"bid fair peace be to my sable shroud."
How natural it is in all its superficial unnaturalness! The walks and talks and verses made together at Cambridge so inevitably leading to the "heavy change now thou art gone. Now thou art gone and never must return"; and the fancy, partly but not wholly a reminiscence of their classical studies, that the trees and flowers which they had loved together must now be sharing the survivor's grief; the reproach to Nature and Nature's divinities following on the thought of Nature's sympathy, and followed by the first of the two incomparable returns upon himself which are among the chief beauties of the poem—
"Ay me! I fondly dream!'Had ye been there,' for what could that have done?"
And so to the vanity of earthly fame and the thought of another fame which is not vanity. Twice he seems to be going to escape out of the world of pastoral, as he strikes his own trumpet note of confident {130} faith and stern judgment; twice the unfailing instinct of art calls him back and makes a beauty of what might have been a mere incongruity—
"Return, Alpheus; the dread voice is past,That shrunk thy streams: return, Sicilian Muse,And call the vales, and bid them hither castTheir bells and flowerets of a thousand hues."
The flowers come, in their amazing beauty, as poetry knows and names them, not altogether after the order of nature; till the fine flight is once more recalled to earth in that second return to the sad reality of things which provides the most beautiful, and as the manuscript shows, one of the most carefully elaborated passages in the whole—
"Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.For so, to interpose a little ease,Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seasWash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled,Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,{131}Where thou perhaps under the whelming tideVisit'st the bottom of the monstrous world."
The least critical reader, when he is told that the daffodil and amaranthus lines were once in the reverse order, that the "frail thoughts" were at first "sad," and the "shores" "floods," and above all that the "whelming tide" was once a thing so insignificant as the "humming tide," can judge for himself by what a succession of inspirations a work of consummate art is produced.
There remain the sonnets, whose sufficient praise is given in an immortal line of Wordsworth, while all that a fine critic had thought or learnt about them is contained in the scholarly edition of Mark Pattison. Technically they are remarkable, like everything else of Milton's, at once for their conservatism and their originality; while their content has all his characteristic sincerity. They occupy a most important place in the history of the English sonnet, which had so far been almost entirely given up to a single theme, that of the poet's unhappy love, which had commonly little existence outside his verses. The shadowy mistresses who emulated the glories of Beatrice and Laura were even less substantial than they; and, though that could {132} not hinder great poets from making fine poetry out of them, it was fatal to the ordinary sonnetteer, and gave the sonnet a tradition of overblown and insincere verbiage. From all this Milton emancipated it and, as Landor said, "gave the notes to glory." To glory and to other things; for not all his sonnets are consecrated to glory. They deal with various subjects; but each, whether its topic be his blindness, the death of his wife, or the fame of Fairfax or Cromwell, is the product of a personal experience of his own. No one can read them through without feeling that he gets from them a true knowledge of the man. At their weakest, as in thatTo a Lady, they convey, in the words of Mark Pattison, "the sense that here is a true utterance of a great soul." The rather commonplace thought and language somehow do not prevent the total effect from being impressive. He entirely fails only when he goes below the level of poetry altogether and repeats in verse the angry scurrility of his divorce pamphlets. And even there some remnant of his artist's sense of the self-restraint of verse preserves him from the worst degradations of his prose. For the rest, they give us his musical and scholarly tastes, his temperate pleasures and his love of that sort of company which Shelley {133} confessed to preferring, "such society as is quiet, wise and good"; they give us the high ideal with which he became a poet, the high patriotism that drew him into politics, and that sense, both for himself and for others, of life as a thing to be lived in the presence and service of God which was the eternally true part of his religion. The four finest are those on the Massacre in Piedmont, On his Blindness, On attaining the age of twenty-three, and that addressed to Cromwell, which perhaps has the finest touch of all in the pause which comes with such tremendous effect after "And Worcester's laureate wreath." But that to the memory of his wife and "Captain or Colonel or Knight in Arms," the one addressed to Lawrence and the first of those addressed to Skinner, come very near the best; and the whole eight would be included by any good judge in a collection of the fifty best English sonnets, to which Milton would make a larger contribution than any one except, perhaps, Wordsworth and Shakspeare.
And both of these poets, Shakspeare always and Wordsworth often, sinned as Milton did not against the true genius of the sonnet. No doubt they had nearly all precedent with them, and their successors down to Rossetti {134} and Meredith have followed in the same path. But not even Shakspeare and Petrarch can alter the fact that the genius of the sonnet is solitary and self-contained. A series of sonnets is an artistic contradiction in terms. There may be magnificent individual sonnets in it which can stand alone, without reference to those that precede or follow; and so far so good; but on the bulk of the series there inevitably rests the taint of incompleteness. They do not explain themselves. They are chapters not books, parts of a composition and not the whole. It is scarcely possible to doubt that, fine as they may be, the effect they produce is not that of the finest single sonnets, beginning and ending within their own limits. Milton may never have been under any special temptation to write a set of consecutive sonnets; but it is in any case like his habitual submission of all authority to his own judgment that he wrote sonnets and yet defied the tradition of writing them as a continuous series, as he had also disdained the amorous affectations which had been their established subject. But in this, as in everything else where art was concerned, he was as much a conservative as a revolutionary. And so his scholarly interest in the Italian sonnet, and, we may be sure, his consummate {135} critical judgment, made him set aside the various sonnet forms adopted by Shakspeare, Spenser and other famous English poets, and follow the original model of Petrarch more strictly than it had been followed by any English poet of importance before him; for the Petrarchan sonnets of Sidney, Constable and Drummond all end with the unItalian concluding couplet. But here again Milton's example has not proved decisive. Wordsworth did not always follow it, though he never deserted it with success. Keats began with it and gave it up for the Shakspearean model with the concluding couplet. But of him again, it may be said that, while he only wrote three great sonnets and two of them are Shakspearean, his single masterpiece is Petrarchan or Miltonic. Rossetti, on the other hand, has no Shakspearean sonnets, and his finest are among the best proofs of how much a sonnet gains in unity by the single pause between the eight lines and the six instead of Shakspeare's fourfold division, and especially by the interlocking of the rhymes in the second half of the sonnet as opposed to Shakspeare's isolated and half-epigrammatic final couplet.
