Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 2

by Thomas De Quincey

II. The second great charge against Milton is, prima facie, even more difficult to meet. It is the charge of having blended the Pagan and Christian forms. The great realities of angels and archangels are continually combined into the same groups with the fabulous impersonations of the Greek mythology. Eve is interlinked in comparisons with Pandora; sometimes again with Eurynome. Those impersonations, however, may be thought to have something of allegoric meaning in their conceptions, which in a measure corrects this Paganism of the idea. But Eve is also compared with Ceres, with Hebe, and other fixed forms of Pagan superstition. Other allusions to the Greek mythologic forms, or direct combination of them with the real existences of the Christian heavens, might be produced by scores, were it not that we decline to swell our paper beyond the necessity of the case. Now, surely this at least is an error. Can there be any answer to this?

At one time we were ourselves inclined to fear that Milton had been here caught tripping. In this instance, at least, he seems to be in error. But there is no trusting to appearances. In meditating upon the question, we happened to remember that the most colossal and Miltonic of painters had fallen into the very same fault, if fault it were. In his Last Judgment, Michael Angelo has introduced the Pagan deities in connection with the hierarchy of the Christian heavens. Now, it is very true that one great man cannot palliate the error of another great man, by committing the same error himself. But, though it cannot avail as an excuse, such a conformity of ideas serves as a summons to a much more vigilant examination of the case than might else be instituted. One man might err from inadvertency; but that two, and both men trained to habits of constant meditation, should fall into the same error—makes the marvel tenfold greater.

Now we confess that, as to Michael Angelo, we do not pretend to assign the precise key to the practice which he adopted. And to our feelings, after all that might be said in apology, there still remains an impression of incongruity in the visual exhibition and direct juxtaposition of the two orders of supernatural existence so potently repelling each other. But, as regards Milton, the justification is complete; it rests upon the following principle: In all other parts of Christianity, the two orders of superior beings, the Christian heaven and the Pagan pantheon, are felt to be incongruous—not as the pure opposed to the impure, (for, if that were the reason, then the Christian fiends should be incongruous with the angels, which they are not,)—but as the unreal opposed to the real. In all the hands of other poets, we feel that Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, Diana, are not merely impure conceptions, but that they are baseless conceptions, phantoms of air, nonentities; and there is much the same objection, in point of just taste, to the combination of such fabulous beings in the same groups with glorified saints and angels, as there is to the combination, by a painter or a sculptor, of real flesh-and-blood creatures with allegoric abstractions.

This is the objection to such combination in all other poets. But this objection does not apply to Milton: it glances past him; and for the following reason: Milton has himself laid an early foundation for his introduction of the Pagan pantheon into Christian groups:—the false gods of the heathen world were, according to Milton, the fallen angels. They are not false, therefore, in the sense of being unreal, baseless, and having a merely fantastical existence, like our European fairies, but as having drawn aside mankind from a pure worship. As ruined angels under other names, they are no less real than the faithful and loyal angels of the Christian heavens. And in that one difference of the Miltonic creed, which the poet has brought pointedly and elaborately under his reader's notice by his matchless catalogue of the rebellious angels, and of their Pagan transformations in the very first book of the Paradise Lost, is laid beforehand the amplest foundation for his subsequent practice; and at the same time, therefore, the amplest answer to the charge preferred against him by Dr. Johnson, and by so many other critics, who had not sufficiently penetrated the latent theory on which he acted.

CHARLEMAGNE.

[FOOTNOTE: The History of Charlemagne; with a Sketch, and History of
France from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Rise of the Carlovingian
Dynasty. By G.P.R. JAMES, Esq. VOL. II.]

[1832.]

