy, flirting
style; to be girded with frumps and curtal jibes, by one who makes
sentences by the statute, as if all above three inches long were
confiscate." Later on in the _Apology_ he returns to this grievance, and
describes how his adversary "sobs me out half a dozen phthisical mottoes,
wherever he had them, hopping short in the measure of convulsion fits; in
which labour the agony of his wit having escaped narrowly, instead of
well-sized periods, he greets us with a quantity of thumb-ring posies."
The men of the Renaissance despised the homely savour of the native
English syntax with its rude rhetoric and abrupt logic and its lore of
popular adages and maxims; they had learned to taste a subtler pleasure
in the progressive undulations of a long mobile sentence, rising and
falling alternately, reaching the limit of its height towards the middle,
and at the close either dying away or breaking in a sudden crash of
unexpected downward emphasis. This is the sentence preferred by Milton,
and, where haste or zeal does not interfere with the leisurely ordering,
handled by him with excellent skill. At its best and at its worst alike
his prose is the prose of a poet. His sentences rarely conform to any
strict periodic model; each idea, as it occurs to him, brings with it a
train of variation and enrichment, which, by the time the sentence
closes, is often found in sole possession. The architecture depends on
melody rather than on logic. The emphasis and burden of the thought
generally hangs on the epithets, descriptive terms, and phrases, which he
strengthens by arranging them in pairs, after a fashion much practised by
poets. Thus, to take a few examples from the Divorce pamphlets, a wife,
who should be "an intimate and speaking help," "a ready and reviving
associate," to comfort "the misinformed and wearied life of man" with "a
sweet and gladsome society," is too often "a mute and spiritless mate,"
united to her husband in "a disconsolate and unenjoined matrimony,"
whereby the blessing that was expected with her is changed "into a
familiar and coinhabiting mischief, at least into a drooping and
disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption." "The
mystical and blessed union of marriage can be no way more unhallowed and
profaned, than by the forcible uniting of such disunions and
separations." "And it is a less breach of wedlock to part with wise and
quiet consent betimes, than still to foil and profane that mystery of joy
and union with a polluting sadness and perpetual distemper."
The balance of epithet, the delicate music, the sentence that resembles a
chain with link added to link rather than a hoop whose ends are welded
together by the hammer--these are the characteristics of Milton's prose.
They are illustrated in that short passage of the _Areopagitica_, well
known to all readers of English: "I cannot praise a fugitive and
cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and
seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal
garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." Or in the striking
description of London during the Civil War: "Behold now this vast city, a
city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded
with his protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and
hammers working, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed
justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads
there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new
notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their
fealty, the approaching reformation; others as fast reading, trying all
things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement."
This sonorous balance of phrase and epithet cannot always escape what
Milton himself calls "the heathenish battology of multiplying words." It
serves the uses of rhetoric rather than of logic, and by the fervour of
its repetitions and enlargements unfits his prose for the plainer
purposes of argument or exposition. His argument is sometimes destroyed
or blemished by the fire that it kindles, his narrative overwhelmed in
the tide of passions that it sways.
His vocabulary is extraordinarily rich, and here again the contrast is
great between his prose and his verse. A full-bodied and picturesque
dictionary might be made of the words that occur only in the prose. Most
of these words would be found to derive from the Saxon stock, which
yields him almost all his store of invective and vituperation. The
resources of his Latinised vocabulary enable him to rise by successive
gyrations to a point of vantage above his prey, and then the downward
rush that strikes the quarry is a Saxon monosyllable. In this cardinal
point of art for those who have to do with the English speech he became
the teacher of Burke, who, with a lesser wealth of Saxon at his command,
employed it with a more telling parsimony.
Milton avoids no word of humble origin, so it serve his purpose. His
contempt finds voice in such expressions as to "huddle" prayers, and to
"keck" at wholesome food. Gehazi "rooks" from Naaman; the bishops "prog
and pander for fees," and are "the common stales to countenance every
politic fetch that was then on foot." The Presbyterians were earnest
enough "while pluralities greased them thick and deep"; the gentlemen who
accompanied King Charles in his assault on the privileges of the House of
Commons were "the spawn and shipwreck of taverns and dicing-houses." The
people take their religion from their minister "by scraps and mammocks,
as he dispenses it in his Sunday's dole"; and "the superstitious man by
his good will is an atheist, but being scared from thence by the pangs
and gripes of a boiling conscience, all in a pudder shuffles up to
himself such a God and such a worship as is most agreeable to remedy his
fear."
There were few incidents in Milton's career, from his personal relations
with his college tutor to his choice of blank verse for his epic, that he
was not called upon at some time or other in his life to explain and
defend. When his free use of homely figures and turns of speech was
objected to him, his answer was ready: "Doth not Christ Himself teach the
highest things by the similitude of old bottles and patched clothes? Doth
He not illustrate best things by things most evil? His own coming to be
as a thief in the night, and the righteous man's wisdom to that of an
unjust steward?" But the defence is misleading, for the rules that
governed Milton's usage are not what it would suggest. When he came to
treat of the best and highest things his use of native English became
more sparing and dainty, while the rank, strong words that smack of the
home soil were all foregone.
His prose works, therefore, help us to appreciate better the tribulations
of the process whereby he became a classic poet. Eclecticism and the
severe castigation of style are dangerous disciplines for any but a rich
temperament; from others they produce only what is exquisite and thin and
vapid. The "stylist" of the modern world is generally an interesting
invalid; his complexion would lose all its transparency if it were
exposed to the weather; his weak voice would never make itself heard in
the hubbub of the bazaar. Sunbeams cannot be extracted from cucumbers,
nor can the great manner in literature emanate from a chill self-culture.
But Milton inherited the fulness and vigour of the Elizabethans, and so
could afford to write an epic poem in a selection of the language really
used by men. The grandeur of _Paradise Lost_ or _Samson Agonistes_ could
never, by any conceivable device of chemistry or magic, be compounded
from delicate sensibilities and a superfine ear for music. For the
material of those palaces whole provinces were pillaged, and the waste
might furnish forth a city.
CHAPTER III
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.
CHAPTER IV
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 M
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/21677