ed the series of its upliftings, and the God: then the grand lyric verse_will | beings, and a history of the world; at formity with their primitive nature; puer Adam and Eve, the first pair! I ap. proach, and it seems as though I discovered the Adam and Eve of Raphael Sanzio, imitated by Milton, so his biog. raphers tell us, glorious, strong volup tuous children, naked in the light of heaven, motionless and absorbed before grand landscapes, with bright vacant eyes, with no more thought than the bull or the horse on the grass beside them. I listen, and I hear an English household, two reasoners of the period-Colonel Hutchinson and his wife. Good Heavens ! dress them But the age of metaphysical inspiration, long gone by, had not yet reappeared. Far in the past Dante was fading away; far in the future Goethe ay unrevealed. People saw not yet the pantheistic Faust, and that incomprehensible nature which absorbs all varying existence in her deep bosom; they saw no longer the mystic paradise and immortal Love, whose ideal light envelopes souls redeemed. Protestantiem had neither altered nor renewed the divine nature; the guardian of an accepted creed and ancient tradition, it had only transformed ecclesiastical discipline and the doctrine of grace. It had only called the Christian to personal salvation and freedom from priestly rule. It had only remodelled man, 't had not recreated the Deity. It could not produce a divine epic, but a human epic. It could not sing the battles and works of God, but the temp-at once. People with so much culture tations and salvation of the soul. At should have invented before all a pair the time of Christ came the poems of of trousers and modesty. What dia Losmogony; at the time of Milton, the logues! Dissertations capped by polite confessions of psychology. At the ness, mutual sermons concluded by time of Christ each imagination pro- bows. What bows! Philosophical com duced a hierarchy of supernatural pliments and moral smiles. I yielded * ὦ δῖος αἰθὴρ καὶ ταχύπτεροι πνοαί says Eve, ποταμῶν τε πηγαί, ποντίων τε κυμάτων ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα, παμμητόρ τε γῆ, καὶ τὸν πανόπτην κύκλον ἡλίου καλῶ, ἱδεσθέ μ', οἷα πρὸς θεῶν πάσχω θεός. Prometheus Vinctus, ed. Hermann, p. 487, ine 88.-FR. † Ps. xc. 5. "And from that time see • Paradise Lost, book iv. 7. 489. Dear learned poet, you would have been better pleased if one of your three wives, as an apt pupil, had uttered to you by way of conclusion the above solid theoretical maxim. They did utter it to you; this is a scene from your own household: "So spake our general mother; and, with eyes Of conjugal attraction unreproved And meek surrender, half-embracing lean'd On our first father; half her swelling breast Naked met his, under the flowing gold Of her loose tresses hid; he, in delight Both of her beauty and submissive charms, Smiled with superiour love, and press'd her matron lip With kisses pure." "# This Adam entered Paradise via England. In that country he learned respectability, and studied moral speechifying. Let us hear this man before he has lasted of the tree of knowledge. A bachelor of arts, in his inaugural address, could not utter more fitly and nobly a greater number of pithless sentences: "Fair consort, the hour Of night, and all things now retired to rest, Mind us of like repose; since God hath set Labour and rest, as day and night, to men Successive; and the timely dew of sleep, Now falling with soft slumbrous weight, inclines Our eyelids; other creatures all day long Rove idle, unemploy'd, and less need rest: Man hath his daily work of body or mind Appointed, which declares his dignity, And the regard of Heaven on all his ways; While other animals unactive range, And of their doings God takes no account."+ A very useful and excellent Puritanical exhortation! This is English virtue and morality; and at evening, in every family, it can be read to the children like the Bible.Adam is your true paterfamilias, with a vote, an M. P., an old Oxford man, consulted at need by his wife, dealing out to her with prudent measure the scientific explanations which she requires. This night, for instance, the poor lady had a bad dream, and Adam, in his trencher-cap, administers this learned psychological draught: ‡ Reason as chief; among these Fancy next ... Oft in her absence mimic fancy wakes Here was something to send Eve off to sleep again. Her husband noting the effect, adds like an accredited casuist: "Yet be not sad: Evil into the mind of God or man May come and go, so unapproved; and leave No spot or blame behind." ↑ We recognize the Protestant husband, his wife's confessor. Next day comes an angel on a visit. Adam tells Eve: "Go with speed, And, what thy stores contain, bring forth, and pour Abundance, fit to honour and receive She, like a good housewife, talks about the menu, and rather proud of her kitchen-garden, says: He Beholding shall confess, that here on earth God hath dispensed his bounties as in