There can be little doubt, though attempts have been made to deny it, that nothing but {136} the prestige of the greatest of all poetic names has prevented the superiority of the Petrarchan model from being universally recognized. Shakspeare could do anything. But the greatness of his sonnets is due not to their form but simply to their being his; and the fact that he could triumph over the defects of that form ought not to make other people fancy that these defects do not exist. They do; and but for the courage and genius of Milton they might have dominated the history of the English sonnet to this day. That is part of our great debt to Milton. He could not give the sonnet the supple and insinuating sweetness with which Shakspeare often filled it. He had not got that in him, and perhaps it would scarcely have proved tolerable except as part of a sequence in which it could be balanced by sterner matter. Nor, again, could he give it Shakspeare's infinite tenderness, nor his sense of the world's brooding mystery. But he could and did give it his own high spirit of courage, sincerity and strength, and his own masterly cunning of craftsmanship. And no just reader of the greatest sonnets of the nineteenth century forgets Milton's share in their greatness. Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie has lately remarked that it is in thePreludeandExcursionof {137} Wordsworth that "more profoundly than anywhere out of Milton himself Milton's spiritual legacy is employed." The same thing may be as truly said of Wordsworth's sonnets. If, as he said, in Milton's hands "the thing became a trumpet," there is no doubt that it remained one in his own. He is a greater master of the sonnet than Milton; the greatest on the whole that England has known. He used it far more freely than Milton and for more varied purposes. Perhaps it hardly afforded room enough for one the peculiar note of whose genius was vastness. It is seldom possible to do justice to a quotation fromParadise Lostwithout giving at least twenty lines. The sense, and especially the musical effect, is incomplete with less; for a Miltonic period is a series of intellectual and rhythmical actions and reactions which cannot be detached from each other without loss. It is obvious that a poet whose natural range is so great can hardly be fully himself in the sonnet. But Wordsworth had little of this spacious freedom of poetic energy; to him—
"'twas pastime to be bound Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground."
And so he could use it for everything; for great events and also for very small; not {138} exhausting great or small, but finding in each, whatever it might be, some single aspect or quality which he could touch to new power by that meditative tenderness of his to which Milton was, to his great loss, an entire stranger. The natural mysticism, for instance, of such sonnets as, "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," or, "Earth has not anything to show more fair," is quite out of Milton's reach. In this and other ways Wordsworth could do much more with the sonnet than Milton could. But without Milton some of his very greatest things would scarcely have been attempted. All the sonnets that utter his magnanimous patriotism, his dauntless passion for English liberty, his burning sympathy with the oppressed, the "holy glee" of his hatred of tyranny, are of the right lineage of Milton himself. One can almost hear Milton crying—
"It is not to be thought of that the FloodOf British freedom, which to the open seaOf the world's praise from dark antiquityHath flowed 'with pomp of waters unwithstood,'Roused though it be full often to a moodWhich spurns the checks of salutary bands,That this most famous Stream in Bogs and SandsShould perish; and to evil and to goodBe lost for ever."
{139} There and in the "Two Voices" and in the "Inland within a Hollow Vale" and in the Toussaint l'Ouverture sonnet, and others, we cannot fail to catch an echo of the poet who first "gave the sonnet's notes to glory." No one can count up all the things which have united in the making of any poem, but among those which made these sonnets possible must certainly be reckoned the Fairfax and Cromwell sonnets, and above all the still more famous one on the Massacre in Piedmont. The forces which animated England to defy and defeat Napoleon were only partly moral; but so far as they were that they found perfect expression through only one voice, that of Wordsworth. And there is no doubt as to where he caught the note which he struck again to such high purpose. He has told us himself—
"Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour;England hath need of thee."
And, what seems stranger, he has now had in return a kind of reflected influence upon Milton. The total experience of a reader of poetry is a thing of many actions and reactions, co-operating and intermingling with each other. And as we can hardly read Virgil or the Psalms now without thinking of all {140} that has come of them, and reading some of it back into the old words whose first creator could not foresee all that would be found in them, so it is with Milton and Wordsworth. There are many things in Milton which no Wordsworthian can now read exactly as they were read in the seventeenth century. Wordsworth's line
"Thy Soul was like a Star and dwelt apart"
was strangely true of Milton as he lived in his own day. But it is less true now that his place is among the spiritual company of the English poets and that Wordsworth stands by his side, or sits at his feet. That does not detract from his greatness. Indeed, it adds to it; for it is only the greater poets who thus transcend their own day and cannot be read as if they belonged to it alone. Read the great sonnet on the Massacre—
"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bonesLie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,{141}Forget not; in thy book record their groansWho were thy sheep, and in their ancient foldSlain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolledMother with infant down the rocks.Their moansThe vales redoubled to the hills, and theyTo heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sowO'er all the Italian fields, where still doth swayThe triple Tyrant; that from these may growA hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,Early may fly the Babylonian woe."
Is there not more in it than the Hebrew prophet or psalmist and the English Puritan? Is there not, for us now, something beside the past of which Milton had read, and the present which he knew by experience? Is there not an anticipation of another struggle against another tyrant—nay, the creation of the very spirit in which that struggle was to be faced? So Milton influences Wordsworth and the England of Wordsworth's day; and they in their turn inevitably influence our minds as we read him. There lies one part of the secret of his greatness; a part which is seen at its highest in his sonnets.
{142}
Paradise Lostis in several ways one of the most wonderful of the works of man. And not least in the circumstances of its composition. The Restoration found Milton blind, and to blindness it added disappointment, defeat, obscurity, and fear of the public or private revenge of his victorious enemies. Yet out of such a situation as this the most indomitable will that ever inhabited the soul of a poet produced three great poems, every one of which would have been enough to give him a place among the poets who belong to the whole world.
The first and greatest of these was, of course,Paradise Lost. Unlike many great poems, but like all the great epics of the world, it obtained recognition at once. It sold well for a work of its bulk and seriousness, and it received the highest praise from those whose word was and deserved to be law in questions of literature. Throughout the eighteenth {143} century its fame and popularity increased. Literary people read it because Dryden and Addison and all the established authorities recommended it to them, and also because those of them whose turn for literature was a reality found that these recommendations were confirmed by their own experience. But the poem also appealed to another and a larger public. To the serious world it appeared to be a religious book and as such enjoyed the great advantage of being thought fit to be read on the only day in the week on which many people were accustomed to read at all. This distinction grew in importance with the progress of the Wesleyan revival and with it grew the number of Milton's admirers. When Sunday readers were tired of the Bible they were apt to turn toParadise Lost. How many of them did so is proved by the influence Milton has had on English religious beliefs. To this day if an ordinary man is asked to give his recollections of the story of Adam and Eve he is sure to put Milton as well as Genesis into them. For instance, the Miltonic Satan is almost sure to take the place of the scriptural serpent. The influence Milton has had is unfortunately also seen in less satisfactory ways. He claimed to justify the ways of God to men. Perhaps he did so to his own mind {144} which, in these questions, was curiously matter-of-fact, literal, legal and unmystical. He was determined to explain everything and provide for all contingencies by his legal instrument of the government of the world: and he did so after the cold fashion of a lawyer defining rights on each side, and assuming that the stronger party will exert his strength. So far as his genius made his readers accept his views of the relation between God and man it cannot be denied that he did a great injury to English religious thought. Everybody who stops to reflect now feels that the attitude of his God to the rebel angels and to man is hard and unforgiving, below the standard of any decent human morality, far below the Christian charity of St. Paul. The atmosphere of the poem when it deals with these matters is often suggestive of a tyrant's attorney-general whose business is to find plausible excuses for an arbitrary despot. Milton had his share in creating that bad sort of fear of God which is always appearing as the thorn in the theological rose-bed of the eighteenth century, and, later on, becomes the nightmare of the Evangelical revival. None of these conceptions, the capricious despot, the remorseless creditor, the Judge whose {145} invariable sentence is hell fire, have proved easy to get rid of: and part of their permanence may be laid to the account ofParadise Lost.
