232 Adam and Eve's repentance. He speaks to the faithful angels: O Sons, like one of us Man is become To know both good and evil, since his taste Of that defended fruit! 37 So that, even in Milton's God, there are traces of the poet's humaneness. Divine reason, with some admixture of irony and pity, is reconciled with human feeling. 37 XI, 84-86. CHAPTER III PARADISE REGAINED AND SAMSON AGONISTES P ARADISE REGAINED sings Man's Regeneration. The most remarkable thing about it, from our point of view here, is that such a title should be given to such a work. The drama remains entirely intellectual. There is no action, and no passions come into play. The purely emotional side of Jesus's story, his suffering and crucifixion, has not attracted Milton. Divine love, God's love for the world, which makes him sacrifice his only Son for the salvation of his creatures, Christ's love for men which makes him give his blood as an offering to Eternal Justice, has no appeal for Milton either. Milton was not sentimental; he was not a mystic. He had his strong share of human feelings and passions, but he was simple and natural, and satisfied his desires in the plain normal human way, without refining overmuch. Besides, he wanted to understand things. The incomprehensibility of God is to him an intellectual fact, a perception by the mind of its own limitations. It is not a mystery of love and blind self-forgetfulness. Therefore, even as the Fall had been an argument in which man had been deceived, so the Restoration is an argument in which man, in the person of Jesus, triumphs. Paradise Regained is a tale of Reason and Passion discussing who shall win in man. It comes as near as it can to being an allegory, and barely escapes being one through Milton's poetical scheme, which includes the persons of Satan and Christ. Christ is hardly a success artistically. It is agreed that the poet had his own childhood in mind in the lines When I was yet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing, all my mind was set Milton has for once made a bad mistake in bringing in his own autobiography. He may have been a child with a passion for learning- there are such children—and an abnormal pride. The fact, transmitted into Jesus's experience, sounds like the worst sort of cant; and the whole of the presentation of Christ in the first book is vitiated by intolerable self-consciousness. Satan is not the grand Rebel of the first books of Paradise Lost, but the subtle tempter of Eve; and in that part, he is worthy of his glory. He shows true psychological acumen when he decides that the evident temptations of sensuality will be of no avail on Jesus and that only legitimate desires, like hunger, must be made use of. It is curious to point out that this should have driven the theme of sensuality out of the poem, but not at all: the loveliest part of Paradise Regained (and it contains many beautiful passages) is on women. Listen to Belial: Set women in his eye, and in his walk, 1 I, 201-04. |