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From the Library of
SIMEON E. BALDWIN, Y '61.
Gift of his cliildren
HELEN BALDWIN GILMAN
ROGER SHERMAN BALDWIN, Y '90
1927

THE

MASTERPIECES

ICHELANGELO AND MILTON

BY

ALEXANDER S. TWOMBLY

ILLUSTRATED

SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY
New York BOSTON Chicago
1896

¥AIP

Copyright, 1896,
By SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY.

J. «. Cushing i LV. - Berwick & Stuitb
Norwood Mass. I'.S.A

EPeoicatton TO HER
WHOSE APPRECIATIVE SYMPATHY
IN ART AND LETTERS
HAS BEEN A CONSTANT INSPIRATION

MICHELANGELO AND MILTON.

In genius they are akin. Milton wrote his Epic in verses
that will never die; Michelangelo wrought out his, in immortal
works. Both deal in colossal figures, and in grandeur of conception
they are one. Had they changed places and epochs, Milton
would have been, as the great artist was, a defender of liberty
and a mighty prophet of judgment. Michelangelo would have
celebrated Cromwell and his Ironsides in Art, with the vigor
of a Puritan, and would have given immortality to the Regi
cides in imperishable marble.
Milton's II Penseroso is matched by some of the more som
ber sonnets of Michelangelo, and both have interpreted to men
the deeper things of God. Milton, in his blindness, drew light
for the world from the inner revelation of Divine Truth, and
Michelangelo, in his isolation from men, communed with the
Infinite. They fittingly belong together, although differing in attributes,
and the Sistine creations of the painter may well illustrate, as
they do in this book, the masterful inspirations of the writer
of Paradise Lost.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PART FIRST.
MICHELANGELO. PAGE
I. La Pieta and The David. Earlier Works . . . 15
II. The Moses. First Great Masterpiece  35
III. Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel . .... 45
IV. Tombs of the Medici. Night and Day. Twilight and
Dawn  56
V. The Last Judgment. Sistine Chapel  73
PART SECOND.

MILTON.
Prefatory Note 
I. The Poet and the Poem. Paradise Lost .
II. Miltonic Conception of Supernatural Beings
III. Miltonic Theory of the Life of Mortals .
IV. Special Study of Milton's Eve .

9599
107127156

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PA
Michelangelo .

RT FIRST. PAGE
Portrait, by himself . Frontispiece

Masque of Satyr

The Bargello, Florence

21

La Pieta. 

St. Peter's, Rome

29

The David

Florence

33

The Moses

Rome .

39

Zacherias ....

Sistine Ceiling

49

Libyan Sibyl

Sistine Ceiling

53

Twilight and Dawn

Sacristy, Florence

65

Night and Day

Sacristy, Florence

69

The Last Judgment .

Sistine Chapel

81

St. Peter's

Rome ....

89

PART SECOND.

Milton 
The Creation of Adam .
Satan . . . .
Christ as a Judge
The Temptation and Expulsion
The Creation of Eve

Portrait, A.D. 1670
Michelangelo Wiertz, Bruxelles
Michelangelo Michelangelo
Michelangelo

93
103"3"7133 ¦57

Part First.
MICHELANGELO.

" When Nature made him
She broke the mold." — Ariosto.

MICHELANGELO.

THE EPIC MEANING OF HIS MASTERPIECES.

LA PIETA AND THE DAVID.
It is not our purpose at this time " to drag the
lumber of the schools through the garden of the
muses," or to relate all the events which belong
to the great artist's life and times.
We shall simply attempt to show the epic mean
ing of Michelangelo's greatest masterpieces, as a
study of the higher motive in his career and char
acter. The works which we consider the greatest
and the best adapted to our purpose, are four in
number: viz. The Moses, in the Church of San
Pietro in Vinculi at Rome ; the frescoes of the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in the Vatican ; the
four recumbent statues, Night and Day, Twilight
and Dawn, in the Sacristy of the Church of San
Lorenzo at Florence, and The Last Judgment,
on the wall of the Sistine Chapel.
'5

1 6 Michelangelo.
These works mark four distinct periods in
Michelangelo's life, and represent the noteworthy
characteristics of his thought and action.
He was always a peculiar being; he never had
a mother's care; as a boy he was wild, erratic,
imaginative, and the idiosyncrasies of his maturity
were the natural outgrowth of the peculiarities of
his youth. The only change in him as he grew
older was that he became more caustic, exclusive,
and impetuous.
None of the sweet felicities of mist and twilight,
surrounding the towers and heights of Florence
with a veil of beauty, softened the vigorous move
ment of his mind. None of that gleaming sunlight
which gilds the Dome of Brunelleschi and the
Campanile of Giotto imparted its chastened luster
to his conceptions. It was Florence, magnificent
in agony, sublime in civil convulsion, that seized
upon his mature genius and hurled him, mallet
in hand, upon the marble from which he drew
forth the images of his soul's passion.
He worked his marble with his own hand. Manv
sculptors fashion their models only in the clav.
He could see in the rough block the form he
meant to bring out of it, and must hasten lest the
ideal image vanish. There is no hesitancy ; there
can be none in the creative transport; every clip

La Pieta and the David. 17
tells ; not a false stroke ; delicate touches, but with
a powerful hand ; no rest till the form emerges ;
sleep is an enemy, food an interruption ; he lies
down at night in his clothes, to be ready at dawn ;
into an hour is put the intensity of a lifetime.
He appeared on the stage during an epoch which
demanded this intensity in action and which pro
duced men like Columbus, Luther, the Emperor
Charles V., and Henry the Eighth.
Born of noble stock, with a crest which carried
as a symbol two bulls' horns, full of hereditary
impetuosity, he took into his heart all the trials,
shames, and sorrows of his native land, and flung
forth in impassioned works the feelings which over
mastered him. These monuments, while they tell
us of his superb ability, are also a revelation of
their creator's inner life.
Had Michelangelo been a soldier, he would have
been foremost in the midst of tumults and battles ;
a poet, he would have been like Dante, whom he
studied and passionately admired ; a reformer, with
Luther he would have answered the anathemas of
Popes and made them tremble at his name.
But as an artist, there is but one way: his art~is
his only channel for expression ; his tempestuous
spirit must free itself in the production of immortal
works.

1 8 Michelangelo.
Great natures demand great movement, and the
times in which he lived stimulated and developed
his grandest powers. The old world was dying ;
the new bursting into flower. Printing was be
ginning to diffuse and popularize knowledge,
hitherto the exclusive possession of the learned.
The first book (Jenson's Decor Puellarum) was
printed in Italy in 1461. Dante's Divina Come-
dia in 1472. America was discovered when
Michelangelo was a youth of seventeen years ;
the Reformation, under Luther's leadership, began
to change the political as well as the religious as
pect of Europe, when he was at the zenith of his
fame. The Church of Rome, imperial, remorseless, in
quisitorial, originated at this time and followed up
with success the idea of enlarged temporal sove
reignty ; under the Borgias, the Medici, and the
Farnese, it became diplomatic, intriguing, and war
like. The fine arts likewise felt the new impulse. The
old Roman architecture yielded to new modes of
expression, subject to the forms of the ecclesiastical
renaissance. Finally, the free cities and republics
of Italy passed into the hands of tyrants; Florence
itself, after heroic but fruitless struggles, submitted
to its fate — oblivious of the past and careless of

La Pieta and the David. 19
the future — to become the prize of the strongest
usurper. It was, however, the good fortune of Michel
angelo in his youth to live in Florence during its
palmy days, before its liberties were lost, and there
to receive an education, the best the world afforded
at that time. To be sure, society was both culti
vated and coarse, heroic yet brutal, materialistic
yet superstitious. A strange environment, which
nevertheless gathered influences about him that
kindled enthusiasm, opened his mind, fitted it for
observation, and gave it the broadest scope for its
genius possible in that age.
The Italy of that period was the center of the
trade, the luxury, and the art of the known world.
All the nations were under tribute to this land of
merchant princes. The Dark Ages gave up long-
buried, ornamented manuscripts. The Popes began
to unearth the statues of antiquity, and all that
was finest in Italy flowed into Florence, under
the enlightened though selfish policy of the
Medici. Gimabue had brought Byzantine art to Florence.
Giotto had embellished the city. Lorenzo de'
Medici had collected ancient marbles. Massive
palaces, the Cathedral, the Baptistry, and the palace
of the Signory, were already built, and stood, as in

20 Michelangelo.
our day, for Michelangelo to catch the inspiration
of their solid grandeur.
Gems, carvings, iron filigree, abounded ; the fables
of Ovid were painted on the bedsteads and mantels
of the princely houses ; the artisans competed for
prizes and were gratified by processions, pageants,
masquerades, in the streets. In the loggia, or
covered piazzas on the tops of the palaces, princely
men and gay women looked down on the surging
masses of the highways, or off towards beautiful
Fiesole and the hill crowned by the Church of San
Mineato. Ambassadors were received in regal state
by the merchants, and treaties were negotiated.
Thus Florence at the height of its glory was
the educator of the young sculptor, the history
of Florence his text-book, its temples, galleries,
and works of art his object lessons, and its
applause the prize he sought. Any other city,
even Rome itself, which contributed not a little
to his artistic development, could not so well
have furnished his mind in its adolescent stao-e.
It is true that the old Paganism was revived
in these intellectual and luxurious tastes, but it
is also true that the Christian element was not
lacking. That masque of a satyr, on which Michel
angelo exercised his youthful powers in the war
den of San Marco, is a symbol of one side only

La Pieta and the David. 23
of the influence of Florence upon the exuberant
imagination of his precocious young manhood.
His education was many-sided. His intelligence
was stimulated by contact with the learned in
the household of Lorenzo de' Medici, and his
genius cultivated by contact with the best mas- 1
ters and their works.1 \
It remained, however, for the voice of a monk
to awaken the slumbering soul of the artist to
the perception of a spiritual ideal, which began
the process that ended in the production of his
most noble creations. He achieved some remark
able works in this early period, a Madonna, a
Cupid, a Hercules, and a St. Johir; but as yet
nothing commensurate with his great power had
been produced.
It was Savonarola, the Prior of San Marco,
the religious enthusiast, the reformer of religion
and the State, who, coming to Florence when
Michelangelo was barely of age, brought with
him a new revelation to the artist's soul. The
passionate discourses of the monk, during Lent in
1495, aroused the popular conscience, and the
youthful artist at once became his willing and
devoted adherent.
1 Some contemporary painters : Giorgione, Diirer, Titian, Correggio,
Perugino, Raffaelle, Da Vinci, Giulio Romano, Sebastian del Piombo, Hans
Holbein, Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, Domenichino (1581-1641).

24 Michelangelo.
Not only did this fervent pleader implant seeds
of religious truth deep in the susceptible soil of
his heart, but he also burned in upon the nature
of Michelangelo an intense love of liberty — for
Savonarola sought to remodel the city politically
as well as morally. This was his mistake as a
preacher of righteousness, and it cost him his
life ; but none the less did he emancipate the
whole being of one of the grandest men of the
century from sordid aims and mean endeavor.
He opened to the sculptor the courts of the
city of God, that he might become immortal in
the works which even to-day satisfy our ideal of
majesty and truth, and in which is embodied a
mystic exaltation, which all who look upon and-
study them must feel.
Thus the dignity of Truth in Michelangelo's
masterpieces is not only a gift to the world by
their author, but is also a legacy from Savonarola
to the ages. The great artist himself bears wit
ness to this, in his statement that " the living
word of Savonarola would alwavs live in his soul."
It is by no means claimed that Michelangelo
became a consecrated man, weaned from self and
given to holy service. Religion in his day was
busy with external ceremonials; it fostered material
and gross conceptions, penance, and the tragic

La Pieta and the David. 25
element in Christ's sufferings, which blinded men
to the holier ideals of love and sacrifice. Even
in Savonarola's teachings there was an excess of
zeal, which reacted on a mind like that of Michel
angelo in its calmer moods, and could not give
comfort in times of despondency.
When, therefore, the young Florentine, just
coming of age, went from home to seek his for
tune, and was carried into the great vortex of
Rome, a city spiritually and ecclesiastically de
moralized, we do not wonder that he yielded for
a time to the seductions of ignoble ambition, and
was in danger of being overcome by the almost
wholly- Pagan spirit in religion and in art, which
prevailed under the very shadow of St. Peter's.
Alexander VI., of the shameless and cruel
family of the Borgias, was Pope, and his son
(called his "nephew") was the pugilist, Caesar
Borgia, who, fighting on horseback with a pike,
slew with his own hand six savage bulls. There
were also young Cardinals in Rome, who, clad
in complete armor, galloped through the streets,
and who sold at auction the gold and silver ves
sels of their churches for money to bribe their
friends and foes.
And yet, standing amid the ruins of old temples,
on the rock of the Capitol, in the churches and

26 Michelangelo.
the Vatican adorned with the paintings of Man
tegna and Melozzo, Michelangelo seems to have
forgotten that Lucrezia Borgia of infamous memory
was the Pope's daughter, and that the vulture-
wings of that debauched family were spread over
all the churches, castles, and habitations of the
most princely and luxurious city of the world.
He gave himself up for a time to the fascina
tions of antique art, and his first work, executed
at Rome for a Roman gentleman, was the statue
of a drunken Bacchus. He also made a Cupid
for the same patron.
But during the three years of his first visit to
Rome, strange things were happening in Florence,
from which news was received almost daily. He
heard of the marvelous power which his beloved
Prior was gaining over the people ; how thou
sands of boys and girls gathered in the city to
receive the sacrament, and how at the carnival
a pyramid was raised in the square, of condemned
luxuries — false braids of women's hair, costly gar
ments, profane books (Petrarch and Ariosto among
them) — and burned with cries of " Long live Christ,
the King of Florence," and " Mary the Queen,"
while enthusiastic crowds danced around the
pyre and sang religious songs, — a kind of Sal
vation Army of the fifteenth century.

La Pieta and the David. 27
He heard reports of the fiery Monk's invectives
against corruption in morals, and his ardent ap
peals for a holy life ; but he also heard how the
bold preacher interfered with the government of
the city, drove out the Medici, and established
popular sovereignty. Then came the Monk's de
fiance of the Pope, the Pope's excommunication
of the Monk and the fatal blunders in prophecy,
which at last, in 1498, consigned the Reformer to
the flames.
Gradually the young sculptor, under the influ
ence of these tidings which revived his early feel
ing, recovered that higher conception of art, with
which the Monk's teachings had at first inspired
him, and suddenly, relinquishing his brilliant imi
tation of the antique, produced a different kind
of work, which at once placed him among the
most original and famous masters of religious art.
It was a group called La Pieta. and represented
the Virgin Mary with the dead Christ in her lap.
The group stands to-day in a side chapel, on the
right as one enters St. Peter's. Although the
divine son seems older in death than the mother
in her pure, virginal freshness, yet the whole group
withdraws the mind from the contemplation of
possible incongruity, and fills it with profound
sympathy for the inconsolable Virgin, and rever-

28 Michelangelo.
ence for the divine form lying so heavy and help
less on her knees.
As this marvelous creation was finished about
the time that Savonarola was burned at Florence,
and as a revolution in popular feeling speedily
followed the martyrdom (the martyr's picture, with
a crown of glory around his head, being exposed
for sale even in Rome itself), we cannot help be
lieving that this sad ending of a life which was
so dear to the young artist, had much to do with
the obvious change which from this day forth
took place in his thought and art.
Having been beguiled to linger in the groves
of the Harpies, and to trifle for a while with the
Pagan spirit which poisoned the atmosphere sur
rounding him, he now rises up, like his great
prototype Dante, from the seductive temptation,
and hearing the dying voice of Savonarola as
Dante heard the voice of Beatrice from the
Shades below, triumphs over the years to come
— years in Florence, when it would have been
riches to him to have served obsequiously his
country's masters — and years in Rome, when even
Popes would seek to seduce him to sacrifice his
honor to their favor.
Before he came to Rome, he yielded to the
suggestion of one of the Medici, that the Cupid

La Pieta a?zd the David. 31
he had wrought should be stained to imitate the
antique, and that a Roman Cardinal would give
a princely sum for it. Woefully cheated in this
affair by the agent, one Baldassare of Milan, he
set out for Rome to recover his loss. When,
however, he returned to Florence in 1499 or
1500, it was in a very different frame of mind
and with far nobler purposes. Immediately he
designed a life-size Madonna, and a Holy Family
now in the Tribune at Florence. At once, For
tune began to smile upon him. .__—
While engaged in these works, in 1501 a sud
den calamity overwhelmed his native city. Csesar
Borgia, the Pope's son, demanded that the tyran
nical Medici in exile should be restored, and so
threatened the Florentines that they agreed to
pay 36,000 florins if he would withdraw his
troops. In spite, however, of this immense trib
ute, the art-loving city at this very time com
missioned Michelangelo to undertake an impor
tant public work.
An immense block of awkwardly hewn marble
had been lying unused in the courtyard of the
workshops of the Cathedral. This block the citi
zens commissioned the sculptor to fashion into a
colossal statue to be placed in the great square
of the city. And thus, with great difficulties to

3 2 Michelangelo.
be confronted, owing to the malformation of the
block, the masterpiece of the David was begun.
It was completed in January, 1504, and stood
in its proud position before the ancient palace of
the Signory until, in 1873, it was removed to
the Accademia delle Belle Arti, that it might the
better be preserved. Its completion, so near the
time of the deliverance of Florence from her
three most dangerous enemies, Alexander, Caesar
Borgia, and Piero de' Medici, may have sug
gested to the mind of its originator, even as it
did to the minds of his countrymen, the personi
fication of the still youthful vigor and splendid
exaltation of the city of his fondest admiration.

