Si quando indigenas revocabo in carmina regea, Arturumque etiam sub terris bella moventem, Aut dicam invictae sociali foedere mensae Magnanimos heroas, et, o modo spiritus adsit!
Frangam Saxonicas Britonum sub marte phalangas.
May I find such a friend ... when, if ever, I shall revive in song our native princes, and among them Arthur moving to the fray even in the nether world, and when I shall, if only inspiration be mine, break the Saxon bands before our Britons" prowess.
The same announcement is reproduced in the Epitaphium Damonis, 1639, and, in Pamphlet No. 4, in the often-quoted words:-
Perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, composed at under twenty, or thereabout, met with acceptance.... I began to a.s.sent to them (the Italians) and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting which now grows dally upon me, that by labour and intent study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die.
Between the publication of the collected Poems in 1645, and the appearance of Paradise Lost in 1687, a period of twenty-two years, Milton gave no public sign of redeeming this pledge. He seemed to his cotemporaries to have renounced the follies of his youth, the gewgaws of verse; and to have sobered down into the useful citizen, "Le bon poete," thought Malherbe, "n"est pas plus utile a l"etat qu"un bon joueur de quilles." Milton had postponed his poem, in 1641, till "the land had once enfranchished herself from this impertinent yoke of prelatry, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish." Prelatry was swept away, and he asked for further remand on account of the war. Peace was concluded, the country was settled under the strong government of a Protector, and Milton"s great work did not appear. It was not even preparing. He was writing not poetry but prose, and that most ephemeral and valueless kind of prose, pamphlets, extempore articles on the topics of the day. He poured out reams of them, in simple unconsciousness that they had no influence whatever on the current of events.
Nor was it that, during all these years, Milton was meditating in secret what he could not bring forward in public; that he was only holding back from publishing, because there was no public ready to listen to his song. In these years Milton was neither writing nor thinking poetry. Of the twenty-four sonnets indeed-twenty-four, reckoning the twenty-lined piece, "The forcers of conscience," as a sonnet-eleven belong to this period. But they do not form a continuous series, such as do Wordsworth"s Ecclesiastical Sonnets, nor do they evince a sustained mood of poetical meditation. On the contrary, their very force and beauty consist in their being the momentary and spontaneous explosion of an emotion welling up from the depths of the soul, and forcing itself into metrical expression, as it were, in spite of the writer. While the first eight sonnets, written before 1645, are sonnets of reminiscence and intention, like those of the Italians, or the ordinary English sonnet, the eleven sonnets of Milton"s silent period, from 1645 to 1658, are records of present feeling kindled by actual facts. In their naked, unadorned simplicity of language, they may easily seem, to a reader fresh from Petrarch, to be homely and prosaic. Place them in relation to the circ.u.mstance on which each piece turns, and we begin to feel the superiority for poetic effect of real emotion over emotion meditated and revived. History has in it that which can touch us more abidingly than any fiction. It is this actuality which distinguishes the sonnets of Milton from any other sonnets. Of this difference Wordsworth was conscious when he struck out the phrase, "In his hand the thing became a trumpet." Macaulay compared the sonnets in their majestic severity to the collects, They remind us of a Hebrew psalm, with its undisguised outrush of rage, revenge, exultation, or despair, where nothing is due to art or artifice, and whose poetry is the expression of the heart, and not a branch of literature. It is in the sonnets we most realise the force of Wordsworth"s image-
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea.
We are not then to look in the sonnets for latent traces of the suspended poetic creation They come from the other side of Milton"s nature, the political, not the artistic. They are akin to the prose pamphlets, not to Paradise Lost. Just when the sonnets end, the composition of the epic was taken in hand. The last of the sonnets (23 in the ordinary numeration) was written in 1658, and it is to the same year that our authority, Aubrey-Phillips, refers his beginning to occupy himself with Paradise Lost. He had by this time settled the two points about which he had been long in doubt, the subject, and the form. Long before bringing himself to the point of composition, he had decided upon the Fall of man as subject, and upon the narrative, or epic, form, in preference to the dramatic. It is even possible that a few isolated pa.s.sages of the poem, as it now stands, may have been written before. Of one such pa.s.sage we know that it was written fifteen or sixteen years before 1658, and while he was still contemplating a drama. The lines are Satan"s speech, P. L. iv. 32, beginning,-
O, thou that with surpa.s.sing glory crowned.
