PARADISE LOST

1667

Lon

Paradise lost. | A | Poem | written in | Ten Books By John Milton. | Licensed and Entred according to Order. don | Printed, and are to be sold by Peter Parker under Creed Church neer Aldgate; And by Robert Boulter at the Turks Head in Bishopsgate-street; | And Matthias Walker, under St. Dunstons Church in Fleet-street, 1667.-- TITLE PAGE OF FIRST EDITION.

Mr. Sam. Symons entered for his copie, under the hands of Mr. Thomas Tomkyns and Mr. Warden Royston, a Booke or Copie Intituled Paradise Lost, a Poem in Tenne bookes, by J. M. 6d.-ENTRY AT

STATIONERS' HALL, 1667, August 20.
Thou hast not miss'd one thought that could
be fit,

And all that was improper dost omit;
So that no room is here for writers left,
But to detect their ignorance or theft.
That majesty which thro' thy work doth reign
Draws the devout, deterring the profane.
And things divine thou treat'st of in such
state

As them preserves, and thee, inviolate.
At once delight and horror on us seize,
Thou sing'st with so much gravity and ease;
And above human flight dost soar aloft,
With plume so strong, so equal, and so soft:
The bird named from that paradise you sing
So never flags, but always keeps on wing.
Where could'st thou words of such a compass
find?

Whence furnish such a vast expense of mind?
Just heaven thee, like Tiresias, to requite,
Rewards with prophecy thy loss of sight.
-MARVELL, ANDREW, 1674, On Milton's
Paradise Lost.

That "Paradise Lost" of Milton, which some are pleased to call a poem.—RYMER, THOMAS, 1678-92, On the Tragedies of the Last Age.

Milton, whose Muse with such a daring Flight,

expression, without defending his antiquated words, and the perpetual harshness of their sound? It is as much commendation as a man can bear, to own him excellent; all beyond it is idolatry.DRYDEN, JOHN, 1685, Preface to Second Miscellany, Works, ed. Scott and Saintsbury, vol. XII, p. 300.

As for Mr. Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his subject is not that of an heroic poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous, like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and his human persons are but two. But I will not take Mr. Rymer's work out of his hands: he has promised the world a critique on that author; wherein though he will not allow his poem for heroic, I hope he will grant us, that his thoughts are elevated, his words. sounding, and that no man has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so copiously translated his Grecisms, and the Latin elegances of Virgil. It is true, he runs into a flat of thought, sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he is got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser, as Spenser did Chaucer. . . . Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him, by the example of Hannibal Caro, and other Italians, who have used it; for whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme, (which I have not now the leisure to examine), his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it; which is manifest in his Juvenilia, or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer,

Imitation is a nice point, and there are few poets who deserve to be models in all they write. Milton's "Paradise Lost" is admirable; but am I therefore bound to maintain, that there are no flats amongst his elevations, when it is evident he creeps along sometimes for above an hundred lines together? Cannot I admire the height. of his invention, and the strength of his

Essay on Satire, Works, ed. Scott and Saintsbury, vol. XIII, pp. 18, 20.

As the first place among our English poets is due to Milton, and as I have drawn more quotations out of him than from any other, I shall enter into a regular criticism upon his "Paradise Lost,' which I shall publish every Saturday till I have given my thoughts upon that poem. I must likewise take notice,

that there are in Milton several words of his own coining, as Cerberean, miscreated, hell-doom'd, embryon atoms, and many others. If the reader is offended at this liberty in our English poet, I would recommend him to a discourse in Plutarch, which shows us how frequently Homer has made use of the same liberty. Milton, by the above-mentioned helps, and by the choice of the noblest words and phrases which our tongue would afford him, has carried our language to a greater height than any of the English poets have ever done before or after him, and made the sublimity of his style equal to that of his sentiments. This redundancy of those several ways of speech, which Aristotle calls "foreign language," and with which Milton has so very much enriched, and in some places darkened, the language of his poem, was the more proper for his use because his poem is written in blank verse. ADDISON, JOSEPH, 1711-12, The Spectator, Nos. 262, 285.

It must be acknowledged that till about forty years ago Great Britain was barren of critical learning, though fertile in excellent writers; and in particular had so little taste for epic poetry, and was so unacquainted with the essential properties and peculiar beauties of it, that "Paradise Lost," an admirable work of that kind, published by Mr. Milton, the great ornament of his age and country, lay many years unspoken of and entirely disregarded, till at length it happened that some persons of great delicacy and judgment found out the merit of that excellent poem, and, by communicating their sentiments to their friends, propagated the esteem of the author, who soon acquired universal applause. BLACKMORE, SIR RICHARD, 1716, Essays.

