Theological Essays and Other Papers v2

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Before we notice these two cases of Milton, first of all let us ask--Who
and what _is_ Milton? Dr. Johnson was furiously incensed with a certain
man, by trade an author and manufacturer of books wholesale and retail,
for introducing Milton's name into a certain index thus--'Milton, Mr.
John.' That _Mister_, undoubtedly, was hard to digest. Yet very often
it happens to the best of us--to men who are far enough from 'thinking
small beer of themselves,'--that about ten o'clock, A. M., an official
big-wig, sitting at Bow Street, calls upon the man to account for his
_sprees_ of the last night, for his feats in knocking down lamp-posts
and extinguishing watchmen, by this ugly demand of--'Who and what are
you, sir?' And perhaps the poor man, sick and penitential for want of
soda water, really finds a considerable difficulty in replying
satisfactorily to the worthy _beek's_ apostrophe. Although, at five
o'clock in the evening, should the culprit be returning into the country
in the same coach as his awful interrogator, he might be very apt to
look fierce, and retort this amiable inquiry, and with equal thirst
for knowledge to demand, 'D--your eyes, if you come to _that_, who and
what are _you_?' And the _beek_ in _his_ turn, though so apt to indulge
his own curiosity at the expense of the public, might find it very
difficult to satisfy that of others.

The same thing happens to authors; and to great authors beyond all
others. So accustomed are we to survey a great man through the cloud
of years that has gathered round him--so impossible is it to detach
him from the pomp and equipage of all who have quoted him, copied him,
echoed him, lectured about him, disputed about him, quarrelled about
him, that in the case of any Anacharsis the Scythian coming amongst
us--any savage, that is to say, uninstructed in our literature, but
speaking our language, and feeling an interest in our great men--a man
could hardly believe at first how perplexed he would feel--how utterly
at a loss for any _adequate_ answer to this question, suddenly
proposed-_'Who and what was Milton?'_ That is to say, what is the place
which he fills in his own vernacular literature? what station does he
hold in universal literature?

We, if abruptly called upon in that summary fashion to convey a
_commensurate_ idea of Milton, one which might at once correspond to
his pretensions, and yet be readily intelligible to the savage, should
answer perhaps thus:--Milton is not an author amongst authors, not a
poet amongst poets, but a power amongst powers; and the _Paradise Lost_
is not a book amongst books, not a poem amongst poems, but a central
force amongst forces. Let us explain. There is this great distinction
amongst books; some, though possibly the best in their class, are still
no more than books--not indispensable, not incapable of supplementary
representation by other books. If they had never been--if their place
had continued for ages unfilled--not the less, upon a sufficient
excitement arising, there would always have been found the ability,
either directly to fill up the vacancy, or at least to meet the same
passion virtually, though by a work differing in form. Thus, supposing
Butler to have died in youth, and the _Hudibras_ to have been
intercepted by his premature death, still the ludicrous aspects of the
Parliamentary war, and its fighting saints, were too striking to have
perished. If not in a narrative form, the case would have come forward
in the drama. Puritanical sanctity, in collision with the ordinary
interests of life, and with its militant propensities, offered too
striking a field for the Satiric Muse, in any case, to have passed in
total neglect. The impulse was too strong for repression--it was a
volcanic agency, that, by some opening or, other, must have worked a
way for itself to the upper air. Yet Butler was a most original poet,
and a creator within his own province. But, like many another original
mind, there is little doubt that he quelled and repressed, by his own
excellence, other minds of the same cast. Mere despair of excelling
him, so far as not, after all, to seem imitators, drove back others
who would have pressed into that arena, if not already brilliantly
filled. Butler failing, there would have been another Butler, either
in the same or in some analogous form.

But, with regard to Milton and the Miltonic power, the case is far
otherwise. If the man had failed, the power would have failed. In that
mode of power which he wielded, the function was exhausted in the
man--species was identified with the individual--the poetry was
incarnated in the poet.