These lines, Phillips says, his uncle recited to him, as forming the opening of his tragedy. They are modelled, as the cla.s.sical reader will perceive, upon Euripides. Possibly they were not intended for the very first lines, since if Milton intended to follow the practice of his model, the lofty lyrical tone of this address should have been introduced by a prosaic matter-of-fact setting forth of the situation, as in the Euripidean prologue. There are other pa.s.sages in the poem which have the air of being insit.i.tious in the place where they stand. The lines in Book iv, now in question, may reasonably be referred to 1640-42, the date of those leaves in the Trinity College MS., in which Milton has written down, with his own hand, various sketches of tragedies, which might possibly be adopted as his final choice.
A pa.s.sage in The Reason of Church Government, written at the same period, 1641, gives us the the fullest account of his hesitation. It was a hesitation caused, partly by the wealth of matter which his reading suggested to him, partly by the consciousness that he ought not to begin in haste while each year was ripening his powers. Every one who has undertaken a work of any length has made the experience, that the faculty of composition will not work with ease, until the reason is satisfied that the subject chosen is a congenial one. Gibbon has told us himself of the many periods of history upon which he tried his pen, even after the memorable 16 October, 1764, when he "sate musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter." We know how many sketches of possible tragedies Recine would make before he could adopt one as the appropriate theme, on which he could work with that thorough enjoyment of the labour, which is necessary to give life and verve to any creation, whether of the poet or the orator.
The leaves of the Trinity College MS., which are contemporary with his confidence to the readers of his tract Of Church Government, exhibit a list of nearly one hundred subjects, which, had occurred to him from time to time as practicable subjects. From the mode of entry we see that, already in 1641, a scriptural was likely to have tie preference over a profane subject, and that among scriptural subjects Paradise Lost (the familiar t.i.tle appears in this early note), stands out prominently above the rest. The historical subjects are all taken from native history, none are foreign, and all are from the time before the Roman conquest. The scriptural subjects are partly from the Old, partly from the New, Testament. Some of these subjects are named and nothing more, while others are slightly sketched out. Among these latter-are Baptistes, on the death of John the Baptist, and Christus Patiens, apparently to be confined to the agony in the garden. Of Paradise Lost there are four drafts in greater detail than any of the others. These drafts of the plot or action, though none of them that which was finally adopted, are sufficiently near to the action of the poem as it stands, to reveal to as the fact that the author"s imaginative conception of what he intended to produce was generated, cast, and moulded, at a comparatively early age. The commonly received notion, therefore, with which authors, as they age, are wont to comfort themselves, that one of the greatest feats of original invention achieved by man, was begun after fifty, must be thus far modified. Paradise Lost was composed after fifty, but was conceived at thirty-two. Hence the high degree of perfection realised in the total result. For there were combined to produce it the opposite virtues of two distinct periods of mental development; the daring imagination and fresh emotional play of early manhood, with the exercised judgment and chastened taste of ripened years. We have regarded the twenty-five years of Milton"s life between 1641 and the commencement of Paradise Lost, as time ill laid out upon inferior work which any one could do, and which was not worth doing by any one. Yet it may be made a question if in any other mode than by adjournment of his early design, Milton could have attained to that union of original strength with severe restraint, which distinguishes from all other poetry, except that of Virgil, the three great poems of his old age. If the fatigue of age is sometimes felt in Paradise Regained, we feel in Paradise Lost only (in the words of Chateaubriand), "la maturite de l"age a travers les pa.s.sions des legeres annees; une charme extraordinaire de vieillesse et de jeunesse."
A still further inference is warranted by the Trinity College jottings of 1641. Not the critics merely, but readers ready to sympathise, have been sometimes inclined to wish that Milton had devoted his power to a more human subject, in which the poet"s invention could have had freer play, and for which his reader"s interest could have been more ready. And it has been thought that the choice of a Biblical subject indicates the narrowing effect of age, adversity, and blindness combined. We now know that the Fall was the theme, if not determined on, at least predominant in Milton"s thoughts, at the age of thirty-two. His ripened judgment only approved a selection made in earlier years, and in days full of hope. That in selecting a scriptural subject he was not In fact exercising any choice, but was determined by his circ.u.mstances, is only what must be said of all choosing. With all his originality, Milton was still a man of his age. A Puritan poet, in a Puritan environment, could not have done otherwise. But even had choice been in his power, it is doubtful if he would have had the same success with a subject taken from history.