But Milton, who is like the Bible in so many ways, is not least like it in his happy unconsciousness of his own immorality. The writer of the story of Samuel and Agag, or that of Rebekah and Jacob, was perfectly unaware that he was immoral: and so was Milton inParadise Lost: and so also and for that very reason were the majority of their readers. Happily most of us when we read a book that makes for righteousness are like children reading Shakspeare, who simply do not notice the things that make their elders nervous. It is not that we refuse the evil and choose the good: we are quite unaware of the presence of the evil at all. No doubt that sometimes makes its influence the more powerful because unperceived: and for this kind of subtle influence both Milton and the Old Testament have to answer. But with many happy natures an escape is made by the process of selection: and, as they manage to acquire the God-fearing righteousness of the Old Testament without its ferocity, so they manage to receive from Milton his high emotional consciousness of life as the glad and {146} free service of God and to ignore altogether his intellectual description of it as a very one-sided bargain with a very dangerous Potentate.
Nor must Milton be made, as he often is, to bear more blame in this matter than he deserves. Divine tyranny with hell as its sanction was no invention of his. The Catholic Church, as all her art shows, had always made full use of it. And the new horror of his own day, the Calvinist predestination, he expressly and frequently repudiates. The free will of man is the very base of his system. In it men may suffer, as it seems to us, out of all proportion to their guilt; but at least they suffer only for deeds done of their own free will.
But the true answer to the charge of corrupting English religious thought so often brought against Milton is that while the harm he did must be admitted it was far outweighed by the good. It could not be for nothing that generations of readers, as they turned over Milton's pages, found themselves listening to the voice of a man to whom God's presence was the most constant of realities, the most active of daily and hourly influences: who, from his youth up, visibly glowed with an ardent desire for the service of God and man: who, whatever his faults were, had nothing {147} base or mean about him, habitually thought of life as a thing to be lived on the heights, and by his exalted spirit and unconquerable will enlarges for those who know him the whole conception of what a human being may achieve. It could not be for nothing that on the topmost heights of English poetry stood a man who could scarcely finish a single one of his poems without some soaring ascent to heaven and heavenly things: whose most characteristic utterances for himself are such lines as
"Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven";
or—
"As ever in my great Task-Master's eye:"
and for others as well as for himself such a hope as that which concludes hisAt a Solemn Music—
"O, may we soon again renew that song,And keep in tune with Heaven, till God ere longTo his celestial concert us unite,To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of light!"
Tu habe Deum prae oculis tuis, says the author ofThe Imitation: "Have thou God {148} before Thine eyes." And so by his poetry and by his life says Milton. The influence of such a man, whatever the faults of his intellectual creed, can hardly on the whole have been anything but a good one, either on those who heard his living voice or on those who for two hundred years have caught what they may of it from the printed pages of his books.
So much it seemed worth while to say in defence of Milton whose sins in these matters have always been exaggerated by his ecclesiastical and political opponents. But the effect, good or bad, which a great poem produces on opinion is a mere by-product: its essential business is nothing of that sort but the production in the minds of competent readers of the pleasure proper to a great work of the imagination. And this is the criterion by which theParadise Lost, like every other work of the kind, must primarily be judged.
The poem, as we have it, is the long delayed result of an intention formed in Milton's strangely ripe and resolute youth. Before he was thirty he spoke openly to his friends of writing a great poem which was, as he shortly afterwards had no hesitation in telling the public, to be of the sort that the world does not willingly let die. At first the subject was to have been the Arthurian legend which {149} poets of all ages have found so fruitful. But that was soon abandoned, apparently for the reason that a little examination of the authorities convinced the poet that it was not historically true. This fact has a literary as well as a biographical importance. Great artist as Milton was, he seems to have confused truth of art with truth of fact. He preferred a Biblical subject because it was his belief that every statement in the Bible was literally true. This belief, except from the emotional fervour it inspired in him, was a positive disadvantage to him as a poet. It circumscribed his freedom of invention, it compelled him to argue that the action of his drama as he found it was already reasonable and probable instead of letting his imagination work upon it and make it so; it made him aim too often at producing belief instead of delight in his hearers. This, of course, had obvious drawbacks as soon as people ceased to regard the first chapters of Genesis as a literal prose record of events which actually happened. For a hundred and fifty years many people read theParadise Lostand supposed themselves to be enjoying the poem when what they were really enjoying was simply the pleasure of reading their own beliefs expressed in magnificent verse. In the same way many {150} religious people imagine that they enjoy early Italian art when they in fact enjoy nothing but its religious sentiment. But neither art nor poetry can live permanently on these extraneous supports. So when less interest came to be felt in Adam and Eve there were fewer readers forParadise Lost. But the readers who were lost were not those that matter. For it is a complete mistake to say, as is sometimes said, that the fact that the story ofParadise Lostwas once believed and now is so no longer is fatal to the interest of the poem. That is not so for the right reader: or at least, so far as it is so, it is Milton's fault and not that of his subject. TheAeneidloses no more by our disbelief in the historical reality of Aeneas or Dido thanOthelloloses by our ignorance whether such a person ever existed. The difficulty, so far as there is one, is not that many readers disbelieve the story of Milton's poem: it is that he himself passionately believed it. If he had been content with offering us his poem as an imaginative creation, if he had not again and again insisted on its historical truth and theological importance, no changes in the views of his readers, no merely intellectual or historical criticism, could have touched him more than they can Virgil. As a poet he is {151} perfectly invulnerable by any such attacks: it is only so far as he deserted poetry for the pseudo-scientific matter-of-fact world of prose that he fails and irritates us. All the poetry ofParadise Lostis as true to-day as when it was first written: it is only the science and logic and philosophy, in a word the prose, which has proved liable to decay. There is always that difference between the works of the imagination and those of the intellect. A hundred theories about the Greek legends of the Centaurs or the Amazons may establish themselves, have a vogue, undergo criticism and finally be exploded as absurdities: that is the common fate of intellectual products after they have done their work. But the Centaurs of the Parthenon and the Amazons of the Mausoleum are immortally independent of all changes of opinion.
