Some Notes On Milton

Much of the criticism on Milton, if not hostile, is apologetic, and it is considered quite correct to say we “do not care” for him.  Partly this indifference is due to his Nonconformity.  The “superior” Englishman who makes a jest of the doctrines and ministers of the Established Church always pays homage to it because it is respectable, and sneers at Dissent.  Another reason why Milton does not take his proper place is that his theme is a theology which for most people is no longer vital.  A religious poem if it is to be deeply felt must embody a living faith.  The great poems of antiquity are precious to us in proportion to our acceptance, now, as fact, of what they tell us about heaven and earth.  There are only a few persons at present who perceive that in substance the account which was given in the seventeenth century of the relation between man and God is immortal and worthy of epic treatment.  A thousand years hence a much better estimate of Milton will be possible than that which can be formed to-day.  We attribute to him mechanic construction in dead material because it is dead to ourselves.  Even Mr. Ruskin who was far too great not to recognise in part at least Milton’s claims, says that “Milton’s account of the most important event in his whole system of the universe, the fall of the angels, is evidently unbelievable to himself; and the more so, that it is wholly founded on, and in a great part spoiled and degraded from, Hesiod’s account of the decisive war of the younger gods with the Titans.  The rest of his poem is a picturesque drama, in which every artifice of invention is visibly and consciously employed; not a single fact being for an instant conceived as tenable by any living faith” (Sesame and Lilies, section iii.).

Mr. Mark Pattison, quoting part of this passage, remarks with justice, “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 be standing on the sure ground of fact and reality” (English Men of Letters—Milton, p. 186, ed. 1879).

St. Jude for ages had been sufficient authority for the angelic revolt, and in a sense it was a reasonable dogma, for although it did not explain the mystery of the origin of evil it pushed it a step further backwards, and without such a revolt the Christian scheme does not well hold together.  So also with the entrance of the devil into the serpent.  It is not expressly taught in any passage of the canonical Scriptures, but to the Church and to Milton it was as indisputable as the presence of sin in the world.  Milton, I repeat, believed in the framework of his poem, and unless we can concede this to him we ought not to attempt to criticise him.  He was impelled to turn his religion into poetry in order to bring it closer to him.  The religion of every Christian if it is real is a poem.  He pictures a background of Holy Land scenery, and he creates a Jesus who continually converses with him and reveals to him much more than is found in the fragmentary details of the Gospels.  When Milton goes beyond his documents he does not imagine for the purpose of filling up: the additions are expression.

Milton belonged to that order of poets whom the finite does not satisfy.  Like Wordsworth, but more eminently, he was “powerfully affected” only by that “which is conversant with or turns upon infinity,” and man is to him a being with such a relationship to infinity that Heaven and Hell contend over him.  Every touch which sets forth the eternal glory of Heaven and the scarcely subordinate power of Hell magnifies him.  Johnson, whose judgment on Milton is unsatisfactory because he will not deliver himself sufficiently to beauty which he must have recognised, nevertheless says of the Paradise Lost, that “its end is to raise the thoughts above sublunary cares,” and this is true.  The other great epic poems worthy to be compared with Milton’s, the Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, and Divine Comedy, all agree in representing man as an object of the deepest solicitude to the gods or God.  Milton’s conception of God is higher than Homer’s, Virgil’s, or Dante’s, but the care of the Miltonic God for his offspring is greater, and the profound truth unaffected by Copernican discoveries and common to all these poets is therefore more impressive in Milton than in the others.

There is nothing which the most gifted of men can create that is not mixed up with earth, and Milton, too, works it up with his gold.  The weakness of the Paradise Lost is not, as Johnson affirms, its lack of human interest, for the Prometheus Bound has just as little, nor is Johnson’s objection worth anything that the angels are sometimes corporeal and at other times independent of material laws.  Spirits could not be represented to a human mind unless they were in a measure subject to the conditions of time and space.  The principal defect in Paradise Lost is the justification which the Almighty gives of the creation of man with a liability to fall.  It would have been better if Milton had contented himself with telling the story of the Satanic insurrection, of its suppression, of its author’s revenge, of the expulsion from Paradise, and the promise of a Redeemer.  But he wanted to “justify the ways of God to man,” and in order to do this he thought it was necessary to show that man must be endowed with freedom of will, and consequently could not be directly preserved from yielding to the assaults of Satan.

