Life of John Milton Part 5

"Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole, More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged To hoa.r.s.e or mute, though fallen on evil days, On evil days though fallen and evil tongues; In darkness, and with dangers compa.s.sed round, And solitude; yet not alone, while thou Visitest my slumbers nightly, or when morn Purples the east. Still govern thou my song, Urania, and fit audience find, though few.

But drive far off the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard."

This allusion to the licentiousness of the Restoration literature could hardly have been made until its tendencies had been plainly developed.

At this time "Paradise Lost" was half finished. ("Half yet remains unsung.") The remark permits us to conclude that Milton conceived and executed his poem as a whole, going steadily through it, and not leaving gaps to be supplied at higher or lower levels of inspiration. There is no evidence of any resort to older material, except in the case of Satan's address to the Sun.

The publication of "Paradise Lost" was impeded like the birth of Hercules. In 1665 London was a city of the dying and the dead; in 1666 the better part of it was laid in ashes. One remarkable incident of the calamity was the destruction of the stocks of the booksellers, which had been brought into the vaults of St. Paul's for safety, and perished with the cathedral. "Paradise Lost" might have easily, like its hero--

"In the singing smoke Uplifted spurned the ground."

but the negotiations for its publication were not complete until April 27, 1667, on which day John Milton, "in consideration of five pounds to him now paid by Samuel Symmons, and other the considerations herein mentioned," a.s.signed to the said Symmons, "all that book, copy, or ma.n.u.script of a poem int.i.tuled 'Paradise Lost,' or by whatsoever ether t.i.tle or name the same is or shall be called or distinguished, now lately licensed to be printed." The other considerations were the payment of the like sum of five pounds upon the entire sale of each of the first three impressions, each impression to consist of thirteen hundred copies. "According to the present value of money," says Professor Ma.s.son, "it was as if Milton had received 17 10s. down, and was to expect 70 in all. That was on the supposition of a sale of 3,900 copies." He lived to receive ten pounds altogether; and his widow in 1680 parted with all her interest in the copyright for eight pounds, Symmons shortly afterwards reselling it for twenty-five. He is not, therefore, to be enumerated among those publishers who have fattened upon their authors, and when the size of the book and the unfashionableness of the writer are considered, his enterprise may perhaps appear the most remarkable feature of the transaction. As for Milton, we may almost rejoice that he should have reaped no meaner reward than immortality.

It will have been observed that in the contract with Symmons "Paradise Lost" is said to have been "lately licensed to be printed." The censorship named in "Areopagitica" still prevailed, with the difference that prelates now sat in judgment upon Puritans. The Archbishop gave or refused license through his chaplains, and could not be ignored as Milton had ignored the little Presbyterian Popes; Geneva in his person must repair to Lambeth. Chaplain Tomkyns, who took cognisance of "Paradise Lost," was fortunately a broad-minded man, disposed to live and let live, though scrupling somewhat when he found "perplexity" and "fear of change" imputed to "monarchs." His objections were overcome, and on August 20, 1667--three weeks after the death of Cowley, and eight days after Pepys had heard the deceased extolled as the greatest of English poets--John Milton came forth clad as with adamantine mail in the approbation of Thomas Tomkyns. The moment beseemed the event, it was a crisis in English history, when heaven's "golden scales" for weighing evil against good were hung--

"Betwixt Astrea and the Scorpion sign,"

one weighted with a consuming fleet, the other with a falling minister.

The Dutch had just burned the English navy at Chatham; on the other hand, the reign of respectable bigotry was about to pa.s.s away with Clarendon. Far less reputable men were to succeed, but men whose laxity of principle at least excluded intolerance. The people were on the move, if not, as Milton would have wished, "a n.o.ble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep," at least a faint and weary nation creeping slowly--Tomkyns and all--towards an era of liberty and reason when Tomkyns's imprimatur would be accounted Tomkyns's impertinence.

CHAPTER VII.