This is the first disadvantage of the subject chosen by Milton, that he believed in it too much. The fact that he did so and thought its prose truth all-important at once limited the freedom of his imagination and diverted him from the single-minded pursuit of the proper end of poetry. He was evidently quite unaware of this drawback and it has been little, if at all, noticed by his critics. {152} On the other hand, he was perfectly aware of what would appear to other people to be the disadvantages involved in the choice of a subject so unlike those of previous epics. He speaks more than once of the novelty of this theme, the best-known allusion being the beautiful introduction to Book IX., in which he describes his subject, that of the human sin and the divine anger
"That brought into this World a world of woe,Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery,Death's harbinger:"
and contrasts it with those other sins and other angers on which Homer and Virgil built their poems. But he is not afraid of the contrast: he thinks it is all to his own advantage—
"Sad task! yet argumentNot less but more heroic than the wrathOf stern Achilles on his foe pursuedThrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rageOf Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;Or Neptune's ire or Juno's, that so longPerplexed the Greek, and Cytherea's son:If answerable style I can obtainOf my celestial Patroness who deignsHer nightly visitation unimplored,And dictates to me slumbering, or inspiresEasy my unpremeditated verse,{153}Since first this subject for heroic songPleased me, long choosing and beginning late,Not sedulous by nature to inditeWars, hitherto the only argumentHeroic deemed—"
The whole passage is too long for quotation. Indeed, as we have already had occasion to notice, it is one of the difficulties of discussing Milton that quotation is almost always compelled to do him an injury by giving less than the whole of any one of those long-sustained flights of music in which he rises and falls, turns to the left hand or the right, as his imagination leads him, but always on unflagging wings of undoubted and easy security. But enough has been quoted here to illustrate the poet's direct challenge of Homer and Virgil in this matter of subject. He was perfectly well aware that he was making an entirely new departure, not only from the subject of the ancients but also, as is shown by his detailed condemnation of "tilting furniture, emblazoned shields" and the rest, from those of such poets as Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. He did it deliberately, with open eyes. And there is no doubt that he was at least partly right. To this day he and Dante, in their different ways, enjoy a common advantage {154} over Homer, and still more over a poet mainly of fancy like Tasso, in the fact that their subject, that of the meaning and destiny of human life, is one in itself of profound and absorbing interest to all thinking men and women. Even if their treatment of it be in some parts and for some people unsatisfying or irritating they at least have started with that advantage. A dangerous advantage because, as we have seen in Milton's case and might also see in Dante's, tempting them to go outside the pure business of their art; but still in itself an advantage. Milton was probably also right in feeling that the fighting element in the old poets had been greatly overdone. The most interesting parts of theIliadfor us to-day are not battles, but such things as the parting of Hector and Andromache and the scene between Priam and Achilles. Where the fighting still moves us, as in the case of Hector and Achilles, or Virgil's Turrus and Pallas, it is mainly for the sake of an accompanying human and moral interest altogether above its own. The miscellaneous details of weapons and wounds which evidently once gave so much pleasure are now equally tedious to us whether it is Homer or Malory or Morris who narrates them. They can no longer give interest; they can only receive it {155} from such intrinsic interest as may belong to the combatants.
So far Milton had some justification for preferring his own subject to those of Homer and Virgil. But, so far as we can judge, he was entirely unconscious of its disadvantages: as well of those which it shares with theIliadandAeneidas of those peculiar to itself. Of the former, the most conspicuous is that inevitably involved in the introduction of divine persons into the action. Everybody feels that Homer's gods constantly spoil the interest and probability of his story, while very rarely enhancing its dignity. One never understands why they can do so much, and yet do no more, to affect the action. Their interference is always irritating, generally immoral, and on the whole ineffective. Their omnipotence is occasional and irrational: they are limited in the use of it by each other, and all alike, even Zeus, are limited by a shadowy Law or Fate in the background. Their interventions only make the struggle seem unfair or unreal, and we are glad to be rid of them.
Milton is still more deeply involved in the same difficulty. All his personages except two are superhuman. It is his great disadvantage as compared with Dante that the {156} main lines of his story are all scriptural and therefore outside the influence of his invention, that his actors are divine, angelic, or sinless beings, and therefore such as can provide little of the uncertainty of issue or variety of temper and experience which are the stuff of drama. He is hampered by having constantly to assert the true free will and responsibility of Satan for his rebellion and of Adam for his disobedience, even to the extent of putting argumentative soliloquies confessing it into their own mouths. So far he succeeds: both are felt to be free in their fatal choice. But the war in heaven can arouse no interest because its issue is obviously foregone, and much of the action of the rebel angels necessarily conflicts with the frequent statements that they can do nothing except as permitted by their Conqueror. At one moment they know their powerlessness, at another they hope for revenge and victory. These are grave difficulties which deprive large parts of the poem of that illusion of probability or truth without which poetry cannot do its proper work. A further difficulty, from which ancient poets were free, arises from the purely intellectual and spiritual nature of the Christian God. It is as if Homer had had to deal with the divine unity of Plato instead of {157} with his family of loving, quarrelling, fighting gods and goddesses. A being who is Incomprehensible as well as Almighty and Omniscient can hardly be an actor in a poem written for human readers. The gods in theIliadshock us because they are too like ourselves: Milton's God may sometimes shock us too: but He is more often in danger of fatiguing us by His utter remoteness from our experience, by His dwelling not merely, not indeed so often as we could wish, in clouds and darkness, but in a world of theological mysteries which necessarily lose more in sublimity than they gain in clearness by being perpetually discussed and explained. Dante's poem is at least as full as Milton's of obscure theological doctrines and attempts at their explanation; but, either by virtue of the plan of theDivina Commediaor by some finer instinct of reserve and reverence in the poet, we never find ourselves in Dante as we do in Milton exercising our critical faculties, whether we will or no, on the very words of God Himself. If we reject an argument as unconvincing or fallacious, it is on Virgil or Statius, Beatrice or Thomas Aquinas, that we sit in judgment. The Divine Mind, intensely and constantly felt as its presence is from the first canto of the poem to the last, is yet felt always as from behind a {158} curtain which can never be raised for the sight of mortal eyes.
Still, it must be admitted that, impossible as was the task of making the Infinite and Eternal an actor and speaker in a human poem, Milton's very failure in it is sublime. His prodigious powers are nowhere more wonderfully displayed than in trying to do what no one, not even himself, could do. The second half of his third book, for instance, is far more interesting than the first, but it may well be doubted whether the mere fact of his accomplishing the first at all is not a greater proof of his poetic genius. Nowhere does that unfailing certainty of style, in which he has scarcely an equal among the poets of the whole world, stand him in such astonishing stead as in these difficult dialogues in heaven.