Let it be remembered, that, of all powers which act upon man through
his intellectual nature, the very rarest is that which we moderns call
the _Sublime_. The Grecians had apparently no word for it, unless it
were that which they meant by [Greek Text: to ogchodes]: for [Greek
Text: upsos] was a comprehensive expression for all qualities which
gave a character of grace or animation to the composition, such even
as were philosophically opposed to the sublime. In the Roman poetry,
and especially in Lucan, at times also Juvenal, there is an exhibition
of a moral sublime, perfectly distinct from anything known to the Greek
poetry. The delineations of republican grandeur, as expressing itself
through the principal leaders in the Roman camps, or the trampling
under foot of ordinary superstitions, as given in the reasons assigned
to Labienus for passing the oracle of the Lybian Jupiter unconsulted,
are in a style to which there is nothing corresponding in the whole
Grecian literature, nor would they have been comprehensible to an
Athenian. The famous line--'Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque
moveris,' and the brief review of such questions as might be worthy
of an oracular god, with the summary declaration, that every one of
those points we know already by the light of nature, and could not
know them better though Jupiter Ammon himself were to impress them on
our attention--

'Scimus, et haec nobis non altius inseret Ammon:' all this is truly
Roman in its sublimity; and so exclusively Roman, that there, and not
in poets like the Augustan, expressly modelling their poems on Grecian
types, ought the Roman mind to be studied.

On the other hand, for that species of the sublime which does not rest
purely and merely on moral energies, but on a synthesis between man
and nature--for what may properly be called the Ethico-physical
Sublime--there is but one great model surviving in the Greek poetry,
viz. the gigantic drama of the Prometheus crucified on Mount Elborus.
And this drama differs so much from everything else, even in the poetry
of Aeschylus, as the mythus itself differs so much from all the rest
of the Grecian mythology, (belonging apparently to an age and a people
more gloomy, austere, and nearer to the _incunabula mundi_, than those
which bred the gay and sunny superstitions of Greece,) that much
curiosity and speculation have naturally gathered round the subject
of late years. Laying this one insulated case apart, and considering
that the Hebrew poetry of Isaiah and Ezekiel, as having the benefit
of inspiration, does not lie within the just limits of competition,
we may affirm that there is no human composition which can be challenged
as constitutionally sublime--sublime equally by its conception and
by its execution, or as uniformly sublime from first to last, excepting
the _Paradise Lost_. In Milton only, first and last, is the power of
the sublime revealed. In Milton only does this great agency blaze and
glow as a furnace kept up to a white heat--without intermission and
without collapse.

If, therefore, Milton occupies this unique position--and let the reader
question himself closely whether he can cite any other book than the
_Paradise Lost_, as continuously sublime, or sublime even by its
prevailing character--in that case there is a peculiarity of importance
investing that one book which belongs to no other; and it must be
important to dissipate any erroneous notions which affect the integrity
of that book's estimation. Now, there are two notions countenanced by
Addison and by Dr. Johnson, which tend greatly to disparage the
character of its composition. If the two critics, one friendly, the
other very malignant, but both meaning to be just, have in reality
built upon sound principles, or at least upon a sound appreciation of
Milton's principles--in that case there is a mortal taint diffused
over the whole of the _Paradise Lost_: for not a single book is clear
of one or other of the two errors which they charge upon him. We will
briefly state the objections, and then as briefly reply to them, by
exposing the true philosophy of Milton's practice. For we are very
sure that, in doing as he did, this mighty poet was governed by no
carelessness or oversight, (as is imagined,) but by a most refined
theory of poetic effects.

I. The first of these two charges respects a supposed pedantry, or too
ambitious a display of erudition. It is surprising to us that such an
objection should have occurred to any man; both because, after all,
the quantity of learning cannot be great for which any poem can find
an opening; and because, in any poem burning with concentrated fire,
like the Miltonic, the passion becomes a law to itself, and will not
receive into connection with itself any parts so deficient in harmony,
as a cold ostentation of learned illustrations must always have been
found. Still, it is alleged that such words as _frieze, architrave,
cornice, zenith,_ &c., are words of art, out of place amongst the
primitive simplicities of Paradise, and at war with Milton's purpose
of exhibiting the Paradisaical state.

