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$Title{Dr. Samuel Johnson On Milton
Part V}
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$Author{Johnson, Dr. Samuel}
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$Subject{milton
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$Date{1889}
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Title:       Dr. Samuel Johnson On Milton
Author:      Johnson, Dr. Samuel
Date:        1889

Part V

     It is justly remarked by Addison that this poem has, by the nature of its
subject, the advantage above all others, that it is universally and
perpetually interesting.  All mankind will, through all ages, bear the same
relation to Adam and to Eve, and must partake of that good and evil which
extend to themselves.

     Of the machinery, so called from <illegible>, by which is meant the
occasional interposition of supernatural power, another fertile topic of
critical remarks, here is no room to speak, because every thing is done under
the immediate and visible direction of Heaven; but the rule is so far observed
that no part of the action could have been accomplished by any other means.

     Of episodes, I think there are only two contained in Raphael's relation
of the war in heaven, and Michael's prophetic account of the changes to happen
in this world.  Both are closely connected with the great action; one was
necessary to Adam as a warning, the other as a consolation.

     To the completeness or integrity of the design, nothing can be objected;
it has distinctly and clearly what Aristotle requires - a beginning, a middle,
and an end.  There is perhaps no poem, of the same length, from which so
little can be taken without apparent mutilation.  Here are no funeral games,
nor is there any long description of a shield.  The short digressions at the
beginning of the third, seventh, and ninth books might doubtless be spared;
but superfluities so beautiful who would take away? or who does not wish that
the author of the "Iliad" had gratified succeeding ages with a little
knowledge of himself?  Perhaps no passages are more frequently or more
attentively read than those extrinsic paragraphs; and, since the end of poetry
is pleasure, that cannot be unpoetical with which all are pleased.

     The questions, whether the action of the poem be strictly one, whether
the poem can be properly termed heroic, and who is the hero, are raised by
such readers as draw their principles of judgment rather from books than from
reason.  Milton, though he entitled "Paradise Lost" only a poem, yet calls it
himself heroic song.  Dryden petulantly and indecently denies the heroism of
Adam; because he was overcome; but there is no reason why the hero should not
be unfortunate, except established practice, since success and virtue do not
go necessarily together.  Cato is the hero of Lucan; but Lucan's authority
will not be suffered by Quintilian to decide.  However, if success be
necessary, Adam's deceiver was at last crushed; Adam was restored to his
Maker's favor, and therefore may securely resume his human rank.

     After the scheme and fabric of the poem, must be considered its component
parts, the sentiments and the diction.

     The sentiments, as expressive of manners, or appropriated to characters,
are, for the greater part, unexceptionably just.

     Splendid passages, containing lessons of morality or precepts of
prudence, occur seldom.  Such is the original formation of this poem, that, as
it admits no human manners till the fall, it can give little assistance to
human conduct.  Its end is to raise the thoughts above sublunary cares or
pleasures.  Yet the praise of that fortitude, with which Abdiel maintained his
singularity of virtue against the scorn of multitudes, may be accommodated to
all times; and Raphael's reproof of Adam's curiosity after the planetary
motions, with the answer returned by Adam, may be confidently opposed to any
rule of life which any poet has delivered.

     The thoughts which are occasionally called forth in the progress are such
as could only be produced by an imagination in the highest degree fervid and
active, to which materials were supplied by incessant study and unlimited
curiosity.  The heat of Milton's mind may be said to sublimate his learning,
to throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser
parts.

     He had considered creation in its whole extent, and his descriptions are
therefore learned.  He had accustomed his imagination to unrestrained
indulgence, and his conceptions therefore were extensive.  The characteristic
quality of his poem is sublimity.  He sometimes descends to the elegant, but
his element is the great.  He can occasionally invest himself with grace; but
his natural port is gigantic loftiness.^1 He can please when pleasure is
required; but it is his peculiar power to astonish.

[Footnote 1: Algarotti terms it gigantesca sublimita Miltoniana.]

     He seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, and to know
what it was that nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon
others; the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing
the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful; he therefore
chose a subject on which too much could not be said, on which he might tire
his fancy without the censure of extravagance.

     The appearances of nature, and the occurrences of life, did not satiate
his appetite of greatness.  To paint things as they are requires a minute
attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy.  Milton's delight was
to sport in the wide regions of possibility; reality was a scene too narrow
for his mind.  He sent his faculties out upon discovery into worlds where only
imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and
furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the counsels of
hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven.

     But he could not be always in other worlds; he must sometimes revisit
earth, and tell of things visible and known.  When he cannot raise wonder by
the sublimity of his mind, he gives delight by its fertility.

