XIV. Satan’s Followers
Hell is no vastness, it has naught to keep
But little rotting souls.
EDITH SITWELL.
I had read Book II of Paradise Lost a great many times before I fully understood the infernal debate; and it is a pleasure to acknowledge how much my understanding has been helped by a remark of Miss Muriel Bentley’s (unhappily not yet printed) which she gives me permission to quote. ‘Mammon,’ she wrote, ‘proposes an ordered state of sin with such majesty of pride that we are almost led astray. Perhaps Milton has touched here so essentially the nature of sin that if it were not for the suspicious live to ourselves (II, 254) we should not recognize it as such, so natural is it to man.’ This hint I wish to develop.
The difficulty of doing so is that I shall seem to be merely moralizing and even to be treating the poem as an allegory, which it is not. But the truth is that the aesthetic value of every speech in this debate partly depends on its moral significance, and that this moral significance cannot easily be exhibited without indicating those situations in human life which resemble the situation of the devils in Pandemonium. They resemble it not because Milton is writing an allegory, but because he is describing the very root from which these human situations grow. This needed no explanation when he wrote, for his contemporaries believed in Hell; but it does need explanation now. I therefore make bold to remind my readers of the mundane parallels to the predicament of the fiends. They have newly fallen out of Heaven into Hell. That is, each of them is like a man who has just sold his country or his friend and now knows himself to be a pariah, or like a man who has by some intolerable action of his own just quarrelled irrevocably with the woman he loves. For human beings there is often an escape from this Hell, but there is never more than one—the way of humiliation, repentance, and (where possible) restitution. For Milton’s devils this way is closed. The poet very wisely never really allows the question ‘What if they did repent?’ to become actual. Mammon in II (249–51) and Satan in IV (94–104) both raise it only to decide that it is, for them, no real issue. They know they will not repent. That door out of Hell is firmly locked, by the devils themselves, on the inside; whether it is also locked on the outside need not, therefore, be considered. The whole debate is an attempt to find some door other than the only door that exists. From this point of view all the speeches begin to reveal their full poetry.
The kernel of Moloch’s speech is in lines 54–8. Shall we sit ‘lingering here’ and ‘accept this dark approbrious den of shame?’ He cannot bring himself to regard the present misery as unavoidable. There must be a way out of these intolerable sensations; and the way out that occurs to him is rage. It is a way out which often occurs to human beings in a similar position. If the knowledge that we have betrayed what we valued most is unbearable, perhaps furious enmity against it will drown the knowledge. Anger, hatred, blind fury—these are pleasant compared with what we are feeling at the moment. But is fury safe? That does not matter. Nothing can be worse than the present. To rush blind-headed at the thing we have wronged, to die hitting it—this would be the best that could happen to us. And who knows? We may hurt it a bit before we die. Moloch is the simplest of the fiends; a mere rat in a trap.
Belial is less obvious. The key to his speech comes at line 163. ‘Is this then worst?’ Was it not far worse when we fled ‘pursued and strook’ by ‘Heav’n’s afflicting thunder’? Whatever we do, let us be careful. Some pains have begun to go to sleep, but a rash movement of ours might reawake them at any moment. We don’t want that. Anything but that. Our policy must be the very opposite of Moloch’s—to be very, very quiet, to do nothing that might release the fierce energies of Hell, and to hope that we shall presently grow more or less used to it. Once more, this has its analogue in human experience. The actual moment at which we were wrenched out of our heaven, the fall itself, may be remembered as so appalling that our hell is a refuge in comparison. There was a moment when the traitor first saw the real nature of what he was doing, and that he was now committed to it; there was for the lover one last unforgettable conversation with the woman he had cheated. These moments were agony because in them he felt ‘Heav’n ruining from Heav’n’—he was still a native of heaven himself, and the traces of honour and love were still in him. It is that state to which, at all costs, he does not want to return. The fires must not be reawakened: to grow numb, voluntarily to decline on to a lower plane of being, never again to admit any aspiration, any thought, any emotion which might ‘dispell The comfortable glooms of Hell’, to avoid great literature and noble music and the society of uncorrupted men as an invalid avoids draughts—this is his cue. Of course, there is no question of happiness, but perhaps the time will pass somehow. Perhaps we shall reach Parolles’ state: ‘simply the thing I am shall make me live’.
Mammon goes one better. It is hard to select any lines as the kernel of his speech; it is all kernel. If I had to, I should choose the lines
Nor want we skill or art from whence to raise
Magnificence; and what can Heav’n show more? (272)
and what can Heav’n show more? In those words we read Mammon to the very bottom. He believes that Hell can be made into a substitute for Heaven. For everything that has been lost, you can find something else that will do quite as well. Heaven was magnificent: if Hell is made equally magnificent it must be just as good. There was light in Heaven: if we produce artificial light, it will be just as good. There was darkness in Heaven: why then should we dislike the darkness of Hell?—for of course there can be only one kind of darkness. This is why Mammon is called ‘the least erected spirit that fell from Heav’n’ (I, 679). He has never understood the difference between Hell and Heaven at all. The tragedy has been no tragedy for him: he can do very well without Heaven. The human analogues are here the most obvious and the most terrible of all—the men who seem to have passed from Heaven to Hell and can’t see the difference. ‘What do you mean by saying we have lost love? There is an excellent brothel round the corner. What do you mean by all this talk of dishonour? I am positively plastered with orders and decorations and everyone I meet touches his cap.’ Everything can be imitated, and the imitation will do just as well as the real thing.
But all the speeches are alike futile. In human experience Mammon’s plan or Belial’s may sometimes work. But from Milton’s point of view that is because the present world is temporary and protects us for a while from spiritual reality. But the fiends are not so protected. They are in the world of spiritual reality already and Hell is their ‘dungeon’ not their ‘safe retreat’ (II, 317). That is why none of these schemes is really going to work, why no device can possibly render their life endurable. Hence, like the sea sweeping away a sand castle, or an adult silencing children, comes in at last the voice of Beelzebub, recalling them to reality. And the reality to which he recalls them is this, that they cannot at all escape from Hell nor in any way injure their enemy, but that there is a chance of injuring someone else. Perhaps you cannot harm your country; but are there a few black men somewhere in the world owning her flag whom you could bomb or even flog? The woman may be safe from you. Has she perhaps a young brother whom you could cut out of a job—or even a dog you could poison? This is sense, this is practical politics, this is the realism of Hell.
Pope, praising Homer’s invention, remarks that in the Iliad ‘every battle rises above the last in greatness, horror, and confusion’. Milton deserves somewhat the same praise for his Debate in Hell. If we had only Moloch’s speech we should have no conception of what was going to follow it. What else is there for impenitent and defeated evil to do but to rage and stamp? Few poets could have found an answer. But such is Milton’s invention that each new speaker uncovers further recesses of misery and evil, new subterfuge and new folly, and gives us fuller understanding of the Satanic predicament.