226 227 228 the hero, are raised by such readers as draw their principles of judgement rather from books than from reason. Milton, though he intituled Paradise Lost only a 'poem ',' yet calls it himself 'heroick song "' Dryden, petulantly and indecently, denies the heroism of Adam because he was overcome; but there is no reason why the hero should not be unfortunate except established practice, since success and virtue do not go necessarily together 3. Cato is the hero of Lucan, but Lucan's authority will not be suffered by Quintilian to decide. However, if success be necessary, Adam's deceiver was at last crushed; Adam was restored to his Maker's favour, and therefore may securely resume his human rank. After the scheme and fabrick of the poem must be considered its component parts, the sentiments, and the diction. The sentiments, as expressive of manners or appropriated to characters, are for the greater part unexceptionably just. Splendid passages containing lessons of morality or precepts of prudence occur seldom. Such is the original formation of this poem that as it admits no human manners till the Fall, it can whether Milton's Paradise Lost may be called an heroick_poem.' ADDISON, The Spectator, No. 267. In the title to the second edition * ' Since first this subject for Heroick Paradise Lost, ix. 25. 3 Dryden, after maintaining that Homer, Virgil, and Tasso completed 'the file of heroic poets,' and after mentioning 'a crowd of little poets who press for admission,' continues: 'Spenser has a better plea for his Fairy Queen, had his action been finished, or had been one. And Milton, if the devil had not been his hero instead of Adam, if the giant had not foiled the knight, and driven him out of his stronghold, to wander through the world with his ladyerrant.' Works, xiv. 144. See post, ADDISON, 141. 'He that looks for an hero in Paradise Lost searches for that which Milton never intended; but if he will needs fix the name of an hero upon any person in it, it is certainly the Messiah who is the hero, both in the principal action and in the chief episodes.' ADDISON, Spectator, No. 297. 'I assert, with Mr. Dryden, that the Devil is in truth the Hero; his plan, which he lays, pursues, and at last executes, being the subject of the poem.' CHESTERFIELD, Letters to his Son, ii. 138. Burns wrote on June 11, 1787:Give me a spirit like my favourite Hero, Milton's Satan. He quotes Paradise Lost,i.250-3. H. Sotheran's Catalogue, 1899, No. 12, lot 21. 'There is neither truth nor wit in saying that Satan is hero of the piece, unless, as is usually the case in human life, he is the greatest hero who gives the widest sway to the worst passions. It is Adam who acts and suffers most, and on whom the consequences have most influence. This constitutes him the main character.'. LANDOR, Imag. Conver. iv. 201. Post, ROWE, 35. give little assistance to human conduct. Its end is to raise the thoughts above sublunary cares or pleasures. Yet the praise of that fortitude, with which Abdiel maintained his singularity of virtue against the scorn of multitudes, may be accommodated to all times; and Raphael's reproof of Adam's curiosity after the planetary motions, with the answer returned by Adam', may be confidently opposed to any rule of life which any poet has delivered. The thoughts which are occasionally called forth in the pro- 229 gress are such as could only be produced by an imagination in the highest degree fervid and active, to which materials were supplied by incessant study and unlimited curiosity. The heat of Milton's mind might be said to sublimate his learning, to throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts. He had considered creation in its whole extent, and his de- 230 scriptions are therefore learned. He had accustomed his imagination to unrestrained indulgence, and his conceptions therefore! were extensive. The characteristick quality of his poem is sublimity 3. He sometimes descends to the elegant, but his element is the great. He can occasionally invest himself with grace; but his natural port is gigantick loftiness. He can please when pleasure is required; but it is his peculiar power to astonish. He seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, 231 and to know what it was that Nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon others 5; the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful: he therefore chose a subject on which too much could not be said, on which he might tire his fancy without the censure of extravagance. The appearances of nature and the occurrences of life did not 232 satiate his appetite of greatness. To paint things as they are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy. Milton's delight was to sport in the wide regions of 233 234 possibility; reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery, into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the counsels of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven. But he could not be always in other worlds: he must sometimes revisit earth, and tell of things visible and known. When he cannot raise wonder by the sublimity of his mind he gives delight by its fertility. Whatever be his subject he never fails to fill the imagination. But his images and descriptions of the scenes or operations of Nature do not seem to be always copied from original form, nor to have the freshness, raciness, and energy of immediate observation. He saw Nature, as Dryden expresses it, 'through the spectacles of books'; and on most occasions calls learning to his assistance. The garden of Eden brings to his mind the vale of Enna, where Proserpine was gathering flowers 3. Satan makes his way through fighting elements, like Argo between the Cyanean rocks, or Ulysses between the two Sicilian whirlpools, when he shunned Charybdis 'on the larboard .' The mythological allusions have been justly censured, as not being always used with notice of their vanity 5; but they contribute variety to the narra 'He [Shakespeare] was naturallyThe last fault which I shall take learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.' DRYDEN, Works, xv. 344. Johnson quotes these words in his Preface to Shakespeare, Works, v. 153. Unhappily both Johnson and Dryden saw Nature from between the houses of Fleet Street. If ever there was a poet who knew her well, and described her in all her loveliness, it was Milton.' LANDOR, Imag. Conver. iv. 244. 