II.
THE MOSES.
We come now to a period in his history when
Michelangelo's real masterpieces begin to appear.
We say " begin to appear," because the Moses
was a work on which he toiled at intervals for
fifty years ; the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was
not completed till 151 1; the Sacristy of San
Lorenzo with its sculptures was never finished,
but was left in 1530 as it now is; and the Last
Judgment, on the wall of the Sistine, was ex
hibited to the public in 1541, when the artist
was sixty-six years of age.
As has been said already, these four are the
sculptor's mightiest achievements. We do not add
to them the architectural triumph which he won
in the building of St. Peter's Dome, because that
is so different in its demand on his genius as
to deserve a careful treatment from another hand ;
and, moreover, it has no place in our present
purpose. We shall confine ourselves therefore to
the four masterpieces, in which the grand motive
35

36 Michelangelo.
of the artist's life, from this time onward, may be
definitely traced.
Michelangelo is now thirty years of age and in
the full maturity of his powers. He is again in
Rome, called there by Pope Julius 1 1., who, what
ever his faults, was the noblest patron of the arts
that ever wore the tiara, and the most sagacious
of all the Popes in selecting artists of ability.
His large projects are seen in the various orders
given to the sculptor soon after his arrival. The
Vatican is to be splendidly remodeled, and he
commissions Michelangelo to build at once the
most magnificent mausoleum ever planned by
Christian or Pagan potentate. St. Peter's itself
is to be rebuilt in order to receive it.
Michelangelo suggests a hundred thousand
crowns as the expense; Julius exclaims " Two hun
dred thousand," and sends a man to view the loca
tion of the tomb. Placed in the interior of the
great church, its base is to measure thirty-six by
twenty-four feet ; there are to be quadrangular pro
jecting pedestals, with colossal youths chained to
the pillars ; gods of victory above and emblems of
conquered cities beneath ; forty statues for the
pedestals alone. A second story will sustain a
sarcophagus of elaborate form and ornamentation.
Eight vast sitting figures on this second story will

The Moses. 37
be placed over the architectural corners of the
lower building. To crown the whole, two angelic
forms, bearing the figure of the Pope falling into
the sleep of death, are to surmount the structure,
which is to be thirty feet in height and adorned
with the finest architectural decorations.
Such was the design of Michelangelo, accepted
by the Pope ; a design which " would require a life
time to complete and the revenues of an empire."
The project was no less indicative of the magnifi
cent ambition of the Pope, than of the bold, aspir
ing spirit of the designer. It was a Herculean
task. Only the most daring mind could conceive
and the most skillful hand undertake it.
But the Pope unhesitatingly gave Michelangelo
a bill for a thousand ducats and sent him to
Carrara, there to quarry the large blocks of mar
ble needed for the work.
Alas for the folly of human ambition and human
vanity ! Out of the fifty or more heroic figures,
planned by the sculptor for the monument, only
one was ever finished, although a few others —
some blocked out and some nearly completed —
have been assigned to the great scheme.
That one, however, — that solitary example of the
whole which the mind of the designer had con
ceived, — is enough to give Julius undying remem-

38 Michelangelo.
brance, and Michelangelo a glory never to pass
away. For, that single statue, colossal, unique,
unrivaled, is his immortal Moses, beyond all com
parison the most sublime creation ever chiseled
from the marble by the hand of man.
Michelangelo was at work upon it for more than
twoscore years, chiseling at intervals, making a
smooth surface, the veins of arms and hands and
even the thongs of the sandals being minutely
wrought. In spite of its present position on the
floor in the Church of San Pietro in Vinculi at
Rome and its mean surroundings, no one can con
template its size, its majestic strength, its stern,
unyielding countenance, without feeling in some
measure the awfulness of the ideal being which
the artist intended to portray.
We say " ideal being," for it is no real personage,
not even the ancient lawgiver whose name it bears.
It surpasses in grandeur not only the foremost
man of the epoch in which it was conceived, but
also the foremost man of any era of the earth's
history. The sculptor determined to reveal in
that heroic brow, in that flowing beard, that Her
culean frame, that terrible glance, and the horns
(ancient symbols of strength) protruding from the
forehead, the sublime hope of his nation's deliver
ance from foes temporal and spiritual.

The Moses. 41
The times were full of danger to liberty. Italy
stood between two powers contending for the
empire. Spain and France were rivals. It was
supposed that the Pope must become subject to
one or the other. Florence was threatened by the
exiled Medici; the city had paid Spain 15,000
ducats to buy off an invasion. It was in view of
these exigencies that the ardent soul of Michel
angelo, filled with yearnings for his country's deliv
erance, conceived the Moses. So great was his
desire for the fulfilment of his dreams, that when
the statue was done, he struck it on the knee with
his mallet and said to it " Now live ! "
The Pope himself may have seemed to Michel
angelo to embody something of his ideal, as the
sculptor came more and more to understand and
appreciate him. An old man when called to the
Papal Chair, Julius II. conquered his feebleness
by an exercise of the will, and he delivered Italy
from tyrants at home and abroad. He had no idea
of surrendering to France or Spain. In his day,
no monarch could be crowned Emperor at Rome.
By statecraft as well as by force of arms, he pre
vented a catastrophe. Sometimes on one side and
then on the other, he fought and excommunicated;
he never surrendered, although he occasionally
retired from the field, even as he changed his head-

42 Michelangelo.
quarters once when a cannon-ball entered the
house. Arriving at last in Rome without an army, ill,
and summoned before a Council which certain
hostile Cardinals had called, he still projected plans
for resistance, gathered a fresh army and took it
upon himself to call together a Lateran Council
at Rome.
He chose for his watchword, " The Expulsion of
the Barbarians from Italy," and this is the mean
ing of that famous painting by Raffaelle, on the
wall of the Vatican, called " The Expulsion of
Heliodorus from the Temple."
During a large part of his Pontificate, Florence
was under a constitutional government. The familv
of the Medici made no violent attempts to regain
the sovereignty which they had misused. Thev
became politic and bided their time. In spite, how
ever, of the Pope, when Spain invaded Italy and
Florence was compelled to pay the 15,000 ducats,
the Medici, having asked to return simply as citi
zens, by the aid of the Spanish garrison seized
the supreme command.
This was in 1 5 1 2 ; Julius was embarrassed for
money, but planned for the expulsion of the Medici
and other measures.
He was a born warrior. When Michelangelo

The Moses. 43
asked him what he should put in the raised hand
of his bronze statue at Bologna, the Pope answered
"Put a sword: I am no scholard." Fierce and
furious when any one opposed his will, by no means
scrupulous in morals, he was at all events brave,
a lover of freedom, and a noble patron of the arts.
When, therefore, Michelangelo thought of Julius,
as he designed and chiseled out his Moses, he must
have felt that in the fiery successor of St. Peter
were some at least of the characteristics of the
great Hebrew leader, whom he portrayed as
"Waiting and clutching his tempestuous beard."
The epic meaning of this masterpiece, then, is
not so much religious as patriotic. Michelangelo
chiseled the Moses for St. Peter's and for Julius'
tomb, but mainly as an everlasting symbol of the
deliverance which Italy might expect and which
sometime would be wrought out.
Into this statue he put the might of a Titanic
force in reserve for the emergency, that his coun
trymen, yea! that all the world might recognize
a power in the heavens above, giving to men im
perious courage and persistency.
The Moses is a great leader and commander,
seated calmly for the moment in significant repose,
as if awaiting the fullness of time. When events,

44 Michelangelo.
in God's providence and the inspired voice of a
united people, shall call him to arise, then must
he, arousing himself and shaking his locks, go
forth to conquer in Jehovah's name.
As we gaze at those stupendous limbs and
into that stern eye, it seems as if the powerful
arms must quickly raise themselves aloft, as
Moses lifted his hands with the rod over the
field of Rephidim, when Israel fought with the
Amalekites and prevailed.

III.
THE SISTINE CEILING.
Julius II. was destined to see neither the com
pletion of his mausoleum nor the fulfilment of
his wish for the freedom of Italy. Before the
Moses was ready to be exposed to popular view,
he became indifferent to the building of the
tomb, and in 1508 commanded the sculptor, much
to his disgust, to leave the statue and begin an
other work which promised a speedier completion.
The Pope insisted that Michelangelo should paint
the immense vault or ceiling of the chapel built
by Sixtus in 1473. The artist resisted, but Julius
was obstinate.
Unlike in many characteristics, these two men
were in perfect accord in seeking the restora
tion of freedom to the whole of Italy. Their
similarity also in a sort of fiery independence
is no less remarkable.
What strange times they must have had to
gether! The Pope refused the sculptor an
audience on one occasion, and so the sculptor
45

46 Michelangelo.
gathered up his effects and went off to Florence,
only to be brought back after repeated solicita
tion and then under a safeguard as ambassador
from Florence. Julius might even have made
war with the Signory to get the artist back; there
fore they pleaded with him to return.
Julius knew the value of his acquisition, and
when, after another quarrel, a Cardinal ventured
to excuse Michelangelo by saying " These artists
never know how to behave," the Pope turned
on him, and, berating him soundly, exclaimed,
" Do you dare to say to this man things I would
not say to him myself ? Out of my sight with
your awkwardness ! "
Sometimes one yielded and sometimes the other;
but the result was alwavs a mutual recognition
of the independent persistency of each other.
Once (in 15 10), because of an angry word, the
Pope struck the sculptor with his stick, and again
Michelangelo went home and prepared to leave.
This was the man whom Pope Clement VII. did
not ask to take off his hat in his presence, for
fear that he would immediately put it on again ;
and lie always asked him to sit down, lest Michel
angelo should sit without being asked.
When it was decided that the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel should be frescoed, six painters

The Sistine Ceiling. 47-
of ability were summoned from Florence to assist
the artist. He soon found them useless, and one
day they found the chapel closed and their mas
ter absent. There was nothing for them to do
but to set out quietly and return to Florence.
Michelangelo could not bring himself to the point
of telling them to leave.
After this, on the scaffolding which he invented
and which was a marvel of mechanical skill, the
great artist lay on his back, one hundred feet
above the floor, in the unwholesome atmosphere
close by the ceiling, and for twenty months worked
away, communing only with his own thoughts.
A color-grinder and the Pope were the sole per
sons allowed upon the scaffolding. At the end
of a period of ten months, one-half of the ceiling
was nearly completed and the Pope insisted on
taking down the staging.
The artist resisted, but Julius was inexorable
and asked in a passion, "When will you come to
an end?" "When I can," replied Michelangelo.
Then the Pope thundered out, "You want me
to have you thrown off the scaffold, do you ? "
and the artist knew he must yield. He sus
pended his work before it was quite done, and
on All Saints' Day, 1509, all Rome poured into
the chapel to see the wonderful work.

48 Michelangelo.
In ten months more, after incredible labor,
fatigue, and vexatious interruptions on the part
of the Pope, the whole was exposed to view. The
painter had lain on his back so long that to read
a scroll or manuscript he must hold it above his
head. At the present time, after the lapse of nearly
four centuries, one can hardly imagine the bril
liant effect of the colors which time and the
smoke of candles have greatly dimmed. And
yet the figures still gleam forth in parts like
sculptured bas-reliefs hanging from the sky under
murky clouds, the boldest existing delineations of
the most transcendent scenes and characters that
have ever fascinated and baffled the imagination
of man.
The main arch or center of the ceiling, two
hundred feet long, displays the historical record
of the Book of Genesis. The Almightv appears
in realistic proportions, as Creator in the midst of
suns and stars, brooding over chaos, sweeping into
existence out of nothing the svstems which he
fashioned by his word.
Man's creation, Eve's appearance, the Relapse
from innocence, and the Expulsion from the o-ar-
den are all delineated in graphic perspective.
Cain and Abel offering sacrifices, the Deluge and

The Sistine Ceiling. 51
the Drunkenness of Noah enrich the vast center ;
the figures superhuman in their strength of limb,
and the accessories admirably adapted to the con
structive relations of different parts of the various
scenes. In the twelve compartments, set in triangular
spaces around the domelike center, twelve gigan
tic figures appear; figures of Prophet and Sibyl,
both of whom the early church considered as in
spired to utter oracles and to announce Jehovah's
decrees of vengeance or of mercy. In these statu
esque creations in fresco, we see what the sculptor
would have done in marble, had he been permitted
to finish his design for the mausoleum of Julius.
A divine art produced these conceptions ; for the
artist allowed no dictation, in subject or in treat
ment, even from the Pope. He sketched and laid
on the colors, out of the midst of emotions descend
ing upon his soul in the solitude of his com
munion with the Infinite, who revealed to him, as"
in a waking dream, the mighty and mysterious
origins of things.
As we contemplate this stupendous achieve
ment, what conclusion is forced upon us, but that
the artist intended to impress upon his age the
sublime solemnity of life and the prophetic warnings
which ever troubled his austere and inexorable soul?

5 2 Michelangelo.
Not yet had he witnessed, even in vision, the
" Fair and shining cities
Dropped out like jewels from a broken crown."
Florence was still in possession of its freedom,
and the artist had not come into that later period
of his creative life, prolific of works in which the
master seems to recoil upon himself, then " back
upon the world, plunging headlong into dark
ness." But even now the prophetic instinct was strong
within him, and losing all consciousness of self,
penetrating the mysteries of the ages, in dreamy
rhapsody while mechanically using the brush, he
strove to disencumber himself of the premonitions
which oppressed him.
Was he not, as his Zacherias seems to be, striving
to pierce the shadows already darkening over his
fair land? or may we think that, in an age when
Christian Vicars were warriors and the ritual the
only relic of the primitive religion, he placed the
Delphic, Libyan, and Cumaean Sibyls with the
Prophets, to reveal the return to Paganism of
the Church of Christ and the Apostles ?
Why does his Ezekiel, with bodv astrain, stretch
forth his hand, as if the parchment he unrolled
contained the announcement of a coming doom?

The Sistine Ceiling. 55
And why did he place in the four triangles of
the corners of the chapel, the Death of Haman,
the Serpent in the Wilderness, the Slaying of
Goliath of Gath, and Judith with the Head of
Holofernes in her hand, if not to symbolize the
divine rule of righteousness, with no mercy for
the incorrigible ?
The religion of that troubled soul was, as we
have said, of his times, with little in it of reveal
ing or redeeming grace, and much of the Dan
tesque conception of immortality. The school of
Plato in its finer aspects molded the thought of
Michelangelo, more than the tenderness of the
school of Christ.
In sonnets, written in his large handwriting still
to be seen in the Vatican, his doubts of future happi
ness rise almost to despair. In his old age he wrote
" Borne to the utmost brink of life's dark sea,
Too late thy joys I understand, oh earth !
JHow thou dost promise peace which cannot be,
And that repose, which ever dies at birth.
For this I know, the greatest bliss on high
Belongs to him called earliest to die."
Thus the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel marks
the end of the second period, during which the
artist feared and prophetically announced what
afterwards befell him and his unhappy land.