First, looking at his public. He was to write in English. This, which had at one time been matter of doubt, had at an early stage come to be his decision. Sot had the choice of English been made for the sake of popularity, which he despised. He did not desire to write for the many, but for the few. But he was enthusiastically patriotic. He had entire contempt for the shouts of the mob, but the English nation, as embodied in the persons of the wise and good, he honoured and reverenced with all the depth of his nature. It was for the sake of his nation that he was to devote his life to a work, which was to enn.o.ble her tongue among the languages of Europe.
He was then to write in English, for the English, not popularly, but nationally. This resolution at once limited his subject. He who aspires to be the poet of a nation is bound to adopt a hero who is already dear to that people, to choose a subject and characters which are already familiar to them. This is no rule of literary art arbitrarily enacted by the critics, it is a dictate of reason, and has been the practice of all the great national poets. The more obvious examples will occur to every reader, But it may be observed that even the Greek tragedians, who addressed a more limited audience than the epic poets, took their plots from the best known legends touching the fortunes of the royal houses of the h.e.l.lenic race. Now to the English reader of the seventeenth century-and the same holds good to this day-there were only two cycles of persons and events sufficiently known beforehand to admit of being a.s.sumed by a poet. He must go either to the Bible, or to the annals of England. Thus far Milton"s choice of subject was limited by the consideration of the public for whom he wrote.
Secondly, he was still farther restricted by a condition which the nature of his own intelligence imposed upon himself. It was necessary for Milton that the events and personages, which were to arouse and detain his interests, should be real events and personages. The mere play of fancy with the pretty aspects of things could not satisfy him; he wanted to feel beneath him a substantial world of reality. He had not the dramatist"s imagination which can body forth fict.i.tious characters with such life-like reality that it can, and does itself, believe in their existence. Macaulay has truly said that Milton"s genius is lyrical, not dramatic. His lyre will only echo real emotion, and his imagination is only stirred by real circ.u.mstances. In his youth he had been within the fascination of the romances of chivalry, as well in their original form, as in the reproductions of Ariosto and Spenser. While under this influence he had thought of seeking his subject among the heroes of these lays of old minstrelsy. And as one of his principles was that his hero must be a national hero, it was of course upon the Arthurian cycle that his aspiration fixed. When he did so, he no doubt believed at least the historical existence of Arthur. As soon, however, as he came to understand the fabulous basis of the Arthurian legend, it became unfitted for his use. In the Trinity College MS. of 1641, Arthur has already disappeared from the list of possible subjects, a list which contains thirty-eight suggestions of names from British or Saxon history, such as Vortigern, Edward the Confessor, Harold, Macbeth, &c. While he demanded the basis of reality for his personages, he at the same time, with a true instinct, rejected all that fell within the period of well-ascertained history. He made the Conquest the lower limit of his choice. In this negative decision against historical romance we recognise Milton"s judgment, and his correct estimate of his own powers. Those who have been thought to succeed best in engrafting fiction upon history, Shakspeare or Walter Scott, have been eminently human poets, and have achieved their measure of success by investing some well-known name with the attributes of ordinary humanity such as we all know it. This was precisely what Milton could not have done. He had none of that sympathy with which Shakspeare embraced all natural and common affections of his brother men. Milton, burning as he did with a consuming fire of pa.s.sion, and yearning for rapt communion with select souls, had withal an aloofness from ordinary men sad women, and a proud disdain of commonplace joy and sorrow, which has led hasty biographers and critics to represent him as hard, austere, an iron man of iron mould. This want of interest in common life disqualified him for the task of revivifying historic scenes.
Milton"s mental const.i.tution, then, demanded in the material upon which it was to work, a combination of qualities such as very few subjects could offer. The events and personages must be real and substantial, for he could not occupy himself seriously with airy nothings and creatures of pure fancy. Yet they must not be such events and personages as history had pourtrayed to us with well-known characters, and all their virtues, faults, foibles, and peculiarities. And, lastly, it was requisite that they should be the common property and the familiar interest of a wide circle of English readers.
