So, in another of his returns to those tales and fancies of the Middle Age which, in spite {169} of his intellectual and moral rejection of their falsity, yet always moved him to unusual beauty of verse, he compares the dwarfed rebels of Hell to the
"faery elves,
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead 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."
So Eve at her gardening recalls Pales, or Pomona or
"Ceres in her prime,
Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove."
And so, in an earlier book, the beauty of Paradise itself, too great to be directly told, is, like the splendour of Pandemonium, conveyed to us by the most perfect of those negative similes which, forced upon Milton by the narrow bounds of his story, are perhaps the most distinctive of all the glories of Paradise Lost. It is too long to quote in full: but a few lines may be given: and they must include the first four, one of which has just {170} been quoted, verses of such amazing beauty that, if Milton could be represented by four lines, these might well be the chosen four—
"Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers.
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and the inspired
Castalian spring, might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive."
But it is time to leave Milton's similes, though similes play a more important part in Paradise Lost than in any other epic. Indeed their necessary absence is a great element in the comparative dulness of the books given over to the discourses of Raphael and Michael. A single chapter in a little book of this kind can only deal with one or two aspects of so great a subject as Paradise Lost. That being so, it is best, perhaps, to touch on points in which Milton stands pre-eminent or unique. The similes are one of these. Another is the splendour of the Miltonic speeches. It is one of the defects of Paradise Lost that its actors are seldom soldiers whom all the ages agree to admire, and often theologians whom all fear or dislike, or politicians whom all obey {171} and despise. Yet how magnificently Milton turns this weakness into a strength! His speeches have not the eternal humanity of Homer's: but as oratory, above all as debating oratory, they have no poetic rivals outside the drama. The poet who had lived through the Long Parliament and the trial of Strafford knew the art of speech as Homer could not know it. It may seem strange to us that the political struggle of his day affected him so much more than the military; but the fact is so. Pym and Hampden are felt in Paradise Lost far more than Fairfax or Cromwell. The speeches of the second book could only have been written by the citizen of a free state who had lived through a crisis in its fortunes. Other speeches in the poem—that incomparable one of Eve to Adam in the fourth book, "Sweet is the breath of morn," those that pass between Eve and Adam after the Fall and Adam's Job-like lament in the tenth book—have a purer human beauty about them: but of the oratory of debate no poem in the world provides a more magnificent display than the second book of Paradise Lost. The debate is a real debate. The opening of Moloch, "My sentence is for open war," would be instantly effective in any Parliament in the world. It {172} rouses attention by its directness, it compels adherence as only courage can. To undo its effect Belial has to employ the most subtle of all oratorical arts, that of accepting the arguments which he dare not directly combat and then gradually turning them to the confusion of their author. So he and Mammon bring the assembly completely round to the mood of ease and acquiescence. Then follows the tremendous figure of Beelzebub, an aged Chatham or Gladstone, who
"in his rising seemed
A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat and public care;
And princely counsel in his face yet shone,
Majestic though in ruin. Sage he stood,
With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies; his look
Drew audience and attention still as night,
Or summer's noon-tide air."
Yet Milton's consciousness of the situation as it really would be is such that Beelzebub does not dare to revive Moloch's defeated policy of war. To talk of fighting to cowed rebels who have just been taught the too pleasant lesson of the folly of further resistance would have been useless. So he begins by telling them that the ease promised to them is a delusion: they may submit, but submission {173} will never win them peace, or deliver them from their victorious enemy. Peace, then, they cannot have; and must have war: but it need not be open or dangerous: craft has its weapons as well as force: "what if we find Some easier enterprise" than the perilous folly of assaulting heaven?
Such a sketch may just serve to show that the great debate is a living thing in which we feel the temper of the audience submitting to the successive orators and in its turn reacting upon them. Another proof of the actuality of Milton's oratory is the way in which it can be quoted.