Part 11 (1/2)
Or the comparison of Satan, as he ”lay floating many a rood,” to ”that sea beast,”
”Leviathan, which G.o.d of all his works Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream!”
What a force of imagination is there in this last expression! What an idea it conveys of the size of that hugest of created beings, as if it shrunk up the ocean to a stream, and took up the sea in its nostrils as a very little thing! Force of style is one of Milton's greatest excellences.
Hence, perhaps, he stimulates us more in the reading, and less afterwards.
The way to defend Milton against all impugners, is to take down the book and read it.
Milton's blank verse is the only blank verse in the language (except Shakspeare's) that deserves the name of verse. Dr. Johnson, who had modelled his ideas of versification on the regular sing-song of Pope, condemns the Paradise Lost as harsh and unequal. I shall not pretend to say that this is not sometimes the case; for where a degree of excellence beyond the mechanical rules of art is attempted, the poet must sometimes fail. But I imagine that there are more perfect examples in Milton of musical expression, or of an adaptation of the sound and movement of the verse to the meaning of the pa.s.sage, than in all our other writers, whether of rhyme or blank verse, put together, (with the exception already mentioned). Spenser is the most harmonious of our stanza writers, as Dryden is the most sounding and varied of our rhymists. But in neither is there anything like the same ear for music, the same power of approximating the varieties of poetical to those of musical rhythm, as there is in our great epic poet. The sound of his lines is moulded into the expression of the sentiment, almost of the very image. They rise or fall, pause or hurry rapidly on, with exquisite art, but without the least trick or affectation, as the occasion seems to require.
The following are some of the finest instances:
”His hand was known In Heaven by many a tower'd structure high;-- Nor was his name unheard or unador'd In ancient Greece; and in the Ausonian land Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell From Heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o'er the crystal battlements; from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer's day; and with the setting sun Dropt from the zenith like a falling star On Lemnos, the aegean isle: thus they relate, Erring.”--
”But chief the s.p.a.cious hall Thick swarm'd, both on the ground and in the air, Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings. As bees In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides, Pour forth their populous youth about the hive In cl.u.s.ters; they among fresh dews and flow'rs Fly to and fro; or on the smoothed plank, The suburb of their straw-built citadel, New rubb'd with balm, expatiate, and confer Their state affairs. So thick the airy crowd Swarm'd and were straiten'd; till the signal giv'n, Behold a wonder! They but now who seem'd In bigness to surpa.s.s earth's giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless, like that Pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount, or fairy elves, Whose midnight revels by a forest side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while over-head the moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth Wheels her pale course: they on their mirth and dance Intent, with jocund music charm his ear; At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.”
I can give only another instance, though I have some difficulty in leaving off.
”Round he surveys (and well might, where he stood So high above the circling canopy Of night's extended shade) from th' eastern point Of Libra to the fleecy star that bears Andromeda far off Atlantic seas Beyond the horizon: then from pole to pole He views in breadth, and without longer pause Down right into the world's first region throws His flight precipitant, and winds with ease Through the pure marble air his oblique way Amongst innumerable stars that shone Stars distant, but nigh hand seem'd other worlds; Or other worlds they seem'd or happy isles,” etc.
The verse, in this exquisitely modulated pa.s.sage, floats up and down as if it had itself wings. Milton has himself given us the theory of his versification--
”Such as the meeting soul may pierce In notes with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out.”
Dr. Johnson and Pope would have converted his vaulting Pegasus into a rocking-horse. Read any other blank verse but Milton's,--Thomson's, Young's, Cowper's, Wordsworth's,--and it will be found, from the want of the same insight into ”the hidden soul of harmony,” to be mere lumbering prose.
To proceed to a consideration of the merits of Paradise Lost, in the most essential point of view, I mean as to the poetry of character and pa.s.sion. I shall say nothing of the fable, or of other technical objections or excellences; but I shall try to explain at once the foundation of the interest belonging to the poem. I am ready to give up the dialogues in Heaven, where, as Pope justly observes, ”G.o.d the Father turns a school-divine;” nor do I consider the battle of the angels as the climax of sublimity, or the most successful effort of Milton's pen. In a word, the interest of the poem arises from the daring ambition and fierce pa.s.sions of Satan, and from the account of the paradisaical happiness, and the loss of it by our first parents. Three-fourths of the work are taken up with these characters, and nearly all that relates to them is unmixed sublimity and beauty. The two first books alone are like too ma.s.sy pillars of solid gold.