These being the conditions required in the subject, it is obvious that no choice was left to the poet in the England of the seventeenth century but a biblical subject. And among the many picturesque episodes which the Hebrew Scriptures present, the narrative of the Fall stands out with a character of all-embracing comprehensiveness which belongs to no other single event in the Jewish annals. The first section of the book of Genesis clothes in a dramatic form the dogmatic idea from which was developed in the course of ages the whole scheme of Judaico-Christian anthropology. In this world-drama, Heaven above and h.e.l.l beneath, the powers of light and those of darkness, are both brought upon the scene in conflict with each other, over the fate of the inhabitants of our globe, a minute ball of matter suspended between two infinities. This gigantic and unmanageable material is so completely mastered by the poet"s imagination, that we are made to feel at one and the same time the petty dimensions of our earth in comparison with primordial s.p.a.ce and almighty power, and the profound import to us of the issue depending on the conflict. Other poets, of inferior powers, have from time to time attempted, with different degrees of success, some of the minor Scriptural histories; Bodmer, the Noachian Deluge; Solomon Gessner, the Death of Abel, &c. And Milton himself, after he had spent his full strength upon his greater theme, recurred in Samson Agonistes to one such episode, which he had deliberately set aside before, as not giving verge enough for the sweep of his soaring conception.
These considerations duly weighed, it will be found, that the subject of the Fall of Man was not so much Milton"s choice as his necessity. Among all the traditions of the peoples of the earth, there is not extant another story which, could have been adequate to his demands. Biographers may have been, somewhat misled by his speaking of himself as "long choosing and beginning late." He did not begin till 1658, when he was already fifty, and it has been somewhat hastily inferred that he did not choose till the date at which he began, But, as we have seen, he had already chosen at least as early as 1642, when, the plan of a drama on the subject, and under the t.i.tle, of Paradise Lost was fully developed. In the interval between 1642 and 1658, he changed the form from a drama to an epic, but his choice remained unaltered. And as the address to the sun (Paradise Lost, iv, 32) was composed at the earlier of these dates, it appears that he had already formulated even the rhythm and cadence of the poem that was to be. Like Wordsworth"s "Warrior"-
He wrought Upon the plan that pleas"d his boyish thought.
I have said that this subject of the Fall was Milton"s necessity, being the only subject which his mind, "in the s.p.a.cious circuits of her musing," found large enough. But as it was no abrupt or arbitrary choice, so it was not forced upon him from without, by suggestion of friends, or command of a patron, We must again remind ourselves that Milton had a Calvinistic bringing up. And Calvinism in pious Puritan souls of that fervent age was not the attenuated creed of the eighteenth century, the Calvinism which went not beyond personal gratification of safety for oneself, and for the rest d.a.m.nation. When Milton was being reared, Calvinism was not old and effete, a mere doctrine. It was a living system of thought, and one which carried the mind upwards towards the Eternal will, rather than downwards towards my personal security. Keble has said of the old Catholic views, founded on sacramental symbolism, that they are more poetical than any other religious conception. But it must be acknowledged that a predestinarian scheme, leading the cogitation upward to dwell upon "the heavenly things before the foundation of the world," opens a vista of contemplation and poetical framework, with which none other in the whole cycle of human thought can compare. Not election and reprobation as set out in the petty chicanery of Calvin"s Inst.i.tutes, but the prescience of absolute wisdom revolving all the possibilities of time, s.p.a.ce, and matter. Poetry has been defined as "the suggestion by the image of n.o.ble grounds for n.o.ble emotions," and, in this respect, none of the world-epics-there are at most five or six such in existence-can compete with Paradise Lost. The melancholy pathos of Lucretius indeed pierces the heart with a two-edged sword more keen than Milton"s, but the compa.s.s of Lucretius" horizon is much less, being limited to this earth and its inhabitants. The horizon of Paradise Lost is not narrower than all s.p.a.ce, its chronology not shorter than eternity; the globe of our earth becomes a mere spot in the physical universe, and that universe itself a drop suspended in the infinite empyrean. His aspiration had thus reached "one of the highest arcs that human contemplation circling upwards can make from the gla.s.sy sea whereon she stands" (Doctr. and Disc.), Like his contemporary Pascal, his mind had beaten her wings against the prison walls of human thought.