"Paradise Lost" had been printed forty years before it was known to the greatest part of England that there barely was such a book. DENNIS, JOHN, 1721, Letters.

When Milton first published his famous poem, the first edition was long of going off; few either read, liked, or understood it; and it gained ground merely by its merit. SWIFT, JONATHAN, 1732, Letter to Sir Charles Wogan.

parts of the poem: and, when he is on earth, wherever he is describing our parents in Paradise, you see he uses a more easy and natural way of writing.Though his formal style may fit the higher parts of his own poem, it does very ill for others who write on natural and pastoral subjects.-POPE, ALEXANDER, 1734-36, Spence's Anecdotes, ed. Singer, p. 131.

The British nation, which has produced the greatest men in every profession, before the appearance of Milton could not enter into any competition with antiquity, with regard to the sublime excellencies of poetry. Greece could boast an Euripides, Eschylus, Sophocles and Sappho; England was proud of her Shakespeare, Spenser, Johnson and Fletcher; but their then ancients had still a poet in reserve superior to the rest, who stood unrivalled by all succeeding times, and in epic poetry, which is justly esteemed the highest effort of genius, Homer had no rival. When Milton appeared, the pride of Greece was humbled, the competition became more equal, and since "Paradise Lost" is ours; it would, perhaps, be an injury to our national fame to yield the palm to any state, whether ancient or modern. CIBBER, THEOPHILUS, 1753, Lives of the Poets, vol. II, p. 108.

For second He, that rode sublime Upon the seraph-wings of Extasy, The secrets of the abyss to spy.

He pass'd the flaming bounds of place and
time:

The living throne, the sapphire blaze,
Where angels tremble while they gaze,
He saw; but blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night.
-GRAY, THOMAS, 1757, The Progress of
Poesy.

"What? the barbarian who constructed a long commentary on the first chapter of Genesis in ten books of harsh verse? The clumsy imitator of the Greeks who caricatures creation and who, while Moses represents the Eternal Being as creating the world by his word, makes the Messiah take a big compass out of a cupboard in heaven to trace out the work? What? I admire the man who has spoilt Tasso's hel and Tasso's devil; who makes Lucifer masquerade, now as a toad, now as a pigmy; who puts the same speech in his mouth a hundred times over; who represents him as arguing on divinity; who, in attempting a serious imitation of Ariosto's

comic invention of fire-arms, makes the devils fire cannon in heaven? Neither I, nor anybody in Italy, has ever been able to take pleasure in all these dismal extravagances. His marriage of Sin and Death, and the snakes of which Sin is delivered, make any man of tolerably delicate taste sick, and his long description of a hospital is only good for a grave-digger. This obscure, eccentric, and disgusting poem was despised at its birth: and I treat it to-day as it was treated in its own country by its own contemporaries. Anyhow, I say what I think, and I really care very little whether others agree with me or not."-VOLTAIRE, FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET, 1758-9, Signor Pococurante, Candide, ch. xxv.

His "Paradise Lost" was overlooked in the reign of Charles II., an age as destitute of the noble ideas of taste, as it was of those of virtue. Some of the small poets who lived in the sunshine of the court, and now and then produced a madrigal or a song, were much more regarded than Milton.-GRANGER, JAMES, 17691824, Biographical History of England, vol. V, p. 238.

Adam and Eve, in the state of innocence, are well imagined, and admirably supported; and the different sentiments arising from difference of sex, are traced out with inimitable delicacy, and philosophical propriety. After the fall, he makes them retain the same characters, without any other change than what the transition from innocence to guilt might be supposed to produce: Adam has still that preeminence in dignity, and Eve in loveliness, which we should naturally look for in the father and mother of mankind.