"Father, thy word is passed, Man shall find grace;And shall Grace not find means, that finds her way,The speediest of thy wingèd messengers.To visit all thy creatures, and to allComes unprevented, unimplored, unsought?Happy for Man, so coming;"
On the side of invention there is nothing remarkable; but, on the side of art, what a {159} divine graciousness there is in its tone and manner; what incomparable skill in the management of the verse! Note the quiet monosyllabic beginning, taking note, as it were, of the decree of mercy, and then the expansion of it, the loving voice pressing forward in freer movement as it confidently proclaims the happy results that cannot fail to follow. And observe the peculiarly Miltonic interlacing of the whole, line leading to line and word to word: the "grace" of the first line giving the key to the "grace" of the second, the repeated "find" of the second line and the repeated "all" of the fourth, the "comes" of the fifth line leading on to the "coming" of the sixth. To make a list of such details as these is not to explain the effect which they produce; that is the secret of Milton's genius. So is that cunning variety in the rhythm of the verses: three pauses in the first line, two in the second, only one in the third: the principal pause after the sixth syllable in both the first two lines, and yet the words and their accents so artfully varied that not the slightest monotony is felt; the suggestion of easy flight in the smooth unbroken movement of the third line—
"The speediest of thy wingèd messengers."
{160} Milton knew that an utterance of this kind, in which the Bible had anticipated him a hundred times, admitted of no novelty in itself; and his reverence forbade him to give his invention free rein in these high matters. But what he could do he did. The matter of the speech he leaves as he found it; what the Son says every reader has heard before: but after this manner he has not heard it. In passing through Milton's hands all has been transformed into a new birth by the consummate craftsmanship of a supreme artist.
Thus the poet escapes, as far as it was possible to escape, from the difficulties created for him by his acceptance of divine Persons as actors in his drama. But the escape could only be partial. It is true that as Johnson says, "whatever be done the poet is always great": but greatness of style often struggles in vain against the incongruity of a verbose and argumentative Deity. Such gods as Virgil's Venus and Juno may hurl rhetorical speeches at each other without much ill effect, but we feel that it was a lack of the sense of mystery in Milton that kept him from realizing that the one God, Creator, Father and Judge of all, cannot with fitness debate or argue: He can only decree. "Let thy words be few"; that is even truer, we {161} instinctively feel, of words put into His mouth than of words addressed to Him. Milton's God suffers even more than Shakspeare's Ghosts from a garrulity which destroys the sense of the awe properly belonging to a supernatural being; and the grim laughter of the Miltonic heaven is in its different way even more fatal to that awe than the Jack-in-the-box appearances and disappearances of the dead Hamlet and Banquo.
Such are some of the difficulties, in part overcome by the poet and in part unperceived, inherent in the subject ofParadise Lost. One more, the greatest of all, remains. Poetry is a human art and its subject is human life. In the story Milton set himself to tell there are only two human figures; and how can they, living as they do in isolated perfection and sinlessness, without children or friends, without learning or art or business, without hopes or fears or memories, without the experience of disease or the expectation of death, and therefore without the joy, as we know it, of life and health, how can they provide material for a poem that can interest beings so utterly unlike them as ourselves? The answer is twofold. It is partly that they do fail to provide that material. TheParadise Losthas in fact far less of ordinary human life in {162} it, far less variety of action, than theIliadandOdyssey. This was probably unavoidable but it was probably also Milton's deliberate intention. It was not his nature to care much about the small doings of ordinary people in everyday life. The line which he most often repeats inParadise Lostis the very opposite of those which are repeated so often in theIliad, verses of no noticeable poetic quality, just doing their plain duty of linking two speeches or two paragraphs together: such as—
hos oi men toiauta pros allêlous agoreuon
What Milton chooses for repetition is, on the other hand, one of his stateliest lines, the magnificent—
"Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers."
The choice is characteristic of the man. His "natural port," as Johnson well said, "is gigantic loftiness," and his end to "raise the thoughts above sublunary cares or pleasures." So it may well be that this disadvantage of his subject did not weigh with him as much as it would have done with most poets. But he was not altogether blind to it, and the amazing skill he shows in partly getting over it is the other half of the answer to {163} the question asked just now. His action up to the moment of the Fall is the inhuman one of a few days in hell, heaven, and a small sinless spot of earth: and the Fall does not increase the number of actors. Yet into the mouths of this tiny group of persons Milton may be said to have brought all the history of the world and all its geography, art, science and learning, the Jew, the Christian and the Pagan, Greek philosophy and Roman politics, classical myth, mediaeval romance, and even the contemporary life of his own experience. This is partly done, as Virgil had done it, by the way of a prophecy of future ages: but to a much greater extent by the way of similes which are more elaborate and learned in Milton than in any poet. By their assistance he gives rest to the imagination exhausted by the sublimity of heaven and hell, bringing it home to its own familiar earth, to scenes whose charm, unlike that of Eden or Pandemonium, lies not, in the wonder their strangeness excites but in the old habits, experiences and memories which they recall. So, after the strain of the great debate with which the second book opens, he soothes us with the beautiful simile of the evening after storm—
"Thus they their doubtful consultations darkEnded, rejoicing in their matchless Chief;{164}As, when from mountain-tops the dusky cloudsAscending, while the North-wind sleeps, o'erspreadHeaven's cheerful face, the louring elementScowls 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 herdsAttest their joy, that hill and valley rings."
Note how large and general it is. Its method is the classical appeal to universal knowledge and feeling, not the romantic method of strangeness of sentiment and detailed particularity of truth. Matthew Arnold once recommended those who cannot read Greek or Latin to read Milton as a far better key than any translation can be to the secret of the greatness of the ancient poets. This is the truth: and not only for the reason on which Arnold laid just stress—the "sure and flawless perfection of rhythm and diction" in which, as he truly says, Milton is unique among English poets: but also for his classical habit of mind, for his central sanity, for the sureness with which he makes his call on the thoughts and emotions, not of eccentric {165} or exceptional individuals, but of the men and women of all times and all nations.
Yet he can use his similes, as we said, to introduce the life of his own day and still generally carry his classical manner with him. So in the following simile he begins with the Homeric wolf and ends with the Roman and Laudian clergy. Satan has leapt over the wall of Paradise: and the simile begins—
"As when a prowling wolf,Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eveIn hurdled cotes amid the field secure,Leaps o'er the fence with ease into the fold:Or as a thief bent to unhoard the cashOf some rich burgher, whose substantial doors,Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault,In at the window climbs, or o'er the tiles:So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold:So since into his Church lewd hirelings climb."
The last line smacks perhaps more of the angry pamphleteer than fits with classical sanity: but how admirably the London citizen's house gives vivid reality to the beautiful remoteness of the wolf which English shepherds had long forgotten to fear; how the recollection, present to every reader's {166} mind, of that very same simile in the Gospel of St. John, prepares the way for its religious application here: how the attention is seized by that magnificent line of arresting mono-syllables, each heavy with the sense of fate—
"So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold!"