The vastness of the scheme of Paradise Lost may become more apparent to us if we remark that, within its embrace, there to be equal place for both the systems of physical astronomy which were current in the seventeenth century. In England, about the time Paradise Lost was being written, the Copernican theory, which placed the sun in the centre of our system, was already the established belief of the few well-informed. The old Ptolemaic or Alphonsine system, which explained the phenomena on the hypothesis of nine (or ten) transparent hollow spheres wheeling round the stationary earth, was still the received astronomy of ordinary people. These two beliefs, the one based on science, though still wanting the calculation which Newton was to supply to make it demonstrative, the other supported by the tradition of ages, were, at the time we speak of, in presence of each other in the public mind. They are in presence of each other also in Milton"s epic. And the systems confront each other in the poem, in much the same relative position which they occupied in the mind of the public. The ordinary, habitual mode of speaking of celestial phenomena is Ptolemaic (see Paradise Lost, vii. 339; iii. 481). The conscious, or doctrinal, exposition of the same phenomena is Copernican (see Paradise Lost, viii. 122). Sharp as is the contrast between the two systems, the one being the direct contradictory of the other, they are lodged together, not harmonised, within the vast circuit of the poet"s imagination. The precise mechanism of an object so little as is our world in comparison with the immense totality may be justly disregarded. "De minimis non curat poeta." In the universe of being the difference between a heliocentric and a geocentric theory of our solar system is of as small moment, as the reconcilement of fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute is in the realm of absolute intelligence. The one Is the frivolous pastime of devils; the other the Great Architect
Hath left to there disputes, perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide.
As one, and the princ.i.p.al, inconsistency in Milton"s presentment of his matter has now been, mentioned, a general remark may be made upon the conceptual incongruities in Paradise Lost. The poem abounds in such, and the critics, from Addison downwards, have busied themselves in finding out more and more of them. Milton"s geography of the world is as obscure and untenable as that of Herodotus. The notes of time cannot stand together. To give an example: Eve says (Paradise Lost, iv. 449)-
That day I oft remember, when from sleep I first awak"d.
But in the chronology of the poem, Adam himself, whose creation preceded that of Eve, was but three days old at the time this reminiscence is repeated to him. The mode in which the Son of G.o.d is spoken of is not either consistent Athanasianism or consistent Arianism. Above all there is an incessant confusion of material and immaterial in the acts ascribed to the angels. Dr. Johnson, who wished for consistency, would have had it preserved "by keeping immateriality out of sight." And a general arraignment has been laid against Milton of a vagueness and looseness of imagery, which contrasts unfavourably with the vivid and precise detail of other poets, of Homer or of Dante, for example.
Now first, it must be said that Milton is not one of the poets of inaccurate imagination. He could never, like Scott, have let the precise picture of the swan on "still Saint Mary"s lake" slip into the namby-pamby "sweet Saint Mary"s lake." When he intends a picture, he is unmistakably distinct; his outline is firm and hard. But he is not often intending pictures. He is not, like Dante, always seeing-he is mostly thinking in a dream, or as Coleridge best expressed it, he is not a picturesque, but a musical poet. The pictures in Paradise Lost are like the paintings on the walls of some n.o.ble hall-only part of the total magnificence. He did not aim at that finish of minute parts in which, each bit fits into every other. For it was only by such disregard of minutiae that the theme could be handled at all. The impression of vastness, the sense that everything, as Bishop Butler says, "runs up into infinity," would have been impaired if he had drawn attention to the details of his figures. Had he had upon his canvas only a single human incident, with ordinary human agents, he would have known, as well as other far inferior artists, how to secure perfection of illusion by exactness of detail. But he had undertaken to present, not the world of human experience, but a supernatural world, peopled by supernatural beings, G.o.d and his Son, angels and archangels, devils; a world in which Sin and Death, may be personified without palpable absurdity. Even his one human pair are exceptional beings, from whom we are prepared not to demand conformity to the laws of life which now prevail in our world. Had he presented all these spiritual personages in definite form to the eyes the result would have been degradation. We should have had the ridiculous instead of the sublime, as in the scene of the Iliad, where Diomede wounds Aphrodite in the hand, and sends her crying home to her father. Once or twice Milton has ventured too near the limit of material adaptation, trying to explain how angelic natures subsist, as in the pa.s.sage (Paradise Lost, v. 405) where Raphael tells Adam that angels eat and digest food like man. Taste here receives a shock, because the incongruity, which before was latent, is forced upon our attention. We are threatened with being transported out of the conventional world of Heaven, h.e.l.l, Chaos, and Paradise, to which we had well adapted ourselves, into the real world in which we know that such beings could not breathe and move.