Paradise Regained comes, perhaps, closer to us than Paradise Lost because its temptations are more nearly our own, and every amplification which Milton introduces is designed to make them more completely ours than they seem to be in the New Testament.  It has often been urged against Paradise Regained that Jesus recovered Paradise for man by the Atonement and not merely by resistance to the devil’s wiles, but inasmuch as Paradise was lost by the devil’s triumph through human weakness it is natural that Paradise Regained should present the triumph of the Redeemer’s strength.  It is this victory which proves Jesus to be the Son of God and consequently able to save us.

He who has now become incarnated for our redemption is that same Messiah who, when He rode forth against the angelic rebels,

            “into terror chang’d
His count’nance too severe to be beheld,
And full of wrath bent on his enemies.”

It is He who

         “on his impious foes right onward drove,
Gloomy as night:”

whose right hand grasped

         “ten thousand thunders, which he sent
Before him, such as in their souls infix’d
Plagues.”

(P. L. vi. 824–38.)

Now as Son of Man he is confronted with that same Archangel, and he conquers by “strong sufferance.”  He comes with no fourfold visage of a charioteer flashing thick flames, no eye which glares lightning, no victory eagle-winged and quiver near her with three-bolted thunder stored, but in “weakness,” and with this he is to “overcome satanic strength.”

Milton sees in the temptation to turn the stones into bread a devilish incitement to use miraculous powers and not to trust the Heavenly Father.

“Why dost thou then suggest to me distrust,
Knowing who I am, as I know who thou art?”

(P. R. i. 355–6.)

Finding his enemy steadfast, Satan disappears,

                     “bowing low
His gray dissimulation,”

(P. R. i. 497–8.)

and calls to council his peers.  He disregards the proposal of Belial to attempt the seduction of Jesus with women.  If he is vulnerable it will be to objects

         “such as have more shew
Of worth, of honour, glory, and popular praise,
Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck’d;
Or that which only seems to satisfy
Lawful desires of Nature, not beyond.”

(P. R. ii. 226–30.)

The former appeal is first of all renewed.  “Tell me,” says Satan,

         “‘if food were now before thee set
Would’st thou not eat?’  ‘Thereafter as I like
The giver,’ answered Jesus.”

(P. R. ii. 320–22.)

A banquet is laid, and Satan invites Jesus to partake of it.

“What doubts the Son of God to sit and eat?
These are not fruits forbidd’n.”

(P. R. ii. 368–9.)

But Jesus refuses to touch the devil’s meat—

“Thy pompous delicacies I contemn,
And count thy specious gifts no gifts, but guiles.”

(P. R. ii. 390–1.)

So they were, for at a word

“Both table and provision vanish’d quite,
With sound of harpies’ wings and talons heard.”

(P. R. ii. 402–3.)

If but one grain of that enchanted food had been eaten, or one drop of that enchanted liquor had been drunk, there would have been no Cross, no Resurrection, no salvation for humanity.

The temptation on the mountain is expanded by Milton through the close of the second book, the whole of the third and part of the fourth.  It is a temptation of peculiar strength because it is addressed to an aspiration which Jesus has acknowledged.

         “Yet this not all
To which my spirit aspir’d: victorious deeds
Flam’d in my heart, heroic acts.”

(P. R. i. 214–16.)

But he denies that the glory of mob-applause is worth anything.

      “What is glory but the blaze of fame,
The people’s praise, if always praise unmixt?
And what the people but a herd confus’d,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar, and, well weigh’d, scarce worth the praise?”

(P. R. iii. 47–51.)

To the Jesus of the New Testament this answer is, in a measure, inappropriate.  He would not have called the people “a herd confus’d, a miscellaneous rabble.”  But although inappropriate it is Miltonic.  The devil then tries the Saviour with a more subtle lure, an appeal to duty.

“If kingdom move thee not, let move thee zeal
And duty; zeal and duty are not slow;
But on occasion’s forelock watchful wait.
They themselves rather are occasion best,
Zeal of thy father’s house, duty to free
Thy country from her heathen servitude.”

(P. R. iii. 171–6.)

But zeal and duty, the endeavour to hurry that which cannot and must not be hurried may be a suggestion from hell.

“If of my reign prophetic writ hath told
That it shall never end, so when begin
The Father in His purpose hath decreed.”

(P. R. iii. 184–6.)

Acquiescence, a conviction of the uselessness of individual or organised effort to anticipate what only slow evolution can bring, is characteristic of increasing years, and was likely enough to be the temper of Milton when he had seen the failure of the effort to make actual on earth the kingdom of Heaven.  The temptation is developed in such a way that every point supposed to be weak is attacked.  “You may be what you claim to be,” insinuates the devil, “but are rustic.”