2 Post, MILTON, 268. 'For the enumeration of the Syrian and Arabian deities, it may be observed that Milton has comprised, in one hundred and thirty very beautiful lines, the two large and learned syntagmas which Selden had composed on that abstruse subject.' GIBBON, The Decline and Fall, ii. 4 n. 3 Paradise Lost, iv. 268. notice of in Milton's style is the fre- Veer starboard sea and land." 'Milton makes use of larboard in the same manner.' ADDISON, The Spectator, No. 297. See post, MILTON, 263; DRYDEN, 255, 336. 5 I do not find fault with these allusions where the poet himself represents them as fabulous, as he does in some places, but where he mentions them as truths and matters of fact.' ADDISON, The Spectator, No. 297. 'What has been adverse to Milton's art of illusion is, that the belief that the gods of the heathen world were tion, and produce an alternate exercise of the memory and the fancy. His similes are less numerous and more various than those of 235 his predecessors'. But he does not confine himself within the limits of rigorous comparison: his great excellence is amplitude, and he expands the adventitious image beyond the dimensions which the occasion required. Thus, comparing the shield of Satan to the orb of the Moon, he crowds the imagination with the discovery of the telescope and all the wonders which the telescope discovers. Of his moral sentiments it is hardly praise to affirm that they 236 excel those of all other poets; for this superiority he was indebted to his acquaintance with the sacred writings. The ancient epick poets, wanting the light of Revelation, were very unskilful teachers of virtue: their principal characters may be great, but they are not amiable. The reader may rise from their works. with a greater degree of active or passive fortitude, and sometimes of prudence; but he will be able to carry away few precepts of justice, and none of mercy. From the Italian writers it appears that the advantages of even 237 Christian knowledge may be possessed in vain. Ariosto's pravity 3 is generally known; and, though the Deliverance of Ferusalem may be considered as a sacred subject, the poet has been very sparing of moral instruction. In Milton every line breathes sanctity of thought and purity\238 of manners, except when the train of the narration requires the introduction of the rebellious spirits; and even they are compelled the rebellious angels has ceased to be part of the common creed of Christendom. Milton was nearly the last of our great writers who was fully possessed of the doctrine.' PATTISON, Milton, p. 198. See De Quincey's Works, vi. Preface, p. 14, for a criticism on the passage in the text, beginning :-'The word vanity is here used in an oldworld Puritanical sense for falsehood or visionariness.' E. FitzGerald writes that Tennyson in his youth 'used to say that the two grandest of all similes were those of the ships hanging in the air [ii. 636], and "the gunpowder one" [iv. 8141, which he used slowly and grimly to enact in the days that are no more. He certainly then thought Milton the sublimest of all the gang; his diction modelled on Virgil, as perhaps Dante's.' FitzGerald's Letters, ii. 193. Ofthe simile of the ships 'Tennyson said, "What simile was ever so vast as this?" Tennyson's Life, ii. 519. 2 Paradise Lost, i. 286; v. 261. 3 Johnson gives depravity in his Dictionary, but without any instance of its use. In the New Eng. Dict. only one instance, in its sense of corruption, is given earlier than the Lives of the Poets. 'indu'd With sanctity of reason.' Paradise Lost, vii. 507. 239 240 241 to acknowledge their subjection to God in such a manner as excites reverence and confirms piety. Of human beings there are but two; but those two are the parents of mankind, venerable before their fall for dignity and innocence, and amiable after it for repentance and submission'. In their first state their affection is tender without weakness, and their piety sublime without presumption. When they have sinned they shew how discord begins in mutual frailty 2, and how it ought to cease in mutual forbearance; how confidence of the divine favour is forfeited by sin, and how hope of pardon may be obtained by penitence and prayer. A state of innocence we can only conceive, if indeed in our present misery it be possible to conceive it; but the sentiments and worship proper to a fallen and offending being we have all to learn, as we have all to practise. The poet whatever be done is always great3. Our progenitors in their first state conversed with angels; even when folly and sin had degraded them they had not in their humiliation 'the port of mean suitors;' and they rise again to reverential regard when we find that their prayers were heard. As human passions did not enter the world before the Fall, there is in the Paradise Lost little opportunity for the pathetick; but what little there is has not been lost. That passion which is peculiar to rational nature, the anguish arising from the consciousness of transgression and the horrours attending the sense of the Divine Displeasure, are very justly described and forcibly impressed 5. But the passions are moved only on one occasion; sublimity is the general and prevailing quality in this poemsublimity variously modified, sometimes descriptive, sometimes argumentative. 242 The defects and faults of Paradise Lost, for faults and defects every work of man must have, it is the business of impartial criticism to discover. As in displaying the excellence of Milton I have not made long quotations, because of selecting beauties there had been no end, I shall in the same general manner In the first edition, 'natural frailty.' 'The whole species of mankind was in two persons. . . . We have, however, four distinct characters in these two persons. We see man and woman in the highest innocence and perfection, and in the most abject state of guilt and infirmity.' ADDISON, The Spectator, No. 273. 36 Shakespeare is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him.' DRYDEN, Works, xv. 344. 'Yet their port Not of mean suitors.' Par. L. xi. 8. 5 lb. x. 714. |