For the world of Paradise Lost is an ideal, conventional world, quite as much as the world of the Arabian Nights, or the world of the chivalrous romance, or that of the pastoral novel. Not only dramatic, but all, poetry is founded on illusion. We must, though it be but for the moment, suppose it true. We must be transported out of the actual world into that world in which the given scene is laid. It is chiefly the business of the poet to effect this transportation, but the reader (or hearer) must aid. "Willst du Dichter ganz verstehen, musst in Dichter"s Lande gehen." If the reader"s imagination is not active enough to a.s.sist the poet, he must at least not resist him. When we are once inside the poet"s heaven, our critical faculty may justly require that what takes place there shall be consistent with itself, with the laws of that fantastic world. But we may not begin by objecting that it is impossible that such a world should exist. If, in any age, the power of imagination is enfeebled, the reader becomes more unable to make this effort; he ceases to co-operate with the poet. Much of the criticism on Paradise Lost which we meet with resolves itself into a refusal on the part of the critic, to make that initial abondonment to the conditions which the poet demands; a determination to insist that his heaven, peopled with deities, dominations, princ.i.p.alities, and powers, shall have the same material laws which govern our planetary system. It is not, as we often hear it said, that the critical faculty is unduly developed in the nineteenth century. It is that the imaginative faculty fails us; and when that is the case, criticism is powerless-it has no fundamental a.s.sumption upon which its judgments can proceed,
It is the triumph of Milton"s skill to have made his ideal world actual, if not to every English mind"s eye, yet to a larger number of minds than have ever been reached by any other poetry in our language. Popular (in the common use of the word) Milton has not been, and cannot be. But the world he created has taken possession of the public mind. Huxley complains that the false cosmogony, which will not yield, to the conclusions of scientific research, is derived from the seventh, book of Paradise Lost, rather than, from Genesis. This success Milton owes partly to his selection of his subject, partly to his skill in handling it. In his handling, he presents his spiritual existences with just so much relief as to endow them with life and personality, and not with, that visual distinctness which would at once reveal their spectral immateriality, and so give a shock to the illusion. We might almost say of his personages that they are shapes, "if shape it might be called, that shape had none." By his art of suggestion by a.s.sociation, he does all he can to aid us to realise his agents, and at the moment when distinctness would disturb, he withdraws the object into a mist, and so disguises the incongruities which he could not avoid. The tact that avoids difficulties inherent in the nature of things, is an art which gets the least appreciation either in life or in literature.
But if we would have some measure of the skill which in Paradise Lost has made impossible beings possible to the imagination, we may find it in contrasting them with the incarnated abstraction and spirit voices, which we encounter at every turn in Sh.e.l.ley, creatures who leave behind them no more distinct impression than that we have been in a dream peopled with ghosts. Sh.e.l.ley, too,
Voyag"d th" unreal, vast, unbounded deep Of horrible confusion.
Paradise Lost, x. 470.
and left it the chaos which he found it. Milton has elicited from similar elements a conception so life-like that his poetical version has inseparably grafted itself upon, if it has not taken the place of, the historical narrative of the original creation.
So much Milton has effected by his skilful treatment. But the illusion was greatly facilitated by his choice of subject. He had not to create his supernatural personages, they were already there. The Father, and the Son, the Angels, Satan, Baal and Moloch, Adam and Eve, were in full possession of the popular imagination, and more familiar to it than any other set of known names. Nor was the belief accorded to them a half belief, a bare admission of their possible existence, such as prevails at other times or in some countries. In the England of Milton, the angels and devils of the Jewish Scriptures were more real beings, and better vouched, than any historical personages could be. The old chronicles were full of lies, but this was Bible truth. There might very likely have been a Henry VIII, and he might have been such as he is described, but at any rate he was dead and gone, while Satan still lived and walked the earth, the identical Satan who had deceived Eve.
Nor was it only to the poetic public that his personages were real, true, and living beings. The poet himself believed as entirely in their existence as did his readers. I insist upon this point, because one of the first of living critics has declared of Paradise Lost that it is a poem in which every artifice of invention, is consciously employed, not a single fact being, for an instant, conceived as tenable by any living faith. (Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, p. 138). On the contrary, we shall not rightly apprehend either the poetry or the character of the poet until we feel that throughout Paradise Lost, as in Paradise Regained and Samson, Milton felt himself to he standing on the sure ground of fact and reality. It was not in Milton"s nature to be a showman, parading before an audience a phantasmagoria of spirits, which he himself knew to be puppets tricked up for the entertainment of an idle hour. We are told by Lockhart, that the old man who told the story of Gilpin Horner to Lady Dalkeith bona fide believed the existence of the elf. Lady Dalkeith repeated the tale to Walter Scott, who worked it up with consummate skill into the Lay of the Last Minstrel. This is a case of a really believed legend of diablerie becoming the source of a literary fiction. Scott neither believed in the reality of the goblin page himself, nor expected his readers to believe it. He could not rise beyond the poetry of amus.e.m.e.nt, and no poetry with only this motive can ever be more than literary art.
