VI.
For Dante's power, his absolute mastery over,
although rare exhibition of, the pathetic, I can do no more than
refer to the passages on Francesca di Rimini (
Infer
. C. v.
ver. 73 to the end.) and on Ugolino, (
Infer
. C. xxxiii.
ver. 1. to 75.) They are so well known, and rightly so admired,
that it would be pedantry to analyze their composition; but you
will note that the first is the pathos of passion, the second
that of affection; and yet even in the first, you seem to
perceive that the lovers have sacrificed their passion to the
cherishing of a deep and rememberable impression.
VII.
As to going into the endless subtle beauties of
Dante, that is impossible; but I cannot help citing the first
triplet of the 29th canto of the
Inferno
:
La molta gente e le diverse piaghe
Avean le luci mie sì inebriate,
Che dello stare a piangere eran vaghe.
So were mine eyes inebriate with the view
Of the vast multitude, whom various wounds
Disfigur'd, that they long'd to stay and weep.
(Cary.)
Nor have I now room for any specific comparison of Dante with
Milton. But if I had, I would institute it upon the ground of the
last canto of the
Inferno
from the 1st to the 69th line,
and from the 106th to the end. And in this comparison I should
notice Dante's occasional fault of becoming grotesque from being
too graphic without imagination; as in his Lucifer compared with
Milton's Satan. Indeed he is sometimes horrible rather than
terrible, falling into the
misaeton
instead of the
deinon
of
Longinus ; in
other words, many of his
images excite bodily disgust, and not moral fear. But here, as in
other cases, you may perceive that the faults of great authors
are generally excellencies carried to an excess.
Footnote
1
: Mr. Coleridge here notes: "I will, if I can, here make
an historical movement, and pay a proper compliment to Mr.
Hallam." Ed.
Footnote
2
: Mr. Coleridge here notes: "Here to speak of Mr. Cary's
translation."
Ed.
Footnote
3
:
De Subl
. 1. ix.
Milton
Born in London, 1608. Died, 1674
If we divide the period from the accession of Elizabeth to the
Protectorate of Cromwell into two unequal portions, the first
ending with the death of James I. the other comprehending the
reign of Charles and the brief glories of the Republic, we are
forcibly struck with a difference in the character of the
illustrious actors, by whom each period is rendered severally
memorable. Or rather, the difference in the characters of the
great men in each period, leads us to make this division.
Eminent as the intellectual powers were that were displayed in
both; yet in the number of great men, in the various sorts of
excellence, and not merely in the variety but almost diversity of
talents united in the same individual, the age of Charles falls
short of its predecessor; and the stars of the Parliament, keen
as their radiance was, in fulness and richness of lustre, yield
to the constellation at the court of Elizabeth; which can
only be paralleled by Greece in her brightest moment, when the
titles of the poet, the philosopher, the historian, the statesman
and the general not seldom formed a garland round the same head,
as in the instances of our Sidneys and Raleighs. But then, on the
other hand, there was a vehemence of will, an enthusiasm of
principle, a depth and an earnestness of spirit, which the charms
of individual fame and personal aggrandisement could not pacify,
an aspiration after reality, permanence, and general good,
in short, a moral grandeur in the latter period, with which
the low intrigues, Machiavellic maxims, and selfish and servile
ambition of the former, stand in painful contrast.
The causes of this it belongs not to the present occasion to
detail at length; but a mere allusion to the quick succession of
revolutions in religion, breeding a political indifference in the
mass of men to religion itself, the enormous increase of the
royal power in consequence of the humiliation of the nobility and
the clergy the transference of the papal authority to the
crown, the unfixed state of Elizabeth's own opinions, whose
inclinations were as popish as her interests were protestant
the controversial extravagance and practical imbecility of
her successor will help to explain the former period; and
the persecutions that had given a life and soul-interest to the
disputes so imprudently fostered by James, the ardour of a
conscious increase of power in the commons, and the greater
austerity of manners and maxims, the natural product and most
formidable weapon of religious disputation, not merely in
conjunction, but in closest combination, with newly awakened
political and republican zeal, these perhaps account for the
character of the latter aera.
In the close of the former period, and during the bloom of the
latter, the poet Milton was educated and formed; and he survived
the latter, and all the fond hopes and aspirations which had been
its life; and so in evil days, standing as the representative of
the combined excellence of both periods, he produced the
Paradise Lost
as by an after-throe of nature. "There are
some persons (observes a divine, a contemporary of Milton's) of
whom the grace of God takes early hold, and the good spirit
inhabiting them, carries them on in an even constancy through
innocence into virtue, their Christianity bearing equal date with
their manhood, and reason and religion, like warp and woof,
running together, make up one web of a wise and exemplary life.