Now, here is displayed broadly the very perfection of ignorance, as
measured against the very perfection of what may be called poetic
science. We will lay open the true purpose of Milton, by a single
illustration. In describing impressive scenery, as occurring in a hilly
or a woody country, everybody must have noticed the habit which young
ladies have of using the word _amphitheatre_: 'amphitheatre of
woods'--'amphitheatre of hills,'--these are their constant expressions.
Why? Is it because the word _amphitheatre_ is a Grecian word? We
question if one young lady in twenty knows that it is; and very certain
we are that no word would recommend itself to her use by that origin,
if she happened to be aware of it. The reason lurks here:--In the word
_theatre_, is contained an evanescent image of a great audience--of
a populous multitude. Now, this image--half withdrawn, half-flashed
upon the eye--and combined with the word _hills_ or _forests_, is
thrown into powerful collision with the silence of hills--with the
solitude of forests; each image, from reciprocal contradiction,
brightens and vivifies the other. The two images act, and react, by
strong repulsion and antagonism.

This principle we might exemplify, and explain at great length; but
we impose a law of severe brevity upon ourselves. And we have said
enough. Out of this one principle of subtle and lurking antagonism,
may be explained everything which has been denounced under the idea
of pedantry in Milton. It is the key to all that lavish pomp of art
and knowledge which is sometimes put forward by Milton in situations
of intense solitude, and in the bosom of primitive nature--as, for
example, in the Eden of his great poem, and in the Wilderness of his
_Paradise Regained_. The shadowy exhibition of a regal banquet in the
desert, draws out and stimulates the sense of its utter solitude and
remotion from men or cities. The images of architectural splendor,
suddenly raised in the very centre of Paradise, as vanishing shows by
the wand of a magician, bring into powerful relief the depth of silence,
and the unpopulous solitude which possess this sanctuary of man whilst
yet happy and innocent. Paradise could not, in any other way, or by
any artifice less profound, have been made to give up its essential
and differential characteristics in a form palpable to the imagination.
As a place of rest, it was necessary that it should be placed in close
collision with the unresting strife of cities; as a place of solitude,
with the image of tumultuous crowds; as the centre of mere natural
beauty in its gorgeous prime, with the images of elaborate architecture
and of human workmanship; as a place of perfect innocence in seclusion,
that it should be exhibited as the antagonist pole to the sin and
misery of social man.

Such is the covert philosophy which governs Milton's practice, and
which might be illustrated by many scores of passages from both the
_Paradise Lost_ and the _Paradise Regained_. [Footnote: For instance,
this is the key to that image in the _Paradise Regained_, where Satan,
on first emerging into sight, is compared to an old man gathering
sticks 'to warm him on a winter's day.' This image, at first sight,
seems little in harmony with the wild and awful character of the supreme
fiend. No: it is _not in_ harmony; nor is it meant to be in harmony.
On the contrary, it is meant to be in antagonism and intense repulsion.
The household image of old age, of human infirmity, and of domestic
hearths, are all meant as a machinery for provoking and soliciting the
fearful idea to which they are placed in collision, and as so many
repelling poles.] In fact, a volume might be composed on this one
chapter. And yet, from the blindness or inconsiderate examination of
his critics, this latent wisdom--this cryptical science of poetic
effects--in the mighty poet, has been misinterpreted, and set down to
the account of defective skill, or even of puerile ostentation.

II. The second great charge against Milton is, _prima facie_, even
more difficult to meet. It is the charge of having blended the Pagan
and Christian forms. The great realities of angels and archangels are
continually combined into the same groups with the fabulous
impersonations of the Greek mythology. Eve is interlinked in comparisons
with Pandora; sometimes again with Eurynome. Those impersonations,
however, may be thought to have something of allegoric meaning in their
conceptions, which in a measure corrects this Paganism of the idea.
But Eve is also compared with Ceres, with Hebe, and other fixed forms
of Pagan superstition. Other allusions to the Greek mythologic forms,
or direct combination of them with the real existences of the Christian
heavens, might be produced by scores, were it not that we decline to
swell our paper beyond the necessity of the case. Now, surely this at
least is an error. Can there be any answer to this?