Other than this was Milton"s conception of his own function. Of the fashionable verse, such as was written in the Caroline age, or in any age, he disapproved, not only because it was imperfect art, but because it was untrue utterance. Poems that were raised "from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite," were in his eyes treachery to the poet"s high vocation.
Poetical powers "are the inspired gift of G.o.d rarely bestowed ... in every nation, and are of power, beside the office of a pulpit, to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbation of the mind, and set the affections in right tune; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of G.o.d"s almightiness, and what he works, and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in his church; to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious nations, doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore the general relapses of kingdoms and states from justice and G.o.d"s true worship."
So he had written in 1642, and this lofty faith in his calling supported him twenty years later, in the arduous labour of his attempt to realise his own ideal. In setting himself down to compose Paradise Lost and Regained, he regarded himself not as an author, but as a medium, the mouthpiece of "that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and all knowledge: Urania, heavenly muse," visits him nightly,
And dictates to me Blumb"ring, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated verse.
Paradise Lost, ix. 24.
Urania bestows the flowing words and musical sweetness; to G.o.d"s Spirit he looks to Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight.
_Paradise Lost,/i>, iii, 50.
The singers with whom he would fain equal himself are not Dante, or Ta.s.so, or, as Dryden would have it, Spenser, but Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
As he in equalled with these in misfortune-loss of sight-he would emulate them in function. Orpheus and Musaeus are the poets he would fain have as the companions of his midnight meditation (Penseroso). And the function of the poet is like that of the prophet in the old dispensation, not to invent, but to utter. It is G.o.d"s truth which pa.s.ses His lips-lips hallowed by the touch of sacred fire. He is the pa.s.sive instrument through whom flows the emanation from on high; His words are not his own, but a suggestion. Even for style Milton is indebted to his "celestial patroness who deigns her nightly visitation unimplor"d."
Milton was not dependent upon a dubious tradition in the subject he had selected. Man"s fall and recovery were recorded in the Scriptures. And the two media of truth, the internal and the external, as deriving from the same source, must needs be in harmony. That the Spirit enlightens the mind within, in this belief the Puritan saint, the poet, and the prophet, who all met in Milton, were at one. That the Old Testament Scriptures were also a revelation, from G.o.d, was an article of faith which he had never questioned. Nor did he only receive these books as conveying in substance a divine view of the world"s history, he regarded them as in the letter a transcript of fact. If the poet-prophet would tell the story of creation or redemption, he was thus restrained not only by the general outline and imagery of the Bible, but by its very words. And here we must note the skill of the poet in surmounting an added or artificial difficulty, in the subject he had chosen as combined with his notion of inspiration. He must not deviate in a single syllable from the words of the Hebrew books. He must take up into his poem the whole of the sacred narrative. This he must do, not merely because his readers would expect such literal accuracy from him, but because to himself that narrative was the very truth which he was, undertaking to deliver. The additions which his fancy or inspiration might supply must be restrained by this severe law, that they should be such as to aid the reader"s imagination to conceive how the event took place. They must by no means be suffered to alter, disfigure, traduce the substance or the letter of the revelation. This is what Milton has done. He has told the story of creation in the very words of Scripture. The whole of the seventh book, is little more than a paraphrase of a few verses of Genesis. What he has added is so little incongruous with his original, that most English men and women would probably have some difficulty in discriminating in recollection the part they derive from Moses, from that which they have added from the paraphrast. In Genesis it is the serpent who tempts Eve, in virtue of his natural wiliness. In Milton it is Satan who has entered into the body of a serpent, and supplied the intelligence. Here indeed Milton was only adopting a gloss, as ancient at least as the Book of Wisdom (ii. 24). But it is the gloss, and not the text of Moses, which is in possession of our minds, and who has done most to lodge it there, Milton or the commentators?