It used to be said that Milton uses mono-syllables to express slowness of action. But that is notably not the case here. And in the main it seems that he uses them, as Shakspeare often did, for expressing the solemnity of grave crisis, or for deep emotion, when anything fanciful, ornate or verbose would be fatal to the simplicity, akin to silence, which all men find fitting at great moments. So Shakspeare makes Kent say at Lear's death—
"Vex not his ghost; O let him pass! he hates himThat would upon the rack of this tough worldStretch him out longer."
And so Milton uses these tremendous mono-syllables, like a bell tolling into the silence of midnight, to force our attention on the doom of all the world that took its beginning when Satan entered Paradise—
{167}
"So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold."
So again, with less solemnity as befitting a less awful person but still with arresting and delaying emphasis, he records the actual eating of the fatal apple—
"she plucked, she eat:Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe,That all was lost."
So he suspends the flow of the richest and most elaborate of his similes by the slow-moving monosyllables of
"which cost Ceres all that painTo seek her through the world:"
So he strikes the deepest note, beyond all politics, of his debate in hell:
"And that must end us; that must be our cure—To be no more:"
So again he closes the first Act ofParadise Regainedwith a verse of solitary awe—
"And now wild beasts come forth the woods to roam."
{168}
But to return to the similes. Milton uses them, as we have seen, to introduce things familiar and contemporary into the remote and majestic theme of his poem. But he also uses them to introduce the whole world into Eden, all later history into the beginning of the world, all the varied glories of art and war, poetry and legend, with which his memory was stored, into an action which was only partly human and provided no scope at all for any human activities except of the most primitive order. So the palace of Hell is, he tells us, something far beyond the magnificence of "Babylon, or great Alcairo"; and the army of rebel angels far exceeds those
"That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each sideMixed with auxiliar gods; and what resoundsIn fable or romance of Uther's son,Begirt with British and Armoric knights;And all who since, baptized or infidel,Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban,Damasco, or Marocco or Trebisond,Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore,When Charlemain with all his peerage fellBy Fontarabbia."
So, in another of his returns to those tales and fancies of the Middle Age which, in spite {169} of his intellectual and moral rejection of their falsity, yet always moved him to unusual beauty of verse, he compares the dwarfed rebels of Hell to the
"faery elves,Whose midnight revels, by a forest sideOr fountain, some belated peasant sees,Or dreams he sees, while overhead the MoonSits arbitress, and nearer to the EarthWheels her pale course; they, on their mirth and danceIntent, with jocund music charm his ear;At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds."
So Eve at her gardening recalls Pales, or Pomona or
"Ceres in her prime,Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove."
And so, in an earlier book, the beauty of Paradise itself, too great to be directly told, is, like the splendour of Pandemonium, conveyed to us by the most perfect of those negative similes which, forced upon Milton by the narrow bounds of his story, are perhaps the most distinctive of all the glories ofParadise Lost. It is too long to quote in full: but a few lines may be given: and they must include the first four, one of which has just {170} been quoted, verses of such amazing beauty that, if Milton could be represented by four lines, these might well be the chosen four—
"Not that fair fieldOf Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers.Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy DisWas gathered, which cost Ceres all that painTo seek her through the world; nor that sweet groveOf Daphne by Orontes, and the inspiredCastalian spring, might with this ParadiseOf Eden strive."
But it is time to leave Milton's similes, though similes play a more important part inParadise Lostthan in any other epic. Indeed their necessary absence is a great element in the comparative dulness of the books given over to the discourses of Raphael and Michael. A single chapter in a little book of this kind can only deal with one or two aspects of so great a subject asParadise Lost. That being so, it is best, perhaps, to touch on points in which Milton stands pre-eminent or unique. The similes are one of these. Another is the splendour of the Miltonic speeches. It is one of the defects ofParadise Lostthat its actors are seldom soldiers whom all the ages agree to admire, and often theologians whom all fear or dislike, or politicians whom all obey {171} and despise. Yet how magnificently Milton turns this weakness into a strength! His speeches have not the eternal humanity of Homer's: but as oratory, above all as debating oratory, they have no poetic rivals outside the drama. The poet who had lived through the Long Parliament and the trial of Strafford knew the art of speech as Homer could not know it. It may seem strange to us that the political struggle of his day affected him so much more than the military; but the fact is so. Pym and Hampden are felt inParadise Lostfar more than Fairfax or Cromwell. The speeches of the second book could only have been written by the citizen of a free state who had lived through a crisis in its fortunes. Other speeches in the poem—that incomparable one of Eve to Adam in the fourth book, "Sweet is the breath of morn," those that pass between Eve and Adam after the Fall and Adam's Job-like lament in the tenth book—have a purer human beauty about them: but of the oratory of debate no poem in the world provides a more magnificent display than the second book ofParadise Lost. The debate is a real debate. The opening of Moloch, "My sentence is for open war," would be instantly effective in any Parliament in the world. It {172} rouses attention by its directness, it compels adherence as only courage can. To undo its effect Belial has to employ the most subtle of all oratorical arts, that of accepting the arguments which he dare not directly combat and then gradually turning them to the confusion of their author. So he and Mammon bring the assembly completely round to the mood of ease and acquiescence. Then follows the tremendous figure of Beelzebub, an aged Chatham or Gladstone, who
"in his rising seemedA pillar of state. Deep on his front engravenDeliberation sat and public care;And princely counsel in his face yet shone,Majestic though in ruin. Sage he stood,With Atlantean shoulders fit to bearThe weight of mightiest monarchies; his lookDrew audience and attention still as night,Or summer's noon-tide air."
Yet Milton's consciousness of the situation as it really would be is such that Beelzebub does not dare to revive Moloch's defeated policy of war. To talk of fighting to cowed rebels who have just been taught the too pleasant lesson of the folly of further resistance would have been useless. So he begins by telling them that the ease promised to them is a delusion: they may submit, but submission {173} will never win them peace, or deliver them from their victorious enemy. Peace, then, they cannot have; and must have war: but it need not be open or dangerous: craft has its weapons as well as force: "what if we find Some easier enterprise" than the perilous folly of assaulting heaven?
Such a sketch may just serve to show that the great debate is a living thing in which we feel the temper of the audience submitting to the successive orators and in its turn reacting upon them. Another proof of the actuality of Milton's oratory is the way in which it can be quoted.
"I give not Heaven for lost;"
"Which, if not victory, is yet revenge:"
"What though the field be lost?All is not lost; the unconquerable will,And study of revenge, immortal hate,And courage never to submit or yield,And what is else not to be overcome:"
"what peace can we returnBut, to our power, hostility and hate?"
"This would surpassCommon revenge, and interrupt his joyIn our confusion:"
{174}
"Advise if this be worthAttempting, or to sit in darkness hereHatching vain empires:"
"What reinforcement we may gain from hope,If not, what resolution from despair:"
"on whom we sendThe weight of all and our last hope relies:"
"This enterpriseNone shall partake with me."