History is sometimes treated under the splendid conception of 'philosophy teaching by example,' and sometimes as an 'old almanac;' and, agreeably to this latter estimate, we once heard a celebrated living professor of medicine, who has been since distinguished by royal favor, and honored with a title, making it his boast, that he had never charged his memory with one single historical fact; that, on the contrary, he had, out of profound contempt for a sort of knowledge so utterly without value in his eyes, anxiously sought to extirpate from his remembrance,—or, if that were impossible, to perplex and confound,—any relics of historical records which might happen to survive from his youthful studies. 'And I am happy to say,' added he, 'and it is consoling to have it in my power conscientiously to declare, that, although I have not been able to dismiss entirely from my mind some ridiculous fact about a succession of four great monarchies, (for human infirmity still clings to our best efforts, and will forever prevent our attaining perfection,) still I have happily succeeded in so far confounding all distinctions of things and persons, of time and of places, that I could not assign the era of any one transaction, as I humbly trust, within a thousand years. The whole vast series of history is become a wilderness to me; and my mind, as to all such absurd knowledge, under the blessing of Heaven, is pretty nearly a tabula rasa.' In this Gothic expression of self-congratulation upon the extent of his own ignorance, though doubtless founded upon what the Germans call an einseitig or one-sided estimate, there was however that sort of truth which is apprehended only by strong minds, and such as naturally adhere to extreme courses. Certainly the blank knowledge of facts, which is all that most readers gather from their historical studies, is a mere deposition of rubbish without cohesion, and resting upon no basis of theory (that is, of general comprehensive survey) applied to the political development of nations, and accounting for the great stages of their internal movements. Rightly and profitably to understand history, it ought to be studied in as many ways as it may be written. History, as a composition, falls into three separate arrangements, obeying three distinct laws, and addressing itself to three distinct objects. Its first and humblest office is to deliver a naked unadorned exposition of public events and their circumstances. This form of history may be styled the purely Narrative; the second form is that which may be styled the Scenical; and the third the Philosophic. What is meant by Philosophic History, is well understood in our present advanced state of society; and few histories are written except in the simplest condition of human culture, which do not in part assume its functions, or which are content to rest their entire attraction upon the abstract interest of facts. The privileges of this form have, however, been greatly abused; and the truth of facts has been so much forced to bend before preconceived theories, whereas every valid theory ought to be abstracted from the facts, that Mr. Southey and others in this day have set themselves to decry the whole genus and class—as essentially at war with the very primary purposes of the art. But, under whatever name, it is evident that philosophy, or an investigation of the true moving forces in every great train and sequence of national events, and an exhibition of the motives and the moral consequences in their largest extent which have concurred with these events, cannot be omitted in any history above the level of a childish understanding. Mr. Southey himself will be found to illustrate this necessity by his practice, whilst assailing it in principle. As to the other mode of history—history treated scenically, it is upon the whole the most delightful to the reader, and the most susceptible of art and ornament in the hands of a skilful composer. The most celebrated specimen in this department is the Decline and Fall of Gibbon. And to this class may in part [Footnote 1] be referred the Historical Sketches of Voltaire. Histories of this class proceed upon principles of selection, presupposing in the reader a general knowledge of the great cardinal incidents, and bringing forward into especial notice those only which are susceptible of being treated with distinguished effect.

These are the three separate modes of treating history; each has its distinct purposes; and all must contribute to make up a comprehensive total of historical knowledge. The first furnishes the facts; the second opens a thousand opportunities for pictures of manners and national temper in every stage of their growth; whilst the third abstracts the political or the ethical moral, and unfolds the philosophy which knits the history of one nation to that of others, and exhibits the whole under their internal connection, as parts of one great process, carrying on the great economy of human improvement by many stages in many regions at one and the same time.

Pursued upon this comprehensive scale, the study of history is the study of human nature. But some have continued to reject it, not upon any objection to the quality of the knowledge gained—but simply on the ground of its limited extent; contending that in public and political transactions, such as compose the matter of history, human nature exhibits itself upon too narrow a scale and under too monotonous an aspect; that under different names, and in connection with different dates and regions, events virtually the same are continually revolving; that whatever novelty may strike the ear, in passages of history taken from periods widely remote, affects the names only, and circumstances that are extra-essential; that the passions meantime, the motives, and (allowing for difference of manners) the means even, are subject to no variety; that in ancient or in modern history there is no real accession made to our knowledge of human nature: but that all proceeds by cycles of endless repetition; and in fact that, according to the old complaint, 'there is nothing new under the sun.' It is not true that 'there is nothing new under the sun,' This is the complaint, as all men know, of a jaded voluptuary, seeking for a new pleasure and finding none, for reasons which lay in his own vitiated nature. Why did he seek for novelty? Because old pleasures had ceased to stimulate his exhausted organs; and that was reason enough why no new pleasure, had any been found, would operate as such for him. The weariness of spirit, and the poverty of pleasure which he bemoaned as belonging to our human condition, were not in reality objective, (as a German philosopher would express himself,) or laid in the nature of things, and thus pressing upon all alike, but subjective, that is to say, derived from the peculiar state and affections of his own organs for apprehending pleasure. Not the apprehensibile, but the apprehendens, was in fault—not the pleasures, or the dewy freshness of pleasures, had decayed, but the sensibilities of him who thus undertook to appraise them.