Paradise Lost (Modern Library Classics) (2 page)

Simmons published a third edition in 1678. A printer named Brabazon Aylmer purchased the poem from Simmons in 1680, then sold half of it to a young entrepreneur named Jacob Tonson. He was
Dryden’s chief publisher and would become known for his beautiful editions of Shakespeare and Spenser. But Milton was his great love and, happily enough for a businessman, his great moneymaker too. He and Aylmer printed a folio-size fourth edition of the epic in 1688, adding illustrations, a frontispiece portrait of Milton, and an epigram by Dryden in which Milton is said to be the union of Homer and Vergil. Tonson purchased Aylmer’s half of the poem in 1691. He also obtained from Aylmer the manuscript of Book 1 now owned by the Pierpont Morgan Library. For the sixth edition, of 1695, Tonson added 321 pages of explanatory notes by Patrick Hume; no other English poem had ever been so lavishly annotated. Tonson and his family would print
Paradise Lost
, and other works by Milton, in various configurations again and again throughout the eighteenth century. When asked which poet had brought him the greatest financial profit, Tonson without hesitation replied “Milton” (Lynch 126). He had his portrait painted holding a copy of
Paradise Lost
.

In 1732 a cantankerous, seventy-year-old academic named Richard Bentley, then England’s foremost classicist and a specialist in textual emendation, published a notorious edition of
Paradise Lost
. Believing that he had purified textual corruption in classical authors such as Manilius, Bentley brought the same methods to Milton’s modern epic. Blind, Milton was unable to correct wayward copyists. But Bentley, suspecting a more deliberate and insidious errancy, posited the existence of a “phantom” editor. Befuddled by Milton’s learning and linguistic precision, this unknown person rewrote the text to suit his own imbecility. Today the Bentley edition seems a work of glaring subjectivity. Truths about the epic, such as the immense thoughtfulness manifest in its details, do not break into the editor’s awareness because his attention is devoted wholly to his own theory and method. It was hardly a compliment to Milton to suppose that
Paradise Lost
as readers knew it was a work of genius systematically effaced by the work of a moron. But modern critics such as William Empson, Christopher Ricks, and John Leonard have been inspired by Bentley’s scrutiny of the minutiae of Milton’s style. Textual emendation became the rage in Shakespeare studies in the eighteenth century and is still widely practiced today. The aberration of Bentley’s
Paradise Lost
aside, it never caught on among Milton’s editors.

The next notable edition was Thomas Newton’s beautiful two-volume
variorum of 1749. Its copious and often unequaled annotations were mostly reprinted, with the addition of many new ones, in the 1826 variorum of Milton’s entire poetic works assembled by Reverend Henry Todd. Anyone who becomes seriously curious about the meaning of a particular word or passage in Milton will want to go back to Todd and Newton, and behind them to the first of Milton’s annotators, Patrick Hume. They will also want to explore works such as Jonathan Richardson’s
Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost
(1734) and James Paterson’s
A Complete Commentary with Etymological, Explanatory, Critical and Classical Notes on Milton’s “Paradise Lost”
(1744). There are many subtleties, exactitudes, and points of information in these notes for which we, like other modern editors, have simply found no room.

Among the editions of the last century or so, we were most surprised to discover the sustained elucidation of A. W. Verity, who is largely forgotten today; besides the excellence of their commentary, his notes teem with examples of Romantic and Victorian imitation of Milton and will prove useful in future studies of that subject. In working on this edition, we came to think of Verity as the unknown god of Milton annotation. We also paid especially close attention to the thoughtful notes of Alastair Fowler and John Leonard, and consulted Merritt Hughes, Douglas Bush, Scott Elledge, and Roy Flannagan, among others.

Heaven sits atop Milton’s cosmos. Beneath it lies Chaos. We sense that both of these realms have, so to speak, been around forever. It would be a nice point in Milton’s theology to ask whether Chaos precedes Heaven or vice versa, since the very existence of God seems to require an abode, and therefore a Heaven of some sort, while on the other hand Chaos appears to be the precondition of all creations, including those of the Son, the angels, and Heaven. As the poem begins, these two established cosmic areas have been joined by two new spaces. At the bottom of Chaos stands Hell, the elder of the new realms. Between Heaven and Chaos, suspended on a golden chain affixed to Heaven (2.1004–6), lies the most recent of God’s creations: our Earth, including the planets and stars surrounding it.