     Whatever be his subject, he never fails to fill the imagination; but his
images and descriptions of the scenes or operations of nature do not seem to
be always copied from original form, nor to have the freshness, raciness, and
energy of immediate observation.  He saw Nature, as Dryden expresses it,
"through the spectacles of books;" and on most occasions calls learning to his
assistance.  The garden of Eden brings to his mind the vale of Enna, where
Proserpine was gathering flowers.  Satan makes his way through fighting
elements like Argo between the Cyanean rocks; or Ulysses, between the two
Sicilian whirlpools, when he shunned Charybdis on the larboard.  The
mythological allusions have been justly censured, as not being always used
with notice of their vanity; but they contribute variety to the narration, and
produce an alternate exercise of the memory and the fancy.

     His similes are less numerous and more various than those of his
predecessors.  But he does not confine himself within the limits of rigorous
comparison: his great excellence is amplitude; and he expands the adventitious
image beyond the dimensions which the occasion required.  Thus, comparing the
shield of Satan to the orb of the moon, he crowds the imagination with the
discovery of the telescope, and all the wonders which the telescope discovers.

     Of his moral sentiments it is hardly praise to affirm that they excel
those of all other poets; for this superiority he was indebted to his
acquaintance with the sacred writings.  The ancient epic poets, wanting the
light of Revelation, were very unskilful teachers of virtue; their principal
characters may be great, but they are not amiable.  The reader may rise from
their works with a greater degree of active or passive fortitude, and
sometimes of prudence; but he will be able to carry away few precepts of
justice, and none of mercy.

     From the Italian writers it appears that the advantages of even Christian
knowledge may be possessed in vain.  Ariosto's pravity is generally known; and
though the "Deliverance of Jerusalem" may be considered as a sacred subject,
the poet has been very sparing of moral instruction.

     In Milton every line breathes sanctity of thought and purity of manners,
except when the train of the narration requires the introduction of the
rebellious spirits; and even they are compelled to acknowledge their
subjection to God, in such a manner as excites reverence and confirms piety.

     Of human beings there are but two; but those two are the parents of
mankind, venerable before their fall for dignity and innocence, and amiable
after it for repentance and submission.  In the first state their affection is
tender without weakness, and their piety sublime without presumption.  When
they have sinned, they show how discord begins in mutual frailty, and how it
ought to cease in mutual forbearance; how confidence of the divine favor is
forfeited by sin, and how hope of pardon may be obtained by penitence and
prayer.  A state of innocence we can only conceive, if, indeed, in our present
misery, it be possible to conceive it; but the sentiments and worship proper
to a fallen and offending being, we have all to learn, as we have all to
practise.

     The poet, whatever be done, is always great.  Our progenitors, in their
first state, conversed with angels; even when folly and sin had degraded them,
they had not in their humiliation the port of mean suitors; and they rise
again to reverential regard when we find that their prayers were heard.

     As human passions did not enter the world before the fall, there is in
the "Paradise Lost" little opportunity for the pathetic; but what little there
is has not been lost.  That passion which is peculiar to rational nature, the
anguish arising from the consciousness of transgression, and the horrors
attending the sense of the Divine displeasure, are very justly described and
forcibly impressed.  But the passions are moved only on one occasion;
sublimity is the general and prevailing quality of this poem; sublimity
variously modified, sometimes descriptive, sometimes argumentative.

     The defects and faults of "Paradise Lost," for faults and defects every
work of man must have, it is the business of impartial criticism to discover.
As, in displaying the excellence of Milton, I have not made long quotations,
because of selecting beauties there had been no end, I shall in the same
general manner mention that which seems to deserve censure; for what
Englishman can take delight in transcribing passages which, if they lessen the
reputation of Milton, diminish in some degree the honor of our country?

     The generality of my scheme does not admit the frequent notice of verbal
inaccuracies; which Bentley, perhaps better skilled in grammar than in poetry,
has often found, though he sometimes made them, and which he imputed to the
obtrusions of a reviser, whom the author's blindness obliged him to employ; a
supposition rash and groundless, if he thought it true; and vile and
pernicious, if, as is said, he in private allowed it to be false.

     The plan of "Paradise Lost" has this inconvenience, that it comprises
neither human actions nor human manners.  The man and woman who act and suffer
are in a state which no other man or woman can ever know.  The reader finds no
transaction in which he can be engaged; beholds no condition in which he can
by any effort of imagination place himself; he has, therefore, little natural
curiosity or sympathy.

