Life of John Milton

by Richard Garnett

A clear conception of the universe as Milton's inner eye beheld it, and of his religious and philosophical opinions in so far as they appear in the poem, is indispensable for a correct understanding of "Paradise Lost." The best service to be rendered to the reader within such limits as ours is to direct him to Professor Masson's discussion of Milton's cosmology in his "Life of Milton," and also in his edition of the Poetical Works. Generally speaking, it may be said that Milton's conception of the universe is Ptolemaic, that for him sun and moon and planets revolve around the central earth, rapt by the revolution of the crystal spheres in which, sphere enveloping sphere, they are successively located. But the light which had broken in upon him from the discoveries of Galileo has led him to introduce features not irreconcilable with the solar centre and ethereal infinity of Copernicus; so that "the poet would expect the effective permanence of his work in the imagination of the world, whether Ptolemy or Copernicus should prevail." So Professor Masson, who finely and justly adds that Milton's blindness helped him "by having already converted all external space in his own sensations into an infinite of circumambient blackness through which he could flash brilliance at his pleasure." His inclination as a thinker is evidently towards the Copernican theory, but he saw that the Ptolemaic, however inferior in sublimity, was better adapted to the purpose of a poem requiring a definite theatre of action. For rapturous contemplation of the glory of God in nature, the Copernican system is immeasurably the more stimulating to the spirit, but when made the theatre of an action the universe fatigues with its infinitude—

"Millions have meaning; after this
Cyphers forget the integer."

An infinite sidereal universe would have stultified the noble description how Satan—

"In the emptier waste, resembling air,
Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold
Far off the empyreal heaven, extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With opal towers and battlements adorned
Of living sapphire, once his native seat;
And fast by, hanging in a golden chain,
This pendant world, in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude close by the moon."

This pendant world, observe, is not the earth, as Addison understood it, but the entire sidereal universe, depicted not as the infinity we now know it to be, but as a definite object, so insulated in the vastness of space as to be perceptible to the distant Fiend as a minute star, and no larger in comparison with the courts of Heaven—themselves not wholly seen—than such a twinkler matched with the full-orbed moon. Such a representation, if it diminishes the grandeur of the universe accessible to sense, exalts that of the supersensual and extramundane regions where the action takes its birth, and where Milton's gigantic imagination is most perfectly at home.

There is no such compromise between religious creeds in Milton's mind as he saw good to make between Ptolemy and Copernicus. The matter was, in his estimation, far too serious. Never was there a more unaccountable misstatement than Ruskin's, that "Paradise Lost" is a poem in which every artifice of invention is consciously employed—not a single fact being conceived as tenable by any living faith. Milton undoubtedly believed most fully in the actual existence of all his chief personages, natural and supernatural, and was sure that, however he might have indulged his imagination in the invention of incidents, he had represented character with the fidelity of a conscientious historian. His religious views, moreover, are such as he could never have thought it right to publish if he had not been intimately convinced of their truth. He has strayed far from the creed of Puritanism. He is an Arian; his Son of God, though an unspeakably exalted being, is dependent, inferior, not self-existent, and could be merged in the Father's person or obliterated entirely without the least diminution of Almighty perfection. He is, moreover, no longer a Calvinist: Satan and Adam both possess free will, and neither need have fallen. The reader must accept these views, as well as Milton's conception of the materiality of the spiritual world, if he is to read to good purpose. "If his imagination," says Pattison, pithily, "is not active enough to assist the poet, he must at least not resist him."

This is excellent advice as respects the general plan of "Paradise Lost," the materiality of its spiritual personages, and its system of philosophy and theology. Its poetical beauties can only be resisted where they are not perceived. They have repeated the miracles of Orpheus and Amphion, metamorphosing one most bitterly obnoxious, of whom so late as 1687 a royalist wrote that "his fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff, and his memory will always stink," into an object of universal veneration. From the first instant of perusal the imagination is led in captivity, and for the first four books at least stroke upon stroke of sublimity follows with such continuous and undeviating regularity that sublimity seems this Creation's first law, and we feel like pigmies transported to a world of giants. There is nothing forced or affected in this grandeur, no visible effort, no barbaric profusion, everything proceeds with a severe and majestic order, controlled by the strength that called it into being. The similes and other poetical ornaments, though inexpressibly magnificent, seem no more so than the greatness of the general conception demands. Grant that Satan in his fall is not "less than archangel ruined," and it is no exaggeration but the simplest truth to depict his mien—

"As when the sun, new risen,
Looks through the horizontal misty air,
Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations."

When such a being voyages through space it is no hyperbole to compare him to a whole fleet, judiciously shown at such distance as to suppress every minute detail that could diminish the grandeur of the image—

"As when far off at sea a fleet descried
Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring
Their spicy drugs: they on the trading flood,
Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape,
Ply stemming nightly towards the pole: so seemed
Far off the flying Fiend."