The world's great epics group themselves in two divisions, which may be roughly defined as the natural and the artificial. The spontaneous or self-created epic is a confluence of traditions, reduced to symmetry by the hand of a master. Such are the Iliad, the Odyssey, the great Indian and Persian epics, the Nibelungen Lied. In such instances it may be fairly said that the theme has chosen the poet, rather than the poet the theme. When the epic is a work of reflection, the poet has deliberately selected his subject, and has not, in general, relied so much upon the wealth of pre-existing materials as upon the capabilities of a single circ.u.mstance. Such are the epics of Virgil, Camoens, Ta.s.so, Milton; Dante, perhaps, standing alone as the one epic poet (for we cannot rank Ariosto and Spenser in this cla.s.s) who owes everything but his creed to his own invention. The traditional epic, created by the people and only moulded by the minstrel, is so infinitely the more important for the history of culture, that, since this new field of investigation has become one of paramount interest, the literary epic has been in danger of neglect. Yet it must be allowed that to evolve an epic out of a single incident is a greater intellectual achievement than to weave one out of a host of ballads. We must also admit that, leaving the unique Dante out of account, Milton essayed a more arduous enterprise than any of his predecessors, and in this point of view may claim to stand above them all. We are so accustomed to regard the existence of "Paradise Lost" as an ultimate fact, that we but imperfectly realize the gigantic difficulty and audacity of the undertaking. To paint the bloom of Paradise with the same brush that has depicted the flames and blackness of the nether world; to make the Enemy of Mankind, while preserving this character, an heroic figure, not without claims on sympathy and admiration; to lend fit speech to the father and mother of humanity, to angels and archangels, and even Deity itself;--these achievements required a Michael Angelo shorn of his strength in every other province of art, that all might be concentrated in song.

It is easy to represent "Paradise Lost" as obsolete by pointing out that its demonology and angelology have for us become mere mythology. This criticism is more formidable in appearance than in reality. The vital question for the poet is his own belief, not the belief of his readers.

If the Iliad has survived not merely the decay of faith in the Olympian divinities, but the criticism which has pulverized Achilles as a historical personage, "Paradise Lost" need not be much affected by general disbelief in the personality of Satan, and universal disbelief in that of Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. A far more vulnerable point is the failure of the purpose so ostentatiously proclaimed, "To justify the ways of G.o.d to men." This problem was absolutely insoluble on Milton's data, except by denying the divine foreknowledge, a course not open to him. The conduct of the Deity who allows his adversary to ruin his innocent creature from the purely malignant motive

"That with reiterated crimes he might Heap on himself d.a.m.nation,"

without further interposition than a warning which he foresees will be fruitless, implies a grievous deficiency either in wisdom or in goodness, or at best falsifies the declaration:

"Necessity and chance Approach me not, and what I will is fate."

The like flaw runs through the entire poem, where Satan alone is resolute and rational. Nothing can exceed the imbecility of the angelic guard to which Man's defence is entrusted. Uriel, after threatening to drag Satan in chains back to Tartarus, and learning by a celestial portent that he actually has the power to fulfil his threat, considerately draws the fiend's attention to the circ.u.mstance, and advises him to take himself off, which Satan judiciously does, with the intention of returning as soon as convenient. The angels take all possible pains to prevent his gaining an entrance into Paradise, but omit to keep Adam and Eve themselves in sight, notwithstanding the strong hint they have received by finding the intruder

"Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve, a.s.saying by his devilish art to reach The organs of her fancy, and with them forge Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams."

If anything more infatuated can be imagined, it is the simplicity of the All-Wise Himself in entrusting the wardership of the gate of h.e.l.l, and consequently the charge of keeping Satan _in_, to the beings in the universe most interested in letting him _out_. The sole but sufficient excuse is that these faults are inherent in the subject. If Milton had not thought that he could justify the ways of Jehovah to man he would not have written at all; common sense on the part of the angels would have paralysed the action of the poem; we should, if conscious of our loss, have lamented the irrefragable criticism that should have stifled the magnificent allegory of Sin and Death. Another critical thrust is equally impossible to parry. It is true that the Evil One is the hero of the epic. Attempts have been made to invest Adam with this character. He is, indeed, a great figure to contemplate, and such as might represent the ideal of humanity till summoned to act and suffer. When, indeed, he partakes of the forbidden fruit in disobedience to his Maker, but in compa.s.sion to his mate, he does seem for a moment to fulfil the canon which decrees that the hero shall not always be faultless, but always shall be n.o.ble. The moment, however, that he begins to wrangle with Eve about their respective shares of blame, he forfeits his estate of heroism more irretrievably than his estate of holiness--a fact of which Milton cannot have been unaware, but he had no liberty to forsake the Scripture narrative. Satan remains, therefore, the only possible hero, and it is one of the inevitable blemishes of the poem that he should disappear almost entirely from the latter books.