     We all, indeed, feel the effects of Adam's disobedience; we all sin like
Adam, and like him must all bewail our offences; we have restless and
insidious enemies in the fallen angels; and in the blessed spirits we have
guardians and friends: in the redemption of mankind we hope to be included;
and in the description of heaven and hell we are surely interested, as we are
all to reside hereafter either in the regions of horror or of bliss.

     But these truths are too important to be new; they have been taught to
our infancy; they have mingled with our solitary thoughts and familiar
conversations, and are habitually interwoven with the whole texture of life.
Being therefore not new, they raise no unaccustomed emotion in the mind; what
we knew before we cannot learn; what is not unexpected cannot surprise.

     Of the ideas suggested by these awful scenes, from some we recede with
reverence, except when stated hours require their association; and from others
we shrink with horror, or admit them only as salutary inflictions, as
counterpoises to our interests and passions.  Such images rather obstruct the
career of fancy than incite it.

     Pleasure and terror are, indeed, the genuine sources of poetry; but
poetical pleasure must be such as human imagination can at least conceive; and
poetical terror such as human strength and fortitude may combat.  The good and
evil of eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit; the mind sinks under
them with passive helplessness, content with calm belief and humble adoration.

     Known truths, however, may take a different appearance, and be conveyed
to the mind by a new train of intermediate images.  This Milton has
undertaken, and performed with pregnancy and vigor of mind peculiar to
himself.  Whoever considers the few radical positions which the Scriptures
afforded him, will wonder by what energetic operation he expanded them to such
extent, and ramified them to so much variety, restrained as he was by
religious reverence from licentiousness of fiction.

     Here is a full display of the united force of study and genius; of a
great accumulation of materials, with judgment to digest and fancy to combine
them: Milton was able to select from nature, or from story, from ancient
fable, or from modern science, whatever could illustrate or adorn his
thoughts.  An accumulation of knowledge impregnated his mind, fermented by
study and exalted by imagination.

     It has been therefore said, without an indecent hyperbole, by one of his
encomiasts, that in reading "Paradise Lost," we read a book of universal
knowledge.

     But original deficience cannot be supplied.  The want of human interest
is always felt.  "Paradise Lost" is one of the books which the reader admires
and lays down, and forgets to take up again.  None ever wished it longer than
it is.  Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.  We read Milton for
instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for
recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.

     Another inconvenience of Milton's design is, that it requires the
description of what cannot be described, the agency of spirits.  He saw that
immateriality supplied no images, and that he could not show angels acting but
by instruments of action: he therefore invested them with form and matter.
This, being necessary, was therefore defensible; and he should have secured
the consistency of his system by keeping immateriality out of sight, and
enticing his reader to drop it from his thoughts.  But he has unhappily
perplexed his poetry with his philosophy.  His infernal and celestial powers
are sometimes pure spirit, and sometimes animated body.  When Satan walks with
his lance upon the burning marl, he has a body; when, in his passage between
hell and the new world, he is in danger of sinking in the vacuity, and is
supported by a gust of rising vapors, he has a body; when he animates the
toad, he seems to be mere spirit, that can penetrate matter at pleasure; when
he starts up in his own shape, he has at least a determined form; and when he
is brought before Gabriel, he has a spear and a shield, which he had the power
of hiding in the toad, though the arms of the contending angels are evidently
material.

     The vulgar inhabitants of Pandemonium, being incorporeal spirits, are at
large, though without number, in a limited space: yet in the battle, when they
were overwhelmed by mountains, their armor hurt them, crushed in upon their
substance, now grown gross by sinning.  This likewise happened to the
uncorrupted angels, who were overthrown the sooner for their arms, for unarmed
they might easily as spirits have evaded by contraction or remove.  Even as
spirits they are hardly spiritual; for contraction and remove are images of
matter; but if they could have escaped without their armor, they might have
escaped from it, and left only the empty cover to be battered.  Uriel, when he
rides on a sunbeam, is material; Satan is material when he is afraid of the
prowess of Adam.

     The confusion of spirit and matter which pervades the whole narration of
the war of Heaven fills it with incongruity; and the book in which it is
related is, I believe, the favorite of children, and gradually neglected as
knowledge is increased.

     After the operation of immaterial agents which cannot be explained, may
be considered that of allegorical persons which have no real existence.  To
exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them
with activity, has always been the right of poetry.  But such airy beings are,
for the most part, suffered only to do their natural office, and retire.  Thus
Fame tells a tale, and Victory hovers over a general or perches on a standard;
but Fame and Victory can do no more.  To give them any real employment, or
ascribe to them any material agency, is to make them allegorical no longer,
but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to nonentity.  In the "Prometheus"
of Aeschylus we see Violence and Strength, and in the "Alcestis" of Euripides
we see Death, brought upon the stage, all as active persons of the drama; but
no precedents can justify absurdity.

