Milton

by John Cann Bailey

Let us hear the most beautiful of all these confessions: and for once let us indulge ourselves with the whole. The themes that make up Milton's great symphony ought in truth always to be given unbroken, if only that were possible. Indeed, there is a sense in which it may be said that nothing less than the whole poem can do justice to a design so majestic as that of Paradise Lost. But in any case it is certain that no fragment of a few lines can convey a full impression of the rhythmical, intellectual, imaginative unity of the Miltonic paragraph or section. This is above all conspicuous in the great speeches and in the elaborate introductions that precede the first, third, seventh and ninth books. Here is the greatest of the four; the most famous of Milton's personal interventions in his poem, and one of the most wonderful things he ever wrote.

"Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born!
Or of the Eternal coeternal beam
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May I express thee unblamed? Since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from eternity; dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate!
Or hearest thou rather pure Ethereal stream,
Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the Sun,
Before the Heavens, thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest
The rising World of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless Infinite!
Thee I revisit now with bolder wing,
Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detained
In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight,
Through utter and through middle Darkness borne,
With other notes than to the Orphean lyre,
I sung of Chaos and eternal Night,
Taught by the Heavenly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to re-ascend,
Though hard and rare; thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled. Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
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Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit; nor sometimes forget
Those other two equalled with me in fate,
So were I equalled with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old:
Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and, for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, Celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight."

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Not all the poetry of all the world can produce more than a few passages that equal this in moving power. Tears are not very far from the eye that is passing over its page: tears in which sympathy plays a smaller part than joy at the discovery that human words can be so beautiful. But if Milton moves us more by his own personality than by that of any of his creations, it is still true that he is not so entirely without dramatic power as has sometimes been alleged. No one would claim for him that he was one of the great narrative or dramatic masters. But his weakness on these sides is so obvious that there has been a tendency to exaggerate it. We notice the undramatic speeches of Satan and Adam: we notice such things as Eve's dream in the fifth book which, anticipating, as it does, so many of the details of her temptation, renders her fall much less probable, and goes far to destroy its interest when it occurs. But we are slower to notice the admirable dramatic management of such a scene as that between Eve and the Serpent in the ninth book. And yet how finely imagined it is, in all its successive stages! Satan, at first "stupidly good," overawed at Eve's beauty and innocence; then, recovering his natural malice, and beginning his attempt by appealing to {187} two things, curiosity and the love of flattery, which have always been supposed especially powerful with women; and Eve, taking no direct notice of his compliments and in appearance surrendering only to the other bait of novelty and surprise; "how cam'st thou speakable of mute?" So the scene begins. Flattery has ensured the tempter a favourable reception; curiosity gives him the chance of an apparently telling argument. I ate, he says, of the fruit of a certain tree and received from it speech and reason. But I have found nothing to satisfy my new-won powers till I saw thee, whom I now desire to worship as the sovran of creation. She affects to rebuke the flattery, but naturally asks to be shown the tree on which the wonderful fruit grows. It of course turns out to be the Forbidden Tree: and Eve mentions the prohibition as a thing final and unquestionable. He meets her refusal by giving a sinister and plausible explanation of the prohibition. Why did God forbid her the fruit? "Why, but to keep ye low and ignorant, His worshippers?" God, he suggests, knows too well that as the fruit had raised the serpent from brute to human, so it would raise the woman from human to divine. Noon and hunger come to fortify his {188} arguments; and, after a speech in which she adds one more of her own drawn from the name, the Tree of Knowledge, given to the tree by God Himself, she plucks and eats. In the first ecstasy of pleasure she luxuriates in joy and self-confidence. Then she considers whether she shall use her new powers to make herself the equal and even the superior of Adam. The prospect tempts her: but she is not quite free from fear that the threatened punishment of death may after all descend upon her. And that suggests the picture of "Adam wedded to another Eve," which brings her swiftly to the decision that Adam shall share with her her fate, whichever it be, bliss or woe. In this, as later in her hasty proposal of suicide, Eve is a living and convincing human figure. To the stronger and wiser Adam it was harder to give life. But what could be finer or truer than his instant repudiation of her plausible tale—

"How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost,
Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!"

followed by his immediate resolution to die with her—

"And me with thee hath ruined: for with thee
Certain my resolution is to die.
How can I live without thee?"

{189} The rest follows with equal probability. Once resolved to unite his lot with hers, he soon finds arguments to prove that that lot is not likely after all to be so dreadful. Having talked himself into the surrender of his judgment he eats, and having eaten he goes at once all lengths of extravagance, folly and sin. Then comes the reaction and the inevitable mutual reproaches; with the fine natural touch of Eve upbraiding Adam for his weakness in yielding to her request and granting her the freedom which had proved so fatal. So the ninth book closes. When the story is resumed in the second half of the tenth book we get the tremendous lamentation of Adam, so strangely undramatic in its argumentative justification of his own punishment, so full of true drama as well as of magnificent lyrical power in its cry of human misery and despair. Then follows the bitter attack upon Eve, as the cause of all his woe: and the whole scene is concluded by her humble and beautiful submission—

"While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps,
Between us two let there be peace:"

by their reconciliation, and by their quiet and resigned acceptance of their common fate.