This (he adds) is a most happy case, wherever it happens; for,
besides that there is no sweeter or more lovely thing on earth
than the early buds of piety, which drew from our Saviour signal
affection to the beloved disciple, it is better to have no wound
than to experience the most sovereign balsam, which, if it work a
cure, yet usually leaves a scar behind." Although it was and is
my intention to defer the consideration of Milton's own character
to the conclusion of this Lecture, yet I could not prevail on
myself to approach the
Paradise Lost
without impressing on
your minds the conditions under which such a work was in fact
producible at all, the original genius having been assumed as the
immediate agent and efficient cause; and these conditions I find
in the character of the times and in his own character. The age
in which the foundations of his mind were laid, was congenial to
it as one golden era of profound erudition and individual genius;
that in which the superstructure was carried up, was no
less favourable to it by a sternness of discipline and a show of
self-control, highly flattering to the imaginative dignity of an
heir of fame, and which won Milton over from the dear-loved
delights of academic groves and cathedral aisles to the
anti-prelatic party. It acted on him, too, no doubt, and modified
his studies by a characteristic controversial spirit, (his
presentation of God is tinted with it) a spirit not less
busy indeed in political than in theological and ecclesiastical
dispute, but carrying on the former almost always, more or less,
in the guise of the latter.
And so far as
Pope's censure
of our poet, that he
makes God the Father a school divine is just, we must
attribute it to the character of his age, from which the men of
genius, who escaped, escaped by a worse disease, the licentious
indifference of a Frenchified court.
Such was the
nidus
or soil, which constituted, in the
strict sense of the word, the circumstances of Milton's mind. In
his mind itself there were purity and piety absolute; an
imagination to which neither the past nor the present were
interesting, except as far as they called forth and enlivened the
great ideal, in which and for which he lived; a keen love of
truth, which, after many weary pursuits, found a harbour in a
sublime listening to the still voice in his own spirit, and as
keen a love of his country, which, after a disappointment still
more depressive, expanded and soared into a love of man as a
probationer of immortality. These were, these alone could be, the
conditions under which such a work as the
Paradise Lost
could be conceived and accomplished.
By a
life-long study Milton had known
What was of use to know,
What best to say could say, to do had done.
His actions to his words agreed, his words
To his large heart gave utterance due, his heart
Contain'd of good, wise, fair, the perfect shape;
and he left the imperishable total, as a bequest to the ages
coming, in the
Paradise Lost
.
Difficult as I shall find it to turn over these leaves without
catching some passage, which would tempt me to stop, I propose to
consider,
1st
, the general plan and arrangement of the work;
2ndly
, the subject with its difficulties and
advantages;
3rdly
, the poet's object, the spirit in the letter, the
enthumion en muthps
, the true school-divinity;
and
lastly
, the characteristic excellencies of the poem,
in what they consist, and by what means they were produced.
1.
As to the plan and ordonnance of the Poem.
Compare it with the
Iliad
, many of the books of which
might change places without any injury to the thread of the
story. Indeed, I doubt the original existence of the
Iliad
as one poem; it seems more probable that it was put together
about the time of the Pisistratidae. The
Iliad
and,
more or less, all epic poems, the subjects of which are taken
from history have no rounded conclusion; they remain, after
all, but single chapters from the volume of history, although
they are ornamental chapters. Consider the exquisite simplicity
of the
Paradise Lost
. It and it alone really possesses a
beginning, a middle, and an end; it has the totality of the poem
as distinguished from the
ab ovo
birth and parentage, or
straight line, of history.
2.
As to the subject.
In Homer, the supposed importance of the subject, as the first
effort of confederated Greece, is an after-thought of the
critics; and the interest, such as it is, derived from the events
themselves, as distinguished from the manner of representing
them, is very languid to all but Greeks. It is a Greek poem. The
superiority of the
Paradise Lost
is obvious in this
respect, that the interest transcends the limits of a nation. But
we do not generally dwell on this excellence of the
Paradise
Lost
, because it seems attributable to Christianity itself;
yet in fact the interest is wider than Christendom, and
comprehends the Jewish and Mohammedan worlds; nay, still
further, inasmuch as it represents the origin of evil, and the
combat of evil and good, it contains matter of deep interest to
all mankind, as forming the basis of all religion, and the true
occasion of all philosophy whatsoever.