Readers of the poem are usually familiar with dualistic visions of Heaven, in which the realm of the divine is carefully separated from such imperfect earthly things as body and alteration. But Milton’s universe is monistic. Everything stems from “one first matter” (5.472). Instead of excluding materiality, pleasure, pain, appetite, sexuality, and time from Heaven, Milton welcomes them in. As on Earth, day and night alternate in Heaven; Heaven’s night is not the darkness of Earth’s but rather comparable to earthly twilight (5.627–29, 645–46, 685–86). Beneath the very Mount of God is a cave “Where light and darkness in perpetual round/Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heav’n/Grateful vicissitude, like day and night” (6.6–8). Milton’s God, satisfying an appetite for vicissitude, resides on time.

Angels live large in a Heaven that is vast but not infinite. When Satan leaves the military camp near the deity, he and his followers retreat to the “palace of great Lucifer” in north Heaven (5.760). Apparently, on the model of the court and the country, angels live in estates various distances from the mountainous throne of God. Buildings designed by angelic architects, radiant with gems and precious metals, grace the realm. The orders of angels (Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, Angels) were strictly hierarchical in traditional Christian thought. At times in Milton, the terms carry their old hierarchical force, but often they are used interchangeably, as a pool of synonyms for the generic angel. Milton is rather insistent on the point that while likenesses between Heaven and Earth may be necessary fictions, they could also be ontologically sound (5.571–76). “O Earth, how like to Heav’n!” Satan exclaims (9.99). Heaven has vales, streams, breezes, trees, flowers, and vines. The vegetation produces ambrosial food, “the growth of Heaven” (5.635). Heaven and Earth, like spirit and matter or men and angels, differ “but in degree, of kind the same” (5.490).

Although Chaos can be studied in terms of antecedents in classical literature and philosophy (Chambers 1963), its appearance in the epic owes its problematic character to Milton’s theology. Chaos is infinite, and filled by a ubiquitous God who has nonetheless withdrawn his creative will from chaotic matter (7.168–73). None of the categorical binaries established during the creation of Genesis inhere in Chaos. It is neither this nor that, “neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/Confus’dly” (2.912–14); therefore
Satan, as he traverses this indeterminate space, confusedly mixes locomotions, “And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies” (2.950). The “embryon atoms” (2.900) of Chaos are “the womb of Nature” (2.911), the pure potential that the Son first circumscribes with golden compasses when creating our universe (7.225–31) and will doubtless use again in creating new worlds (2.915–16). Chaos cannot be good until God has infused it with creative order. It is at least morally neutral, at best thoroughly praiseworthy, as a part of the process by which God makes and sustains all things.

But alongside the language of atomism, Milton gives us a mythic Chaos, personified as the ruler of his realm, or rather its “Anarch” (2.988), since Chaos is by definition without rule. This Chaos, speaking for his consort, Night, and for a shadowy pack of Hesiodic creatures and personifications (2.963–67), expresses his resentment over recent losses (the creations of Hell and our universe) and supports Satan’s mission on the assumption that “Havoc and spoil and ruin are my gain” (2.1009). We thus arrive at paradox. Theologically, Chaos is neutral or better. Mythically, in terms of the epic narrative, Chaos is the ally of Satan.

Jewish and Christian theologians have sometimes distinguished the Bible from other Mesopotamian creation myths in which the god-hero defeats a chaos monster, out of whose slain body the world is made; in Genesis, by contrast, the world is initially good, and God affirms its goodness on every day of the creation. Evil appears with the fall of man (Ricoeur 172, 175–210), though of course the enigmatic presence of the snake promises a backstory of some kind. For Ricoeur the matter at stake here is whether religious symbols are recessive, and must always point backward to the defeat of Chaos, or whether they can look toward novel futures, as is apparently the case with the messianic and eschatological strands of Judaism and Christianity. Regina Schwartz, defending Milton’s mythic Chaos, argues that the separation of evil from the Creation is not really true of the Bible, and is patently untrue of
Paradise Lost
, where Chaos gives Satan his nod of approval. All of God’s revelations, all of Satan’s subsequent defeats, echo the initial triumph over Chaos, and redemption itself is but a repetition of that original victory (Schwartz 8–39; see also Leonard 2000, xx–xxi).