All these have been or could well be hurled by contending Parliamentarians across the table of the House of Commons, often with a fine irony, the Miltonic magnificence emphasizing the pettiness of the ordinary political squabbles. But, of course, the theological questions which are at the root of Milton's debate make many of the arguments inapplicable to politics: indeed, what is probably the most remembered passage in all the speeches has nothing to do with social or political activities but draws its poignant interest from the secret thoughts that visit the hearts of men when they are most alone—
"And that must end us; that must be our cure,To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose,Though full of pain, this intellectual being,{175}Those thoughts that wander through eternity,To perish rather, swallowed up and lostIn the wide womb of uncreated Night,Devoid of sense and motion?"
Here we obviously go outside the dramatic probabilities: it is no longer Belial who is speaking: it is the voice of a highly cultivated and intellectual human being with all Greek thought behind him; it is, in short, Milton himself. The whole poem is full of such autobiographical confessional passages, either indirect like this or open and undisguised like the great introductions to the first, third, seventh and ninth books. This constant intervention of the poet in his epic is one of the originalities ofParadise Lost, and certainly not the least successful. The passages which are due to it have been criticized as irregularities or superfluities, but, as Johnson justly asked, "superfluities so beautiful who would take away?" Homer may be said never to allow us to do more than guess obscurely at what he himself was or thought or felt: so leaving room for the follies of the criticism which supposes him to be a kind of limited company of poets. Virgil spoke directly to his readers at least once in theAeneid, in the most magnificent, and {176} most magnificently fulfilled, of all the poetic promises of eternal fame—
"Fortunati ambo! Si quid mea carmina possuntNulla dies unquam memori vos eximet aevoDum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxumAccolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit."
But it is less in such a direct intervention as this than in the whole tone and temper of his poem that he reveals to us his delicate and beautiful nature. Milton confesses himself in both ways. His high seriousness, his proud and resolute will, his grave sadness at the folly of mankind, are interwoven in the whole of his story. Then in the speeches he will often, as in this of Belial, forget altogether who is speaking and where and when, forget Satan and Adam, Eden and Hell, and make his human escape to his own time and country and to himself. The extreme limitations of his subject made something of this kind almost necessary. When all had been done that simile and prophecy could do to bring in the life of men and women as Milton's readers knew it there still remained the difficulty that Adam and his angel visitors must talk, and that before the Fall there was almost {177} nothing for them to talk about. So they constantly talk as if they had all history behind them and the world's processes were to them, as to us, old and familiar things. "War seemed a civil game To this uproar," says Raphael, as if he were fresh from reading Livy or Gibbon and had all the wars of Europe and Asia in his memory. Often Milton calls attention, as it were, to his own inconsistencies, putting in an apology like that of Michael when he talks to Adam about Hamath and Hermon—
"Things by their names I call though yet unnamed;"
but more often he leaves them unexplained, perhaps not even noticing them himself. These difficulties are seen at their worst in the very earthly geography of heaven and its very unheavenly military operations: and, interesting as the passages are, it is difficult to forget the incongruity of Raphael and Adam discussing the Ptolemaic and Copernican theories of the universe, or Adam moralizing on the unhappiness of marriage as if he had studied the divorce reports or gone through a course of modern novels. Yet few and foolish are the readers who can dwell on dramatic improbabilities when Adam {178} is pouring out the bitter cry wrung from Milton by the still unforgotten miseries of his first marriage—
"Oh! why did God,Creator wise, that peopled highest HeavenWith Spirits masculine, create at lastThis novelty on Earth, this fair defectOf Nature, and not fill the World at onceWith men as Angels, without feminine,Or find some other way to generateMankind? This mischief had not then befallen,And more that shall befall; innumerableDisturbances on Earth through female snares,And strait conjunction with this sex. For eitherHe never shall find out fit mate, but suchAs some misfortune brings him, or mistake;Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain,Through her perverseness, but shall see her gainedBy a far worse, or, if she love, withheldBy parents; or his happiest choice too lateShall meet, already linked and wedlock-boundTo a fell adversary, his hate or shame;Which infinite calamity shall causeTo human life, and household peace confound."
It is obvious that in all this we hear the poet's own voice. But it is scarcely fair to quote it without pointing out that it must {179} not be taken alone. The common notion that Milton's own melancholy experience had made him a purblind misogynist is a complete mistake. No one has praised marriage as he has. The chastest of poets is as little afraid as the Prayer Book of frank acceptance of the physical facts which must commonly be the basis of its spiritual relation. It is the whole union for which he stands, of body, mind, and spirit. He puts into the mouth of this same Adam the most eloquent praise woman ever received, culminating in
"All higher Knowledge in her presence fallsDegraded. Wisdom in discourse with herLoses discountenanced, and like Folly shows;Authority and Reason on her wait,As one intended first, not after madeOccasionally: and, to consummate all,Greatness of mind and nobleness their seatBuild in her loveliest, and create an aweAbout her, as a guard angelic placed."
It is true that the reply of the Angel moderating these ardours is more evidently Miltonic—
"what transports thee so?An outside? fair no doubt and worthy wellThy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love;Not thy subjection. Weigh with her thyself;Then value. Oft-times nothing profits moreThan self-esteem, grounded on just and right."
{180} But, though in these last words Raphael entirely disappears in Milton, the poet who could conceive the panegyric to which Raphael replies, who could elsewhere make his hero say that he received "access in every virtue" from the looks of Eve, had assuredly no low ideal of what a woman may be. Adam speaks for him when he praises love as
"not the lowest end of human life;"
and he gives us a true corrective of the over-severe picture of Milton which half-knowledge is apt to draw when he goes on to declare that
"not to irksome toil, but to delight,He made us, and delight to reason joined."
But this is only one of many subjects on which Milton lets us hear his own voice speaking through his characters. We hear it when Satan cries to Beelzebub—
"Fallen Cherub, to be weak is miserable,Doing or suffering:"
when Raphael reports Nisroch as saying of pain and pleasure what may well have been felt by the blind poet who owed his knowledge of pleasure to memory only, while he knew {181} pain by the frequent experience of one of the most painful of diseases—
"sense of pleasure we may wellSpare out of life, perhaps, and not repine,But live content, which is the calmest life;But pain is perfect misery, the worstOf evils, and, excessive, overturnsAll patience:"
we hear it when Adam, like a weary scholar, says that
"not to know at large of things remoteFrom use, obscure and subtle, but to knowThat which before us lies in daily life,Is the prime wisdom;"
when Raphael asks, like a Platonic philosopher,
"what if Earth Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?"
when Adam, like a doubting Christian in an age of speculation, hesitates for a moment about the efficacy of prayer—
"that from us aught should ascend to HeavenSo prevalent as to concern the mindOf God high-blest, or to incline his will,Hard to belief may seem:"
{182} and once more when Adam cries—
"solitude sometimes is best society,"
as if he, like the blind Milton, was worn out by twenty years of contending voices, and longed for the relief of silent and lonely thought.