heaven." § Mark this becoming zeal of a hospitable lady. She goes "with dispatchful looks, in haste": "What choice to choose for delicacy best; What order, so contrived as not to mix Tastes, not well join'd, inelegant; but bring Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change." She makes sweet wine, perry, creams; scatters flowers and leaves under the table. What an excellent housewife 1 What a great many votes she will gain among the country squires, when Adam stands for Parliament, Adam belongs to the Opposition, is a Whig, a Puritan He "walks forth; without more train Accompanied than with his own complete Perfections: in himself was all his state, More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits On princes, when their rich retinue long Of horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold, Dazzles the crowd." ¶ The epic is changed into a political poem, and we have just heard an epigram against power. The preliminary ceremonies are somewhat long; fortunately, the dishes being uncooked, 'no fear lest dinner cool." The angel, though ethereal, eats like a Lincolnshire farmer: "Nor seemingly The angel, nor in mist, the common gloss Of theologians; but with keen dispatch Of real hunger, and concoctive heat To transubstantiate: what redounds, transpires Through spirits with ease."* At table Eve listens to the angel's That which before us lies in daily life, "His forbidding ... Commends thee more, while it infers the good The flow of dissertations never ceas es; from Paradise it gets into heaven neither heaven nor earth, nor hell it. self, would swamp it. Of all characters which man could bring upon the scene, God is the finest. The cosmogonies of peoples are sublime poems, and the artists' genius does not attain perfection until it is sustained by such conceptions. The Hindoo sacred poems, the Biblical prophecies, the Edda, the Olympus of Hesiod and Homer, the visions of Dante, are glowing flowers from which a whole civilization blooms, and every emotion vanishes before the terrible feeling through which they have leapt from the bottom of our heart. Nothing then can be more depressing than the degradation of these noble ideas, settling into the regularity of formulas, and under the discipline of a popular worship. What is smaller than a god sunk to the level of a king and a man? what more repulsive than the Hebrew Jehovah, defined by theological pedan The angel gone, Eve, dissatisfied with her garden, wishes to have it improved, and proposes to her husband to work in it, she on one side, he on the other.try, governed in his actions by the last He says, with an approving smile: "Nothing lovelier can be found In woman. than to study household good, manual of doctrine, petrified by literal interpretation? Milton's Jehovah is a grave king, who maintains a suitable state, someAnd good works in her husband to promote."+thing like Charles I. When we meet But he fears for her, and would keep him for the first time, in Book III., he her at his side. She rebels with a is holding council, and setting forth a little prick of proud vanity, like a matter of business. From the style young lady who mayn't go out by her- we see his grand furred cloak, his self. She has her way, goes alone pointed Vandyke beard, his velvetand eats the apple. Here interminable covered throne and golden dais. The speeches come down on the reader, as business concerns a law which does numerous and cold as winter showers. not act well, and respecting which he The speeches of Parliament after desires to justify his rule. Adam is Pride's Purge were hardly heavier. about to eat the apple: why have exThe serpent seduces Eve by a collec-posed Adam to the temptation? The tion of arguments worthy of the punc-royal orator discusses the question, and tilious Chillingworth, and then the shows the reason; Byllogistic mist enters her poor brain : Paradise Lost, book v. l. 434— 39. ↑ Ibid, book viii. 7. 192-197. t Ibid. book ix. l. a3a. "I made him just and right Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. • Ibid. l. 753-760. Of true allegiance, constant faith, or love? Where only, what they needs must do, appear'd, Not what they would: what praise could they What pleasure I from such obedience paid? creed Moreover, like a good politician, he had a second motive, just as with his angels, "For state, as Sovran King and to inure our prompt obedience." The word is out; we see what Milton's heaven is: a Whitehall filled with bedizened footmen. The angels are the choristers, whose business is to sing cantatas about the king and before the king, keeping their places as long as they obey, alternating all night long to sing "melodious hymns about the sovran throne." What a life for this poor king! and what a cruel condition to hear eternally his own praises! * Tc amuse himself, Milton's Deity decides to crown his son king-partner-king, if you prefer it. Read the passage, and say if it be not a ceremony of his time that the poet describes: "Ten thousand thousand ensigns high ad- Standards and gonfalons 'twixt van and rear doubtless the capture of a Dutch ves So without least impulse or shadow of fate, "This let him know, *Paradise Lost, book iii. 7. 