"Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean
Rings to the roar of an angel onset;"
nor yet any of those others which delighted Tennyson even more, the scenes of Adam's
"bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, And bloom profuse and cedar arches."
It has no love, no sin, no quarrel, no reconciliation, no central moment of tragic suspense, indeed no human action at all. And Milton has refrained almost absolutely from adorning it with the similes which are among the chief glories of Paradise Lost. It is, in fact, as Mark Pattison has said, "probably the most unadorned poem extant in any language."
At the very beginning of Paradise Lost Milton had cast his eye on to that second chapter in the Christian history of man without which the first is a mere picture of despair. His subject was to be man's first disobedience and its results; death, woe and loss of Eden
"till one greater Man Restore us and regain the blissful seat."
{198} Whether he then had any thought of attempting to deal with that restoration we do not know. Nor do we know what motives induced him to choose the story of the Temptation in the Wilderness as the action in which the new order of things was to be manifested. Some critics have been surprised that he did not take the Crucifixion or the Resurrection. And it is obvious that the first, with the Tree of Calvary pointing back to the Tree in the Garden, would have afforded a natural sequence to Paradise Lost. Others have wondered that he did not use the Descent into Hell in which the liberation of Satan's captives would have followed on the story of how they fell into his power. And it is obvious that there were great poetic, and especially Miltonic, possibilities in the theme of the victorious Son of God entering the very kingdom in which the Satan of Paradise Lost had exercised such splendid rule, and setting free the saints and prophets and kings of the Old Testament. But it is possible, as Sir Walter Raleigh has suggested, that Milton was no longer in the vein for grandiose themes of external majesty and might such as this story would have afforded. "His interest was now centred rather in the sayings of the wise than in the deeds of the mighty." That {199} may be so: though his Samson which was yet to come is certainly not without its mighty deeds. But, whatever were his reasons for putting aside such subjects as the Descent into Hell, it is not difficult to discover several which he probably found decisive in inducing him to prefer the Temptation to the Passion. To begin with, he must have been conscious of the immensely greater difficulty of handling the story of the Passion in such a way that Christian readers could bear to read it. Then, even more certainly operative on his mind was the fact that the Passion is related to us in great detail, the Temptation in a few words of mysterious import; so that the one leaves almost no freedom of invention to the poet, while the other scarcely binds him at all. Then again there is the close parallelism between the temptation in the Garden and the temptation in the Wilderness; and finally, most important of all, the fact that the Temptation is the only event in the life of Christ in which Satan plays a visible and important part. A poem that was to be a second part of Paradise Lost could not do without Satan; and in fact he is even more prominent in Paradise Regained, where he is present throughout, than in its predecessor of which there are several books which scarcely so {200} much as mention him. This was no doubt decisive.
So Milton chose the Temptation in the Wilderness as his subject, with Satan once more as one of the two principal actors in his story. But the actor is even more changed than the story. The Satan of the later poem is no longer the splendid rebel of Paradise Lost. Paradise Regained has in it no heavenly battles and its council of devils is a mere shadow of the great parliament of hell. It has, therefore, no place either for the general of the infernal armies or for the Prime Minister of the infernal Senate. The magnificent figure who imposes himself on the imagination—
"Like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved"—
becomes in it something far less impressive, a political theorist instead of a statesman, a student of the balance of power instead of a soldier, a casuistical disputant about culture and morals in place of a devil venturing all for empire and revenge. It is as if Alexander were exchanged for Aristotle: almost as if St. George were replaced by Mr. Worldly Wiseman. The imagination is affected by the inevitable loss of colour, and Paradise Regained is the sufferer in fame and popularity. It also suffers from the old difficulty {201} inherent in supernatural personages which affects it even more than Paradise Lost. The whole action is a succession of Temptations. The question how far such attempts by a devil upon a Divine Being can afford any hope to the one or any fear or danger to the other is a mystery of which the Church itself scarcely claims to offer a full explanation. Into the theological difficulty this is not the place to enter. It is only with the corresponding poetic difficulty which we are concerned. Just as in Paradise Lost it is impossible not to feel the unreality of the war in heaven, so in Paradise Regained it is impossible not to feel, in spite of some inconsistency of language on the subject, that Satan commonly knows who it is whom he is assailing and is known by Him in return, and that consequently the whole action has for poetic purposes a certain unreality. He knows that Jesus is the Son of God; with a right to the homage of all nature and the power to take all as His own. He asks—