The FALL of Man is the subject; Satan is the cause; man's
blissful state the immediate object of his enmity and attack; man
is warned by an angel who gives him an account of all that was
requisite to be known, to make the warning at once intelligible
and awful; then the temptation ensues, and the Fall; then the
immediate sensible consequence; then the consolation, wherein an
angel presents a vision of the history of men with the ultimate
triumph of the Redeemer. Nothing is touched in this vision but
what is of general interest in religion; any thing else would
have been improper.
The inferiority of Klopstock's
Messiah
is inexpressible. I
admit the prerogative of poetic feeling, and poetic faith; but I
cannot suspend the judgment even for a moment. A poem may in one
sense be a dream, but it must be a waking dream. In Milton you
have a religious faith combined with the moral nature; it is an
efflux; you go along with it. In Klopstock there is a wilfulness;
he makes things so and so. The feigned speeches and events in the
Messiah
shock us like falsehoods; but nothing of that sort
is felt in the
Paradise Lost
, in which no particulars, at
least very few indeed, are touched which can come into collision
or juxta-position with recorded matter.
But notwithstanding the advantages in Milton's subject, there
were concomitant insuperable difficulties, and Milton has
exhibited marvellous skill in keeping most of them out of sight.
High poetry is the translation of reality into the ideal under
the predicament of succession of time only. The poet is an
historian, upon condition of moral power being the only force in
the universe. The very grandeur of his subject ministered a
difficulty to Milton. The statement of a being of high intellect,
warring against the supreme Being, seems to contradict the idea
of a supreme Being. Milton precludes our feeling this, as much as
possible, by keeping the peculiar attributes of divinity less in
sight, making them to a certain extent allegorical only. Again,
poetry implies the language of excitement; yet how to reconcile
such language with God? Hence Milton confines the poetic passion
in God's speeches to the language of scripture; and once only
allows the
passio vera,
or
quasi-humana
to appear,
in the passage, where the Father contemplates his own likeness in
the Son before the battle:
Go then, thou Mightiest, in thy Father's might,
Ascend my chariot, guide the rapid wheels
That shake Heaven's basis, bring forth all my war,
My bow and thunder; my almighty arms
Gird on, and sword upon thy puissant thigh;
Pursue these sons of darkness, drive them out
From all Heaven's bounds into the utter deep:
There let them learn, as likes them, to despise
God and Messiah his anointed king.
(B. VI. v. 710.)
3.
As to Milton's object:
It was to justify the ways of God to man! The controversial
spirit observable in many parts of the poem, especially in God's
speeches, is immediately attributable to the great controversy of
that age, the origination of evil. The Arminians considered it a
mere calamity. The Calvinists took away all human will. Milton
asserted the will, but declared for the enslavement of the will
out of an act of the will itself. There are three powers in us,
which distinguish us from the beasts that perish;
1,
reason;
2,
the power of viewing universal truth;
and
3,
the power of contracting universal truth into
particulars. Religion is the will in the reason, and love in the
will.
The character of Satan is pride and sensual indulgence, finding
in self the sole motive of action. It is the character so often
seen
in little
on the political stage. It exhibits all the
restlessness, temerity, and cunning which have marked the mighty
hunters of mankind from Nimrod to Napoleon. The common
fascination of men is, that these great men, as they are called,
must act from some great motive. Milton has carefully marked in
his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which
would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. To place this
lust of self in opposition to denial of self or duty, and to show
what exertions it would make, and what pains endure to accomplish
its end, is Milton's particular object in the character of Satan.
But around this character he has thrown a singularity of daring,
a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined splendour, which
constitute the very height of poetic sublimity.
Lastly
, as to the execution:
The language and versification of the
Paradise Lost
are
peculiar in being so much more necessarily correspondent to each
than those in any other poem or poet. The connexion of the
sentences and the position of the words are exquisitely
artificial; but the position is rather according to the logic of
passion or universal logic, than to the logic of grammar. Milton
attempted to make the English language obey the logic of passion
as perfectly as the Greek and Latin. Hence the occasional
harshness in the construction.
Sublimity is the pre-eminent characteristic of the
Paradise
Lost
. It is not an arithmetical sublime like Klopstock's,
whose rule always is to treat what we might think large as
contemptibly small. Klopstock mistakes bigness for greatness.
