Paradise Lost (Modern Library Classics) (5 page)

English critics nursed on Gallic canons early on censured
Paradise
Lost
for its wantonness. John Dennis in 1704 described it as “the most lofty but most irregular poem that has been produced by the mind of man” (bv), and unlike Dennis, who ultimately judges
Paradise Lost
above the critical law, subsequent neoclassical critics typically laud Milton’s loftiness and rue his irregularities. Milton’s idiosyncratic version of epic defies standard definitions because it is unusually inclusive, almost all-encompassing. Northrop Frye calls it “the story of all things,” yet even that broad rubric seems inadequate (3). The reach of
Paradise Lost
extends far beyond creation, affording local habitation and a name even to the uncreated realm of the Anarch Chaos and comprising the infinite and eternal together with the finite and fleeting. In its “diffuse” form, epic is the only genre that Milton discusses in
The Reason for Church Government
for which he cites no scriptural precedent. This tantalizing omission may in part suggest that Milton did not consider any book in the Bible, not even Genesis, both unified and ample enough to qualify.

In her magisterial study of Milton and genre, Barbara Lewalski tracks Milton’s use of virtually every subgenre recognized by Renaissance rhetoricians and deems
Paradise Lost
“an encyclopedia of literary forms” (125). Jonathan Richardson makes much the same point in defending Milton’s masterwork as “a composition … not reducible under any known denomination,” “the quintessence of all that is excellent in writing” (cxlv, clii). If in its encompassing formal plenitude
Paradise Lost
violates the “limited genre” defined by neoclassical critics, its promiscuity is nonetheless profoundly classical in spirit. Aristotle himself distinguishes epic from other genres by its capacity to assimilate within a single narrative other modes, such as the dramatic or lyric, and their various subgenres (26). Book 4 illustrates Milton’s singular gift for subduing such multiplicity under a unified narrative arc. The basic story line—Satan’s intrusion into Paradise leading ultimately to his apprehension and expulsion—occasions, among other genre variations, authorial apostrophe, Satanic soliloquy, landscape poetry with features of the country house tradition, various love lyrics, metamorphic tales of origin, evening prayer, and confrontational martial dialogue. Nor was epic originally confined to what Voltaire in his
Essai sur la poésie épique
defined as “narratives in verse of warlike adventures” (331), which Milton scorned as “tedious havoc” (PL 9.30).

Deriving from the Greek word for “story” or “story-related,”
epic
seems to have been a broader category for the early Greeks, virtually indistinguishable from what is now meant by narrative in general. Aristocratic martial and amorous encounters are undeniably the stuff of Homeric epic, and of mock epic (Homer is supposed to have composed one of those, too), but Hesiod’s overtly didactic narratives also qualified, as did Orphic poems celebrating religious mysteries. In each case, the bard tells a story meant to epitomize and even justify the supernaturally shaped course of human events. Milton observes the familiar trappings and formal insignia of epic: invocations, extended similes, catalogs, epithets, and the rest. But he does so idiosyncratically, in line with his highly individual Christian faith. The invocations exemplify this characteristic willingness to interpret the “laws” of epic according to his own situation. Embracing and expanding on a liberty asserted previously by Tasso, he uses the invocations as occasions to speak not simply in his own voice but to an unprecedented extent of himself and his anxious situation, “in darkness, and with dangers compassed round” (7.27).

When Aristotle described epic as an inclusive, composite form, he was distinguishing it from drama, the genre that shows rather than tells and brooks no authorial narration. By contrast, the authorial voice in epic sometimes withdraws in favor of storytelling characters involved in dramatic dialogue or lyrical self-expression. Aristotle thought drama the nobler genre, not only purer in mode but also more disciplined in plot than sprawling epic (26). Early modern theorists, however, focused on the magnitude of solitary authorial effort rather than on the purity of the form or concentrated efficiency of the action. The actors in a drama, furthermore, “share the poet’s praise,” as Dryden says (1800, 1:436). Such critics were nearly unanimous in accounting epic, precisely because it is vast, complicated, and solitary in execution, as “the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform” (Dryden 1800, 1:425). Milton, of course, as if to satisfy classical as well as modern standards of preeminence, composed both a capacious epic and a stringent classical tragedy (one never designed for staging or actors’ shares). Still, the most momentous and defining artistic decision he ever made came down to a choice between these two great genres.