At one time we were ourselves inclined to fear that Milton had been
here caught tripping. In this instance, at least, he seems to be in
error. But there is no trusting to appearances. In meditating upon the
question, we happened to remember that the most colossal and Miltonic
of painters had fallen into the very same fault, if fault it were. In
his _Last Judgment_, Michael Angelo has introduced the Pagan deities
in connection with the hierarchy of the Christian heavens. Now, it is
very true that one great man cannot palliate the error of another great
man, by committing the same error himself. But, though it cannot avail
as an excuse, such a conformity of ideas serves as a summons to a much
more vigilant examination of the case than might else be instituted.
One man might err from inadvertency; but that two, and both men trained
to habits of constant meditation, should fall into the same error--makes
the marvel tenfold greater.

Now we confess that, as to Michael Angelo, we do not pretend to assign
the precise key to the practice which he adopted. And to our feelings,
after all that might be said in apology, there still remains an
impression of incongruity in the visual exhibition and direct
juxtaposition of the two orders of supernatural existence so potently
repelling each other. But, as regards Milton, the justification is
complete; it rests upon the following principle: In all other parts
of Christianity, the two orders of superior beings, the Christian
heaven and the Pagan pantheon, are felt to be incongruous--not as the
pure opposed to the impure, (for, if that were the reason, then the
Christian fiends should be incongruous with the angels, which they are
not,)--but as the unreal opposed to the real. In all the hands of other
poets, we feel that Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, Diana, are not merely
impure conceptions, but that they are baseless conceptions, phantoms
of air, nonentities; and there is much the same objection, in point
of just taste, to the combination of such fabulous beings in the same
groups with glorified saints and angels, as there is to the combination,
by a painter or a sculptor, of real flesh-and-blood creatures with
allegoric abstractions.

This is the objection to such combination in all other poets. But this
objection does not apply to Milton: it glances past him; and for the
following reason: Milton has himself laid an early foundation for his
introduction of the Pagan pantheon into Christian groups:--_the false
gods of the heathen world were, according to Milton, the fallen angels_.
They are not false, therefore, in the sense of being unreal, baseless,
and having a merely fantastical existence, like our European fairies,
but as having drawn aside mankind from a pure worship. As ruined angels
under other names, they are no less real than the faithful and loyal
angels of the Christian heavens. And in that one difference of the
Miltonic creed, which the poet has brought pointedly and elaborately
under his reader's notice by his matchless catalogue of the rebellious
angels, and of _their Pagan transformations_ in the very first book
of the _Paradise Lost_, is laid beforehand the amplest foundation for
his subsequent practice; and at the same time, therefore, the amplest
answer to the charge preferred against him by Dr. Johnson, and by so
many other critics, who had not sufficiently penetrated the latent
theory on which he acted.

CHARLEMAGNE.

[FOOTNOTE: The History of Charlemagne; with a Sketch, and History of
France from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Rise of the Carlovingian
Dynasty. By G.P.R. JAMES, Esq. VOL. II.]

[1832.]