These defects, and many more which might be adduced, are abundantly compensated by the poet's vital relation to the religion of his age. No poet whose fame is co-extensive with the civilised world, except Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever been greatly in advance of his times.

Had Milton been so, he might have avoided many faults, but he would not have been a representative poet; nor could Sh.e.l.ley have cla.s.sed him with Homer and Dante, and above Virgil, as "the third epic poet; that is, the third poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it, developing itself in correspondence with their development." Hence it is that in the "Adonais," Sh.e.l.ley calls Milton "the third among the sons of light."

A clear conception of the universe as Milton's inner eye beheld it, and of his religious and philosophical opinions in so far as they appear in the poem, is indispensable for a correct understanding of "Paradise Lost." The best service to be rendered to the reader within such limits as ours is to direct him to Professor Ma.s.son's discussion of Milton's cosmology in his "Life of Milton," and also in his edition of the Poetical Works. Generally speaking, it may be said that Milton's conception of the universe is Ptolemaic, that for him sun and moon and planets revolve around the central earth, rapt by the revolution of the crystal spheres in which, sphere enveloping sphere, they are successively located. But the light which had broken in upon him from the discoveries of Galileo has led him to introduce features not irreconcilable with the solar centre and ethereal infinity of Copernicus; so that "the poet would expect the effective permanence of his work in the imagination of the world, whether Ptolemy or Copernicus should prevail." So Professor Ma.s.son, who finely and justly adds that Milton's blindness helped him "by having already converted all external s.p.a.ce in his own sensations into an infinite of circ.u.mambient blackness through which he could flash brilliance at his pleasure." His inclination as a thinker is evidently towards the Copernican theory, but he saw that the Ptolemaic, however inferior in sublimity, was better adapted to the purpose of a poem requiring a definite theatre of action.

For rapturous contemplation of the glory of G.o.d in nature, the Copernican system is immeasurably the more stimulating to the spirit, but when made the theatre of an action the universe fatigues with its infinitude--

"Millions have meaning; after this Cyphers forget the integer."

An infinite sidereal universe would have stultified the n.o.ble description how Satan--

"In the emptier waste, resembling air, Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold Far off the empyreal heaven, extended wide In circuit, undetermined square or round, With opal towers and battlements adorned Of living sapphire, once his native seat; And fast by, hanging in a golden chain, This pendant world, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude close by the moon."

This pendant world, observe, is not the earth, as Addison understood it, but the entire sidereal universe, depicted not as the infinity we now know it to be, but as a definite object, so insulated in the vastness of s.p.a.ce as to be perceptible to the distant Fiend as a minute star, and no larger in comparison with the courts of Heaven--themselves not wholly seen--than such a twinkler matched with the full-orbed moon. Such a representation, if it diminishes the grandeur of the universe accessible to sense, exalts that of the supersensual and extramundane regions where the action takes its birth, and where Milton's gigantic imagination is most perfectly at home.

There is no such compromise between religious creeds in Milton's mind as he saw good to make between Ptolemy and Copernicus. The matter was, in his estimation, far too serious. Never was there a more unaccountable misstatement than Ruskin's, that "Paradise Lost" is a poem in which every artifice of invention is consciously employed--not a single fact being conceived as tenable by any living faith. Milton undoubtedly believed most fully in the actual existence of all his chief personages, natural and supernatural, and was sure that, however he might have indulged his imagination in the invention of incidents, he had represented character with the fidelity of a conscientious historian.