“Thy life hath yet been private, most part spent
At home, scarce view’d the Galilean towns,
And once a year Jerusalem.”

(P. R. iii. 232–4.)

Experience and alliances are plausibly urged as indispensable for success.  But Jesus knew that the sum total of a man’s power for good is precisely what of good there is in him and that if it be expressed even in the simplest form, all its strength is put forth and its office is fulfilled.  To suppose that it can be augmented by machinery is a foolish delusion.  The

         “projects deep
Of enemies, of aids, battles and leagues,
Plausible to the world”

(P. R. iii. 395–3.)

are to the Founder of the kingdom not of this world “worth naught.”  Another side of the mountain is tried.  Rome is presented with Tiberius at Capreæ.  Could it possibly be anything but a noble deed to

      “expel this monster from his throne
Now made a sty, and in his place ascending,
A victor people free from servile yoke!”

(P. R. iv. 100–102.)

“And with my help thou may’st.”  With the devil’s help and not without can this glorious revolution be achieved!  “For him,” is the Divine reply, “I was not sent.”  The attack is then directly pressed.

“The kingdoms of the world, to thee I give;
For, giv’n to me, I give to whom I please,
No trifle; yet with this reserve, not else,
On this condition, if thou wilt fall down
And worship me as thy superior lord.”

(P. R. iv. 163–7.)

This, then, is the drift and meaning of it all.  The answer is taken verbally from the gospel.

         “‘Thou shalt worship
The Lord thy God, and only Him shalt serve.’”

(P. R. iv. 176–7.)

That is to say, Thou shalt submit thyself to God’s commands and God’s methods and thou shalt submit thyself to no other.

Omitting the Athenian and philosophic episode, which is unnecessary and a little unworthy even of the Christian poet, we encounter not an amplification of the Gospel story but an interpolation which is entirely Milton’s own.  Night gathers and a new assault is delivered in darkness.  Jesus wakes in the storm which rages round Him.  The diabolic hostility is open and avowed and He hears the howls and shrieks of the infernals.  He cannot banish them though He is so far master of Himself that He is able to sit “unappall’d in calm and sinless peace.”  He has to endure the hellish threats and tumult through the long black hours

         “till morning fair
Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice gray,
Who with her radiant finger still’d the roar
Of thunder, chas’d the clouds, and laid the winds,
And grisly spectres, which the Fiend had rais’d
To tempt the Son of God with terrors dire.
But now the sun with more effectual beams
Had cheer’d the face of earth, and dri’d the wet
From drooping plant, or dropping tree; the birds,
Who all things now beheld more fresh and green,
After a night of storm so ruinous,
Clear’d up their choicest notes in bush and spray
To gratulate the sweet return of morn.”

(P. R. iv. 426–38.)

There is nothing perhaps in Paradise Lost which possesses the peculiar quality of this passage, nothing which like these verses brings into the eyes the tears which cannot be repressed when a profound experience is set to music.

The temptation on the pinnacle occupies but a few lines only of the poem.  Hitherto Satan admits that Jesus had conquered, but he had done no more than any wise and good man could do.

“Now show thy progeny; if not to stand,
Cast thyself down; safely, if Son of God;
For it is written, ‘He will give command
Concerning thee to His angels; in their hands
They shall uplift thee, lest at any time
Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.’”

(P. R. iv. 554–9.)

The promise of Divine aid is made in mockery.

“To whom thus Jesus: ‘Also it is written,
Tempt not the Lord thy God.’  He said, and stood:
But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell.”

(P. R. iv. 560–2.)

It is not meant, “thou shalt not tempt me,” but rather, “it is not permitted me to tempt God.”  In this extreme case Jesus depends on God’s protection.  This is the devil’s final defeat and the seraphic company for which our great Example had refused to ask instantly surrounds and receives him.  Angelic quires

         “the Son of God, our Saviour meek,
Sung victor, and from heavenly feast refresh’t,
Brought on His way with joy; He unobserv’d,
Home to His mother’s house private return’d.”

(P. R. iv. 636–9.)

Warton wished to expunge this passage, considering it an unworthy conclusion.  It is to be hoped that there are many readers of Milton who are able to see what is the value of these four lines, particularly of the last.

It is hardly necessary to say more in order to show how peculiarly Milton is endowed with that quality which is possessed by all great poets—the power to keep in contact with the soul of man.