There is a greatness arising from images of effort and daring,
and also from those of moral endurance; in Milton both are
united. The fallen angels are human passions, invested with a
dramatic reality.
The apostrophe to light at the commencement of the third book is
particularly beautiful as an intermediate link between Hell and
Heaven; and observe, how the second and third book support the
subjective character of the poem. In all modern poetry in
Christendom there is an under consciousness of a sinful nature, a
fleeting away of external things, the mind or subject greater
than the object, the reflective character predominant. In the
Paradise Lost
the sublimest parts are the revelations of
Milton's own mind, producing itself and evolving its own
greatness; and this is so truly so, that when that which is
merely entertaining for its objective beauty is introduced, it at
first seems a discord.
In the description of Paradise itself you have Milton's sunny
side as a man; here his descriptive powers are exercised to the
utmost, and he draws deep upon his Italian resources. In the
description of Eve, and throughout this part of the poem, the
poet is predominant over the theologian. Dress is the symbol of
the Fall, but the mark of intellect; and the metaphysics of dress
are, the hiding what is not symbolic and displaying by
discrimination what is. The love of Adam and Eve in Paradise is
of the highest merit not phantomatic, and yet removed from
every thing degrading. It is the sentiment of one rational being
towards another made tender by a specific difference in that
which is essentially the same in both; it is a union of
opposites, a giving and receiving mutually of the permanent in
either, a completion of each in the other.
Milton is not a picturesque, but a musical, poet; although he has
this merit that the object chosen by him for any particular
foreground always remains prominent to the end, enriched, but not
incumbered, by the opulence of descriptive details furnished by
an exhaustless imagination. I wish the
Paradise Lost
were
more carefully read and studied than I can see any ground for
believing it is, especially those parts which, from the habit of
always looking for a story in poetry, are scarcely read at all,
as for example, Adam's vision of future events in the llth
and l2th books. No one can rise from the perusal of this immortal
poem without a deep sense of the grandeur and the purity of
Milton's soul, or without feeling how susceptible of domestic
enjoyments he really was, notwithstanding the discomforts which
actually resulted from an apparently unhappy choice in marriage.
He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but
finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in
religion, or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the
living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the
world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendant
ideal.
Footnote
1
:
Table Talk
, vol. ii. p. 264.
Footnote
2
: Here Mr. C. notes: "Not perhaps here, but towards, or
as, the conclusion, to chastise the fashionable notion that
poetry is a relaxation or amusement, one of the superfluous toys
and luxuries of the intellect! To contrast the permanence of
poems with the transiency and fleeting moral effects of empires,
and what are called, great events." Ed.
Notes on Milton 1
(Hayley quotes the following passage: )
"Time serves not now, and, perhaps, I might seem too
profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in
the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to
herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether
that epic form, whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other
two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the Book of
Job a brief, model," p. 69.
These latter words deserve particular notice. I do not doubt
that Milton intended his
Paradise Lost
as an epic of the
first class, and that the poetic dialogue of the
Book of
Job
was his model for the general scheme of his
Paradise
Regained
. Readers would not be disappointed in this latter
poem, if they proceeded to a perusal of it with a proper
preconception of the kind of interest intended to be excited in
that admirable work. In its kind it is the most perfect poem
extant, though its kind may be inferior in interest being
in its essence didactic to that other sort, in which
instruction is conveyed more effectively, because less directly,
in connection with stronger and more pleasurable emotions, and
thereby in a closer affinity with action. But might we not as
rationally object to an accomplished woman's conversing, however
agreeably, because it has happened that we have received a keener
pleasure from her singing to the harp?
Si
genus sit probo et sapienti viro hand indignum, et si poema sit
in suo genere perfectum, satis est. Quod si hoc auctor idem
altioribus numeris et carmini diviniori ipsum per se divinum
superaddiderit, mehercule satis est, et plusquam satis.
I cannot, however, but wish that the answer of
Jesus to Satan in the 4th book, (v. 285.)
Think not but that I know these things;
Or think I know them not,
Not therefore am I short
Of knowing what I ought, &c.
had breathed the spirit of Hayley's noble quotation rather than
the narrow bigotry of Gregory the Great. The passage is, indeed,
excellent, and is partially true; but partial truth is the worst
mode of conveying falsehood.
(Hayley, p. 75.) "The sincerest friends of Milton may
here agree with Johnson, who speaks of his controversial
merriment as disgusting."