Of the blessed spirits, Raphael and Michael are well distinguished; the one for affability, and peculiar good-will to the human race; the other for majesty, but such as commands veneration, rather than fear. We are sorry to add, that Milton's attempt to soar still higher, only shows, that he had already soared as high, as, without being "blasted with excess of light," it is possible for the human imagination to rise.-BEATTIE, JAMES, 177679, An Essay on Poetry and Music, p. 85. I am now to examine "Paradise Lost," a poem which, considered with respect to design, may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among

the productions of the human mind. . There is perhaps no poem, of the same length, from which so little can be taken without apparent mutilation. . . . The thoughts which are occasionally called forth in the progress, are such as could only be produced by an imagination in the highest degree fervid and active, to which materials were supplied by incessant study and ultimate curiosity. The heat of Milton's mind may be said to sublimate his learning, to throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts. He can please

when pleasure is required; but it is his peculiar power to astonish. The

want of human interest is always felt. "Paradise Lost" is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master and seek for companions. JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1779, John Milton, Lives of the English Poets.

Was there ever anything so delightful as the music of the "Paradise Lost." It is like that of a fine organ; has the fullest and deepest tones of majesty, with all the softness and elegance of the Dorian flute. Variety without end, and never equalled unless perhaps by Virgil. Yet the Doctor has little or nothing to say upon this copious theme, but talks something about the unfitness of the English language for blank verse, and how apt it is, in the mouth of some readers, to degenerate into declamation. Oh! I could thrash his old jacket, till I made his pension jingle in his pocket. --COWPER, WILLIAM, 1779, Letter to Unwin, Oct. 31.

The boldness, freedom, and variety of our blank verse is infinitely more favourable than rhyme; to all kinds of sublime poetry. The fullest proof of this is afforded by Milton; an author whose genius led him eminently to the sublime The whole first and second books of "Paradise Lost," are continued instances of it.BLAIR, HUGH, 1783, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres, ed. Mills, Lecture iv, p. 44.

Is not Milton a sublimer poet than Homer or Virgil? Are not his personages

more sublimely clothed, and do you not know that there is not perhaps one page in Milton's "Paradise Lost" in which he has not borrowed his imagery from the Scriptures? I allow and rejoice that Christ appealed only to the understanding and the affections; but I affirm that after reading Isaiah, or St. Paul's "Epistle to the Hebrews," Homer and Virgil are disgustingly tame to me, and Milton himself barely tolerable.-COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1796, Letters, ed. E. H. Coleridge, vol. I, p. 199.

Milton has written a sublime poem upon a ridiculous story of eating an apple, and of the eternal vengeance decreed by the Almighty against the whole human race, because their progenitor was guilty of this black and detestable offence.-GODWIN, WILLIAM, 1797, Of Choice in Reading, The Enquirer, p. 135.

Nothing can be farther from my intention than to insinuate that Milton was a plagiarist, or servile imitator; but I conceive, that, having read these sacred poems of very high merit, at the immediate age when his own mind was just beginning to teem with poetry, he retained numberless thoughts, passages, and expressions therein, so deeply in his mind, that they hung inherently on his imagination, and became, as it were, naturalized there. DUNSTER, CHARLES, 1800, Considerations on Milton's Early Reading, p. 11.

The merits of his epic do not, accordingly, consist in regularity of plan so much as in scattered passages of independent beauty, and in the perfection of his poetic diction. The universal admiration of Milton in the eighteenth century is based on his isolated descriptions of paradisaic. innocence and beauty, his awful picture of Hell, with the character of its inhabitants, whom he sketched, after the antique, as giants of the Abyss. It is questionable if any real benefit accrued to the language of English poetry from its increased leaning to the Latinism of Milton rather than to the Germanism of Spenser but this tendency being a fact, Milton must be regarded as the greatest master of style, and in many respects the standard of dignified poetic expression.SCHLEGEL, FREDERICK, 1815, Lectures on the History of Literature, XII.

The Genius of Milton, more particularly in respect to its span in immensity,

calculated him, by a sort of birth-right, for such an "argument" as the "Paradise Lost:" he had an exquisite passion for what is properly, in the sense of ease and pleasure, poetical Luxury; and with that, it appears to me, he would fain have been content, if he could, so doing, have preserved his self-respect and feel[ing] of duty performed; but there was working in him, as it were, that same sort of thing as operates in the great world to the end of a Prophecy's being accomplish'd: therefore he devoted himself rather to the ardours than the pleasures of song, solacing himself at intervals with cups of old wine; and those are, with some exceptions the finest parts of the poem.-KEATS, JOHN, 1818, Notes on Milton's Paradise Lost, Works, ed. Forman, vol. III, p. 19.

