XIX. Conclusion
Be war or ye be woo,
Knoweth your friend fro your foo.
JOHN BALL’S Letter.
The purpose of these lectures has been mainly ‘to hinder hindrances’ to the appreciation of Paradise Lost, and appreciative criticism on my own account has been incidental. In this section I offer a very short estimate of the poem’s value as a whole.
It suffers from a grave structural flaw. Milton, like Virgil, though telling a short story about the remote past, wishes our minds to be carried to the later results of that story. But he does this less skilfully than Virgil. Not content with following his master in the use of occasional prophecies, allusions, and reflections, he makes his two last books into a brief outline of sacred history from the Fall to the Last Day. Such an untransmuted lump of futurity, coming in a position so momentous for the structural effect of the whole work, is inartistic. And what makes it worse is that the actual writing in this passage is curiously bad. There are fine moments, and a great recovery at the very end. But again and again, as we read his account of Abraham or of the Exodus or of the Passion, we find ourselves saying, as Johnson said of the ballad, ‘the story cannot possibly be told in a manner that shall make less impression on the mind’. In these dry and cumbrous periods it is tempting to see the nemesis either of that hieratic manner which I have defended or else of those heresies which I have pronounced uninfluential. But we should debauch our sense of evidence if we yielded to the temptation. If those things sufficed to make writing dull the whole poem would have been dull, for they were there from the beginning. If we stick to what we know we must be content to say that Milton’s talent temporarily failed him, just as Wordsworth’s talent failed in later life. Mr. Yeats, in his Introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, says that ‘but for a failure of talent’ he would have been in the school ‘of Turner and Dorothy Wellesley’. This is sense; he does not attempt to explain the failure. The truth is we know next to nothing about the causes governing the appearance and disappearance of a talent. Perhaps Milton was in ill health. Perhaps, being old, he yielded to a natural, though disastrous, impatience to get the work finished. And since he was writing in a very new manner, he probably had no useful criticism—no one to tell him that the style of these last books bore only a superficial resemblance to that of his epic prime.
In the second place, Milton’s presentation of God the Father has always been felt to be unsatisfactory. Here again it is easy to look too deep for the causes. I very much doubt whether the failure is due to Milton’s religious defects or whether it chiefly consists in giving us a cold, merciless, or tyrannical Deity. Many of those who say they dislike Milton’s God only mean that they dislike God: infinite sovereignty de jure, combined with infinite power de facto, and love which, by its very nature, includes wrath also—it is not only in poetry that these things offend. To be sure, better men than Milton have written better than Milton of God; but the offence of his conception is not wholly due to its defects. And furthermore, I think the offence of his presentation is not wholly, or even mainly, due to his conception. The theological flaws (however we assess them) would not be poetically disastrous if only Milton had shown more poetical prudence. A God, theologically speaking, much worse than Milton’s, would escape criticism if only He had been made sufficiently awful, mysterious, and vague. When the poet is content to suggest, our theological scruples are cast to the winds. When we read
About him all the Sanctities of Heaven
Stood thick as Starrs, and from his sight receiv’d
Beatitude past utterance.
(III, 60),
or
Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appeer
(III, 380),
we are silenced. It is when the Son bows over His sceptre or the Father entertains the angels with ‘rubied Nectar’ served ‘in Pearl, in Diamond, and massie Gold’ that we are displeased. Milton has failed to disentangle himself from the bad tradition (seen at its worst in Vida’s Christiad and at its best in the Gierusalemme Liberata) of trying to make Heaven too like Olympus. It is these anthropomorphic details that make the Divine laughter sound merely spiteful and the Divine rebukes querulous; that they need not have sounded like this, Dante and the Hebrew prophets show.
In depicting the Messiah Milton is much more successful. Some objections here are based on confusion. People complain that his Messiah is unlike the Christ of the Gospels. But of course He ought to be. Milton is not writing about the incarnate Lord, but about the cosmic operations of the Son. The ‘count’nance too severe to be beheld’ (VI, 825) is, indeed, fully represented in the Gospels, too; but the scale and mode of operation are necessarily different. I must frankly confess, however, that I have only lately come to appreciate the War in Heaven at its true worth. The only preparation for it, in our days, is to read Mr. Williams’s Preface. When I turned back from that remarkable piece of criticism to a re-reading of Books V and VI, it was like seeing, at last properly cleaned, a picture we thought we had known all our lives. From a proper understanding of Satan we come to recognize the true nature of the reply which Satan provokes from Heaven, and the very great success with which Milton has depicted its appalling majesty. It is, of course, important to realize that there is no war between Satan and Christ. There is a war between Satan and Michael; and it is not so much won as stopped, by Divine intervention. The criticism that the war in Heaven is uninteresting because we know beforehand how it will end, seems to miss the point. In so far as it is a war we do not know how it will end; nay, Milton’s God says that it will never end at all (VI, 693).
