"Assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."
The justifying answer he reads in the Scriptures. Man fell, tempted from without by another, but by the act of his own free-will, and by his own choice. Thus, according to the theology of Milton, is the divine Rule of the universe completely justified in the sin into which man has fallen—in the punishment which has fallen upon man. The Justice of God is cleared. And his Love? That shines out, when man has perversely fallen, by the Covenant of Mercy, by finding out for him a Redeemer. And thus the two events in the history of mankind, which the Scriptures present as infinitely surpassing all others in importance, which are cardinal to the destinies of the human race, upon which all our woe, and, in the highest sense, all our weal are hung, become the subject of the work—the Fall of man consoled by the promise and undertaking of his Redemption.
The narrative of the Fall, delivered with an awful and a pathetic simplicity to us in a few words in the first chapter of Genesis, becomes accordingly the groundwork of the Poem; and these few words, with a few more scattered through the Scriptures, and barely hinting Celestial transactions, the War and Fall of the Angels, are by a genius, as daringly as powerfully creative, expanded into the mighty dimensions of an Epic. That unspeakable hope, foreshown to Adam as to be accomplished in distant generations, pouring an exhilarating beam upon the darkness of man's self-wrought destruction, which saves the catastrophe of the poem from utter despair, and which tranquillizes the sadness, has to be interwoven in the poet's narrative of the Fall. How stupendous the art that has disposed and ordered the immensity!—comprehended the complexity of the subject into a clearly harmonized, musically proportionate Whole!
Unless the Paradise Lost had risen from the soul of Milton as a hymn—unless he had begun to sing as a worshipper with his hands uplifted before the altar of incense, the choice of the subject would have been more than bold—it would have been the daring of presumption—an act of impiety. For he will put in dialogue God the Father and God the Son—disclosing their supreme counsels. He has prayed to the Third Person of the Godhead for light and succour. If this were a fetch of human wit, it was in the austere zealot and puritan a mockery. To a devout Roman Catholic poet, we could forgive every thing. For nursed among legends and visual representations of the invisible—panoplied in a childlike imposed faith from the access of impiety—his paternoster and his ave-marie more familiar to his lips than his bread, almost so as their breath—the most audacious representations may come to him vividly and naturally, without a scruple and without a thought. But Milton, the purged, the chastened, a spiritual iconoclast, drinking his faith by his own thirst on the waters of Zion, a champion whose weapons from the armoury of God "are given him tempered"—he to holy things cannot lay other than an awful hand. We know that he believed himself under a peculiar guidance. Surely, he had had visions of glory which, when he designed the poem that would include scenes in heaven, offered themselves again almost like very revelations. If we hesitate in believing this of him, it is because we conceive in him a stern intellectual pride and strength, which could not easily kneel to adore. But there we should greatly err. For he recognized in himself—
"Self-knowing, and from thence
Magnanimous to correspond with heaven"—
that capacity of song which nothing but sacred Epos could satisfy. Diodati asks him—"Quid studes?" and he answers—"Mehercle, immortalitatem!" This might persuade us that he finally chose the Fall of Man as he at first had chosen King Arthur. But not so. When Arthur dropped away from his purposes, naturally displaced by the after-choice, the will toward an Epic underwent an answerable revolution. The first subject was called by the "longing after immortality." But another longing, or the longing after another immortality, carried the will and the man to the second. The learning and the learned art of the Paradise Lost, concur in inclining us to look upon Milton as an artist rather than a worshipper. On closer consideration of its spirit, we cannot think of his putting his hand to such a work without the inwardly felt conviction that God was with him in it.
And, what is the feeling with which a youthful mind first regards the Paradise Lost? A holy awe—something as if it were a second Bible. So, too, have felt towards it our great poets. Elwood, the Quaker, has told us, but we cannot believe him, that he suggested to Milton the Paradise Regained! Hardly credible that, being the natural sequel and complement of the Paradise Lost, it should not have occurred to Milton. Pray, did the Quaker suggest the treatment? To conceive that man was virtually redeemed when Jesus had avouched, by proof, his perfect obedience, was a view, we think, proper to spring in a religious mind. It is remarkable, however, certainly, that the Atoning Sacrifice, which in the Paradise Lost is brought into the front of the Divine rule and of the poem, in the Paradise Regained hardly appears—if at all. In both you see the holy awe with which Milton shuns describing the scenes of the Passion. Between Adam and Michael, on that "top of speculation" the Visions end at the Deluge. The Crucifixion falls amongst the recorded events, and is told with few and sparing words. You must think that the removal of the dread Crucifixion from the action of the Paradise Regained recommended that action to the poet—contradicting Warburton, who blames him, as a poet, for not having chosen the more stupendous action. Milton thus obtained further a perfect Greek simplicity of plan. The Crucifixion has always seemed profaned when any modern poet has dared to describe it.
The Samson Agonistes was, you know, Milton's last work. How suitable, above all other subjects, to the Hebrew soul within him! Their common blindness—the simplicity of character that is proper to a strong man—"the plain heroic magnitude of mind"—the absolute dependence on God, that is to say, trustful dependence brought out by blindness—the submission under the visiting hand of heaven provoked by Samson's own disobedience—God's especial selection of him as his own, a dedicated Nazarite—his call to be a national deliverer—All these combined to affect his devout imagination; while one might almost think, that in the youthful Milton the same fancy had delighted in the prowess and exploits of Samson which rejoiced in the heroes of chivalrous fable.
What are Dryden's works to these? How shall we compare Poet with Poet—Man with Man?
Let us then turn to the other clauses in Sir Walter's eulogium, and we shall be able to go along with him in much—not all—of what he affirms of his darling Dryden. He was verily A GREAT TRANSLATOR. But before speaking of his performances, or of his principles, in that Fine Art, Translation, let us say a few words on its range and power.