History is sometimes treated under the splendid conception of
'philosophy teaching by example,' and sometimes as an 'old almanac;'
and, agreeably to this latter estimate, we once heard a celebrated
living professor of medicine, who has been since distinguished by royal
favor, and honored with a title, making it his boast, that he had never
charged his memory with one single historical fact; that, on the
contrary, he had, out of profound contempt for a sort of knowledge so
utterly without value in his eyes, anxiously sought to extirpate from
his remembrance,--or, if that were impossible, to perplex and
confound,--any relics of historical records which might happen to
survive from his youthful studies. 'And I am happy to say,' added he,
'and it is consoling to have it in my power conscientiously to declare,
that, although I have not been able to dismiss entirely from my mind
some ridiculous fact about a succession of four great monarchies, (for
human infirmity still clings to our best efforts, and will forever
prevent our attaining perfection,) still I have happily succeeded in
so far confounding all distinctions of things and persons, of time and
of places, that I could not assign the era of any one transaction, as
I humbly trust, within a thousand years. The whole vast series of
history is become a wilderness to me; and my mind, as to all such
absurd knowledge, under the blessing of Heaven, is pretty nearly a
_tabula rasa_.' In this Gothic expression of self-congratulation upon
the extent of his own ignorance, though doubtless founded upon what
the Germans call an _einseitig_ or one-sided estimate, there was however
that sort of truth which is apprehended only by strong minds, and such
as naturally adhere to extreme courses. Certainly the blank knowledge
of facts, which is all that most readers gather from their historical
studies, is a mere deposition of rubbish without cohesion, and resting
upon no basis of theory (that is, of general comprehensive survey)
applied to the political development of nations, and accounting for
the great stages of their internal movements. Rightly and profitably
to understand history, it ought to be studied in as many ways as it
may be written. History, as a composition, falls into three separate
arrangements, obeying three distinct laws, and addressing itself to
three distinct objects. Its first and humblest office is to deliver
a naked unadorned exposition of public events and their circumstances.
This form of history may be styled the purely Narrative; the second
form is that which may be styled the Scenical; and the third the
Philosophic. What is meant by Philosophic History, is well understood
in our present advanced state of society; and few histories are written
except in the simplest condition of human culture, which do not in
part assume its functions, or which are content to rest their entire
attraction upon the abstract interest of facts. The privileges of this
form have, however, been greatly abused; and the truth of facts has
been so much forced to bend before preconceived theories, whereas every
valid theory ought to be abstracted from the facts, that Mr. Southey
and others in this day have set themselves to decry the whole genus
and class--as essentially at war with the very primary purposes of the
art. But, under whatever name, it is evident that philosophy, or an
investigation of the true moving forces in every great train and
sequence of national events, and an exhibition of the motives and the
moral consequences in their largest extent which have concurred with
these events, cannot be omitted in any history above the level of a
childish understanding. Mr. Southey himself will be found to illustrate
this necessity by his practice, whilst assailing it in principle. As
to the other mode of history--history treated scenically, it is upon
the whole the most delightful to the reader, and the most susceptible
of art and ornament in the hands of a skilful composer. The most
celebrated specimen in this department is the Decline and Fall of
Gibbon. And to this class may in part [Footnote 1] be referred the
Historical Sketches of Voltaire. Histories of this class proceed upon
principles of selection, presupposing in the reader a general knowledge
of the great cardinal incidents, and bringing forward into especial
notice those only which are susceptible of being treated with
distinguished effect.

These are the three separate modes of treating history; each has its
distinct purposes; and all must contribute to make up a comprehensive
total of historical knowledge. The first furnishes the facts; the
second opens a thousand opportunities for pictures of manners and
national temper in every stage of their growth; whilst the third
abstracts the political or the ethical moral, and unfolds the philosophy
which knits the history of one nation to that of others, and exhibits
the whole under their internal connection, as parts of one great
process, carrying on the great economy of human improvement by many
stages in many regions at one and the same time.

Pursued upon this comprehensive scale, the study of history is the
study of human nature. But some have continued to reject it, not upon
any objection to the quality of the knowledge gained--but simply on
the ground of its limited extent; contending that in public and
political transactions, such as compose the matter of history, human
nature exhibits itself upon too narrow a scale and under too monotonous
an aspect; that under different names, and in connection with different
dates and regions, events virtually the same are continually revolving;
that whatever novelty may strike the ear, in passages of history taken
from periods widely remote, affects the names only, and circumstances
that are extra-essential; that the passions meantime, the motives, and
(allowing for difference of manners) the means even, are subject to
no variety; that in ancient or in modern history there is no real
accession made to our knowledge of human nature: but that all proceeds
by cycles of endless repetition; and in fact that, according to the
old complaint, 'there is nothing new under the sun.' It is not true
that 'there is nothing new under the sun,' This is the complaint, as
all men know, of a jaded voluptuary, seeking for a new pleasure and
finding none, for reasons which lay in his own vitiated nature. Why
did he seek for novelty? Because old pleasures had ceased to stimulate
his exhausted organs; and that was reason enough why no new pleasure,
had any been found, would operate as such for _him_. The weariness of
spirit, and the poverty of pleasure which he bemoaned as belonging to
our human condition, were not in reality _objective_, (as a German
philosopher would express himself,) or laid in the nature of things,
and thus pressing upon all alike, but _subjective_, that is to say,
derived from the peculiar state and affections of his own organs for
apprehending pleasure. Not the _apprehensibile_, but the _apprehendens_,
was in fault--not the pleasures, or the dewy freshness of pleasures,
had decayed, but the sensibilities of him who thus undertook to appraise
them.

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