To many it seems that the failure—even if it is only a partial failure—of Milton’s God destroys Paradise Lost as a religious poem. And I think it is quite true that in some very important senses it is not a religious poem. If a Christian reader has found his devotion quickened by reading the medieval hymns or Dante or Herbert or Traherne, or even by Patmore or Cowper, and then turns to Paradise Lost, he will be disappointed. How cold, how heavy and external it will all seem! How many blankets seem to be interposed between us and our object! But I am not sure that Paradise Lost was intended to be a religious poem in the sense suggested, and I am sure it need not be. It is a poem depicting the objective pattern of things, the attempted destruction of that pattern by rebellious self love, and the triumphant absorption of that rebellion into a yet more complex pattern. The cosmic story—the ultimate plot in which all other stories are episodes—is set before us. We are invited, for the time being, to look at it from outside. And that is not, in itself, a religious exercise. When we remember that we also have our places in this plot, that we also, at any given moment, are moving either towards the Messianic or towards the Satanic position, then we are entering the world of religion. But when we do that, our epic holiday is over: we rightly shut up our Milton. In the religious life man faces God and God faces man. But in the epic it is feigned, for the moment, that we, as readers, can step aside and see the faces both of God and man in profile. We are not invited (as Alexander would have said) to enjoy the spiritual life, but to contemplate the whole pattern within which the spiritual life arises. Making use of a distinction of Johnson’s we might say that the subject of the poem ‘is not piety, but the motives to piety’. The comparison with Dante may be misleading. No doubt Dante is in most respects simply a better poet than Milton. But he is also doing a different kind of thing. He is telling the story of a spiritual pilgrimage—how one soul fared in its passage through the universe and how all may fear and hope to fare. Milton is giving us the story of the universe itself. Hence, quite apart from any superiority in Dante’s art or Dante’s spirituality (and I freely admit that he is often superior in both) the Comedy is a religious poem, a poetical expression of religious experience, as Paradise Lost is not. A failure in the last canto of the Paradiso would be disastrous because Dante is himself looking at God and inviting us to look with him. But Milton has only to describe how the angels and Adam looked at God: and a theologically inadequate symbol for God will not ruin the whole scheme—as in some large religious pictures it may be the position of the Christ that counts rather than the actual drawing of His face. No doubt the drawing of the face might be so bad that we could not get over it, and similarly Milton’s God might be so bad as to spoil the whole pattern of which He is the centre. But I do not think He is as bad, or even nearly as bad, as that.
When these reservations have been made, the case of the advocatus diaboli against Paradise Lost is, I believe, complete. Its story, as treated by Milton, fulfils the conditions of great story better perhaps than any other, for, more than any other, it leaves things where it did not find them. The close of the Iliad, nay even perhaps of the Aeneid, is not really final; things of this sort will happen again. But Paradise Lost records a real, irreversible, unrepeatable process in the history of the universe; and even for those who do not believe this, it embodies (in what for them is mythical form) the great change in every individual soul from happy dependence to miserable self-assertion and thence either, as in Satan, to final isolation, or, as in Adam, to reconcilement and a different happiness. The truth and passion of the presentation are unassailable. They were never, in essence, assailed until rebellion and pride came, in the romantic age, to be admired for their own sake. On this side the adverse criticism of Milton is not so much a literary phenomenon as the shadow cast upon literature by revolutionary politics, antinomian ethics, and the worship of Man by Man. After Blake, Milton criticism is lost in misunderstanding, and the true line is hardly found again until Mr. Charles Williams’s preface. I do not mean that much interesting and sensitive and erudite work was not done in the intervening period: but the critics and the poet were at cross purposes. They did not see what the poem was about. Hatred or ignorance of its central theme led critics to praise and to blame for fantastic reasons, or to vent upon supposed flaws in the poet’s art or his theology the horror they really felt at the very shapes of discipline and harmony and humility and creaturely dependence.
As for the style of the poem, I have already noted this peculiar difficulty in the meeting the adverse critics, that they blame it for the very qualities which Milton and his lovers regard as virtues. Milton institutes solemn games, funeral games, and triumphal games in which we mourn the fall and celebrate the redemption of our species; they complain that his poetry is ‘like a solemn game’. He sets out to enchant us and they complain that the result sounds like an incantation. His Satan rises to make a speech before an audience of angels ‘innumerable as the starrs of night’ and they complain that he sounds as if he were ‘making a speech’. It reminds us of Aristotle’s question—if water itself sticks in a man’s throat, what will you give him to wash it down with? If a man blames port wine for being strong and sweet, or a woman’s arms for being white and smooth and round, or the sun for shining, or sleep because it puts thought away, how can we answer him? Dr. Leavis does not differ from me about the properties of Milton’s epic verse. He describes them very accurately—and understands them better, in my opinion, than Mr. Pearsall Smith. It is not that he and I see different things when we look at Paradise Lost. He sees and hates the very same that I see and love. Hence the disagreement between us tends to escape from the realm of literary criticism. We differ not about the nature of Milton’s poetry, but about the nature of man, or even the nature of joy itself. For this, in the long run, is the real question at issue; whether man should or should not continue to be ‘a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave’. I think he should. I wish to see ‘ceremonies of bravery’ continued even in the present ‘infamy of his nature’. The opposite view is held by very different people. A few comments on the reasons for which it could be held will conclude my book.