Again, it is Milton and not Moses who makes the serpent pluck and eat the first apple from the tree. But Bp. Wilson comments upon the words of Genesis (iii, 6) as though they contained this purely Miltonic circ.u.mstance,
It could hardly but he that one or two of the incidents which Milton has supplied, the popular imagination has been unable to h.o.m.ologate. Such an incident is the placing of artillery in the wars in heaven, We reject this suggestion, and find it mars probability. But It would not seam so Improbable to Milton"s contemporaries; not only because it was an article of the received poetic tradition (see Ronsard 6, p. 40), but also because fire-arms had not quite ceased to be regarded as a devilish enginery of a new warfare, unfair in the knightly code of honour, a base subst.i.tute of mechanism for individual valour. It was gunpowder and not Don Quixote which had destroyed, the age of chivalry,
Another of Milton"s fictions which has been found too grotesque is the change (P, L., x. 508) of the demons into serpents, who hiss their Prince on his return from his emba.s.sy. Here it is not, I think, so much the unnatural character of the incident itself, as its gratuitousness which offends. It does not help us to conceive the situation. A suggestion of Chateaubriand may therefore go some way towards reconciling the reader even to this caprice of imagination. It indicates, he says, the degradation of Satan, who, from the superb Intelligence of the early scenes of the poem, is become at its close a hideous reptile. He has not triumphed, but has failed, and is degraded into the old dragon, who haunts among the d.a.m.ned. The braising of his head has already commenced.
The bridge, again, which Sin and Death construct (Paradise Lost, x. 300), leading from the mouth of h.e.l.l to the wall of the world, has a chilling effect upon the imagination of a modern reader. It does not a.s.sist the conception of the cosmical system which we accept in the earlier books. This clumsy fiction seems more at home in the grotesque and lawless mythology of the Turks, or in the Persian poet Sadi, who is said by Marmontel to have adopted it from the Turk. If Milton"s intention were to reproduce Jacob"s ladder, he should, like Dante (Parad, xxi. 25), have made it the means of communication between heaven and earth.
It is possible that Milton himself, after the experiment of Paradise Lost was fully before him, suspected that he had supplemented too much for his purpose; that his imagery, which was designed to ill.u.s.trate history, might stand in its light. For in the composition of Paradise Regained (published 1671) he has adopted a much severer style. In this poem he has not only curbed his imagination, but has almost suppressed it. He has amplified, but has hardly introduced any circ.u.mstance which is not in the original. Paradise Regained is little more than a paraphrase of the Temptation as found in the synoptical gospels. It is a marvel of ingenuity that more than two thousand lines of blank verse can have been constructed out of some twenty lines of prose, without the addition of any invented incident, or the insertion of any irrelevant digression. In the first three books of Paradise Regained there is not a single simile. Nor yet can it be said that the version of the gospel narrative has the fault of most paraphrases, viz., that of weakening the effect, and obliterating the chiselled features of the original. Let a reader take Paradise Regained not as a theme used as a canvas for poetical embroidery, an opportunity for an author to show off his powers of writing, but as a bona fide attempt to impress upon the mind the story of the Temptation, and he will acknowledge the concealed art of the genuine epic poet, bent before all things upon telling his tale. It will still be capable of being alleged that the story told does not interest; that the composition is dry, hard, barren; the style as of set purpose divested of the attributes of poetry. It is not necessary indeed that an epic should be in twelve books; but we do demand in an epic poem multiplicity of character and variety of incident. In Paradise Regained there are only two personages, both of whom are supernatural. Indeed, they can scarcely be called personages; the poet, in his fidelity to the letter, not having thought fit to open up the fertile vein of delineation which was afforded by the human character of Christ. The speakers are no more than the abstract principles of good and evil, two voices who hold a rhetorical disputation through four books and two thousand lines.
The usual explanation of the frigidity of Paradise Regained is the suggestion, which is nearest at hand, viz., that it is the effect of age. Like Ben Jonson"s New Inn, it betrays the feebleness of senility, and has one of the most certain marks of that stage of authorship, the attempt to imitate himself in those points in which he was once strong. When "glad no more, He wears a face of joy, because He has been glad of yore." Or it is an "oeuvre de la.s.situde," a continuation, with the inevitable defect of continuations, that of preserving the forms and wanting the soul of the original, like the second parts of Faust, of Don Quixote, and of so many other books.