John Rumrich, defending the theological Chaos, notes that the irony of Chaos’s expression of solidarity with Satan lies in the old Anarch’s
failure to understand that Satanic evil is rigid, not anarchic, a fixed posture of defiance and disobedience (1995, 1035–44). We see this in Book 10, where Sin and Death are building a bridge through Chaos to link Earth and Hell, and a double-crossed Chaos seethes at this new incursion into his realm:

Chaos, Rumrich maintains, is “a part of the deity, arguably feminine, over which the eternal father does not exercise control, from which, in other words, the father is absent as an active, governing agent” (1995, 1043; see also Danielson 32–57).

Expelled from Heaven, the rebel angels fall for nine days and nights through Chaos to Hell (6.871), which “Yawning received them whole, and on them closed” (6.875). They land on a burning sulfurous lake. After spending another nine days and nights stretched out dazed or unconscious on this lake (1.50–53), they awaken to the baleful prospect of Hell. Milton famously describes it as “darkness visible” (1.63), a place where fire burns without giving off light. Its purpose is not clear to the fallen angels. Among the first topics addressed in Hell is whether the Hell is for punishment or confinement (1.146–52).

In Milton’s day the idea of Hell and its eternal torments was just entering a period of declining popularity among educated Europeans (Walker). Americans in particular, remembering such figures as Jonathan Edwards, tend to associate Puritanism with resistance to this trend. Milton exposes the simplicity of this view. His narrator introduces Hell as a “dungeon” for “torture without end” (1.61–69). But beyond the nine days in burning sulfur, we do not observe much in the way of punishment. To be sure, there are the more or less classical touches of the devils’ periodic exposure to the extremes of ice and fire (2.596–603); the frustrating waters of Lethe, which shrink from seekers of oblivion (2.604–14); the terrifying monsters bred in Hell (2.622–28); the annual metamorphosis of the demons into serpents (10.572–77). But nothing here approaches the individualized tortures inflicted over and over on the inmates of Dante’s Hell. Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that
Milton’s Hell is inhabited by fallen angels only, whereas Dante’s is peopled. But there is no direct allusion in
Paradise Lost
to tortures awaiting the damned in the future. William Empson, a critic acutely attuned to the idea of God as torturer, found no evidence of this despicable notion in
Paradise Lost:
“Milton’s God is not interested in torture, and never suggests that he uses it to improve people’s characters” (273). For Milton, one has the impression, exile from God is the primal punishment, and all others merely the flash points of low imaginations.

As for confinement, the only exit from Hell is through a locked gate. But the key has been entrusted to Sin (2.774–77, 850–53, 871–89). She alone can unlock the gate, and does, and is incapable of closing it. At the end of time, Hell may indeed become a dungeon of torment (10.629–37), the universe’s vacuum-cleaner bag, but in the meantime devils will possess the fallen earth, especially its air. Milton’s Hell is more importantly a spiritual condition. “The mind is its own place,” Satan declares, “and in itself/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (1.254–55). It can certainly do the second, as we see in the birth of Sin from the mind of Satan. Out of the “darkness” of a painful headache, “flames thick and fast” appear (2.754): a precise echo of Hell’s “darkness visible.” Even in Heaven, Satan has Hell within him, “nor from Hell/One step no more than from himself can fly/By change of place” (4.21–23).

The first half of
Paradise Lost
begins with Milton’s search for a Heavenly Muse who was present at the Creation, “and with mighty wings outspread/Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss” (1.20–21). Only with this Muse illuminating what is dark in him, raising and supporting what is low in him, can Milton create the poem. The second half of
Paradise Lost
begins in Book 7 with a direct and expanded account of this miracle. It is the perfect fit between inspiration and subject matter: the metaphorical creation of the poem now recounts the actual Creation. This world, the handiwork of God, was the single greatest stimulus to Milton’s imagination.