     Milton's allegory of Sin and Death is undoubtedly faulty.  Sin is indeed
the mother of Death, and may be allowed to be the portress of hell; but when
they stop the journey of Satan, a journey described as real, and when Death
offers him battle, the allegory is broken.  That Sin and Death should have
shown the way to hell, might have been allowed; but they cannot facilitate the
passage by building a bridge, because the difficulty of Satan's passage is
described as real and sensible, and the bridge ought to be only figurative.
The hell assigned to the rebellious spirits is described as not less local
than the residence of man.  It is placed in some distant part of space,
separated from the regions of harmony and order by a chaotic waste and an
unoccupied vacuity; but Sin and Death worked up a mole of aggravated soil,
cemented with asphaltus; a work too bulky for ideal architects.

     This unskilful allegory appears to me one of the greatest faults of the
poem; and to this there was no temptation but the author's opinion of its
beauty.

     To the conduct of the narrative some objections may be made.  Satan is
with great expectation brought before Gabriel in Paradise, and is suffered to
go away unmolested.  The creation of man is represented as the consequence of
the vacuity left in heaven by the expulsion of the rebels; yet Satan mentions
it as a report rife in heaven before his departure.

     To find sentiments for the state of innocence was very difficult; and
something of anticipation, perhaps, is now and then discovered.  Adam's
discourse of dreams seems not to be the speculation of a new-created being.  I
know not whether his answer to the angel's reproof for curiosity does not want
something of propriety; it is the speech of a man acquainted with many other
men.  Some philosophical notions, especially when the philosophy is false,
might have been better omitted.  The angel, in a comparison, speaks of
timorous deer, before deer were yet timorous, and before Adam could understand
the comparison.

     Dryden remarks that Milton has some flats among his elevations.  This is
only to say that all the parts are not equal.  In every work one part must be
for the sake of others: a palace must have passages; a poem must have
transitions.  It is no more to be required that wit should always be blazing,
than that the sun should always stand at noon.  In a great work there is a
vicissitude of luminous and opaque parts, as there is in the world a
succession of day and night.  Milton, when he has expatiated in the sky, may
be allowed sometimes to revisit earth; for what other author ever soared so
high, or sustained his flight so long?

     Milton, being well versed in the Italian poets, appears to have borrowed
often from them; and, as every man catches something from his companions, his
desire of imitating Ariosto's levity has disgraced his work with the "Paradise
of Fools;" a fiction not in itself ill-imagined, but too ludicrous for its
place.

     His play on words, in which he delights too often; his equivocations,
which Bentley endeavors to defend by the example of the ancients; his
unnecessary and ungraceful use of terms of art, it is not necessary to
mention, because they are easily remarked and generally censured; and at last
bear so little proportion to the whole that they scarcely deserve the
attention of a critic.

     Such are the faults of that wonderful performance, "Paradise Lost;" which
he who can put in balance with its beauties must be considered not as nice but
as dull, as less to be censured for want of candor than pitied for want of
sensibility.

     Of "Paradise Regained" the general judgment seems now to be right, that
it is in many parts elegant, and everywhere instructive.  It was not to be
supposed that the writer of "Paradise Lost" could ever write without great
effusions of fancy and exalted precepts of wisdom.  The basis of "Paradise
Regained" is narrow; a dialogue without action can never please like an union
of the narrative and dramatic powers.  Had this poem been written not by
Milton, but by some imitator, it would have claimed and received universal
praise.

     If "Paradise Regained" has been too much depreciated, "Samson Agonistes"
has in requital been too much admired.  It could only be by long prejudice,
and the bigotry of learning, that Milton could prefer the ancient tragedies,
with their encumbrance of a chorus, to the exhibitions of the French and
English stages; and it is only by a blind confidence in the reputation of
Milton that a drama can be praised in which the intermediate parts have
neither cause nor consequence, neither hasten nor retard the catastrophe.

     In this tragedy are, however, many particular beauties, many just
sentiments and striking lines; but it wants that power of attracting the
attention which a well-connected plan produces.

     Milton would not have excelled in dramatic writing; he knew human nature
only in the gross, and had never studied the shades of character, nor the
combinations of concurring, or the perplexity of contending, passions.  He had
read much, and knew what books could teach; but had mingled little in the
world, and was deficient in the knowledge which experience must confer.