His religious views, moreover, are such as he could never have thought it right to publish if he had not been intimately convinced of their truth. He has strayed far from the creed of Puritanism. He is an Arian; his Son of G.o.d, though an unspeakably exalted being, is dependent, inferior, not self-existent, and could be merged in the Father's person or obliterated entirely without the least diminution of Almighty perfection. He is, moreover, no longer a Calvinist: Satan and Adam both possess free will, and neither need have fallen. The reader must accept these views, as well as Milton's conception of the materiality of the spiritual world, if he is to read to good purpose. "If his imagination,"

says Pattison, pithily, "is not active enough to a.s.sist the poet, he must at least not resist him."

This is excellent advice as respects the general plan of "Paradise Lost," the materiality of its spiritual personages, and its system of philosophy and theology. Its poetical beauties can only be resisted where they are not perceived. They have repeated the miracles of Orpheus and Amphion, metamorphosing one most bitterly obnoxious, of whom so late as 1687 a royalist wrote that "his fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff, and his memory will always stink," into an object of universal veneration. From the first instant of perusal the imagination is led in captivity, and for the first four books at least stroke upon stroke of sublimity follows with such continuous and undeviating regularity that sublimity seems this Creation's first law, and we feel like pigmies transported to a world of giants. There is nothing forced or affected in this grandeur, no visible effort, no barbaric profusion, everything proceeds with a severe and majestic order, controlled by the strength that called it into being. The similes and other poetical ornaments, though inexpressibly magnificent, seem no more so than the greatness of the general conception demands. Grant that Satan in his fall is not "less than archangel ruined," and it is no exaggeration but the simplest truth to depict his mien--

"As when the sun, new risen, Looks through the horizontal misty air, Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon, In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations."

When such a being voyages through s.p.a.ce it is no hyperbole to compare him to a whole fleet, judiciously shown at such distance as to suppress every minute detail that could diminish the grandeur of the image--

"As when far off at sea a fleet descried Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring Their spicy drugs: they on the trading flood, Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape, Ply stemming nightly towards the pole: so seemed Far off the flying Fiend."

These similes, and an infinity of others, are grander than anything in Homer, who would, however, have equalled them with an equal subject.

Dante's treatment is altogether different; the microscopic intensity of perception in which he so far surpa.s.ses Homer and Milton affords, in our opinion, no adequate compensation for his inferiority in magnificence. That the theme of "Paradise Lost" should have evoked such grandeur is a sufficient compensation for its incurable flaws and the utter breakdown of its ostensible moral purpose. There is yet another department of the poem where Milton writes as he could have written on nothing else. The elements of his under-world are comparatively simple, fire and darkness, fallen angels now huddled thick as leaves in Vallombrosa; anon,

"A forest huge of spears and thronging helms,"

charming their painful steps over the burning marl by

"The Dorian mood Of flutes and soft recorders;"

the dazzling magnificence of Pandemonium; the ineffable welter of Chaos; proudly eminent over all like a tower, the colossal personality of Satan. The description of Paradise and the story of Creation, if making less demand on the poet's creative power, required greater resources of knowledge, and more consummate skill in combination. Nature must yield up her treasures, whatever of fair and stately the animal and vegetable kingdoms can afford must be brought together, blended in gorgeous ma.s.ses or marshalled in infinite procession. Here Milton is as profuse as he has. .h.i.therto been severe, and with good cause; it is possible to make h.e.l.l too repulsive for art, it is not possible to make Eden too enchanting. In his descriptions of the former the effect is produced by a perpetual succession of isolated images of awful majesty; in his Paradise and Creation the universal landscape is bathed in a general atmosphere of l.u.s.trous splendour. This portion of his work is accordingly less great in detached pa.s.sages, but is little inferior in general greatness. No less an authority than Tennyson, indeed, expresses a preference for the "bowery loneliness" of Eden over the "t.i.tan angels"

of the "deep-domed Empyrean." If this only means that Milton's Eden is finer than his war in heaven, we must concur; but if a wider application be intended, it does seem to us that his Pandemonium exalts him to a greater height above every other poet than his Paradise exalts him above his predecessor, and in some measure, his exemplar, Spenser.