He stood alone and aloof above his times, the bard of immortal subjects, and, as far as there is perpetuity in language, of immortal fame. The very choice of those subjects bespoke a contempt for any species of excellence that was attainable by other men. There is something that overawes the mind in conceiving his long deliberated selection of that theme-his attempting it when his eyes were shut upon the face of nature-his dependence, we might almost say, on supernatural inspiration, and in the calm air of strength with which he opens "Paradise Lost, beginning a mighty performance without the appearance of an effort. Taking the subject all in all, his powers could nowhere else have enjoyed the same scope. It was only from the height of this great argument that he could look back upon eternity past, and forward upon eternity to come; that he could survey the abyss of infernal darkness, open visions of Paradise, or ascend to heaven and breathe empyreal air. -CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, An Essay on English Poetry.

I am not persuaded that the "Paradise Lost" would not have been more nobly conveyed to posterity, not perhaps in heroic couplets, although even they could sustain the subject if well balanced, but in the stanza of Spenser or of Tasso, or in the terza rima of Dante, which the powers of Milton could easily have grafted on our language.-BYRON, LORD, 1820, Observations upon an Article in Blackwood's Magazine.

Called at Pickering's in Chancery Lane,

who showed us the original agreement between Milton and Symonds for the payment of five pounds for "Paradise Lost." The contrast of this sum with the £2000 given for [the unexpired term of the copyright of] Mrs. Rundell's "Cookery," comprises a history in itself. Pickering, too, gave forty-five guineas for this agreement, three times as much as the whole sum given for the poem. It was part payment, I think?-MOORE, THOMAS, 1826, Diary, Oct. 21.

The Second great name in the annals of English Poetry is Milton: which is the First, of course, I need not say. Many other Poets have excelled him in variety and versatility; but none ever approached him in intensity of style and thought, in unity of purpose and in the power and grandeur with which he piles up the single monument of Genius, to which his mind is for the time devoted. His Harp may have but one string, but that is such an one, as none but his own finger knows how to touch. "Paradise Lost" has few inequalities; few feeblenesses. It seems not like a work taken up and continued at intervals; but one continuing effort; lasting, perhaps, for years, yet never remitted: elaborated with the highest polish, yet all the marks of ease and simplicity in it's composition.-NEELE, HENRY, 182729, Lectures on English Poetry, Lecture ii.

In the "Paradise Lost"-indeed in everyone of his poems-it is Milton himself whom you see; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve-are all John Milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works. The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit. COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1833, Table Talk, Aug. 18.

"The Paradise Lost" is totally unlike all the poetry that has followed it. Even in the controversial metaphysics of his poetry Milton has found no rival; and although Byron, in his "Cain," has combined tenderness the most touching with a lofty sublimity, still it may be said, with truth, of the Bard of our Republic, that he has nerve been imitated.-ELLIOTT, EBENEZER, 1833, Spirits and Men, Preface, p.213.

If the poet sometimes betrays fatigue, if the lyre drops from his wearied hand, he rests, and I rest along with him. . . Who ever wrote like this? What poet

ever spoke such langauge? How miserable seem all modern compositions beside these strong and magnificent conceptions. CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANÇOIS RENÉ, VICOMTE DE 1837, Sketches of English Literature, vol. II, pp. 118, 130.

The slowness of Milton's advance to glory is now generally owned to have been much exaggerated: we might say that the reverse was nearer the truth.

It would hardly, however, be said, even in this age, of a poem 3,000 copies of which had been sold in eleven years, that its success had been small; and some, perhaps, might doubt whether "Paradise Lost," published eleven years since, would have met with a greater demand. There is sometimes a want of congeniality in public taste which no power of genius will overcome. For Milton it must be said by every one conversant with the literature of the age that preceded Addison's famous criticism, from which some have dated the reputation of "Paradise Lost, that he took his place among great poets from the beginning.-HALLAM, HENRY, 1837-39, Literature of Europe, pt. iv, ch. V, par. 34.

Adam and Eve are beautiful, graceful objects, but no one has breathed the Pygmalion life into them; they remain cold statues. Milton's sympathies were with things rather than with men, the scenery and phenomena of nature, the trim gardens, the burning lake; but as for the phenomena of the mind, he was not able. to see them. He has no delineations of mind except Satan, of which we may say that Satan was his own character, the black side of it. I wish however, to be understood not to speak at all in disparagement of Milton; far from that.-CARLYLE, THOMAS, 1838, Lectures on the History of Literature, p. 166.

I, 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 poems, 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.

DE QUINCEY, THOMAS, 1839-57, On Milton, Writings, ed. Masson, vol. x, p. 399.