     Through all his greater works there prevails an uniform peculiarity of
diction, a mode and cast of expression which bears little resemblance to that
of any former writer; and which is so far removed from common use that an
unlearned reader, when he first opens his book, finds himself surprised by a
new language.

     This novelty has been, by those who can find nothing wrong in Milton,
imputed to his laborious endeavors after words suitable to the grandeur of his
ideas.  Our language, says Addison, sunk under him.  But the truth is, that,
both in prose and verse, he had formed his style by a perverse and pedantic
principle.  He was desirous to use English words with a foreign idiom.  This
in all his prose is discovered and condemned; for there judgment operates
freely, neither softened by the beauty nor awed by the dignity of his
thoughts; but such is the power of his poetry that his call is obeyed without
resistance, the reader feels himself in captivity to a higher and a nobler
mind, and criticism sinks in admiration.

     Milton's style was not modified by his subject; what is shown with
greater extent in "Paradise Lost" may be found in "Comus." One source of his
peculiarity was his familiarity with the Tuscan poets; the disposition of his
words is, I think, frequently Italian; perhaps sometimes combined with other
tongues.

     Of him, at least, may be said what Jonson says of Spenser, that he wrote
no language, but has formed what Butler calls a Babylonish dialect, in itself
harsh and barbarous, but made by exalted genius and extensive learning the
vehicle of so much instruction and so much pleasure, that, like other lovers,
we find grace in its deformity.

     Whatever be the faults of his diction he cannot want the praise of
copiousness and variety: he was master of his language in its full extent; and
has selected the melodious words with such diligence that from his book alone
the art of English poetry might be learned.

     After his diction something must be said of his versification.  The
measure, he says, is the English heroic verse without rhyme.  Of this mode he
had many examples among the Italians, and some in his own country.  The Earl
of Surrey is said to have translated one of Virgil's books without rhyme; and
beside our tragedies, a few short poems had appeared in blank verse,
particularly one tending to reconcile the nation to Raleigh's wild attempt
upon Guiana, and probably written by Raleigh himself.  These petty
performances cannot be supposed to have much influenced Milton, who more
probably took his hint from Trissino's Italia Liberata; and, finding blank
verse easier than rhyme, was desirous of persuading himself that it is better.

     Rhyme, he says, and says truly, is no necessary adjunct of true poetry.
But, perhaps, of poetry, as a mental operation, metre or music is no necessary
adjunct: it is, however, by the music of metre that poetry has been
discriminated in all languages; and, in languages melodiously constructed with
a due proportion of long and short syllables, metre is sufficient.  But one
language cannot communicate its rules to another; where metre is scanty and
imperfect, some help is necessary.  The music of the English heroic lines
strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of
every line cooperate together; this co-operation can be only obtained by the
preservation of every verse unmingled with another as a distinct system of
sounds; and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of
rhyme.  The variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse,
changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer; and
there are only a few skilful and happy readers of Milton who enable their
audience to perceive where the lines end or begin.  Blank verse, said an
ingenious critic, seems to be verse only to the eye.

     Poetry may subsist without rhyme, but English poetry will not often
please; nor can rhyme ever be safely spared but where the subject is able to
support itself.  Blank verse makes some approach to that which is called the
lapidary style; has neither the easiness of prose nor the melody of numbers,
and therefore tires by long continuance.  Of the Italian writers without
rhyme, whom Milton alleges as precedents, not one is popular; what reason
could urge in its defence has been confuted by the ear.

     But, whatever be the advantages of rhyme, I cannot prevail on myself to
wish that Milton had been a rhymer; for I cannot wish his work to be other
than it is; yet, like other heroes, he is to be admired rather than imitated.
He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse; but those
that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.

     The highest praise of genius is original invention.  Milton cannot be
said to have contrived the structure of an epic poem, and therefore owes
reverence to that vigor and amplitude of mind to which all generations must be
indebted for the art of poetical narration, for the textures of the fable, the
variation of incidents, the interposition of dialogue, and all the stratagems
that surprise and enchain attention.  But, of all the borrowers from Homer,
Milton is perhaps the least indebted.  He was naturally a thinker for himself,
confident of his own abilities, and disdainful of help or hindrance: he did
not refuse admission to the thoughts or images of his predecessors, but he did
not seek them.  From his contemporaries he neither courted nor received
support; there is in his writings nothing by which the pride of other authors
might be gratified, or favor gained, no exchange of praise, nor solicitation
of support.  His great works were performed under discountenance, and in
blindness; but difficulties vanished at his touch; he was born for whatever is
arduous; and his work is not the greatest of heroic poems, only because it is
not the first.