The lowest and most contemptible class (in which I include no critic whom I have mentioned by name) may hate Milton through fear and envy. His art is eminently civil. I do not say ‘civilized’, for vulgar power and vulgar luxury have debauched that word beyond redemption. It is civil in the sense that it presupposes in those who are to enjoy it some discipline in good letters and good ‘manners’. It demands that our merely natural passions should have already been organized into such ‘sentiments’ as ordered and magnanimous commonwealths prefer. It is not rustic, naif, or unbuttoned. It will therefore be unintelligible to those who lack the right qualifications, and hateful to the baser spirits among them. It has been compared to the great wall of China, and the comparison is good: both are among the wonders of the world and both divide the tilled fields and cities of an ancient culture from the barbarians. We have only to add that the wall is necessarily hated by those who see it from the wrong side, and the parallel is complete. From this point of view the decline in Milton’s fame marks a stage in the rebellion of ‘civilization’ against civility.
A much more respectable class of readers dislike it because they are in the grip of a particular kind of realism. Such people think that to organize elementary passions into sentiments is simply to tell lies about them. The mere stream of consciousness is for them the reality, and it is the special function of poetry to remove the elaborations of civility and get at ‘life’ in the raw. Hence (in part) the popularity of such a work as Ulysses. In my opinion this whole type of criticism is based on an error. The disorganized consciousness which it regards as specially real is in fact highly artificial. It is discovered by introspection—that is, by artificially suspending all the normal and outgoing activities of the mind and then attending to what is left. In that residuum it discovers no concentrated will, no logical thought, no morals, no stable sentiments, and (in a word) no mental hierarchy. Of course not; for we have deliberately stopped all these things in order to introspect. The poet who finds by introspection that the soul is mere chaos is like a policeman who, having himself stopped all the traffic in a certain street, should then solemnly write down in his note-book ‘The stillness in this street is highly suspicious.’ It can very easily be shown that the unselective chaos of images and momentary desires which introspection discovers is not the essential characteristic of consciousness. For consciousness is, from the outset, selective, and ceases when selection ceases. Not to prefer any one datum before another, not to attend to one part of our experience at the expense of the rest, is to be asleep: the process of waking, and after that of coming fully awake, consists in bringing selected elements into focus. When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much claim to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more. That this chaos may furnish hints for a psychologist’s diagnosis, I do not deny. But to conclude thence that in it we reach the reality of the mind is like thinking that the readings of a clinical thermometer or the flayed arms in a medical text book give us a specially ‘real’ view of the body. And even if it were granted (which I do not grant) that the unfocused or unelaborated consciousness were in itself specially real, it would still remain true that literature which claims to represent it is specially unreal. For the very nature of such unfocused consciousness is that it is not attended to. Inattention makes it what it is. The moment you put it into words you falsify it. It is like trying to see what a thing looks like when you are not looking at it. You cannot make a true picture of that no-man’s-land between the visible and the invisible which exists on the edges of our field of vision, because just in so far as you make a picture you are bringing it into the centre. I do not say that it may not be fun to try. There may be a place for literature which tries to exhibit what we are doing when will and reason and attention and organized imagination are all off duty and sleep has not yet supervened. But I believe that if we regard such literature as specially realistic we are falling into illusion.
Finally there is the class to which Mr. Eliot himself probably belongs. Some are outside the Wall because they are barbarians who cannot get in; but others have gone out beyond it of their own will in order to fast and pray in the wilderness. ‘Civilization’—by which I here mean barbarism made strong and luxurious by mechanical power—hates civility from below: sanctity rebukes it from above. The round table is pressed between the upper millstone (Galahad) and the nether (Mordred). If Mr. Eliot disdains the eagles and trumpets of epic poetry because the fashion of this world passes away, I honour him. But if he goes on to draw the conclusion that all poetry should have the penitential qualities of his own best work, I believe he is mistaken. As long as we live in merry middle earth it is necessary to have middle things. If the round table is abolished, for every one who rises to the level of Galahad, a hundred will drop plumb down to that of Mordred. Mr. Eliot may succeed in persuading the reading youth of England to have done with robes of purple and pavements of marble. But he will not therefore find them walking in sackcloth on floors of mud—he will only find them in smart, ugly suits walking on rubberoid. It has all been tried before. The older Puritans took away the maypoles and the mince-pies: but they did not bring in the millennium, they only brought in the Restoration. Galahad must not make common cause with Mordred, for it is always Mordred who gains, and he who loses, by such alliance.