To the direct interventions of the poet there is less need to call attention as, of course, no reader can miss them. They are probably the most universally admired passages of the poem. Every reader who deserves to read them at all finds himself unable to do so without wishing to get them by heart. They do not rival the daring splendour of the scenes in hell: nor perhaps the suave and gracious perfection of the evening scene in Paradise in the fourth book; nor can they, of course, exhibit the dramatic power of the scene that precedes and still more of those that follow the Fall. But nothing in the whole poem moves us so much. It is not merely that Milton has exerted his whole mastery of his art to make their every line and every word please the ear, awaken the memory, stimulate the imagination, lift the whole mental and emotional nature of the reader up to a height of being unknown to its ordinary experience. This he has {183} done in some other parts of his poem. But, fine as some of his dramatic touches are, the essence of his genius was lyrical and not dramatic or objective at all. And so none of his characters, divine, diabolic or human, will ever move us quite as he moves us himself.
Let us hear the most beautiful of all these confessions: and for once let us indulge ourselves with the whole. The themes that make up Milton's great symphony ought in truth always to be given unbroken, if only that were possible. Indeed, there is a sense in which it may be said that nothing less than the whole poem can do justice to a design so majestic as that ofParadise Lost. But in any case it is certain that no fragment of a few lines can convey a full impression of the rhythmical, intellectual, imaginative unity of the Miltonic paragraph or section. This is above all conspicuous in the great speeches and in the elaborate introductions that precede the first, third, seventh and ninth books. Here is the greatest of the four; the most famous of Milton's personal interventions in his poem, and one of the most wonderful things he ever wrote.
"Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born!Or of the Eternal coeternal beam{184}May I express thee unblamed? Since God is light,And never but in unapproached lightDwelt from eternity; dwelt then in thee,Bright effluence of bright essence increate!Or hearest thou rather pure Ethereal stream,Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the Sun,Before the Heavens, thou wert, and at the voiceOf God, as with a mantle, didst investThe rising World of waters dark and deep,Won from the void and formless Infinite!Thee I revisit now with bolder wing,Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detainedIn that obscure sojourn, while in my flight,Through utter and through middle Darkness borne,With other notes than to the Orphean lyre,I sung of Chaos and eternal Night,Taught by the Heavenly Muse to venture downThe dark descent, and up to re-ascend,Though hard and rare; thee I revisit safe,And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thouRevisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vainTo find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,Or dim suffusion veiled. Yet not the moreCease I to wander where the Muses haunt{185}Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,Smit with the love of sacred song; but chiefThee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow,Nightly I visit; nor sometimes forgetThose other two equalled with me in fate,So were I equalled with them in renown,Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old:Then feed on thoughts that voluntary moveHarmonious numbers; as the wakeful birdSings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the yearSeasons return; but not to me returnsDay or the sweet approach of even or morn,Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;But cloud instead and ever-during darkSurrounds me, from the cheerful ways of menCut off, and, for the book of knowledge fair,Presented with a universal blankOf Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.So much the rather thou, Celestial Light,Shine inward, and the mind through all her powersIrradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thencePurge and disperse, that I may see and tellOf things invisible to mortal sight."
{186}
Not all the poetry of all the world can produce more than a few passages that equal this in moving power. Tears are not very far from the eye that is passing over its page: tears in which sympathy plays a smaller part than joy at the discovery that human words can be so beautiful. But if Milton moves us more by his own personality than by that of any of his creations, it is still true that he is not so entirely without dramatic power as has sometimes been alleged. No one would claim for him that he was one of the great narrative or dramatic masters. But his weakness on these sides is so obvious that there has been a tendency to exaggerate it. We notice the undramatic speeches of Satan and Adam: we notice such things as Eve's dream in the fifth book which, anticipating, as it does, so many of the details of her temptation, renders her fall much less probable, and goes far to destroy its interest when it occurs. But we are slower to notice the admirable dramatic management of such a scene as that between Eve and the Serpent in the ninth book. And yet how finely imagined it is, in all its successive stages! Satan, at first "stupidly good," overawed at Eve's beauty and innocence; then, recovering his natural malice, and beginning his attempt by appealing to {187} two things, curiosity and the love of flattery, which have always been supposed especially powerful with women; and Eve, taking no direct notice of his compliments and in appearance surrendering only to the other bait of novelty and surprise; "how cam'st thou speakable of mute?" So the scene begins. Flattery has ensured the tempter a favourable reception; curiosity gives him the chance of an apparently telling argument. I ate, he says, of the fruit of a certain tree and received from it speech and reason. But I have found nothing to satisfy my new-won powers till I saw thee, whom I now desire to worship as the sovran of creation. She affects to rebuke the flattery, but naturally asks to be shown the tree on which the wonderful fruit grows. It of course turns out to be the Forbidden Tree: and Eve mentions the prohibition as a thing final and unquestionable. He meets her refusal by giving a sinister and plausible explanation of the prohibition. Why did God forbid her the fruit? "Why, but to keep ye low and ignorant, His worshippers?" God, he suggests, knows too well that as the fruit had raised the serpent from brute to human, so it would raise the woman from human to divine. Noon and hunger come to fortify his {188} arguments; and, after a speech in which she adds one more of her own drawn from the name, the Tree of Knowledge, given to the tree by God Himself, she plucks and eats. In the first ecstasy of pleasure she luxuriates in joy and self-confidence. Then she considers whether she shall use her new powers to make herself the equal and even the superior of Adam. The prospect tempts her: but she is not quite free from fear that the threatened punishment of death may after all descend upon her. And that suggests the picture of "Adam wedded to another Eve," which brings her swiftly to the decision that Adam shall share with her her fate, whichever it be, bliss or woe. In this, as later in her hasty proposal of suicide, Eve is a living and convincing human figure. To the stronger and wiser Adam it was harder to give life. But what could be finer or truer than his instant repudiation of her plausible tale—
"How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost,Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!"
followed by his immediate resolution to die with her—
"And me with thee hath ruined: for with theeCertain my resolution is to die.How can I live without thee?"
{189} The rest follows with equal probability. Once resolved to unite his lot with hers, he soon finds arguments to prove that that lot is not likely after all to be so dreadful. Having talked himself into the surrender of his judgment he eats, and having eaten he goes at once all lengths of extravagance, folly and sin. Then comes the reaction and the inevitable mutual reproaches; with the fine natural touch of Eve upbraiding Adam for his weakness in yielding to her request and granting her the freedom which had proved so fatal. So the ninth book closes. When the story is resumed in the second half of the tenth book we get the tremendous lamentation of Adam, so strangely undramatic in its argumentative justification of his own punishment, so full of true drama as well as of magnificent lyrical power in its cry of human misery and despair. Then follows the bitter attack upon Eve, as the cause of all his woe: and the whole scene is concluded by her humble and beautiful submission—