The man who reads a work meant for immediate effect on one age
with the notions and feelings of another, may be a refined
gentleman, but must be a sorry critic. He who possesses
imagination enough to live with his forefathers, and, leaving
comparative reflection for an after moment, to give himself up
during the first perusal to the feelings of a contemporary, if
not a partizan, will, I dare aver, rarely find any part of
Milton's prose works disgusting.
(Hayley, p. 104. Hayley is speaking of the passage in Milton's
Answer to Icon Basilice
, in which he accuses Charles of
taking his Prayer in captivity from Pamela's prayer in the 3rd
book of Sidney's
Arcadia
. The passage begins,
"But this king, not content with that which, although
in a thing holy, is no holy theft, to attribute to his own making
other men's whole prayers, &c. (Symmons' Ed. 1806, p.
407.))
Assuredly, I regret that Milton should have written this
passage; and yet the adoption of a prayer from a romance on such
an occasion does not evince a delicate or deeply sincere mind. We
are the creatures of association. There are some excellent moral
and even serious lines in
Hudibras
; but what if a
clergyman should adorn his sermon with a quotation from that
poem! Would the abstract propriety of the verses leave him
"honourably acquitted?" The Christian baptism of a line in Virgil
is so far from being a parallel, that it is ridiculously
inappropriate, an absurdity as glaring as that of the
bigotted Puritans, who objected to some of the noblest and most
scriptural prayers ever dictated by wisdom and piety, simply
because the Roman Catholics had used them.
(Hayley, p. 107.) "The ambition of Milton,"
&c.
I do not approve the so frequent use of this word
relatively to Milton. Indeed the fondness for ingrafting a good
sense on the word "ambition," is not a Christian impulse in
general.
Hayley, p. 110. "Milton himself seems to have thought
it allowable in literary contention to vilify, &c. the character
of an opponent; but surely this doctrine is unworthy,"
&c.
If ever it were allowable, in this ease it was especially so.
But these general observations, without meditation on the
particular times and the genius of the times, are most often as
unjust as they are always superficial.
(Hayley, p. 133. Hayley is speaking of Milton's panegyric on
Cromwell's government:-)
Besides, however Milton might and did regret the
immediate necessity, yet what alternative was there? Was it not
better that Cromwell should usurp power, to protect religious
freedom at least, than that the Presbyterians should usurp it to
introduce a religious persecution, extending the notion of
spiritual concerns so far as to leave no freedom even to a man's
bedchamber?
(Hayley, p. 250. Hayley's conjectures on the origin of the
Paradise Lost
: )
If Milton borrowed a hint from any writer, it was
more probably from Strada's Prolusions, in which the Fall of the
Angels is pointed out as the noblest subject for a Christian
poet.[1] The more dissimilar the detailed images are, the more
likely it is that a great genius should catch the general
idea.
(Hayl. p. 294. Extracts from the
Adamo
of Andreini:)
"Lucifero. Che dal mio centre oscuro
Mi chiama a rimirar cotanta luce?
Who from my dark abyss
Calls me to gaze on this excess of light?"
The words in italics are an unfair translation. They may suggest
that Milton really had read and did imitate this drama. The
original is 'in so great light.' Indeed the whole version is
affectedly and inaccurately Miltonic.
(p Ib. v. 11.)
Che di fango opre festi
Forming thy works of
dust (no, dirt. )
(Ib. v. 17.)
Tessa pur stella a stella
V'aggiungo e luna, e sole.
Let him unite above Star upon star, moon, sun.
Let him weave star to star, Then join both moon and sun!
(Ib. v. 21.)
Ch'al fin con biasmo e scorno
Vana l'opra sara, vano il sudore!
Since in the end division
Shall prove his works and all his efforts vain.
Since finally with censure and disdain
Vain shall the work be, and his toil be vain!
1796
3
The reader of Milton must be always on his duty: he is
surrounded with sense; it rises in every line; every word is to
the purpose. There are no lazy intervals; all has been
considered, and demands and merits observation. If this be called
obscurity, let it be remembered that it is such an obscurity as
is a compliment to the reader; not that vicious obscurity, which
proceeds from a muddled head.
Footnote
1
: These notes were written by Mr. Coleridge in a copy of
Hayley's
Life of Milton
, (4to. 1796), belonging to Mr.
Poole. By him they were communicated, and this seems the fittest
place for their publication.
Ed.