98–123. ↑ End of the continuation of Faust. Pro logue in Heaven. Paradise Lost, book v. & 343. All knees in heaven. "To him shall bow Him who disobeys, and such were, in fact, expelled from That day, as other solemn days, they spent turn Desirous." Milton describes the tables, the dishes, the wine, the vessels. It is a popular festival; I miss the fireworks, the bell. ringing, as in London, and I can fancy that all would drink to the health of We are reminded of the history of Ira in Voltaire, condemned to hear without intermis "Que son mérite est extrême! 66 the new king. Then Satan revolts; he takes his troops to the other end of the country, like Lambert or Monk, toward "the quarters of the north," Scotland perhaps, passing through we'l-governed districts, empires," with their sheriffs and lord-lieutenants. Heaven is partitioned off like a good map. Satan holds forth before his vfficers against royalty, opposes in a word-combat the good royalist Abdiel, who refutes his blasphemous, false, and proud" arguments, and quits him to rejoin his prince at Oxford. Well armed, the rebel marches with his pikemen and artillery to attack the fortress. The two parties slash each other with the sword, mow each other down with cannon, knock each other down with political arguments. These sorry angels have their mind as well disciplined as their limbs; they have passed their youth in a class of logic and in a drill school. Satan holds forth like a preacher: "What heaven's Lord had powerfulest to send Against us from about his throne, and judged Sufficient to subdue us to his will, But proves not so: then fallible, it seems, He also talks like a drill-sergeant. "Vanguard, to right and left the front unfold." He makes quips as clumsy as those of Harrison, the former butcher turned officer. What a heaven! It is enough to disgust a man with Paradise; any one would rather enter Charles I.'s troop of lackeys, or Cromwell's Ironsides. We have orders of the day, a hierarchy, exact submission, extra duties, disputes, regulated ceremonials, prostrations, etiquette, furbished arms, arsenals, depots of chariots and ammunition. Was it worth while leaving earth to find in heaven carriage-works, buildings, artillery, a marual of tactics, the art of salutations, and the Almanac de Gotha? Are The Miltonic Deity is so much on the level of a king and man, that he uses (with irony certainly) words like these: "Lest unawares we lose This our high place, our Sanctuary, our Hill." His son, about to flesh his maiden sword, replies: "If I be found the worst in heaven," etc. Book v. 731-742. • Paradise Lost, book vi. l. 435–430. these the things which "eye hath no seen, nor ear heard, nor hath entered into the heart to conceive?" What a gap between this monarchical frippery* and the visions of Dante, the souls floating like stars amid the harmonies, the mingled splendors, the mystic roses radiating and vanishing in the azure, the impalpable world in which all the laws of earthly life are dissolved, the unfathomable abyss traversed by fleeting visions, like golden bees gliding in the rays of the deep central sun! Is it not a sign of extinguished imagination, of the inroad of prose, of the birth of practical genius, replacing metaphysics by morality? What a fall! To measure it, read a true Christian poem the Apocalypse. I copy half-a-dozen verses; think what it has become in the hands of the imitator: "And I turned to see the voice that spake with me. And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; "And in the midst of the seven candlesticks, one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle. to His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; "And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters. "And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two edged sword and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength. "And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead." + When Milton was arranging his celestial show, he did not fall as dead. But if the innate and inveterate habits of logical argument, joined with the literal theology of the time, prevented him from attaining to lyrical illusion or from creating living souls, the splen dor of his grand imagination, combined with the passions of Puritanism, fu: nished him with an heroic character, several sublime hymns, and scenery which no one has surpassed. The finest thing in connection with this Paradise is hell; and in this history of *When Raphael comes on earth, the angels who are "under watch," "in honour rise." The disagreeable and characteristic feature of this heaven is, that the universal motive is obedience, while in Dante's it is love. "Lowly reverent they bow.... Our happy state we hold, like yours, while our obedience holds." + Rev. i 12. |