When he originally conceived the story of the Fall as the subject of a tragedy, Milton honored the long-standing critical consensus that unhappy events are best reserved for dramatic presentation—an affinity
of form and subject acknowledged in the epic’s most genre-conscious moment, the invocation to Book 9. As if to signal this anomaly formally, the same invocation fails to do what invocations by their very name promise they will do: invoke. Acknowledging his dependence on the Muse only in the last line, Milton devotes this “invocation” instead to justifying his deviation from mainline epic into tragedy. For, despite his concessions, Milton clearly thought that in choosing to tell this sad story in the grandest narrative genre, he had made a good trade-off. The story of the Fall allows him, as he indicates in the invocation, to redefine heroism in accordance with his Christian faith (9.13–41). More important, if “an epic poem must either be national or mundane,” as Coleridge claimed, once an author has chosen the mundane, the goal must be to tell a story “common to all mankind” (1886, 240). This is a tall order, but in a Christian culture, the story of Adam and Eve, though tragic, more than fills the bill. Not simply the greatest story ever told, it is every story ever told: Milton’s “Adam and Eve are all men and women inclusively,” as Coleridge observed (240). If he could not claim to invent the epic mode, as Homer had, Milton could reinvent it in light of Christian revelation and aspire to include all other epics, all other narratives of any kind.

The other main advantage of arranging the story of man’s first disobedience as a narrative and not a tragic drama was the chance to exploit the single most definitive formal requirement of an epic narrative—that it begin in the midst of things. Milton made much of this opportunity: a titanic Satan and his followers, first rolling in hellfire and then debating revenge, followed by the farsighted judgment of a Zeus-like God and his obsequious adherents in Heaven. Indeed, the opening books are so striking that they have largely determined the poem’s reception in modern times. These books address received traditions of heroic poetry overtly and extensively, and they also contain, according to many readers, the most poetic energy and the thematic designs crucial to the work as a whole.

To revive a thesis that originated in the early eighteenth century and fell out of fashion in the twentieth, we think it likely that Milton’s inspiration for making Satan weltering in Hell his “midst of things” was the pre-Norman, English tradition of biblical poetry, especially the Old English
Genesis B
, long attributed to Caedmon. No one denies that Milton had opportunity to become acquainted with this and other
works in the Caedmon manuscripts, discovered in 1651 by the philologist Franciscus Junius, then residing in London. If Milton was given access to the manuscripts while he was still sighted, he probably took note of the illustrations, including one of the rebel angels plunging headlong into the jaws of Leviathan (below). Scholars have argued, not without evidence, that Milton’s competency in Old English was at best slight and that any acquaintance he might have had with the Caedmon poems, whether in manuscript or in print, would therefore have been superficial and inconsequential. Yet even a superficial acquaintance would have left him aware that
Genesis B
begins, as
Paradise Lost
does, with Satan and his thanes rallying in Hell. Furthermore, as French Fogle’s introduction to Milton’s
History of Britain
observes, Milton’s access to freshly published Old English texts and translations was extensive (Yale 5: xxxvi–xxxvii). The conception of Christ prevalent in England until the Conquest, “which views the cross from the perspective of world history and emphasizes its victorious aspect, the conquest of Satan,” was far more amenable to him than the later emphasis on the sufferings of Christ (Huttar 242).

“Him the Almighty Power / Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky” (1.44–45).
(illustration credit itr.1)

While Milton dismissed the monks who wrote the early history of Britain as “ill gifted with utterance” (Yale 5:288), it does not follow that he would have disdained the Anglo-Saxon language. His schoolmaster at St. Paul’s, Alexander Gill, was an advocate of the English vernacular and demonstrably knowledgeable about Old English (Fletcher 1:185). The common complaint that
Paradise Lost
is replete with Latinisms, an English estranged from its vernacular roots, is unjustified, as Fowler’s edition repeatedly observes. On the contrary, Milton’s English is generally idiomatic. When in 1807 James Ingram translated the first fifteen lines of
Paradise Lost
into Old English, he left the syntax virtually untouched and required substitutes for ten loan words only (47–48). We think it not only fitting but probable that the catalyst for Milton’s choice of epic subject once he had abandoned the British theme was the coincidental discovery in the 1650s of a native tradition of biblical poetry written before the Conquest.