IV.

TOMBS OF THE MEDICI.

We now approach a group of works, by which
we can more clearly interpret the inner life and
surcharged heart of the great artist, during the
twenty years, in which, for most of the time, two
Popes of the family of the Medici ruled in the
Papal Seat. The Medicean family, merchants
(with three balls on their coat of arms, now used
as a symbol by pawnbrokers), rose to power in the
fourteenth century, by means of their wealth.
Cosmo de' Medici made Florence the central city
of Italy. Lorenzo de' Medici, Michelangelo's
patron, rose by perilous struggles to the head of
the State, humbled the families opposed to him,
made himself popular, encouraged the arts, and
died leaving three sons, about whom he said that
" the first was good, the second clever, and the
third a fool." The third was Piero, who succeeded
his father in Florence, but was drowned during a
battle between the Spaniards and the French.
The second son, Giovanni, a Cardinal at seventeen
5<5

Tombs of the Medici. 57
years of age, became Pope Leo X. when he was
thirty-eight years old, and held that dignity for
nine years. The Florentines were proud of the
honor, crowded to Rome, and obsequiously kissed
the foot of the new pontiff.
Freedom now became impossible to Florence.
The Pope aimed to divide the whole land among
his relations.
Leo was a man of taste, extravagant, cunning,
and desirous of appropriating for himself all the
fame that Julius II. had won. Raffaelle was the
new Pope's favorite and painted a flattering por
trait of the bloated old man with frog-like eyes.
Yet Leo gave Michelangelo a commission to cover
the facade of the Medicean church of San Lorenzo
at Florence with sculptures. It was an immense
task, and Michelangelo spent much time in Carrara,
getting out the marble. Finally the work on the
facade came to a standstill because the Pope was
short of funds, and Michelangelo went back to
Rome and began again on the mausoleum of
Julius, whose heirs still clamored for its comple
tion. Raffaelle died in 1520, leaving Michelangelo
without a rival, but in 1522 Leo X. also died sud
denly, and in 1523 another Cardinal de' Medici suc
ceeded him with the title of Pope Clement VII.

58 Michelangelo.
Leo had squandered the wealth of three pontifi
cates and died heavily in debt. The rivalry be
tween Charles V. of Spain and Francis I. for the
imperial crown, which convulsed Europe for the
next thirty years, had begun to disturb Italy, and
Clement's pontificate is a history of most terrible
scenes. Nevertheless, the favorite plan of the Medicean
family to erect a sacristy, with the tombs of the
Medici in it, at Florence, was entrusted to Michel
angelo, who began on it at once. The work was
completed — that is, it was carried as near comple
tion as we see it now — at the end of the year
1530. The recumbent statues on these Medicean
tombs are the most marvelous of all Michelangelo's
sculptures except the Moses, and we shall see how
the great sculptor wrought into these marbles the
very innermost anguish of his soul.
The seven years between the beginning and the
end of this great achievement were most eventful.
The plague appeared repeatedly at Rome and
Florence. The Emperor Charles V. of Spain,
having conquered Francis I., crossed the Alps.
German and Spanish soldiers, under the Duke of
Bourbon, captured Rome. The Pope fled to the
castle of San Angelo, and the horrible sack and
massacre of 1527 took place under his eyes.

Tombs of the Medici. 59
It was at this time that some German soldiers
proclaimed Martin Luther Pope, under the eaves
of the frowning castle itself. Rome had ninety
thousand inhabitants under Leo X. After the sack
scarcely thirty thousand poor, famished people re
mained. When the tidings of Rome's conquest reached
Florence, the citizens drove out the Medici and
Jesus Christ was again proclaimed King. It was
not Lutheranism but superstitious Catholicism
which induced these outward acts of piety.
Michelangelo was in Florence working in the
Sacristy. He assisted in restoring liberty to his
native city and sat as a member of the Grand
Council. In 1529 the very troops who had sacked
Rome, Spaniards and Germans, were hired by the
Pope and the exiled Medici to attack Florence. It
was at this period that iron balls from bronze guns
took the place of the old stone missiles from iron
barrels. One Maletesta, a native of Perugia, was made,
commander by the Florentines to resist the in
vaders. The city was put in a condition to with
stand a siege. War was at the very gates ; but
a panic seized the citizens, who suspected that
Maletesta was a traitor, as finally he proved to be.
Many withdrew from the city. Among them was

60 Michelangelo.
Michelangelo, who, after warning the authorities in
vain, went to Venice, where he lived in retirement
till the citizens insisted on his return.
It was still a matter of life and death with Flor
ence. Famine stared the city in the face ; but the
motto " Poor but free " remained chalked on the
house-walls and doors. Michelangelo exerted his
strength and skill day and night in fortifying the
walls. Occasionally he spent a few hours among
his marble figures. While he was fighting the
Medici openly, he was secretly working on their
monuments. It was because he must work, and
these were works already begun. Besides, we shall
see why he. continued to chisel these statues, even
if they were to grace a Medicean tomb.
At last Maletesta turned open traitor and the
city, after a most heroic resistance, fell into the
enemy's hands. From this time forth, " The soul
of Florence is outside the gates : within is but a
corpse, corrupted and corrupting." The liberties
of Florence henceforth are but a memory and a
name. Michelangelo concealed himself in the bell-tower
of a church ; he had held his post courageously to
the last. The Medici again were masters, but he
was too grand a personage to be destroyed. He
was allowed to come forth from his hiding-place

Tombs of the Medici. 61
and went to work at once on the figures for the
monuments in the Sacristy of San Lorenzo. He
was treated exceptionally, a privileged veteran :
even an Emperor dared not abuse him, and as Pope
Julian III. afterwards remarked, when one of his
Cardinals opposed the sculptor, " When one Pope
dies another is soon made, and I can make a dozen
Cardinals ; but I cannot make one Michelangelo."
The same Pope is also credited with saying that
" the sculptor came of noble blood, and for his crest
bears two bull's horns, and has .given us proof that
he can toss with them."
But with what feelings did the baffled, weary,
and hopeless man labor on those immortal statues
in the Sacristy?
You may see the casts of them, of the same
size as the originals, in many a museum of art;
but only in Florence itself can you feel the indomi
table rebellion in the soul of the artist while he
worked upon_ them.
Each sarcophagus is surmounted by a seated
statue of heroic size ; one represents Lorenzo de'
Medici, who was brave like his father Piero ; the
other, Giuliano, who was melancholy and wrote a
sonnet in defense of suicide. Lorenzo seems like
a general listening to the noise of conflict. Giu
liano, his uncle, wears a Roman helmet and covers

62 Michelangelo.
his mouth with his forefinger, as if in meditation,
" brooding over his own doom and the extinction
of his race."
Neither of these Dukes was worthy of such me
mentos. The faces have little resemblance to the
originals, but Michelangelo wished simply to express
reflection and action, in elevated and impressive
forms. He himself confessed the want of likeness,
and said " WTho in a thousand years will appear, to
prove that the Dukes looked otherwise ? " They
are magnificent ideals, and perhaps the sculptor
wished to requite his former patrons, Lorenzo and
his brother, by a princely idealization of the
family. A far deeper significance, however, attaches to
the four recumbent statues which grace the two
sarcophagi, over which the noble Dukes are seated.
Whatever Michelangelo wished to represent by
the statues of Lorenzo and Giuliano, it was the
overflowing and outpouring of his whole soul that
produced the Night and Da}', the Twilight and
Dawn, the marvelous figures which eclipse all
sculptured works from other artists' hands.
Passion and despair nerved his arm ; he worked
with desperate haste; in a few months the figures
were as nearly finished as we now see them. Amid
the humiliations of his country he executed these

Tombs of the Medici. 63
works, which, while they declare the overthrow of
liberty, proclaim in unmistakable and ever-enduring
forms the agony of his soul, the tumult of his out
raged sense of justice, and the stern fate which his
presentiments foretold.

~These massive figures, one on either side of
each sarcophagus, speak of a vast strength rendered
powerless ; of a grief which can find relief only in
the profoundest slumber, and of a superb beauty,
half awakened from sleep, with the painful con
sciousness of a captivity from which there is' no
release. He might have made more painful
groups, like the Laocoon, which he saw exhumed
near the Baths of Titus in his early visit to Rome,
but it was not pangs that he wished to portray
so much as dull hopelessness in view of an inevi
table fate.

Michelangelo had already given to Italy a sur
prise in art. The antique was made by him a
vitalizing force in modern naturalism, raising it
into idealism. This classical revival was directed
towards that lofty and genuine style, from which
all true art in modern times has sprung. As
Longfellow says : —
" New learning all ! yet fresh from fountains old ;
Hellenic inspiration, pure and deep ;
Strange treasures of Byzantine hoards unrolled."

64 Michelangelo.
Here, then, we have this pure, ideal type in its
perfection : Of the four recumbent statues, two are
men and two are women ; or, rather, the pairs are
like the angels " which neither marry nor are given
in marriage," so heroic are the muscles, and so for
midable the limbs.
The Dawn (so-called) is more nearly completed
tharTthe^othFrs, and despondency is written on her
features, as if she dreads to have the light touch
her heavy lids. Some dream has destroyed her
peace and she is reluctant, even in that half-roused
state, to resume life's heavy burden. Could anything
express more powerfully the sculptor's passionate
weariness of spirit, surrounded by the crushed
liberties and expiring hopes of his native land ?
He himself gives the clue to this meaning of
the statues, in verses written in answer to some
stanzas, affixed, according to the custom of the
times, to the statue of Night, when it was exhibited
for the first time. Those stanzas read : —
"Night, whom you see slumbering here so charmingly,
Has been carved in marble by an Angel."
(A play on the name of the sculptor.)
"Waken her if you will not believe it,
And she will speak."
Michelangelo's response was, as if the statue
itself replied : —

Tombs of the Medici. 6 J
" Sleep is dear to me, and still more that I am stone,
So long as dishonor and shame last among us.
The happiest fate is to hear and see nothing.
For this reason waken me not ;
I pray you, speak gently."
Like Samson in his prison house, the mighty
artist ground for the Philistines who had con
quered ; but it was to exhibit before all coming
generations the baseness of their conduct, as pos
terity discovered more and more fully the meaning
he had hidden in the stone.
He worked for the ages and not for men; for
Fame, for love of his Art ; for Justice and for
Freedom! His employers were an accident; his
creations are immortal ! His art was free, and he
triumphed even when he seemed to add to the
trophies of the conquerors.
Michelangelo was no sycophant, no time-server.
He would scorn to purchase even life at the ex
pense of principle. He carved those shrines, not
to gain the favor of usurpers, nor for the miser
able ducats he received. He had begun the work,
as his spiritual lord, the Pope, had commissioned
him; in good faith he continues it, but knows
that his revenge is sure — that Heaven will see
that the tyrants shall receive no honor, but, on the
contrary, the everlasting scorn of posterity, by the
very means they used to perpetuate their names.

68 Michelangelo.
When the sons shall ask their fathers, "What
mean these stones ? " then the story of the death
blow of freedom at the hand of traitors will be
told them and Florence be avenged.
Michelangelo could never fashion the soft and
yielding curves, such as ancient sculptors wrought
into their goddesses and nymphs. The coarser,
harder muscles, which banish thoughts of sex and
combine the contradictions of beauty and force,
leave even the most undraped of his female figures
a modest protection of their own, and suggest less
of love than of fear to him who seeks to possess
their charms.
This refutes the charge of the fastidious Pope
Adrian against the nude figures of the Sistine
Chapel. They are not naked, but wrapt in a
majestic vitality, compelling lofty thoughts like
the Venus de Milo, that noble antique which
breathes of power rather than of passion.
Michelangelo was unlike all others. He can
not be judged by ordinary standards. There was
but one, there never can be more than one
Michelangelo. His moods were fatal to his own
happiness, although favorable to his art. His rude
vehemence disdained the ordinary conditions of
artistic work. He made the marble conform to
his ideal ; hence his bold contrasts, lofty idealiza-

Tombs of the Medici. 71
tions, with occasional departures from conventional
symmetries. Inspecting carefully the recumbent
statues in the Sacristy, one finds that the block in
some places proved insufficient for the heroic size
of the human body; therefore, behind the statues
are large clefts, as if a portion were broken off.
One foot of the male figure, called " The Day,"
is also too small for the Herculean shoulders and
the immensity of muscle.
But if impetuosity aided him in creating marvels
in art, it made his life exclusive and melancholy.
He began by provoking Torrigiano, a fellow-
student, and received a blow which disfigured
him for life. With all his competitors in 'art,
except the immortal Raffaelle whom he recognized
as his peer, he lived in perpetual antagonism.
He had no intimate companions, until in his old
age he gathered about him a few young men as
his disciples, who hung upon his lips.
He was kind and helpful to his inferiors, but
he had a pride in his own conscious power
which made him insufferable and overbearing
towards those who claimed to be his equals. He
was volcanic in his eruptions of temper, although
he was often sorry after the mischief had been
done. He blustered and then lapsed into quiet
ness, after giving vent to his wrath. Seclusion

72 Michelangelo.
became almost a necessity; he cared for no luxuries
although he earned large sums. He supported his
aged father and the Buonarroti family, even when
they criticised his gifts. The softer side of his
nature was overgrown with bristling peculiarities;
and yet it must be conceded that the softer side
was there, for how could an absolutely rude and
uncurbed spirit have indited, even to an ideal
object, the lines written by the artist : —
"Around that fair and flower-encircled brow,
How gladly does the golden garland shine ;
The proudest bloom is that, which pressing low,
Leaves the first kiss upon her brow divine."

V.
THE LAST JUDGMENT.
We now pass on to the last masterpiece of
Michelangelo that claims our attempt to fathom
its epic meaning ; it is The Last Judgment, a
fresco, painted on the end wall of the Sistine
Chapel at Rome, the ceiling of which the artist
had already covered with heroic conceptions.
It has been said by a careful critic of Michel
angelo's works,1 that in this fourth period and man
ner of his art, the great painter resembles Milton,
as he appears to us in Paradise Regained, and in
his Samson Agonistes. "Both artist and poet,"
this author declares, " exaggerate the defects of
their qualities in their old age/' while their " ideals
become stereotyped and strained,"

Even if this is in a measure true, we do not find
that as he grows older there is any marked decline
in Michelangelo's enthusiasm, or any servile or
degrading obsequiousness to the demand of the
times for smooth things. On the contrary, his last
1 J. A. Symonds, Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, I. 283.
73

74 Michelangelo.
great fresco is more menacing and tumultuously
grand (as we shall soon see) than any of his pre
vious creations.
Michelangelo had returned to Rome never again
to set foot in Florence. The " black " Alessandro
de' Medici was duke and tyrant over the Floren
tines, and Paul III., of the Farnese family, was Pope
for nineteen years. This pontiff was a man of de
praved private and political life, but amiable and
generous towards men of learning and ability. He
was a firm friend of Michelangelo as long as he
lived. One day he came with his Cardinals into the
artist's studio, where the sculptor was still work
ing on the Moses ; he looked at the statue and
declared that one such alone was a sufficient monu
ment for the mausoleum of Julius; he then insisted
on Michelangelo's beginning at once a fresco on
the wall of the Sistine Chapel, and that was the
origin of The Last Judgment.
Times had greatly changed since the ceiling was
painted. A great religious movement throughout
Italy was occasioned by Luther's German Refor
mation. The necessity of reform, in at least the
external manners of the clergy, was openly ac
knowledged ; and yet the Church acted towards
the Reformation as if it was more a political than

The Last judgment. 75
a religious movement. Paul III. sought a recon
ciliation by gentle means.
Michelangelo was touched by the new move
ment, not as a thinker, much less as a theologian,
but because now in his old age a mighty force had
come for the first time into his austere and melan
choly life. It was the force, not merely of friend
ship, but of love !
The " Lion all men feared and none could tame "
yielded to the soft influence of a woman ! But that
woman was no less a personage than the Princess
Vittoria Colonna, in every respect worthy of the
illustrious friend who laid all at her feet.
He who "braved imperious Popes, more than a
King of France would have done," suffered, when
he was more than threescore years of age, the pure
passion of which he had often dreamed but which
he had never before experienced.
From the gnarled old trunk, when it had stood
the storms of more than sixty winters, the tender
branches shot forth and bore abundant fruit.
It is no common love-story, and yet it is a ro
mance. If it had ended in marriage, it might have
lost its interest for us. Some may satirically de
clare, " If Michelangelo was so morose without a
wife, what would he have been with one ? " while
most women would say, " How could a wife have

76 Michelangelo.
possibly lived with him ? " Thus we are reconciled
to the fact as it was, that Michelangelo had no
thought of marriage, and Vittoria was vowed to
perpetual widowhood. The world would have been
distressed had it been otherwise, just as it troubles
our sense of fitness to think of the Farnesan Her
cules, captivated by Omphale, and spinning flax.
The two friends met, conversed, and parted. The
themes they talked about were architecture, the
signs of the times, and St. Paul's Epistles. Once it
was "justification by faith" (not so bad a subject
for a courtship). But the friendship between them,
not to call it by a warmer name, was to Michel
angelo as holy, and to Vittoria as precious, as har
mony in minds and hearts could make it.
Vittoria once gave him a collection of her poems,
and he sent her the following lines, which reveal
the sweetness which she drew out of the strong, as
Samson drew honey from the carcass of the lion: —
" Not all unworthy of the boundless grace
Which thou, most noble lady, hast bestowed,
I fain at first would pay the debt I owed,
And some small gift for thy acceptance, place.
(But) well I see, how false it were, to think
That any work, faded and frail, of mine
Could emulate the perfect grace of thine.
A thousand works from mortals like to me
Can ne'er repay what Heaven has given thee."

The Last Judgment. J J
When Michelangelo was seventy-two years old,
Vittoria Colonna died. He saw her at the last, and
was so much affected by her death that he be
came for a time almost insane. To a friend he
confessed, several years after, that he repented of
nothing so much as that he had only kissed her
hand and not her forehead when he went to her
at the last hour.
We mention this episode in the career of the
great artist to show how his love for this noble
woman affected his religious sentiment and in
fluenced his art. She was one of the intellectual
centers in Rome, around which the followers of
the reformed ideas gathered. She was suspected
by the Inquisition, and in 1541 retired to Viterbo
with a few old friends.
If she achieved nothing more, she at least set
Michelangelo free from all limitations of the con
ventional and heartless orthodoxy of the times.
Under her influence, he saw the hierarchy as it
really was, theatrical even in its devotions. Just
as under the power of Dante's works he has
reconciled, in his Moses, the Homeric and the
Hebrew types, so in his sonnets to Vittoria he
has set Plato side by side with the Song of
Solomon. These sonnets are as truly the Songs of Divine

78 Michelangelo.
Love for his corrupt times, as the Song of Songs
was for the era which produced the Canticles.
They are spikenard among rough Styrian rocks.
They show this master of great secrets listening
to voices we cannot hear, and fathoming the mys
teries, of which the common world never gets a
glimpse. When, then, we turn to The Last Judgment, a
part of which was executed on the wall of the
Sistine Chapel during this period of Michelangelo's
intimacy with Vittoria, we have at least a par
tial clue to the long step in advance of his age,
which the painter took when he produced this
last great masterpiece.
The walls of many a Campo Santo, or church
yard, in Italy were painted, or frescoed, with gro
tesque and horrible scenes representing the final
condemnation of the wicked. The damned were
raised from their tombs, to be seized by devils
and thrust into the burning pit. All the ingenuity
of genius had been suborned to portray the tor
tures to be inflicted on lost souls. " Heaps of
nude flesh — skulls and grinning skeletons — rigid
faces — griping hands — staggering limbs " sug
gested infernal scenes, on which the blessed ones,
with Christ above them all, looked down in serene
submission or complacent composure.

The Last Judgment. 79
Even when Rubens tried later to paint The
Last Judgment, in his picture now in Munich,
he only succeeded (as one has said) in producing
the effect of "an immense stream of fishes poured
out of a pail," as the naked creatures stream
downward into hell.
But The Last Judgment of Michelangelo im
presses the mind with a very different emotion ;
so different that one competent critic has declared
that its title should be the "Resurrection," not
the "Judgment."
It is true that the Christ appears in it as a
stern judge — more of a Jupiter than a Redeemer.
It is true, as Mrs. Stowe has written, that the
Virgin Mother seems to hide her eyes from the
sight, as if she were the only compassionate being
in the picture. It is also true that "the graces
of reserve and mystery " are wanting.
But as we think of the religion of the times,
the superstition of the people, the cruelty of
the Inquisition, the corrupt lives of the Popes
and clergy, and the general debasement of the
Christian into the Pagan type of the Deity, we
cannot help perceiving, even amid the destruc
tive impulses which rule throughout the compo
sition, that the artist has really taken a long
stride in advance of all his contemporaries and

80 Michelangelo.
predecessors, although far behind our modern
thought. For one sees here, not the torments of hell,
but only the dread of them on the faces of those
^descending into the lower space.
An artist like Botticelli, who shows us the soles
of upturned feet in his illustrations of Dante's
Inferno, has tried to carry the present material
world into Hades, and the porterage has proved
too big a load even for his genius. It is imagina
tion run riot ; but pandemonium is not power.
Michelangelo may have had in mind the sub
lime stanzas of his favorite Dante : —
"Where St. Peter thunders
In Paradise against degenerate Popes
And the corruptions of the Church,
Till all the heaven about him blushes like a sunset,"
but no lurid flames, no exulting fiends, no horrible
grimaces, shock us with exhibitions of human gross
ness under the guise of devilish exaggeration.
To the modern mind the picture is largely
anatomical ; its foreshortenings surprise one into
admiration of the skill of the painter, and the
emotion awakened is rather that of astonishment
than of awe. Yet Professor W. T. Harris, of the
Concord School of Philosophers, keeps the picture
over his study table, as a restful object of con-

The Last Judgment. 83
templation, seeing in the groups of the lost, souls
hastening, conscience-stricken, away from the sight
of the pierced hands and side of Jesus, but not
hurled by his vengeance into the abyss.
There is a touch of Pagan revenge, we must
allow, in one corner of the picture, where Michel
angelo has placed Signor Biagio (the master of
ceremonies who criticised his work) under the
semblance of the heathen Minos, judge in Hades,
with a large serpent coiled about his body; and
Charon is also there, the boatman of the Styx,
driving the accursed out of his bark with an oar.
But to the people of the sixteenth century, this
pictured dream of the artist's restless and oppressed
imagination came like a spectacle of retributive
justice, which, as disembodied spirits, they must
certainly confront.
They recognized as a true prophecy the struggle
of the victims against their well-deserved fate; and
they beheld, on the other hand, with equal belief,
the saints and martyrs carrying, in proof of vic
tory, the implements and tokens of their sufferings
in the service of the Master.
To the Roman populace of that day there was
nothing rhetorical or exaggerated in the fresco ;
those struggling out of the ground were as if
actually awakened by the last trump. The whole

84 Michelangelo.
scene was terribly tragic, tumultuous, intense, but
true to the life. The summons broke over the
earth : —
" Blow, ye bright angels, on your golden trumpets
To the four corners of the earth, and wake
The dead to judgment ! Ye recording angels,
Open your books and read ! Ye dead, awake !
Rise from your graves, drowsy and drugged with death ! "
The space allotted to the fresco is peopled by
a few hundred figures, but in the cloud-tossed,
multitudinous composition and arrangement, it
seems to contain all the kingdoms, tribes, and
peoples of the earth. A sense of largeness, breadth,
and universal motion makes the impression of a
stupendous upheaval of all nations.
We must remember that books were few and
that object lessons were the education of the com
mon people, to whom a work of art like this was
the delineation and enforcement of what they
believed and feared.
To the crowd that thronged to see the finished
painting on that Christmas Day in the year 1541,
the marvelous execution and skill displayed in the
work may well have been forgotten, as with up
turned faces they read what Michelangelo meant
that they should read and feel, the wrath of the
Almighty when he comes to judge the earth.

The Last Jttdgment. 85
It was the painter's last prodigious effort to tell
the astonished and terrified nation that the day
of retribution must come at last.
No one can study the character of Michel
angelo in this work, the somber melancholy, the
brooding speculation, the sense of unavenged wrong
on earth, the consciousness of the pride, sensuality,
infamy, and luxury existing in his times, without
perceiving, in this last bitter cry of his dejected
soul, a plea for the triumph of good over evil,
though a sepulcher of flame receive the transgress
ors of these shameful years.
The Pope and his Cardinals might quietly take
their snuff, as they critically examined the fresco
— for what cared they for the Last Great Day in
which they practically disbelieved! Paul III.
might jest with Signor Biagio's request to have
his likeness erased, and say to him, that " Even
the High Pontiff cannot release his chamberlain
from the pains of Purgatory " ; but the people,
under the spell of superstitious terror, must have
seen the picture with astonished fear.
Going back then four centuries, and sharing
with the originator of the work his weariness of
the sin which he daily witnessed in that corrupt
city of the hierarchy ; entering also into sympathy
with all the pent-up" longings of his soul, we too

86 Michelangelo.
must yield assent to the medieval impulse of the
painter, and be compelled to acknowledge the high
purpose which vindicates " the exaggerated use of
sensational foreshortening, and of violent postures
of the human body, by which alone the artist's
imaginations could be presented to the people of
his day."
With one great impulse dominating his art,
Michelangelo could not conceive or fashion even
the figure of the Christ with any gentle and for
giving presence. He could write beneath his
Christ upon the Cross, " Men have forgotten
how much blood it cost"; but, as in his Christ
standing by his Cross in the Church of Sopra
Minerva at Rome, his representations of the
much-enduring Son of Man are always muscular,
sometimes gigantic, more suggestive of Achilles
than of Jesus.
Such being the great sculptor's disposition, im
petuous, conscientious according to his light, un
able "to condone murder with wax-tapers and
Ave Marias," it is the glory of his career that in
his four greatest masterpieces he has given art a
new vitality, capable of imparting lofty lessons
and inspirations to the end of time.
In an age of " servile and degraded obsequious
ness " he did not fear to show, in these triumphs

The Last Judgment. 87
of his genius, his utter scorn of those whom he
distrusted and despised. He lived and wrought,
like one of the old prophets whom he depicted,
. under the eye of God, and pointed his country-
\ men and all the nations to the great white throne
and to Him that sat thereon, leaving the gentler
message for gentler times, to be proclaimed by
those more fitted to make known the Almighty
Father's love. Keeping then in view the exalted
aims and peculiar surroundings of the great artist,
we behold, with Hippolyte Taine, " The disciple
of Dante ; the friend of Savonarola ; the recluse,
feeding himself on the menaces of the Old Tes
tament ; the patriot ; the Stoic ; the lover of jus
tice, who bears in his heart the grief of his
people and who attends the funeral of Italian
liberty (himself alone surviving and exalted amid
degraded characters and degenerate minds), pass
ing eight years at this immense work, his soul
filled with thoughts of the supreme Judge and
listening beforehand to the thunders of the Last
Day." The following year (1542), the Inquisition was
established at Rome, under Loyola and Caraffa,
the latter of whom became Pope in 1555, under
the name of Paul IV.

88 Michelangelo-
Michelangelo was made court architect, a po
sition which he held till his death in 1564. St.
Peter's Church owes its magnificent dome to his
genius, but his life continued a struggle to the end.
He died of old age in his ninetieth year,
strange and solitary to the last, without a rival,
leaving in his will " His soul to God ; his body
to the earth and all his worldly possessions to
his relatives." But he left no heir to his genius!
Better delineations of the human form in its
actual proportions have been given to the world,
both in modern and antique art.
Truer interpretations of scriptural scenes and
characters have been made by gifted artists ; and
modern science has enriched art by reconstructing
medieval and traditional thought. Yet Michel
angelo still stands alone in his supremacy as the
greatest modern artist of the world.
It is because his grander works are the result
of a unique artistic ability, combined with an in
tense experience of life's discords, struggles, and
vanities. Something in his work awakens in us a sense
of the mystery and sublimity of human destiny,
even as the utterances of the old prophets sug
gested to Israel, Jehovah's infinitude and incom
prehensible attributes.

The Last Judgment.

89

He had begun many other works and his
sketches were innumerable ; but by the four great
masterpieces we have described he will ever live
in the remembrance of the generations, as one
who, like Moses, struck the rock, perhaps too
vehemently, but after whom no mightier leader
in art has arisen, to teach the people freedom,
righteousness, and the fear of God.
" So from old chronicles, where sleep in dust
Names that once filled the world with trumpet tones,
I build this verse,
Which to this end, I fashion as I must.
********
Quickened are they that touch the prophet's bones."

Part Second.
MILTON.

" Qui legis Amissum Paradisum, grandia magni carmina Miltoni, quid
nisi cuncta legis?" — Samuel Barrow.

W GutrriS^nv^y^tim:

^^n-^rr-~Mn^ni-: -",:]

PREFATORY.
The transition from Michelangelo to Milton is
not great even in the lapse of time, the one pass
ing off the stage in 1564, the life of the other
beginning in 1608 and ending in 1675.
A passionate lover of liberty, civil and religious,
Milton met Galileo at Arcetri, visited Rome (1638-9),
and soon after entered keenly into the political con
test in England. As a controversialist his polemical
writings in prose won him great renown. He was
appointed Secretary to Cromwell, and, gradually
becoming blind, heroically devoted the sight that
remained to him to the writing of a reply to the
Eikon Basilike, a work in favor of the King and
the Monarchy. He also wrote A Defence of the
People of England.
But his lasting memorial is his great poem,
Paradise Lost, the masterpiece of his life, com
pleted in 1665. We select this immortal work
in order to show the Theory of Life which he has
worked out in a masterly style, full of inspiring
sentiments and metaphors, and original in its
new development of the English tongue.
95

96 Milton.
With Michelangelo, he had his infirmities of
temper, and though his Theory of Life, as revealed
in Paradise Lost, provokes criticism and dissent,
yet as a contribution to English literature the
poem will ever rank among the grandest epics in
the language.
Like the great sculptor, he was too important
a personage to be destroyed, and though his
books which were most offensive to the monarchy
were burned by the hangman, he was included
in the Act of Indemnity and lived to a good old
age. Both Michelangelo and Milton were disap
pointed in their desire to behold the liberation of
their countrymen, and died while the enemy they
had fought held possession of the field.
With many points of dissimilarity in character
and surroundings, their minds were cast in similar
molds. Both boldly invaded the realm of the
supernatural, and will live in history among the
foremost men of their times, while the whole
civilized world will ever honor their genius, their
sterling integrity, and their lofty achievements
for the exaltation and glory of mankind.
The following pages present the Theory of Life
in Paradise Lost, in the light of modern thought.

Prefatory. 97
This is done in the hope of stimulating new
interest in a classic which is too often allowed
to stand neglected on the library shelf.
To enable the reader to study and to make a still
more extended analysis of the poem, the numbers
of the books and the lines are appended to the
quotations, which are taken from the John Mit
ford edition.
And as Milton's Adam made bold to ask
Raphael to listen to him, so the author ventures
to say to his " fit audience though few,"
"Now hear me relate
My story, which perhaps thou hast not heard ;
How subtly to detain thee I devise,
Inviting thee to hear while I relate "
what a great genius has written concerning mys
teries, about which, since they belong in the realm
of the imagination, the more we argue the less
we apprehend.

MILTON.
THEORY OF LIFE AS SEEN IN PARADISE LOST.
I.
THE POET AND THE POEM.
There can be little doubt that Milton as a poet
lived in a very different mental sphere from that in
which he appeared as a philosopher and a patriot.
The inspiration of his poetic genius led him into
realms of the imagination where he breathed his
native air. When he descended and wrote for his
age and times, he felt the limitations of his epoch
and wandered into intricate paths where he halted
and stumbled ; witness his plea for divorce and
some of his devices for a better civil government.
Much wisdom, but much folly, marked these lower
meanderings. Taking wing as a poet, however, the
Cosmos became his empyrean and the universe his
expanse of thought.
Necessarily, then, as a poet he was wafted into
what with the Greeks was mythological fancy, but
with him, poetic symbolism. He must clothe his
99

i oo Milton.
ideas in an intelligible garb, and being furnished,
by his familiarity with the ancient classics, with
heroic models, the sublime altitude of his fancy sur
rounded him at once with the heroes and exploits
of the Homeric age. His unwearied and enthu
siastic industry made him early in life a master in
classic lore, while at the same time he feasted, as
he tells us, on Dante, Petrarch, and all the elder
English poets.
The Theory of Life, therefore, which we attempt
to extract from his greatest poem, the Paradise
Lost, is mainly the supernatural and impassioned
side of life, as he beheld it amid the splendors of
his own creations and the mighty cataclysms of
symbolic fancy.
The poem moves through the celestial part of its
majestic verse, with a cadence which Creation might
have chosen for its accompaniment, never descend
ing to the jangle and discord of earth-sounds, such
as civilization obtrudes into the stillness of primeval
forests, or forces upon the plains decked with the
roses of Sharon, on the way to the holy city of
Judea. For the terrestrial portion of his song the Ho
meric poems were also his models ; but he swept by
them far out into space, and took the heights and
depths for his field of action.

The Poet and the Poem. 101
We are too civilized, too scientific, to create or
enjoy poetic themes like this ; we stop too often
to analyze statements ; we are checked in our
progress towards the zenith by instructions of
professors ; we fold the wings of our fancy under
the arc-light of science, and read our Bibles with
the historical critics.
Milton read his Scriptures on the mountain top,
with eye ranging over the firmament, never stoop
ing to pick up specimens at his feet to confirm his
impressions. To us, his angels are " airy nothings,"
and his archangels, majestic fictions. Our mod
ern skeptic never stands with Milton on the eve of
Armageddon, throbbing with expectation mingled
with awe ; never, in the midst of his conflicts, as a
real spectator or participant, thrilled with mystic,
nameless exhilaration, as if the supreme moment of
Time, the crisis of Fate, had come.
It is a play at which one "assists"; everybody
knows that the stage scenery has been set by art
and that the actors have no personal existence
except in the poet's frenzy. The huge form with
dragon wings is no true Satan ; only a manu
factured counterfeit. You see a real Adam and
Eve, because they are man and woman whom you
have known under other conditions. But the dis
comfited angels flounder in a bloodless swamp ;

102 Milton.
their heavy iron armor ill befits a host of spirits
who can feel the pain of wounds but cannot die
of them. Satan poses, and so does Ariel.
Only Adam and Eve live and breathe as we
mortals do each day, although Adam talks too
much like a philosopher for a new-born man, and
is too exalted in his conversation for so callow a
helpmeet as Eve. No wonder she retired, when
Raphael and Adam " girded the sphere " in their
discussions and solved the " thwart obliquities."
She preferred to be taught by Adam alone, who
could " intermix grateful digressions," and " solve
high dispute with conjugal caresses." (vm. 55)
However, among all the great acts and passions,
heroically treated, the thread of a continuous pur
pose runs and may be followed as a plan of life,
a theory of God and a theory of Man, in mutual
relationship. We shall attempt to draw out that
theory, mainly in Milton's own language.
We do not propose to discuss poetic style or
theological dogma, except as incidental to the pur
pose in hand, or to cite the finest passages in
the poem for their own sake ; and we will con
fine ourselves to Paradise Lost as distinct in
itself, without adducing other works or poems of
the author in confirmation or illustration of the
theme.

The Poet and the Poem. 105
The general Theory of Life in this poem is as
follows : —
Milton represents the Almighty as superior to
all, especially in his omniscience and ability to
crush the rebellion of his mightiest chiefs. The
way He hurls them down to hell, through spaces
not then paved with stars, is surpassingly easy,
like the story of creation in six days.
Next to God the Father, is the Son, to whom
is given the glory of overwhelming the rebel
lious angels.
Then comes Satan, who is able to repulse the
host of loyal angels, until the Son comes upon
the scene of conflict and drives the malcontents
down to the pit.
Man is inferior in power to Satan, in that being
tempted by him, he is overcome. Adam is created
a little lower than the angels, including Satan.
He can resist and vanquish Satan only by the aid
of the Son of God.
Woman is inferior to man. She is more
easily overcome by Satan, who knows her inferi
ority and so assails her first. She can influence
man only through his love for her. Adam
eats the forbidden fruit because unwilling that
Eve should bear the penalty of her weakness
alone.

1 06 Milton.
Man and woman are superior to the brutes
which they control.
This is the general Miltonic scheme of the life
universal. It may be divided into two parts, — that
which pertains to the immortals and that which
concerns the mortals of God's vast realm.
We will give a brief account, first of the poet's
Conception of Superhuman Beings, reserving our
more extended excursus for the human beings of
the poem and their relations, as Milton conceived
them, to the grander spiritual existences about
them.

II.
CONCEPTION OF SUPERNATURAL BEINGS.
Some one has remarked that "a poet gains in
fluence over his contemporaries by profound sym
pathy with his generation."
Milton, although he reflected the theology of
his times, soared so far above the spiritual ideal
of his generation that few read his poems or cele
brated his renown.
Thurloe speaks of him as " A blind old man
who wrote Latin verses." Richard Baxter passes
him over in silence, and he himself, in the Seventh
Book of Paradise Lost, states that he has fallen
"on evil days and evil tongues," because he stands
"far off from the barbarous dissonance of Bacchus
and his revelers " ; and he invokes the Muse to
find for him " fit audience though few."
He was born nine years before Shakspeare died ;
was blind at forty-four, and obtained for his immor
tal poem only ^"io. He died in 1675, in his sixty-
seventh year, " without adequate recognition of his
genius as a poet, in darkness, poverty, and solitude."
107

108 Milton.
On his solemn and severe theology as a Puritan,
tinctured with Arianism, he built a structure too
lofty even for his co-religionists. He did not
remain a Puritan, and in his later years belonged
to no sect. " His views," says his biographer,
John Mitford, " appear too exalted, his creed too
abstract and imaginative for general use. The
religion which he sought was not ... to be
grounded on any settled articles of belief; it was
to dwell alone in its holy meditations, within the
sanctuary of the adoring heart."
Producing the highest results from the religious
ideals of his age, he transformed even the dogmas
of the Independents into sublime perceptions, by
personifications too subtile, spectacular events too
transcendent, and achievements too remote for his
countrymen to accept them even as possibilities.
The stars sang together and electric thunders
intoned the tragic conflict between God and Satan,
in the immense cathedral of the universe, while
Englishmen below, upon the pavement of the
earth, pursued their avocations and fought their
battles, hearing scarcely a note of these celestial
symphonies. But for all that, the poet fastened much of the
theology which he thought out for generations of
posterity, in a sure place. Like Bunyan's Pilgrim's

Conception of Supernatural Beings. 109
Progress in the practical Christian experience,
Milton's Paradise Lost fixed in the speculative
theology of his times, the ideas that lived and
were wrought into creeds for centuries to come.
His Satan (not the Hebrew Satan) became the
Satan of the popular mind. His emblematic por
traitures of Michael and Raphael were the angelic
models which painters reproduced, and which the
Church embodied in its hierarchy of heaven.
On what he read out of his Bible, he " piled up
pinnacles of diamond, and hewed towers, as from
rocks of gold." For eight or nine years, until
after Charles II.'s restoration, he brooded over
the problem of human destiny, like Michelangelo
in the solitude of the Sistine Chapel, till he
could stand in the presence of God without be
wilderment or fear, and sustain the shock of the
Infinite without being consumed by the impact
of Divinity.
But his countrymen wanted human passions
presented on a lower plane, and while relishing
his treatises against Popery and Monarchy, ignored
his grandest productions. We of this modern age
care little for one or the other. The horrors of
Paradise Lost are too refined to affect our nerves ;
the poet's theories too antiquated to stir our
blood.

no Milton.
We quote Milton's familiar lines and ignore
the marvelous proportions of his theory of life.
We have given up our belief in Satan, who
" Rais'd impious war in Heaven and battle proud " (I. 43),
and hear complacently, the words
" Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven " (I. 263),
applied to lesser objects of ambition.
He, who
" above the rest,
In shape and gesture proudly eminent,
Stood like a tower " (i. 589),
is no longer the arch-foe of mankind. We care
not " That riches grow in Hell ; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane " (I. 691);
for we desire them all the same on earth.
And yet, what idea of the Satanic element in
human life has been more commonly accepted by
the Anglo-Saxon race since Milton's day, than
that which he has graphically delineated ?
The persistence of Satan, in hating, opposing,
and defying the good, almost if not quite equals
the perseverance of the Almightv in resisting
him. Cast out of heaven, he assembles his legions
and nerves them for a renewed onset.
He maintains his courage even when weltering

Conception of Supernatural Beings. 1 1 1
in tempestuous floods of fire, and says to his
second in power, Beelzebub : —
"Consult . . .
What reinforcement we may gain from hope ;
If not, what resolution from despair." — !. 187-191.
Escaping the Stygian flood, only to enter the
mournful gloom of hell, he is able to cry : —
" Hail, horrors ! hail
Infernal World ! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor."— 1. 250.
Then, as if to reassure himself, he adds : —
"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." — 1. 254-
Again, learning that God has created a new race
called man, to take the place of the lost angels,
he alone dares the perilous voyage to seek and
ruin the new world.
When he spake of war,
" To confirm his words, outflew
Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs
Of mighty Cherubim ; the sudden blaze
Far round illumin'd Hell."— 1. 663.
But when it was a solitary journey "through
all the coasts of dark destruction,"
" All sat mute,
Pondering the danger with deep thoughts."— 11. 4*°-

1 1 2 Milton.
All but he, who at once " puts on swift wings "
and meets the "shock of fighting elements,"
alone. He is finally vanquished by force, but Will to
Will, Satan against God, the Arch-fiend stands
front to front, without submission. It is brute
force in which the Almighty is superior, not in
strength of will.
This is almost the old Demiurge theory ; two
supreme powers contending for the mastery of
the universe ; good against evil, with much sus
pense and apparent uncertainty as to which of the
two shall win at last.
When God the Father saw Satan in rebellion,
leading banded multitudes to oppose the armies
of heaven, he said to the Son : —
" Let us advise, and to this hazard draw
With speed what force is left, and all employ
In our defense, lest unawares we lose
This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill." — v. 729.
Add then to this indomitable will-power, Satan's
apostrophe, in a somewhat relenting mood, to
" Heaven's matchless King," and we can hardly
believe that he may not sometime yield to grace
and become a reinstated spirit.
Hear him soliloquize as he thinks of his rebel
lion against his rightful Lord : —

Conception of Supernatural Beings. 115
"Ah, wherefore? he deserv'd no such return
From me, whom he created what I was,
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard." — iv. 42.
He alights on the orb of the sun, in his journey
to the earth ; Milton's description lingers almost
lovingly on the picture : —
"And now a stripling cherub he appears,
Not of the prime, yet such as in his face
Youth smil'd celestial, and to every limb
Suitable grace diffus'd, so well he feign'd ;
Under a coronet his flowing hair
In curls on either cheek, play'd ; wings he wore
Of many a colour'd plume, sprinkled with gold."— ill. 636.
Hear also his soliloquy as he approaches and
gazes upon the innocent beings, whom he calls a
"gentle pair," and towards whom he says to him
self that he is not hostile : —
..." No purpos'd foe
To you, whom I could pity thus forlorn,
Though I unpitied. . . .
Honour and empire, with revenge enlarg'd
By conquering this new world, compels me now
To do what else, though damn'd, I should abhor." — IV. 373-392.
Again remember how, after changing his form
to that of a glittering serpent and gliding towards
Eve when she was alone, her

1 1 6 Milton.
" heavenly form
Angelic, but more soft and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air
Of gesture or least action, over-aw'd
His malice, and with rapine sweet, bereav'd
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought."— ix. 457.
These temporary glimpses of his former state
almost compel the mind to disbelieve his excla
mation : — " All good to me is lost ;
Evil, be thou my good ! " (iv. 109),
and so, to accept Milton's own explanation and
acknowledge that
" Neither do the spirits damn'd lose all their virtue,
Lest bad men should boast their specious deeds on earth."
— n. 482.
Turning now from Satan, who is undeniably the
hero of this epic, to Milton's conception of the
Father Almighty, we are obliged to recognize more
of a Jupiter on Olympus, holding thunderbolts in
his right hand, than of the Father whom the New
Testament presents as an object of the highest
reverence and love.
This was also Michelangelo's conception, in his
Last Judgment, of God as represented in the Christ
as Judge.
Without the vices and vulgar indifference to
good and evil of the mythological Jove, there is

Conception of Supernatural Beings. 119
in Milton's supreme Jehovah so much of wrath,
so much of vengeance, and so little of that quality
for which the Son is worshiped, that Satan may
well have found some excuse for rejecting "grace,
on promise of subjection."
We get Milton's idea of the Supreme Being (for
it is his and not the Bible's) more by what he
suggests than by any direct description of the
Divine attributes ; and the result is by no means
satisfactory. Milton's most remarkable theological tenet is
the avowal of what is called the anthropopathy
of God, attributing to God a Spirit, human pas
sions, and a human form. He says, " If God habit
ually assigns to himself the members and forms
of a man, why should we be afraid of attributing
to him what he attributes to himself ? " In this,
the poet resembles Michelangelo, who had no scru
ples about representing the Almighty Father, in
his frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, as a venerable
man, with flowing beard and garments.
Severity, dignity, even visibility for pictorial and
poetical purposes, are characteristics which do not
disturb us in an exalted poem like Paradise Lost
or in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, but when
God contemplates, with calm complacency, the
unbroken, never-ending misery of Satan and a

1 20 Milton.
third part of heaven, we think of a cruel despot,
and all that he permits the Son to do, to save
tempted and fallen men, goes for little in offset
ting his inexorable wrath.
The Almighty Father, seated on his throne,
sees Satan flying towards the world to pervert
mankind, and reasons thus with the Son concern
ing the ill-desert of the race, which, yet unborn, is
doomed to pay the penalty of its progenitor's dis
obedience : —
" Man will hearken to his glozing lies,
And easily transgress the sole command,
Sole pledge of his obedience : so will fall
He and his faithless progeny. Whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall." — in. 93.
This idea of free-will is often repeated.
The Father relents towards man, because
tempted by Satan who he says is self-tempted.
Sin, therefore, according to the poet, came into
the moral universe, without temptation as an
objective motive, and through a spirit or spirits
previously innocent, on whom no definite com
mand had been laid. That sort of transgres-
sion, by which the angels fell, is without
forgiveness.

Conception of Supernatural Beings. 121
Man's case is different, and the Almighty de
clares, in Miltonic phrase, that towards men
"Mercy first and last shall brightest shine.'' — in. 134.
" Man shall not quite be lost,
But sav'd who will." — in. 173.
Still, man must die, "unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death." — in. 210.
To make it harder for the race to maintain its
steadfastness, God allows Sin, that monster born
of Satan, to build a bridge between hell and earth,
over which Sin and Death and all polluting fiends
may easily transport themselves at will.
In regard to the Son, his nature, and his rela
tions to the Father and the hosts of fallen spirits,
let Milton's own words reveal the poet's thought —
" By merit more than birthright Son of God,
Found worthiest to be so by being good,
Far more than great or high."— ill. 309.
"Milton," says Mitford, "denies the eternal
filiation of the Son, his self-existence, his co-
equality, and co-essentiality with the Father." The
Son is " the first of the whole creation, within
the limits of Time, endued with the divine nature
and substance, but distinct from the Father and

1 2 2 Milton.
inferior to him. The Holy Ghost is inferior to
the Father and the Son. Matter is imperishable
and eternal. The body is immortal as the soul."
The Almighty Father said to Adam, when
Adam asked for a companion,
"What think 'st thou then of me, and this my state?
Seem I to thee sufficiently possess'd
Of happiness, or not? who am alone
From all eternity ; for none I know
Second to me or like, equal much less."— viu. 403.
Adam, in the same conversation, declared : —
" Thou in thy secrecy although alone,
. . . yet so pleas'd,
Canst raise thy creature to what height thou wilt
Of union or communion, deify'd." — vm. 427-431.
In harmony with this sentiment, before the
assembled angels, thrones, and powers, the Father
proclaimed : — "Hear my decree ! . . .
This day have I begot whom I declare my only Son :
And on this holy hill, Him have anointed
Whom ye now behold at my right hand." — v. C02-606.
And what a Son !
"At his right hand, Victory
Sat eagle-wing'd ; beside him hung his bow
And quiver, with three-bolted thunder stor'd ;
And from about him fierce effusion roll'd
Of smoke, and bickering flame, and sparkles dire.
Attended with len thousand thousand Saints
He onward came" (Vi. 762);

Conception of Supernatural Beings. 123
. . . "and into terror chang'd
His count'nance, too severe to be beheld,
And full of wrath bent on his enemies." — vi. 824.
"Love your enemies, bless them that curse
you," is our only commentary on these lines.
A brief description of Milton's theory of other
spiritual beings, and we pass to the theory he
has woven into this poem concerning mortals,
their relation to the superhuman beings thus de
scribed, and their destiny.
To quote again the poet's own words concern
ing the denizens of the upper sphere : —
" Spirits that live throughout
Vital in every part, not as frail man,
*******Cannot but by annihilating die;
Nor in their liquid texture mortal wound
Receive, no more than can the fluid air.
All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,
All intellect, all sense ; and as they please,
They limb themselves, and colour, shape, or size
Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare " (vi. 344-353),
and he has added : —
"Though what if Earth
Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought ! "-v. 574-
Old Lucian of Samosata knew as much as this,
or pretended that he knew. Possibly Milton bor-

124 Milton.
rowed a touch here and there of the " Laughing
Syrian Greek," when he wrote, that " shadowy
spirits walk the earth invisible."
Lucian gives an account of the "Happy Isles"
and their occupants, as follows : —
" Here is a city built wholly of gold. Its wall
is of emerald and it has seven gates. There are
temples to all the gods built in it of beryl stones.
And round about the city flows a river of fra
grant oil, more beautiful than can be conceived.
There are baths in this city, but in these baths
they use not water, but dew. The clothes they
wear are of spider web, very fine and of a purple
color. They have no bodies, nor flesh, nor can
they be touched; yet, though they have the form
and semblance only of men, they stand and move
and think and speak.
" It seemed to me when I saw them as if it were
the bare soul, clothed only with a certain likeness
of the body."
When Milton's rebellious angels fought,
"Their armour help'd their harm, crush'd-in and bruis'd
Into their substance pent, which wrought them pain
Implacable, and many a dolorous groan." — vi. 656.
And the worst of their misery was that
"They needs must last, endless." — vi. 693.

Conception of Supernatural Beings. 125
Even the angels and archangels were "with
impetuous fury, smote " by " chained thunderbolts
and hail of iron globes," belched on them by the
devilish host. " Down they fall
By thousands, angel on archangel roll'd,
The sooner for their arms ; unarm'd they might
Have easily as spirits evaded swift
By quick contraction or remove."— vi. 593.
Spirits also need nourishment
. . . "and food alike those pure
Intelligential substances require,
As doth your rational ; and both contain
Within them every lower faculty
Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste ;
Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate,
And corporeal to incorporeal turn." — v. 407.
" In Heaven the trees
Of life ambrosial fruitage bear, and vines
Yield nectar ; . . . from off the boughs each morn
We brush mellifluous dews, and find the ground
Cover'd with pearly grain."— v. 426.
" Time may come when men
With Angels may participate, and find
No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare ;
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit."— v. 493.
The truth is, that Milton never attains in this
poem to a new idea of spiritual existence. He
cannot elucidate heaven nor rise above an earthly

126 Milton.
paradise. No ray of his genius pierces the un
known. His entire and marvelous range of simile,
figure and metaphor enlarges no human vision of
glory or the spirit land.
We come into no intimate relations with the
supernatural because of what he has written, ex
cept as his lofty periods lift us into the over
powering brightness of the unsearchable, and make
the mystery of that other life more intense and
ecstatic. Like Dante, Milton must have his fling at the
hooded friars,
..." who, to be sure of Paradise,
Dying put on the weeds of Dominic,
Or in Franciscan think to pass disguis'd.
*********
And now Saint Peter at Heav'n's wicket seems
To wait them with his keys, and now at foot
Of Heaven's ascent they lift their feet, when lo !
A violent cross-wind from either coast
Blows them transverse, ten thousand leagues awry,
Into the devious air. Then might ye see
Cowls, hoods, and habits with their wearers, tost
And flutter'd into rags ; then reliques, beads,
Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls,
The sport of winds ; all these, upwhirl'd aloft,
Fly o'er the backside of the World far off
Into a Limbo large and broad, since call'd
The Paradise of Fools." in. 478-496.

III.
THEORY OF THE LIFE OF MORTALS.
We turn now to Milton's Theory of Life under
mortal conditions, as Adam experienced it after
the flaming sword had shut him out of Paradise ;
"from that day, mortal."
Until that time, he had lived amid
" Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm,
Others whose fruit, burnish'd with golden rind,
Hung amiable . . .
. . . and of delicious taste.
Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interpos'd,
Or palmy hillock, or the flowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread her store,
Flow'rs of all hue, and without thorn the rose.
Another side, umbrageous grots and caves
Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling vine
Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant. Meanwhile murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills dispers'd, or in a lake,
That to the fringed bank, with myrtle crown'd,
Her crystal mirror holds, unite their streams.
The birds their quire apply; airs, vernal airs,
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
127

128 Milton.
The trembling leaves, while universal Pan,
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,
Led on th' eternal Spring."— iv. 248-268.
After that fatal day,
"The Sun, as from Thyestean banquet, turn'd
His course intended ; . . .
These changes in the heavens, though slow, produc'd
Like change on sea and land, sideral blast,
Vapour, and mist, and exhalation hot,
Corrupt and pestilent." — x. 688-695.
Before, " Sporting the lion ramp'd, and in his paw
Dandled the kid ; bears, tigers, ounces, pards,
Gambol'd before them ; th' unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth, us'd all his might, and wreath'd
His lithe proboscis."— iv. 343.
Now,
" Beast . . . with beast 'gan war, and fowl with fowl,
And fish with fish ; to graze the herb all leaving
Devour'd each other."— x. 710.
"With delight (Death) snuff'd the smell
Of mortal change on Earth." — x. 272.
Man himself, who had been born, according to
Milton, with high ideas of God's sovereignty, and
saying, in his converse with the Infinite,
"Thou in thyself art perfect, and in thee
Is no deficience found " (vm. 415),

Theory of the Life of Mortals. 129
now questions his Creator, in terms since used by
many of his descendants : —
"Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me, or here place
In this delicious garden? . . . unable to perform
Thy terms too hard, by which I was to hold
The good I sought not ?" — x. 744-752.
This man Adam, who had said " I feel that I
am happier than I know," now cries : —
"How gladly would I meet
Mortality, my sentence, and be earth
Insensible ! how glad would lay me down
As in my mother's lap ! There I should rest,
And sleep secure; his dreadful voice no more
Would thunder in my ears."— x. 775.
Both Adam and Eve, who in Eden,
" In naked majesty, seem'd lords of all,
And worthy seem'd ; for in their looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker shone,
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure '' (iv. 290),
now came into God's presence, after they had
sinned, with hesitating step : —
" Love was not in their looks, either to God
Or to each other, but apparent guilt,
And shame, and perturbation, and despair,
Anger, and obstinacy, and hate, and guile." — x. m.

1 30 Milton.
While they remained in Eden, for the
" Fair couple, link'd in happy, nuptial league " (iv. 339),
*********
"[The] heav'nly choirs the Hymensean sung" (iv. 7n);
For them,
..." all Heaven,
And happy constellations, on that hour
Shed their selectest influence" (viii. 5n);
..." the flowery roof
Shower'd roses, which the morn repair'd."-iv. 772.
Raphael instructs Adam that this love
" Refines the thoughts and heart enlarges ; "
********
It " is the scale, by which to heavenly love
Thou may'st ascend."— vui. 589-592.
But after the transgression a different kind of
love was " of their mutual guilt the seal,
The solace of their sin."— ix. 1043.
No longer did they " in honor prefer one an
other." The man made mean extenuation of his
fault, and charged the woman with the blame,
" She gave me of the tree, and I did eat " ; for
they had quarreled. " Nor only tears
Rain'd at their eyes, but high winds worse within
Began to rise, high passions, anger, hate,

Theory of the Life of Mortals. 131
Mistrust, suspicion, discord, and shook sore
Their inward state of mind, calm region once
And full of peace, now tost and turbulent :
. . . From thus distemper'd breast,
Adam, estrang'd in look and alter'd style,
Speech intermitted thus to Eve renew'd :
'Would thou hadst hearken'd to my words, and stay'd
With me, as I besought thee, when that strange
Desire of wand'ring, this unhappy morn,
I know not whence possess'd thee.' "— ix. 1121-1137.
To whom then Eve,
" ' Being as I am, why didst not thou, the head,
Command me absolutely not to go?
*********Hadst thou been firm and fix'd in thy dissent,
Neither had I transgress'd, nor thou with me.' "
— IX. 1155-1161.
The expulsion and the flaming sword soon follow.
In what condition then, were these mortal
creatures ? What was the world to them, and
what the life they now must live ?
Scientifically and morally, their lot was hard ;
for though Adam talked like a philosopher, he
had been taught by the Archangel Raphael
" to live
The easiest way, nor with perplexing thoughts,
To interrupt the sweet of life " (vui. 182),
and all this, after he had been informed by the
same high authority that, among other wonders
of creation,

132 Milton.
"Out of the ground up-rose,
As from his lair, the wild beast where he wons
In forest wild, in thicket, brake, or den
— Among the trees in pairs they rose, they walk'd —
The cattle in the fields and meadows green :
*********
The grassy clods now calv'd ; now half-appear'd
The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs, as broke from bonds,
And rampant shakes his brinded mane ; . . .
********* . . . the swift stag from underground
Bore up his branching head ; . . .
*********. . . fleec'd the flocks and bleating rose,
As plants ; ambiguous between sea and land
The river-horse and scaly crocodile. "— vn. 456-474.
Moreover, the poet, although he had visited
Galileo at Arcetri and probably had looked
through his telescope, made Raphael say to Adam,
"Whether the Sun, predominant in Heaven,
Rise on the Earth, or Earth rise on the Sun,
*********
Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid." — vui. 160-167.
Under these circumstances and with these com
mands, Adam, when expelled from Eden, could
not solace himself nor occupy his mind with sci
entific researches. Evolution and its solution of
great mysteries was not for him nor for his race.
Adam knew more of "devolution," as Froude calls
it, than of evolution or its kindred ideas.

Theory of the Life of Mortals. 135
To be sure, he had some beautiful poetic descrip
tions to muse upon and brood over ; for example,
when Chaos heard God's voice, and when the
great Creator
..." took the golden compasses, prepar'd
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe
This Universe, and all created things.
One foot he center'd, and the other turn'd
Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said : ' Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just circumference, O World !'"- vn. 225.
Also the fine passage : —
"For, of celestial bodies first, the Sun
A mighty sphere he fram'd, unlightsome first,
Though of ethereal mold ; then form'd the Moon
Globose, and every magnitude of Stars,
And sow'd with stars the Heaven, thick as a field."— vn. 354.
He might also regale himself with Raphael's
fascinating recital — one of the most exquisite of
all the pearls that fell from the archangel's lips —
concerning the birds : —
"From branch to branch the smaller birds with song
Solac'd the woods, and spread their painted wings,
Till ev'n; nor then the solemn nightingale
Ceas'd warbling, but all night tun'd her soft lays.
Others, on silver lakes and rivers, bath'd
Their downy breast; the swan, with arched neck
Between her white wings mantling, proudly rows
Her state with oary feet."— vu. 433.

136 Milton.
He might even allow himself to guess that every
star may be "perhaps a world of destined habita
tion " ; for the " Angelic quires," ascending to Je
hovah, had voiced this thought as a settled fact,
when the " Creation and the six days' acts they
sung." But with this small measure of liberty to specu
late, and a false theory of the universe to begin
with, what could Adam hold as a theory of life
by which to guide his new desire for knowledge,
excited by partaking at his wife's request of the
forbidden fruit ? What ethical basis was there for
him to stand upon ?
The only moral influence exerted over him in
the garden was a false idea of the Almighty and
a command to abstain from the fruit of one tree ;
otherwise, he might follow his native impulses.
Adam tells Eve that God is good, but it is not
the goodness grounded in the Scriptures as we
now understand them.
Neither does any genesis of Genesis land us in
such deep perplexity as Milton's Adam must have
reached, if, unheeding in his acquired willfulness
the archangel's caution, he ventured to extend his
search, upon the foundation of the knowledge im
parted to him bv his heavenly visitant.
Imagine the book of Nature closed to him, and

Theory of the Life of Mortals. 137
all the stars and constellations sealed up by the
peremptory command that he accept, as scientific
enough for all practical purposes, the theory of
creation and the universal life which was pro
pounded to him. With such notions of God as
Creator, exhibiting his original operations in
obvious contradiction to all the laws of Nature
which man would soon discover, the race must
either repudiate the Deity who thus disclosed him
self, or, blindly receiving the Miltonic theory of
creation as a mystery, hold itself prepared to
accept any theory of God as a moral governor,
however contrary that theory may be to its own
ethical conceptions of a supreme ruler.
Raphael is sent from heaven to inform Adam that
"Not to Earth are those bright luminaries [the stars]
Officious; but to thee, Earth's habitant." -viu. 98.
Having thus exalted man to the highest place
in the new creation, the archangel tells Adam that
he has an enemy who will destroy his peace if he
can by any artifice; and then gives as a reason
why man was created at all, the determination on
God's part not to allow Satan to claim that by
his defection God has fewer beings to serve and
glorify him. His final warning to Adam is, that
" thine, and of all thy sons
The weal or woe in thee is plac'd; beware ! " — viii. 637.

1 38 Milton.
Adam is naturally confused in mind by these and
other partial revelations to him of the Infinite
Being; therefore, in the midst of dismay and
greater perplexity after the fall, he exclaims : —
"Ah, why should all mankind,
For one man's fault, thus guiltless be condemn'd?
If guiltless ; but from me what can proceed
But all corrupt, both mind and will deprav'd
Not to do only, but to will the same
With me?"-x. 822.
He would have been all the more confirmed in
this Miltonic conception of God's attitude towards
man, if he had known of the colloquy between
the Eternal Father and the Son, a part of which
we have already quoted as taking place when the
Father, sitting on his throne, saw Satan flying to
the newly created world.
Quoth the Father to the Son concerning the
guilt of the angels who fell : —
" If I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
Which had no less prov'd certain unforeknown." — m. u7.
. . . "they themselves ordain'd their fall." — in. 128.
As for Adam's responsibility for his posterity,
God declared : —
" His crime makes guilty all his sons." — in. 290.

Theory of the Life of Mortals. 139
After gaining possession of this preposterous
idea, as' Adam seems to have done, no wonder
that in his mind the unscientific idea of an infi
nite creator, who on the Demiurge theory might
fear to be deprived of his supremacy, should rec
oncile him intellectually to acquiesce in the notion
of an unjust ruler, who could condemn all the
race because of their original progenitor's trans
gression. We are, however, greatly surprised when Adam,
touched and relenting because of Eve's unhappy
plight and her desire for death, suddenly raises
"To better hopes his more attentive mind."— x. ion.
Calling to mind the mysterious promise that
the, woman's seed shall bruise the serpent's head,
he exclaims, as by a new inspiration : —
... "To crush his head
Would be revenge indeed ; which will be lost
By death brought on ourselves, or childless days
Resolv'd as thou proposest " (x. 1035);
then, as if recalling something he had forgotten,
he bids Eve think of the Almighty, and
..." Remember with what mild
And gracious temper he both heard and judg'd,
Without wrath or reviling. We expected
Immediate dissolution, which we thought

1 40 Milton.
Was meant by death that day ; when lo ! to thee
Pains only in child-bearing were foretold,
And bringing forth, soon recompens'd with joy.
... on me the curse aslope
Glanc'd on the ground. With labour I must earn
My bread ; what harm ? Idleness had been worse." — X. 1046.
Therefore," What better can we do, than to the place
Repairing, where he judg'd us, prostrate fall
Before him reverent, and there confess
Humbly our faults.'' — x. 1086.
" So spake our Father penitent, nor Eve
Felt less remorse. They forthwith, . . . both confess'd
Humbly, their faults and pardon begg'd, with tears
Watering the ground." — x. 1097.
We must remember that this was before any
revelation to Adam of God's mercy through
Christ ; and the marvel of it all is, that Adam
so soon and so suddenly changed his attitude
towards the Being whom he had just before con
ceived of, as creating him and placing him in a
most perilous situation, where he would easily
disobey and suffer for it, as a predestined end for
which he and the race after him were called into
existence. The only harmony in the Miltonic theory lies
in the fact, which has been already stated, that
an unscientific idea of a creator reconciles the

Theory of the Life of Mortals. 141
human mind to any sort of moral arbiter of
human destiny.
Such a being is, by virtue of his supremacy
alone, outside and above the laws both of Nature
and of Justice, as men in their state of partial
enlightenment understand these laws !
With Milton's theory in our minds, we may
therefore expect Adam, not only to be credulous,
docile, and capricious, but weak, irrational, and
turned about with every wind of motive. Such
a character, whether innocent or guilty, would not
harmonize with any Eden.
It may be doubted whether Milton's Adam was
ever free, even in the garden and in a so-called
state of innocence, since he was handicapped by
an arbitrary command, the reason for which he
could not apprehend.
The test of freedom is only for a being more
or less exalted, who is able to perceive and con
trol all that is involved in the alternative of obe
dience or disobedience.
In Adam there is, moreover, no heroism of char
acter. He is commonplace, petty, without even,
the charm of simplicity and freshness, and he
seems to be placed under many of the limitations
which the Greeks called " Fate."
Such a man would fulfill life's obligations only

142 Milton.
under pressure, fear of penalty, or from the desire
of enjoyment. How readily he gave up the search
for knowledge, to live " the easier way " ! In ex
change for a sensuous innocence in the garden,
he accepted husbandry because he must, and then,
for compensation, put aside the grave problems of
human life, as a burden of which he was glad
enough to rid himself.
He was not a child though often childish, be
cause he used his reason. He was not a savage,
solitary among his instincts, because he knew
about spiritual beings and something about God.
He was simply an egotist, incapable of feeling
much beyond his own bodily or mental discom
fort. Because it pained him to see Eve sad, he
added her sorrows to his own.
If Milton's Deity were on the throne and all
the race descendants of Milton's Adam, the only
place for them would be the ragged edge of
Dante's Inferno, made for " the people dolorous,
who have foregone the good of intellect " ; or in
his Limbo, where is placed a class
" That runneth after good, with measure faulty ;
Each one confusedly a good conceives
Wherein the mind may rest, and longeth for it." '
1 Purgatorio, XVII. 126.

Theory of the Life of Mortals. 143
Aristotle has said, " The good of the intellect
is the highest beatitude," and Dante, in the Con
vito, " The true is the good of the intellect." But
we look in vain in the Paradise Lost for any
such instruction from the archangel commissioned
to develop the mind of the luckless parent of
mankind. The conditions are changed somewhat when
Michael, the other archangel, replaces Raphael
in order to show Adam things which will come
to pass. Michael is sent to encourage Adam ; to
explain what the seed of the woman shall be, and
how the Paradise he has lost may be regained.
This heavenly messenger seems to know far more
than Raphael knew, or at least had been permitted
to disclose.
He tells Adam of the Son, the woman's holy
seed, begotten of God, born of a virgin, the
Messiah. "Thy punishment
He shall endure, by coming in the flesh
To a reproachful life and cursed death ;
Proclaiming life to all who shall believe
In his redemption, and that his obedience
Imputed becomes theirs by faith, his merits
To save them, not their own, though legal, works.
*********. . . This godlike act
Annuls thy doom, the death thou shouldst have dy'd."
— XII. 404-428.

1 44 Milton.
Hearing this, " our Sire,
Replete with joy and wonder, thus reply'd :
' O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense !
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good ; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness ! ' " — xu. 467.
Then follows the remarkable declaration, which
reveals Adam's utter misconception of ethical dis
tinctions : — ,
" Full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin,
By me done and occasion'd, or rejoice
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring;
To God more glory, more good-will to men
From God, and over wrath grace shall abound."— xu. 473.
The effect upon Adam of eating the forbidden
fruit seems to have been to confuse not only his
intellectual but his ethical perceptions.
Milton, in Book X., gathers the infernal spirits
as a host in a grove
" laden with fair fruit, like that
Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve
Us'd by the Tempter. . . . Greedily they pluck'd
The fruitage, fair to sight, like that which grew
Near that bituminous lake where Sodom flam'd;
This, more delusive, not the touch, but taste
Deceiv'd. They, fondly thinking to allay
Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit

Theory of the Life of Mortals. 145
Chew'd bitter ashes, which th' offended taste
With spattering noise rejected. . . . Thus were they plagu'd ;
And worn with famine, long and ceaseless hiss,
Till their lost shape, permitted, they resum'd." — x. 550-574.
Somewhat different were Adam's experiences;
but if his increase of knowledge led him to con
clusions such as are stated above, we cannot won
der that the fruit of that tree was forbidden. It
was surely " bitter ashes " that he chewed, in spite
of his hope that " over wrath, grace shall abound."
Michael did not disabuse him of his false notion
that sin has in it a prolific power for good. It
seems, however, that the angelic hosts were taught
better ; and why Michael did not illumine his
pupil's mind is strange indeed. For when the
hosts of heaven were assembled in council, Michael
presumably among them, the Almighty had thus
addressed them : — ¦
" O Sons, like one of us Man is become
To know both good and evil, since his taste
Of that defended fruit. But let him boast
His knowledge of good lost and evil got,
Happier, had it suffic'd him to have known
Good by itself, and evil not at all." — xi. 84.
It was a great mistake on Milton's part, or an
oversight to say the least, to have let Michael
miss the opportunity of correcting that fallacy

1 46 Milton.
into which Adam fell; but perhaps the poet, like
some theologians, may have really believed what
Adam expressed with somewhat of hesitation.
It was a great shock to our first parents to be
sent forth from the garden. They, at the news,
"Heart-struck, with chilling gripe of sorrow, stood." — xi. 264.
But the archangel consoled them by touching
Adam's eyes with "three drops from the well of
life," which gave him the somewhat diluted satis
faction of foreseeing the effects which were to
follow his original disobedience.
In these dissolving pictures, Cain and Abel first
appear. Cain kills Abel; but Michael says the
" bloody fact will be avenged," and the main thing
that troubles Adam is, not so much the turpi
tude of the crime as the first sight he obtains of
Death. He is sorry that Cain has slain his brother
in anger, and says : —
" Alas, both for the deed and for the cause ! "
but, without enlarging on this point, he instantly
exclaims : —
"But have I now seen Death? Is this the way
I must return to native dust? O sight
Of terror, foul and ugly to behold,
Horrid to think, how horrible to feel!"— xi. 461.

Theory of the Life of Mortals. 147
Upon which Michael gives him his fill of horrors,
describing all the diseases to which flesh is heir,
over which Death shakes his dart but forbears to
strike. This terrible catalogue unmans our first
parent, and he gives himself up to tears for a
space. Next comes before his eyes a plain covered with
tents, from which issues
" A bevy of fair women, richly gay
In gems and wanton dress."— xi. 582.
Adam seems to like this vision, but is soon of
his " short joy bereft " as he sees the sons of God
yield all their fame ignobly to " the trains and
smiles of these fair atheists." Afterwards war fol
lows and the " ensanguin'd field." The flood
and other distresses come upon men, till Adam
cries out: —
" O visions ill foreseen ! better had I
Liv'd ignorant of future, so had borne
My part of evil only, each day's lot
Enough to bear."— xi. 763.
He revives when he sees the bow in the cloud.
He rejoices to see Abraham in his day, also
Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and David. He mourns
over the Captivity, but when he learns that the
Son shall ascend the " throne hereditary," " and

148 Milton.
bound his reign with earth's wide bounds," he is
with such joy surcharged that he bursts forth in
the exultant words : —
" Now clear I understand
What oft my steadiest thoughts have search'd in vain —
Why our great Expectation should be call'd
The seed of woman !" — xu. 376.
Eve had received her consolation, without the
horrors shown to her consort, and awoke well
pleased ; " whereat
In either hand th' hast'ning Angel caught
Our ling'ring parents, and to the eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain ; then disappear'd.
They, looking back, all th' eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming brand ; the gate
With dreadful faces throng'd and fiery arms.
Some natural tears they dropp'd, but wip'd them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way." — xn. 636.
Our aim thus far has been to show the theory
of terrestrial existence which Adam and Eve con
sciously or unconsciously must have obtained by
their experience, before issuing from Eden upon
the " subjected plain."

Theory of the Life of Mortals. ,149
When they disobeyed and nothing was left for
them to expect but death, they said by their
actions, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die." When they found life prolonged, they were
somewhat thankful and tried to make the best of
their lot ; they sought for reasons to content them
selves with what was before them.
Eve seems to have discovered that she could
be happy anywhere with Adam.
" Thou to me
Art all things under Heaven; all places, thou ! " — xn. 617.
Adam began to try philosophy, but became con
fused with the great problems and was thrown
into a state bordering on despair. Both Adam
and Eve were haunted by " the vision of the vir
tue they had lost," until Michael's visit to reveal
to them future things.
When finally it was revealed to Adam that a
chance to regain Paradise was still left, he began
to pluck up courage. Then he encouraged Eve,
who, of the two, had shown more bravery and
had done far more to uphold Adam than he had
done to comfort her.
And now, because somewhere in the extremely
remote future the seed of the woman would be
avenged on the serpent, and the race, after ter-

150 Milton.
rible wickedness, apostasy, and misery, would at
last be redeemed, both Adam and Eve are repre
sented as scarcely able to contain themselves for
joy. They showed, however, but little sympathy
for the millions who would sin and suffer hor
ribly, before the blessed end appeared.
Thus Milton's theory of this mortal life, devel
oped in Paradise Lost, is disappointing in its results,
as regards human character and destiny.
Where is the love of virtue for its own sake,
without reward as an incentive ? Where, the
yearning after a grand ideal and a noble destiny,
irrespective of immediate personal gain or loss ?
Where, an unselfish motive, except as gleams of
it appear in Eve ?
Around these two frail, shrinking, erring souls
hangs no effulgence from the central orb of glo
rious being. To them comes no message, by
which their humanity is made a part of the
divine. Some eloquent passages, like Adam's
apostrophe to the Almighty even while the man
was innocent, suggest only the Patriarch's cove
nant, " If thou wilt go with me and keep me,
then God shall be my God." We look in vain
for the beginnings of immortal, spiritual love.
It is, then, with a feeling akin to sadness that
we close the book, without having derived from

Theory of the Life of Mortals. 151
this grandest epic ever written in the English
tongue, any lofty theory either of this mortal or
of the immortal life.
Rich in classical allusion, the author ferries the
lost over the Lethean lake, where
" Medusa with Gorgonian terror guards
The ford ; and of itself, the water flies
All taste ... as once it fled
The lip of Tantalus." -11. 6n.
On a single page, he introduces many different
characters from ancient mythology, — Proserpine,
Ceres, Daphne, Bacchus, and the Libyan Jove.
To arouse Adam and Eve in the morning, the
classic Leucothea wakes, and Adam leads Eve to
" shadier bower, more sacred and sequestered,"
than that in which Pan or Sylvanus ever slept,
or which Nymph or Faunus ever haunted.
There is also a grim humor in many a pas
sage, as when Belial, in "gamesome mood," sees
the angels hit by his iron globes "belch'd from
deep-throated engines," and cries out to Satan: —
" Leader, the terms we sent were terms of weight,
Of hard contents, and full of force, urg'd home,
Such as we might perceive amus'd them all,
And stumbled many. Who receives them right
Had need from head to foot well understand ;
Not understood, this gift they have besides,
They show us when our foes walk not upright." -vi. 621.

152 Milton.
So when the poet calls Sin, that hag, "foul
from the waist downward," Satan's "fair enchant
ing daughter," we find no lack of the grotesque
and, humorous, without which no author, even of
serious verse, is fully equipped. The grotesque
and the horrible intermingle, however, by a strange
fellowship, in Milton's personification of Sin and
Death, when Sin calls on Death to "feed first on
beast and fish and fowl,"
" Till I, in Man residing, through the race,
His thoughts, his looks, words, actions, all infect,
And season him thy last and sweetest prey." — x. 607.
But these are incidentals. Superb, effulgent
adumbrations of the Deity abound throughout
the poem. There are touches of sentiment, as
for example the bliss of Paradise, where our
first parents appear to us in all their nuptial
beauty and innocence. Exalted thoughts inter
spersed lift us up to realms of holy meditation ;
and ambrosial fruit, fit for the gods, hangs over
our head.
Yet, after all, the poem as a whole seems
classical and cold, and, but for a few warm stan
zas, the impression left upon the mind is as if a
dead man's hand were placed on the pulse of
this throbbing nineteenth centurv — a relic from
medieval crypt — a system of articulated bones,

Theory of the Life of Mortals. ,153
bedecked with jewels, brought out in vain attempt
to cure the spiritual diseases and the moral ills
under which earth still groans. We miss espe
cially all holy, humane, exalted nobility of tran
scendent joy in goodness, mercy, and righteousness,
except perhaps in some features of the Messiah,
delineated occasionally as the " radiant image " of
the new covenant of grace with man.
Like St. Augustine's City of God, or Dante's
Inferno, or Michelangelo's Last Judgment, the
Paradise Lost of Milton stood in its day for the
best religious thought, and so performed its office ;
but, like some ancient Credos which the world
finds intolerable to-day, the destined Restorer of
the race, as presented in the poem, causes no
new heavens and earth to appear, welcomed by
choral hallelujahs. Even the Paradise Regained
does not compensate us for what is lacking in
the Paradise Lost.
It is mainly owing to the times in which Milton
lived and wrote, as well as to a certain lack of
spiritual perception in himself, that he fails to
satisfy us ; Government was arbitrary, the people
ignorant ; neither Cromwell nor the Restoration
gave stability to religion, or purity to morals.
Among Christians there were endless disputes
and animosities.

154 Milton.
Add then "the haughtiness of Milton's temper,
the fierceness of his scorn, the defiance of his
manner, and his severe and stoical pride,"1 and
we see why this epic, written between the vernal
and the autumnal equinox of his harassed and
painful life, should be " with blind Maeonides,"
rather than with the sacred muse of the apoc
alyptic John.
We may at least rejoice that the blind poet, in
a manuscript found in 1823 on the shelves of the
old State Paper Office in Whitehall, and entitled
" Concerning Christian Doctrine," took as his
theme the " Book of Sanctity and Virtue " ; and
that, amid the calmness and dignity of age, with
humble and reverential feeling, he wrote, in very
different vein, a work not valuable for doctrinal
opinions, nor for practical suggestions, but lofty
in its aspirations and unquestioned in the fervor
of its piety.
While then we of to-day read the poem of the
great master, more as a majestic oratorio than as
an aid to faith, more as a syllabus of a theory of
life incapable of imitation than as a guide to
righteous living, nevertheless we may derive from
its immortal stanzas, its commemoration of grand
though fanciful events, and its vast reach toward
1 Life of Milton (Preface, ci), J. Mitford.

Theory of the Life of Mortals. 155
the infinities, a stimulus and an exaltation, by
which Beyond " the height of this great argument,
[We] may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men." — 1. 24.

IV.

eve.

This sketch of Milton's Theory of Mortal Life
would be incomplete without a special study of
woman's condition in the world, as the poet con
ceived it.
His own experience as a husband and a father
gives us a clue to his peculiar delineation of Eve
in Paradise Lost. In his thirty-fifth year (1643) he
married Mary Powell, expecting to find intellect
ual companionship. He found his bride, as he
says, " unfit for conversation," while she soon dis
covered that spare diet, a choleric husband, a
house full of pupils, and no company, did not suit
the daughter of a gay cavalier. She thereupon
quickly asked permission to visit her father.
Once more in her paternal home, she refused
to return; but when her father fell into evil for
tune, she came back and begged forgiveness.
This Milton granted, and discharged a debt on
her father's estate, taking possession of it and
also receiving the family into his house after the
father's decease. .56

Eve.

!59

In 1647 he removed into a smaller house and
continued to take pupils, the sons of gentlemen
who were his friends. Mary Powell died in 1653,
leaving three daughters, one of whom, Anne, was
deformed. After being three years a widower, the
poet married Miss Woodcock, who died within a
year. In 1664 he married his third wife, Eliza
beth Minshull, who survived her husband fifty-two
years. Paradise Lost was completed after eight years
of labor, in 1665, so that the domestic com
fort furnished by Mistress Betty had little to do
with the portraiture of Eve. But as neither his
first wife nor his daughters gave him much
pleasure, his home-life undoubtedly colored his
descriptions of the woman in the poem.
He taught his daughters to read foreign lan
guages without understanding the sense, an irk
some task for them. He said that " one tongue
was enough for a woman " ; and yet his daughter
Deborah said of him that he was delightful com
pany, being the life of the conversation and of a
cheerful, equal temper, at least in his old age.
But there is evidence that all the daughters were
undutiful and unkind children, careless of him in
his blindness and deserting him in his declining
years.

1 60 Milton.
In addition to this unfortunate domestic experi
ence, the position of women in England was not,
in Milton's day, conducive to the formation of
a high estimate either of their capacity or their
just rights. According to the old English the
ory, a woman was a chattel, all of whose prop
erty belonged to her husband. He could beat
her as he might a beast of burden, and the law
gave no redress. It was not till 1790 that a law
was passed allowing women to be hanged, like
men, instead of being burned when sentenced to
death. It is true that six hundred years ago abbesses,
equally with male ecclesiastical dignitaries, were
summoned to sit in Parliament ; and in the time
of Charles II. the ownership of a borough occa
sionally devolved upon a woman ; the right of a
woman to succeed to the crown was also unques
tioned. But these prerogatives of women per
tained to an ecclesiastical and monarchical system,
which Milton abhorred, and at best the place for
women was but a narrow one, made larger when
gained, only by exceptional qualities of a mascu
line sort in the feminine occupant.
Taking these things into consideration, we must
give the poet due credit for allowing Adam to
describe his consort as a creature —

Eve. 1 6 1
" so lovely fair,
That what seem'd fair in all the world seem'd now
Mean, or in her summ'd up, in her contain'd.
********* Grace was in all her steps, Heaven in her eye,
In every gesture dignity and love."— viii. 472-489.
But the poet is equally decided in giving to Eve
inferiority of intellect, which he declares to be
" the prime end of Nature." He causes her also
to declare that her subjection to man is accord
ing to God's ordinance. She to Adam says,
" My author and disposer, what thou bidd'st
Unargu'd I obey ; so God ordains :
God is thy law, thou mine ; to know no more
Is woman's happiest knowledge, and her praise." — iv. 635.
On one fatal occasion, however, she seems to
have forgotten this humble submission and argued
for a division of labor, wishing, as all women do,
some time to herself during the day. It takes one
hundred and seventy-five lines of the poem to con
clude the argument between the pair, in which
Eve persists in having the last word, until finally
Adam yields to her importunity, and she, with
drawing her hand,
" like a wood-nymph light,
Oread or Dryad, or of Delia's train,
Betook her to the groves, . . . event perverse !"-ix. 386-4oS.

1 6 2 Milton.
Never was sweeter picture painted than Milton
gives of Eve when Satan found her apart from
her anxious spouse.
" Veil'd in a cloud of fragrance, where she stood,
Half-spy'd, so thick the roses bushing round
About her glow'd, oft stooping to support
Each flow'r of slender stalk, whose head, though gay
Carnation, purple, azure, or speck'd with gold,
Hung drooping unsustain'd ; them she up-stays
Gently with myrtle band, mindless the while
Herself, though fairest unsupported flower,
From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh." — ix. 425.
The poet then goes on to prove her inferiority
and her need of support, by showing how a
woman when alone is " opportune to all at
tempts," first, of flattery, such as Satan poured
into Eve's ear, when he approached her in the
guise of a glittering serpent : —
" Fairest resemblance of thy Maker fair !
Thee all things living gaze on, all things thine
By gift, and thy celestial beauty adore.
With ravishment beheld, there best beheld
Where universally admir'd." — ix. 538.
What woman of average dignity and self-respect
would have listened any longer to such a " per
suader " !
Then the wily tempter weaves into his flattery
the seductive allurement of a new intellectual and

Eve. 163
spiritual perception, illustrating the effect of eat
ing the forbidden fruit by the result in his own
case. " Sated at length, ere long I might perceive
Strange alteration in me, to degree
Of reason in my inward powers, and speech
Wanted not long, though to this shape retain'd.
Thenceforth to speculations high or deep
I turn'd my thoughts, and with capacious mind
Consider'd all things visible in Heaven,
Or earth, or middle, all things fair and good.
But all that fair and good in thy divine
Semblance, and in thy beauty's heavenly ray,
United I beheld ; no fair to thine
Equivalent or second ! which compell'd
Me thus, though importune perhaps, to come
And gaze, and worship thee of right declar'd
Sov'reign of creatures, universal Dame !"-ix. 598.
Curiosity and desire then urge Eve to say quickly,
"Where grows the tree? From hence how far?" — ix. 617.
"To whom the wily Adder, blithe and glad,
'Empress, the way is ready and not long.' " — ix. 625.
" Lead, then," Eve replies, surprised that he
leads her to the Tree of Knowledge. The ser
pent's specious reasoning that life more perfect
will be attained by eating, since he has eaten
and lives in a wider sphere of intelligence,
"Into her heart too easy entrance won,"
and so she plucks and eats.

1 64 Milton.
Adam, when he hears of the fatal trespass, is at
first speechless ; then he chides her ; afterwards,
submitting to what seems remediless, he seeks
arguments no less fallacious than those by which
the woman had been deluded : —
" Perhaps thou shalt not die ; perhaps the fact
Is not so heinous now, foretasted fruit,
Profan'd first by the serpent, by him first
Made common, and unhallow'd, ere our taste :
Nor yet on him found deadly ; he yet Uves ;
Lives, as thou saidst, and gains to live, as man,
Higher degree of life : . . .
Nor can I think that God, Creator wise,
Though threat'ning, will in earnest so destroy
Us, his prime creatures, dignify'd so high,
Set over all his works ; which, in our fall,
For us created, needs with us must fail." — ix. 928-942.
And then, overcome by his love and the sight
of Eve's distress, he settles the question by ex
claiming, " However, I with thee have fix'd my lot,
... if death
Consort with thee, death is to me as life." — ix. 952.
Thus fondly overcome, he scruples not to eat,
and then
" As with new wine intoxicated both,
They swim in mirth, and fancy that they feel
Divinity within them breeding wings,
Wherewith to scorn the earth."— ix. 1008.

Eve. 165
A little after, having quarreled, Adam concludes
their mutual accusation, by saying: —
"Thus it shall befall
Him who, to worth in women overtrusting,
Lets her will rule ; restraint she will not brook,
And, left to herself, if evil thence ensue,
She first his weak indulgence will accuse."— ix. 1182.
But this is not the worst. Adam in his despair
calls her " a serpent," a rib " crooked by nature "
(x. 8s4), and "that bad woman." He predicts
" innumerable
Disturbances on earth thro' female snares
******** . . . which infinite calamity shall cause
To human life, and household peace confound."— x. 896-908.
" Oh, why [he cries] did God
. . . create at last
This novelty on Earth, this fair defect
Of Nature? "-x. 890.
We might attribute all this vilification of woman
to the bad temper in Adam, which a sense of
misery and shame occasioned for the moment,
were it not that Milton himself, with calm, de
liberate intention, has written of the woman's
inferiority and the natural authority over her of
man. His words are
" He for God only : she for God in him.
His fair, large front and eye sublime, declar'd
Absolute rule." . . .— iv. 299.

1 66 Milton.
" She, as a veil down to the slender waist,
Her unadorned, golden tresses wore
Dishevel'd, but in wanton ringlets wav'd
As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied
Subjection, but required with gentle sway,
And by her yielded; by him best receiv'd."— iv. 304.
Milton even makes the archangel advise Adam
not to let go, out of deference to woman's beauty,
his high conceit of himself.
"For what admir'st thou? what transports thee so?
An outside ; fair, no doubt, and worthy well
Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love,
Not thy subjection. Weigh with her thyself;
Then value. Oft-times nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right,
Well manag'd."— viu. 567.
In true accord with this Miltonic theory of
woman's subjection to the man, we find Eve (poor
mother of all daughters of her race!) throwing her
self at Adam's feet, in spite of the epithets he had
thrown at her, and, with tresses all disordered,
humbly embracing and beseeching him for restora
tion and forgiveness.
" Forsake me not thus, Adam ! witness Heaven
AVhat love sincere and reverence in my heart
I bear thee. . . . Thy suppliant
I beg, and clasp thy knees."— x. 9t4.
Adam relents towards her, submissive in dis
tress ; but when the sentence falls on both, of

Eve. 167
expulsion from the garden, neither of them seems
to feel their sin so much as its unpleasant conse
quences. Adam, because life is prolonged, recovers
his composure. Eve laments chiefly because she
must leave her paradise of sweets.
"Must I thus leave thee, Paradise?
*******How shall we breathe in other air
Less pure, accustom'd to immortal fruits?"— xi. 269-285.
Michael does not show to Eve the vision of pos
terity in its vicissitudes of joy and misery; he
considers her too weak to bear the sight. Only
to Adam does he reveal what shall befall the
race derived from him and her. Eve, in her
vision deep in sleep, is simply comforted by the
promise that in her seed the race shall be re
stored. It is very evident from these illustrations, as
well as from the whole tenor of the poem, that
Milton's Theory of Life included in it the natural
inferiority of the woman and her subjection to the
man. He makes her more beautiful, more fas
cinating, but weaker, more open to flattery and
specious reasoning. She is perhaps less selfish,
but her self-devotion is because man is worthily
her head, the crown of her existence and her
glory. She deserves less from the Almighty be-

1 68 Milton.
cause sin came into the world first through her
transgression. Moreover, according to Milton, she
came forth from the great trial not only con
quered and overthrown, but a temptress. Woman
was made to be a conscience to man, but in Eve
she is a dangerous, fascinating, loving, and de
structive obstacle to man's integrity.
If she had stood steadfast, Adam might have
continued innocent and faultless. Therefore if
by nature she is subject to man, much more,
because of her sin and its results in her disposi
tion, is that subjection to be continued through
all generations.
We do not wonder that Milton, with these views,
should have written as he has done on the sub
ject of divorce, which always bears the harder on
the woman. Yet, if the structure of human society
is to stand or fall by the doctrine concerning
woman which is propounded and illustrated in
Paradise Lost, then farewell to all hope ex
pressed by Adam of " a race
To fill the Earth, who shall with us extol
Thy goodness infinite." — iv. 732.
Tlie poet has made Eve to represent what" he
lias adopted as a type of universal womanhood.
She is incomplete, as might be expected of the

Eve. 1 69
primeval woman; but unfortunately the fine ma
terial in her, by which she might become the
complete complement of man, is wanting in Mil
ton's summation of her qualities.
As he delineates her, she is not only inferior
to man, but she feels and acknowledges it, and is
not ashamed of her inferiority any more than of
her unclad beauty. She does not even try to
avenge herself for the deficiency decreed to her,
by making the most of her fascinating power over
Adam to raise him up to a level where she might
worthily be subject unto him. If she is chiefly
a pleasant companion before the transgression,
she is hardly a helpmeet after it, being apparently
unconscious that a true woman will not only con
sole her husband in misfortune, but awaken him
to renewed virtue and exertion.
In order to quicken his best impulses, she need
not urge him to violent measures against Satan
who had deceived them and tried to ruin them ;
but her vehement despair ought not to cause her
to say,
" Let us seek death : . . .
Why stand we longer shivering under fears?"— x. 1001-1003.
As a true wife, she was not called upon to
taunt her husband with his weaknesses, as the

1 70 Milton.
spouse of the Due d'Orange taunted hers after
his defeat at Roncesvalles.
This haughty woman, looking down from the
window of the castle, before which her defeated
lord waited for admission, exclaimed: "Thou art
not my husband! My husband would return a
conqueror, covered with glory and honor. He
would not have lived when all those heroes died."
But Eve, at least might have counseled some
thing better than the destruction of them both.
It was generous in her to pray that all the sen
tence might light on her, as " sole cause of all
this woe " ; but, confessing this, a model woman,
for that very reason, would have tried to put a
new heart into her less guilty spouse.
No ! Milton's Eve can never stand for the
ideal woman of any age, by whose peculiar quali
ties of mind and heart the family is to be kept
pure, the State free from ambition and distraction,
and the race progressive in its approach towards
final regeneration.
No seed of such a woman, although she may
be worthy of cherishing, honoring, and lovino-,
could effectually " bruise the serpent's head," unless
some interposition of divine power forced and
achieved the victory.
Moreover, the poet's description of Eve proved

Eve.

17]

false to the very words which he had put into
Adam's mouth concerning her, when, before the
transgression, the enamoured husband declared,
"when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in herself complete, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say
Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.
All higher Knowledge in her presence falls,
Degraded; Wisdom in discourse with her
Loses discountenanc'd, and like Folly shows;
Authority and Reason on her wait,
As one intended first, not after made
Occasionally; and, to consummate all,
Greatness of mind and Nobleness their seat
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard angelic plac'd." — vm. 546.
^ In reality, Milton's Eve does not come anywhere
near this standard of intelligence or virtue. She
proves herself in the event to be as Milton apos
trophizes her,
" O much deceiv'd, much failing, hapless Eve."— ix. 4o4.
A theory of life with only such women in it
would not be terrible to Satan. They might be
" Fair, divinely fair, fit love for gods " (ix. 489),
but with them as mates, each man might well cry
out with Adam: —

172 Milton.
" How shall I behold the face
Henceforth of God or Angel?
. . . Oh, might I here
In solitude live savage, in some glade
Obscur'd, where highest woods, impenetrable
To star or sunlight,- spread their umbrage, broad
And brown as evening ! Cover me, ye pines ;
Ye cedars, with innumerable boughs,
Hide me where I may never see them more."— ix. 1080-1090.
Therefore we claim that Milton's Theory of Life,
with the woman in it, which he, not the Creator,
has brought to man, leaves the world in a worse
plight than if no woman had ever been made, to
shear man of his strength and leave him " without
harmony and true delight."
As Tennyson has written,
" The woman's cause is man's : They rise or sink
Together, dwarf'd or godlike, bond or free."
If any one now says, But is not this the Scrip
tural account of Eve's relations with our great
progenitor? we leave the questioner to prove
his own implied assertion, being persuaded that
he will search in vain to find in Genesis the
counterpart of Milton's Eve, as she is pictured
in the Paradise she lost.
THE END.

"YALE UNIVERSITY

I il 11

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