Satan is the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem; and the execution is as perfect as the design is lofty. He was the first of created beings, who, for endeavouring to be equal with the highest, and to divide the empire of heaven with the Almighty, was hurled down to h.e.l.l.
His aim was no less than the throne of the universe; his means, myriads of angelic armies bright, the third part of the heavens, whom he lured after him with his countenance, and who durst defy the Omnipotent in arms. His ambition was the greatest, and his punishment was the greatest; but not so his despair, for his fort.i.tude was as great as his sufferings. His strength of mind was matchless as his strength of body; the vastness of his designs did not surpa.s.s the firm, inflexible determination with which he submitted to his irreversible doom, and final loss of all good. His power of action and of suffering was equal. He was the greatest power that was ever overthrown, with the strongest will left to resist or to endure.
He was baffled, not confounded. He stood like a tower; or
”As when Heaven's fire Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines!”
He is still surrounded with hosts of rebel angels, armed warriors, who own him as their sovereign leader, and with whose fate he sympathises as he views them round, far as the eye can reach; though he keeps aloof from them in his own mind, and holds supreme counsel only with his own breast.
An outcast from Heaven, h.e.l.l trembles beneath his feet, Sin and Death are at his heels, and mankind are his easy prey.
”All is not lost; th' unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield, And what else is not to be overcome,”
are still his. The sense of his punishment seems lost in the magnitude of it; the fierceness of tormenting flames, is qualified and made innoxious by the greater fierceness of his pride; the loss of infinite happiness to himself is compensated in thought, by the power of inflicting infinite misery on others. Yet Satan is not the principle of malignity, or of the abstract love of evil--but of the abstract love of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate. From this principle he never once flinches. His love of power and contempt for suffering are never once relaxed from the highest pitch of intensity. His thoughts burn like a h.e.l.l within him; but the power of thought holds dominion in his mind over every other consideration. The consciousness of a determined purpose, of ”that intellectual being, those thoughts that wander through eternity,” though accompanied with endless pain, he prefers to nonent.i.ty, to ”being swallowed up and lost in the wide womb of uncreated night.” He expresses the sum and substance of all ambition in one line: ”Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, doing or suffering!” After such a conflict as his, and such a defeat, to retreat in order, to rally, to make terms, to exist at all, is something; but he does more than this--he founds a new empire in h.e.l.l, and from it conquers this new world, whither he bends his undaunted flight, forcing his way through nether and surrounding fires. The poet has not in all this given us a mere shadowy outline; the strength is equal to the magnitude of the conception. The Achilles of Homer is not more distinct; the t.i.tans were not more vast; Prometheus chained to his rock was not a more terrific example of suffering and of crime. Wherever the figure of Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, ”rising aloft inc.u.mbent on the dusky air,” it is ill.u.s.trated with the most striking and appropriate images: so that we see it always before us, gigantic, irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed--but dazzling in its faded splendour, the clouded ruins of a G.o.d. The deformity of Satan is only in the depravity of his will; he has no bodily deformity to excite our loathing or disgust. The horns and tail are not there, poor emblems of the unbending, unconquered spirit, of the writhing agonies within. Milton was too magnanimous and open an antagonist to support his argument by the bye-tricks of a hump and cloven foot; to bring into the fair field of controversy the good old catholic prejudices of which Ta.s.so and Dante have availed themselves, and which the mystic German critics would restore. He relied on the justice of his cause, and did not scruple to give the devil his due. Some persons may think that he has carried his liberality too far, and injured the cause he professed to espouse by making him the chief person in his poem. Considering the nature of his subject, he would be equally in danger of running into this fault, from his faith in religion, and his love of rebellion; and perhaps each of these motives had its full share in determining the choice of his subject.
Not only the figure of Satan, but his speeches in council, his soliloquies, his address to Eve, his share in the war in heaven; or in the fall of man, show the same decided superiority of character. To give only one instance, almost the first speech he makes:
”Is this the region, this the soil, the clime, Said then the lost archangel, this the seat That we must change for Heaven; this mournful gloom For that celestial light? Be it so, since he Who now is sov'rain can dispose and bid What shall be right: farthest from him is best, Whom reason hath equal'd, force hath made supreme Above his equals. Farewell happy fields, Where joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest h.e.l.l, Receive thy new possessor; one who brings A mind not to be chang'd by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of h.e.l.l, a h.e.l.l of Heav'n.