Paradise Lost
is written in unrhymed pentameter lines, or blank verse. Early in the sixteenth century, the Earl of Surrey adopted this form for his partial translation of Vergil’s
Aeneid,
and toward the end of that century it became the conventional medium of Elizabethan drama. Shakespeare’s plays are primarily written in blank verse. But Spenser had not used it. Milton’s choice of blank verse was a daring one, for at that time there was no long blank-verse poem of much distinction in English or any other language. It was largely because of Milton’s precedent that blank verse established itself as early as James Thomson’s
Seasons
(1726–30) as the preferred metrical form for long and ambitious English poems. Wordworth’s
The Prelude;
Keats’s
Hyperion;
Tennyson’s
The Princess, Enoch Arden
, and
The Idylls of the King;
Browning’s
The Ring and the Book;
Arnold’s
Empedocles on Etna;
the long narratives of Edwin Arlington Robinson; sections of Crane’s
The Bridge;
Stevens’s
Sunday Morning
and
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction;
Frost’s
Home Burial;
and Betjeman’s
Summoned by Bells
are all written in blank verse.

Milton organized his narrative into verse paragraphs, within which he devised syntactical patterns famous for their length and lucidity.
Having freed himself from the ancient bondage of rhyme, he created musical effects with consonance, dissonance, alliteration, repetition, and even the occasional internal rhyme. He particularly excelled in the “turn of words,” as it was called in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—repeating the same words in a reversed or modified order. Dryden tells us that he once looked for these turns in Milton but failed to find them (
Essays
2:108–9). In fact the effect is everywhere, as in “though fall’n on evil days,/On evil days though fall’n” (7.25–26), which reminded Emerson of “the reflection of the shore and trees in water” (R. Richardson 318). When the Father announces the forthcoming creation in Book 7, “Glory they sung to the most high” (182), then “Glory to him” (184), the Son who has just defeated the rebel angels, and finally, with a turn of words, “to him/Glory and praise” (186–87). Through creation the Son will “diffuse” the glory of the Father “to worlds and ages infinite” (190–91), and in this very passage we feel that glory has been squeezed from the word
glory
and diffused from clause to clause. Some of the best-known turns include Eve’s initial infatuation with her image in the pool (“Pleased I soon returned,… Pleased it returned as soon”) at 4.460–65, and Eve’s great love lyric enclosed by the brackets of “Sweet is” and “is sweet” (4.641–56); inside them she lists the same natural beauties twice, once as sweet, once again as not sweet. Addison thought this last “one of the finest turns of words that I have ever seen” (Shawcross 1:142).

Distinguished achievement in sound effects is an excellence that no one has ever seriously denied to Milton. His verse has few rivals in what Hazlitt termed “the adaptation of the sound and movement of the verse to the meaning of the passage” (Thorpe 104). Sometimes the adaptations are relatively simple, like certain film scores. As Satan struggles through Chaos, the verse also seems to have trouble making headway: “So he with difficulty and labor hard/Moved on, with difficulty and labor he” (2.1021–22). When he hears “a universal hubbub wild/Of stunning sounds” (2.951–52), it is clear that
universal
and
wild
are ways of defining what the word
hubbub
, all meaning aside, delivers to us purely through its sound.
Stunning sounds
echoes the chaotic crack of
hubbub
, as if sounds had indeed been stunned. Sometimes the adaptation of sound to meaning is wittier, more conceptual. When Satan departs from Pandaemonium, the philosophical devils “reasoned high/Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,/Fixed fate,
free will, Foreknowledge absolute,/And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost” (2.558–61). Milton makes the catalog of philosophical concepts into a little semantic labyrinth in which “foreknowledge, will and fate” enough resemble “Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute” to make us wonder how they are alike, how not alike. Have we really gone anywhere in moving from one line to the next?