His Faults.—Grand, far above all human efforts, his poems fail in these representations. God is a spirit; he is here presented as a body, and that by an uninspired pen. The poet has not been able to carry us up to those infinite heights, and so his attempt only ends in a humanitarian philosophy: he has been obliged to lower the whole heavenly hierarchy to bring it within the scope of our objective comprehension. He blinds our poor eyes by the dazzling effulgence of that light which is
... of the Eternal co-eternal beam.
And it must be asserted that in this attempt Milton has done injury to the cause of religion, however much he has vindicated the power of the human intellect and the compass of the human imagination. He has made sensuous that which was entirely spiritual, and has attempted with finite powers to realize the Infinite.
The fault is not so great when he delineates created intelligences, ranging from the highest seraph to him who was only "less than archangel ruined." We gaze, unreproved by conscience, at the rapid rise of Pandemonium; we watch with eager interest the hellish crew as they "open into the hill a spacious wound, and dig out ribs of gold." We admire the fabric which springs
... like an exhalation, with the sound
Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet.
Nothing can be grander or more articulately realized than that arched roof, from which,
Pendent by subtle magic, many a row
Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed
With naphtha and asphaltus, yields the light
As from a sky.
It is an illustrative criticism that while the painter's art has seized these scenes, not one has dared to attempt his heavenly descriptions with the pencil. Art is less bold or more reverent than poetry, and rebukes the poet.
Characteristics of the Age.—And here it is particularly to our purpose to observe, that in this very boldness of entrance into the holy of holies—in this attempted grasp with finite hands of infinite things, Milton was but a sublimated type of his age, and of the Commonwealth, when man, struggling for political freedom, went, as in the later age of the French Illuminati, too far in the regions of spirit and of faith. As Dante, with a powerful satire, filled his poem with the personages of the day, assigning his enemies to the girone of the Inferno, so Milton vents his gentler spleen by placing cowls and hood and habits in the limbo of vanity and paradise of fools:
... all these upwhirled aloft
Fly o'er the backside of the world far off,
Into a limbo large and broad, since called
The paradise of fools.