To remain at such an elevation was impossible. Milton compares unfavourably with Homer in this; his epic begins at its zenith, and after a while visibly and continually declines. His genius is unimpaired, but his skill transcends his stuff. The fall of man and its consequences could not by any device be made as interesting as the fall of Satan, of which it is itself but a consequence. It was, moreover, absolutely inevitable that Adam's fall, the proper catastrophe of the poem, should occur some time before the conclusion, otherwise there would have been no s.p.a.ce for the unfolding of the scheme of Redemption, equally essential from the point of view of orthodoxy and of art. The effect is the same as in the case of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar,"

which, having proceeded with matchless vigour up to the flight of the conspirators after Antony's speech, becomes comparatively tame and languid, and cannot be revived even by such a masterpiece as the contention between Brutus and Ca.s.sius. It is to be regretted that Milton's extreme devotion to the letter of Scripture has not permitted him to enrich his latter books with any corresponding episode. It is not until the very end that he is again truly himself--

"They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon.

The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.

They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way."

Some minor objections may be briefly noticed. The materiality of Milton's celestial warfare has been censured by every one from the days of Sir Samuel Morland,[6] a splenetic critic, who had incurred Milton's contempt by his treachery to Cromwell and Thurloe. Warfare, however, there must be: war cannot be made without weapons; and Milton's only fault is that he has rather exaggerated than minimized the difficulties of his subject. A sense of humour would have spiked his celestial artillery, but a lively perception of the ridiculous is scarcely to be demanded from a Milton. After all, he was borrowing from good poets,[7]

whose thought in itself is correct, and even profound; it is only when artillery antedates humanity that the ascription of its invention to the Tempter seems out of place. The metamorphosis of the demons into serpents has been censured as grotesque; but it was imperatively necessary to manifest by some unmistakable outward sign that victory did not after all remain with Satan, and the critics may be challenged to find one more appropriate. The bridge built by Sin and Death is equally essential. Satan's progeny must not be dismissed without some exploit worthy of their parentage. The one pa.s.sage where Milton's taste seems to us entirely at fault is the description of the Paradise of Fools (iii., 481-497), where his scorn of--

"Reliques, beads, Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls,"

has tempted him to chequer the sublime with the ludicrous.

No subject but a Biblical one would have insured Milton universal popularity among his countrymen, for his style is that of an ancient cla.s.sic transplanted, like Aladdin's palace set down with all its magnificence in the heart of Africa; and his diction, the delight of the educated, is the despair of the ignorant man. Not that this diction is in any respect affected or pedantic. Milton was the darling poet of our greatest modern master of unadorned Saxon speech, John Bright. But it is freighted with cla.s.sic allusion--not alone from the ancient cla.s.sics--and comes to us rich with gathered sweets, like a wind laden with the scent of many flowers. "It is," says Pattison, "the elaborated outcome of all the best words of all antecedent poetry--the language of one who lives in the companionship of the great and the wise of past time." "Words," the same writer reminds us, "over and above their dictionary signification, connote all the feeling which has gathered round them by reason of their employment through a hundred generations of song." So it is, every word seems instinct with its own peculiar beauty, and fraught with its own peculiar a.s.sociation, and yet each detail is strictly subordinate to the general effect. No poet of Milton's rank, probably, has been equally indebted to his predecessors, not only for his vocabulary, but for his thoughts. Reminiscences throng upon him, and he takes all that comes, knowing that he can make it lawfully his own. The comparison of Satan's shield to the moon, for instance, is borrowed from the similar comparison of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, but what goes in Homer comes out Milton. Homer merely says that the huge and ma.s.sy shield emitted a l.u.s.tre like that of the moon in heaven. Milton heightens the resemblance by giving the shield shape, calls in the telescope to endow it with what would seem preternatural dimensions to the naked eye, and enlarges even these by the suggestion of more than the telescope can disclose--

"His ponderous shield, Ethereal temper, ma.s.sy, large, and round Behind him cast; the broad circ.u.mference Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb Through optic gla.s.s the Tuscan artist views At evening, from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe."