Part 16 (1/2)
His similes are less numerous, and more various, than those of his predecessors. But he does not confine himself within the limits of rigorous comparison; his great excellence is amplitude; and he expands the advent.i.tious image beyond the dimensions which the occasion required. Thus comparing the s.h.i.+eld 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 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 princ.i.p.al characters may be great, but they are not amiable. The reader may rise from their works with a greater degree of active or pa.s.sive fort.i.tude, 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 Christian knowledge may be possessed in vain. Ariosto's pravity is generally known; and, though the Deliverance of Jerusalem may be considered as a sacred subject, the poet has been very sparing of moral instruction.
In Milton every line breathes sanct.i.ty of thought, and purity of manners, except when the train of the narration requires the introduction of the rebellious spirits; and even they are compelled to acknowledge their subjection to G.o.d, 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 the first state, their affection is tender without weakness, and their piety sublime without presumption. When they have sinned, they show how discord begins in mutual frailty, 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 great. 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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sion 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. But the pa.s.sions are moved only on one occasion; sublimity is the general and prevailing quality of this poem; sublimity variously modified, sometimes descriptive, sometimes argumentative.
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, mention that which seems to deserve censure; for what Englishman can take delight in transcribing pa.s.sages, which, if they lessen the reputation of Milton, diminish, in some degree, the honour of our country?
The generality of my scheme does not admit the frequent notice of verbal inaccuracies; which Bentley, perhaps, better skilled in grammar than in poetry, has often found, though he sometimes made them, and which he imputed to the obtrusions of a reviser, whom the author's blindness obliged him to employ; a supposition rash and groundless, if he thought it true; and vile and pernicious, if, as is said, he, in private, allowed it to be false.
The plan of Paradise Lost has this inconvenience, that it comprises neither human actions nor human manners[61]. The man and woman who act and suffer are in a state which no other man or woman can ever know.
The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged; beholds no condition in which he can, by any effort of imagination, place himself; he has, therefore, little natural curiosity or sympathy.
We all, indeed, feel the effect of Adam's disobedience; we all sin, like Adam, and, like him, must all bewail our offences; we have restless and insidious enemies in the fallen angels; and in the blessed spirits we have guardians and friends; in the redemption of mankind we hope to be included; and in the description of heaven and h.e.l.l we are, surely, interested, as we are all to reside, hereafter, either in the regions of horrour or of bliss.
But these truths are too important to be new; they have been taught to our infancy; they have mingled with our solitary thoughts and familiar conversations, and are habitually interwoven with the whole texture of life. Being, therefore, not new, they raise no unaccustomed emotion in the mind; what we knew before, we cannot learn; what is not unexpected, cannot surprise.
Of the ideas suggested by these awful scenes, from some we recede with reverence, except when stated hours require their a.s.sociation; and from others we shrink with horrour, or admit them only as salutary inflictions, as counterpoizes to our interests and pa.s.sions. Such images rather obstruct the career of fancy than incite it.
Pleasure and terrour are, indeed, the genuine sources of poetry; but poetical pleasure must be such as human imagination can, at least, conceive; and poetical terrour, such as human strength and fort.i.tude may combat. The good and evil of eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit; the mind sinks under them, in pa.s.sive helplessness, content with calm belief and humble adoration.
Known truths, however, may take a different appearance, and be conveyed to the mind by a new train of intermediate images. This Milton has undertaken, and performed with pregnancy and vigour of mind peculiar to himself. Whoever considers the few radical positions which the scriptures afforded him, will wonder by what energetick operation he expanded them to such extent, and ramified them to so much variety, restrained, as he was, by religious reverence from licentiousness of fiction.
Here is a full display of the united force of study and genius; of a great acc.u.mulation of materials, with judgment to digest, and fancy to combine them: Milton was able to select from nature or from story, from ancient fable or from modern science, whatever could ill.u.s.trate or adorn his thoughts. An acc.u.mulation of knowledge impregnated his mind, fermented by study, and exalted by imagination.
It has been, therefore, said, without an indecent hyperbole, by one of his encomiasts, that in reading Paradise Lost, we read a book of universal knowledge.
But original deficience cannot be supplied. The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire hara.s.sed and over-burdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.
Another inconvenience of Milton's design is, that it requires the description of what cannot be described, the agency of spirits. He saw that immateriality supplied no images, and that he could not show angels acting but by instruments of action; he, therefore, invested them with form and matter. This, being necessary, was, therefore, defensible; and he should have secured the consistency of his system, by keeping immateriality out of sight, and enticing his reader to drop it from his thoughts. But he has, unhappily, perplexed his poetry with his philosophy. His infernal and celestial powers are sometimes pure spirit, and sometimes animated body. When Satan walks with his lance upon the ”burning marl,” he has a body; when, in his pa.s.sage between h.e.l.l and the new world, he is in danger of sinking in the vacuity, and is supported by a gust of rising vapours, he has a body; when he animates the toad, he seems to be mere spirit, that can penetrate matter at pleasure; when he starts ”up in his own shape,” he has, at least, a determined form; and, when he is brought before Gabriel, he has ”a spear and a s.h.i.+eld,”
which he had the power of hiding in the toad, though the arms of the contending angels are evidently material.
The vulgar inhabitants of Pandaemonium, being ”incorporeal spirits,”
are ”at large, though without number,” in a limited s.p.a.ce: yet, in the battle, when they were overwhelmed by mountains, their armour hurt them, ”crushed in upon their substance, now grown gross by sinning.” This, likewise, happened to the uncorrupted angels, who were overthrown the ”sooner for their arms, for unarmed they might easily, as spirits, have evaded by contraction or remove.” Even as spirits they are hardly spiritual; for ”contraction” and ”remove” are images of matter; but if they could have escaped without their armour, they might have escaped from it, and left only the empty cover to be battered. Uriel, when he rides on a sunbeam, is material; Satan is material when he is afraid of the prowess of Adam.
The confusion of spirit and matter, which pervades the whole narration of the war of heaven, fills it with incongruity; and the book in which it is related is, I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually neglected, as knowledge is increased.
After the operation of immaterial agents which cannot be explained, may be considered that of allegorical persons, which have no real existence.
To exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity, has always been the right of poetry. But such airy beings are, for the most part, suffered only to do their natural office, and retire. Thus fame tells a tale, and victory hovers over a general, or perches on a standard; but fame and victory can do no more. To give them any real employment, or ascribe to them any material agency, is to make them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to nonent.i.ty. In the Prometheus of Aeschylus, we see violence and strength, and in the Alcestis of Euripides, we see death brought upon the stage, all as active persons of the drama; but no precedents can justify absurdity.
Milton's allegory of sin and death is, undoubtedly, faulty. Sin is, indeed, the mother of death, and may be allowed to be the portress of h.e.l.l; but when they stop the journey of Satan, a journey described as real, and when death offers him battle, the allegory is broken. That sin and death should have shown the way to h.e.l.l, might have been allowed; but they cannot facilitate the pa.s.sage by building a bridge, because the difficulty of Satan's pa.s.sage is described as real and sensible, and the bridge ought to be only figurative. The h.e.l.l a.s.signed to the rebellious spirits is described as not less local than the residence of man. It is placed in some distant part of s.p.a.ce, separated from the regions of harmony and order by a chaotick waste and an unoccupied vacuity; but sin and death worked up ”a mole of aggravated soil,” cemented with ”asphaltus;” a work too bulky for ideal architects.